 Section 1 of Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays by Frederick Nietzsche. Section 1, Translators Preface. The essays contained in this volume treat of various subjects, with the exception of perhaps one we must consider all these papers as fragments. Written during the early 70s and intended mostly as prefaces, they are extremely interesting since traces of Nietzsche's later tenants, like slave and master morality, the Superman, can be found everywhere. But they are also very valuable on account of the young philosophers daring and able handling of difficult and abstruse subjects. Truth and falsity and the Greek woman are probably the two essays which will prove most attracted to the average reader. In the essay on the Greek state, the two tenants mentioned above are clearly discernible, though the Superman still goes by the Schopenhauer ring label genius. Our philosopher attacks the modern ideas of the dignity of man and of the dignity of labor because existence seems to be without worth and dignity. The preponderance of such illusory ideas is due to the political power nowadays vested in the slaves. The Greeks saw no dignity in labor. They saw the necessity of it and the necessity of slavery, but felt ashamed of both. Not even the labor of the artist did they admire, although they praised his completed work. If the Greeks perished through their slavery, one thing is still more certain. We shall perish through the lack of slavery. To the essence of culture, slavery is innate. It is part of it. A vast multitude must labor and slave in order that a few may lead an existence devoted to beauty and art. Strife and war are necessary for the welfare of the state. War concentrates and purifies the state. The purpose of the military state is the creating of the military genius, the ruthless conqueror, the war lord. There also exists a mysterious connection between the state in general and the creating of the genius. In the Greek woman, Nietzsche, the man, who said one cannot think highly enough of women, delineates his ideal of woman. Penelope and Tigny Electra are his ideal types. Plato's dictum that in the perfect state the family would cease to exist belongs to the most intimate things out of about the relation between women and the state. The Greek woman as mother had to vegetate in obscurity to lead a kind of Cren 40 in existence for the greater welfare of the body politic. Only in Greek antiquity did woman occupy her proper position and for this reason she was more honored than she has ever been since. Pythia was the mouthpiece, the symbol of Greek unity. On music and words, music is older, more fundamental than language. Music is an expression of cosmic consciousness. Language is only a gesture symbolism. It is true the music of every people was at first allied to lyric poetry. Absolute music always appeared much later, but that is due to the double nature in the essence of language. The tone of the speaker expresses the basic pleasure and displeasure sensations of the individual. These form the tonal subsoil common to all languages. They are comprehensible everywhere. Language itself is a superstructure on that subsoil. It is a gesture symbolism for all the other conceptions which man adds to that subsoil. The endeavor to illustrate a poem by music is futile. The text of an opera is therefore quite negligible. Modern opera in its music is therefore often only a stimulant or a remembrancer for set stereotype feelings. Great music that is Dionysian music makes us forget to listen to the words. Homer's contest, the Greek genius acknowledged strife, struggle, contest to be necessary in this life only through competition and emulation will the commonwealth thrive. Yet there was no unbridled ambition. Everyone's individual endeavors were subordinated to the welfare of the community. The curse of present day contest is that it does not do the same. In the relation of Schopenhauer's philosophy to a German culture, an amusing and yet serious attack is made on the hollow would-be culture of the German Philistines who after the Franco-Prussian War were swollen with self-conceit, self-sufficiency and were a great danger to real culture. Nietzsche points out Schopenhauer's great philosophy as the only possible means of escaping the humdrum of Philistia with its hypocrisy and intellectual ostrichization. The essay on Greek philosophy during the tragic age is a performance of great interest to the scholar. It brims with ideas that her Gaelian school, especially Zeller, has shown what an important place is held by the earlier thinkers in the history of Greek thought and how necessary a knowledge of their work is for all who wish to understand Plato and Aristotle. Diehl's great book, Die Fragmente der Vorso Krauttiker, Benz, Burnett's and Fair Bank's books we may regard as the peristyle through which we enter the temple of early Greek philosophy. Nietzsche's essay then is like a beautiful festoon swinging between the columns erected by Diehl's and the others out of the marble of facts. Beauty and that personal equation are the two light motifs of Nietzsche's history of the pre-Socradian philosophers, especially does he lay stress upon the personal equation since that is the only permanent item of interest considering that every system crumbles into nothing with the appearance of a new thinker. In this way, Nietzsche treats of Thales and Ximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Xenophonies and Xagoras. There are also some sketches of a draft for an intended but never accomplished continuation in which Empedocles, Democritus and Plato were to be dealt with. Probably the most popular of the essays in the book will prove to be the one on truth and falsity. It is an epistemological rhapsody on the relativity of truth, on appearance and reality, on perceptual flux versus conceptual conceit. Man's intellect is only a means and the struggle for existence, a means taking the place of the animals, horns and teeth. It adapts itself especially to deception and dissimulation. There are no absolute truths. Truth is relative and always imperfect, yet fictitious values fixed by convention and utility are set down as truth. The liar does not use these standard coins of the realm. He is hated not out of love for truth, no, but because he is dangerous. Our words never hit the essence, the X of a thing, but indicate only external characteristics. Language is the columbarium of the ideas, the cemetery of perceptions. Truths are metaphors, illusions, anthropomorphisms about which one has forgotten that they are such. There are different truths to different beings like a spider man sits in the web of his truths and ideas. He wants to be deceived by means of error. He mostly lives. Truth is often fatal. When the liar, the storyteller, the poet, the rhapsodist lie to him without hurting him. He loves them. The text underlying this translation is that of volume one of the Tasq and Al-Zgaba, one or two obscure passages. I hope my conjectures may have elucidated. The dates following the titles indicate the year when these essays were written. In no other work have I felt so deeply the great need of the science of significs with its ultimate international standardization of terms as attempted by Eisler and Baldwin. I hope, however, I have succeeded in conveying accurately the meaning of the author in spite of certain looseness in his philosophical terminology. The English language is somewhat at a disadvantage through its lack of a noun infinitive. I can best illustrate this by a passage from Parmenides. In his usual masterly manner, Dio's translate these lines with das Sagan und Denkenmuss ein Sain des Sain, den das Sain existir, das Nix existir, Nikt, das Heitz, ik, dik, worl, den das Sain existir, das Nix existir, nikt, das Heitz, ik, dik, worl, den das Sain existir, das Heitz, ik, dik, worl, den das Herzigen. On the other hand, in Fairbanks' version, we read it as necessary both to say and to think that being is, for it is possible that being is, and it is impossible that not being is, this is what I bid the ponder. In order to avoid a similar obscurity throughout the paper on early Greek philosophy, I've rendered das Sainte with existin, das Nikt Sainte with non existin, das Sain with being, and das Nikt Sain with not being. Greek equivalents omitted. I'm directly or indirectly indebted for many suggestions of several friends of mine, especially to two of my colleagues, J. Charlton Hipkins, MA, and R. Miller BA for their patient revision of the whole of the proofs. MA Muga, London, July, 1911. End of section one. Section two of early Greek philosophy and other essays by Frederick Nietzsche. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Section two, the Greek state prefaced to an unwritten book. 1871, we moderns have an advantage over the Greeks in two ideas, which are given, as it were, as a compensation to a world behaving thoroughly, slavishly, and yet at the same time, anxiously eschewing the word slave. We talk of the dignity of man and of the dignity of labor. Everybody worries in order miserably to perpetuate a miserable existence. This awful need compels him to consuming labor. The man, or more exactly, the human intellect, seduced by the will, now occasionally marvels at labor as something dignified. However, in order that labor might have a claim on titles of honor, it would be necessary above all that existence itself, to which labor after all, is only a painful means, should have more dignity and value than it appears to have had up to the present to serious philosophies and religions. What else may we find in the labor need of all the millions but the impulse to exist at any price, the same or powerful impulse by which stunted plants stretch their roots through earthless rocks? Out of this awful struggle for existence, only individuals can emerge and they are at once occupied with the noble phantoms of artistic culture lest they should arrive at practical pessimism, which nature abhors as her exact opposite. In the modern world, which, compared with the Greek, usually produces only abnormalities and centaurs in which the individual, like that fabulous creature in the beginning of the Horatian art of poetry, is jumbled together out of pieces here in the modern world in one and the same man, the greed of the struggle for existence and the need for art show themselves at the same time. Out of this unnatural amalgamation has originated the dilemma to excuse and to consecrate that first greed before this need for art, therefore we believe in the dignity of man and the dignity of labor. The Greeks did not require such conceptual hallucinations, for among them the idea that labor is a disgrace is expressed with startling frankness and another piece of wisdom, more hidden and less articulate, but everywhere alive added that the human thing also was an ignominious and piteous nothing and the dream of a shadow. Labor is a disgrace because existence has no value in itself, but even though this very existence in the alluring embellishment of artistic illusions shines forth and really seems to have a value in itself, then that proposition is still valid that labor is a disgrace, a disgrace indeed by the fact that it is impossible for man fighting for the continuance of bare existence to become an artist. In modern times, it is not the art needing man, but the slave who determines the general conceptions, the slave who according to his nature must give deceptive names to all conditions in order to be able to live. Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labor are the needy products of slavedom hiding itself from itself. Woeful time in which the slave requires such conceptions in which he is incited to think about and beyond himself. Cursed seducers who have destroyed the slave's state of innocence by the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Now the slave must vainly scrape through from one day to another with transparent lies recognizable to every one of deeper insight such as the alleged equal rights of all or the so-called fundamental rights of man, of man as such or the dignity of labor. Indeed, he is not to understand at what stage and at what height dignity can first be mentioned, namely at the point where the individual goes holy beyond himself and no longer has to work and to produce in order to preserve his individual existence. And even on this height of labor, the Greek at times is overcome by a feeling that looks like shame. In one place, Plutarch with earlier Greek instincts says that no nobly born youth on beholding the Zeus in Pisa would have the desire to become himself a Phidias or on seeing the Hera in Argos to become himself a polyclad. And just as little would he wish to be anachryon by Lydus or Archulacus, however much he might revel in their poetry. To the Greek, the work of the artist falls just as much under the undignified conception of labor as any ignoble craft. But if the compelling force of the artistic impulse operates in him, then he must produce and submit himself to that need of labor. And as a father admires the beauty and the gift of his child, but thinks of the act of procreation with shame-faced dislike, so it was with the Greek, the joyful astonishment at the beautiful has not blinded him as to its origin, which appeared to him like all becoming in nature to be a powerful necessity of forcing of itself into existence. That feeling by which the process of procreation is considered as something shame-facedly to be hidden, although by it man serves a higher purpose than his individual preservation, the same feeling veiled also the origin of the great works of art in spite of the fact that through them a higher form of existence is inaugurated just as through that other act comes a new generation. The feeling of shame seems therefore to occur where man is merely a tool of manifestations of will infinitely greater than he is permitted to consider himself in the isolated shape of the individual. Now we have the general idea to which are to be subordinated the feelings which the Greek had with regard to labor and slavery. Both were considered by them as a necessary disgrace of which one feels ashamed as a disgrace and as a necessity at the same time. In this feeling of shame is hidden the unconscious discernment that the real aim needs those conditional factors, but that in that need lies the fearful and beast of prey like quality of the sphinx nature who in the glorification of the artistically free culture life so beautifully stretches forth her virgin body. Culture which is chiefly a real need for art rests upon a terrible basis. The latter however makes itself known in the twilight sensation of shame. In order that there may be a broad deep and fruitful soil for the development of art the enormous majority must in the service of a minority be slavishly subjected to life struggle to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate. At their cost through the surplus of their labor that privilege class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence in order to create and to satisfy a new world of want. Accordingly we must accept this cruel sounding truth that slavery is of the essence of culture. A truth of course which leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of existence this truth is the vulture that gnaws at the liver of the Promethean promoter of culture. The misery of toiling men must still increase in order to make the production of the world of art possible to a small number of Olympian men. Here is to be found the source of that secret wrath nourished by communists and socialists of all times and also about their feebler descendants the white race of the liberals not only against the arts but also against classical antiquity. If culture really rested upon the will of a people if here inexorable powers did not rule powers which are law and barrier to the individual then the contempt for culture the glorification of a porous in spirit the iconoclastic annihilation of artistic claims would be more than an insurrection of the suppressed masses against drone-like individuals. It would be the cry of compassion tearing down the walls of culture the desire for justice for the equalization of suffering would swamp all other ideas. In fact here and there sometimes an exuberant degree of compassion has for a short time opened all the floodgates of culture life. A rainbow of compassionate love and of peace appeared with the first radiant rise of Christianity and under it was born Christianity's most beautiful fruit the gospel according to Saint John. But there are also instances to show that powerful religions for long periods petrify a given degree of culture and cut off with inexorable sickle everything that still grows on strongly and luxuriantly for it is not to be forgotten that the same cruelty which we found in the essence of every culture lies also in the essence of every powerful religion and in general in the essence of power which is always evil so that we shall understand it just as well when a culture is shattering with a cry for liberty or at least justice a too highly piled bulwark of religious claims. That which in this sorry scheme of things will live that is must live is at the bottom of its nature a reflex of the primal pain and primal contradiction and must therefore strike our eyes and organ fashion for this world and earth as an insatiable greed for existence and an eternal self-contradiction within the form of time therefore as becoming. Every moment devours the preceding one every birth is the death of innumerable beings begetting living murdering all is one therefore we may compare this grand culture with a bloodstained victor who in his triumphal procession carries the defeated along as slaves chained to his chariot slaves whom a beneficent power has so blinded that almost crushed by the wheels of the chariot they nevertheless still exclaim dignity of labor dignity of man. The voluptuous Cleopatra culture throws ever and again the most priceless pearls the tears of compassion for the misery of slaves into her golden goblet out of the emasculation of modern man has been born the enormous social distress of the present time not out of the true and deep commissuration for that misery. And if it should be true that the Greeks perished through their slavedom then another fact is much more certain that we shall perish through the lack of slavery. Slavedom did not appear in any way objectionable much less abominable either to early Christianity or to the Germanic race. What an uplifting effect on us has the contemplation of the medieval bondman with his legal and moral relations relations that were inwardly strong and tender towards the man of higher rank with the profound fencing in of his narrow existence how uplifting and how reproachful. He who cannot reflect upon the position of affairs in society without melancholy who has learned to conceive of it as the continual painful birth of those privileged culture men in whose service everything else must be devoured he will no longer be deceived by that false clamor which the moderns have spread over the origin and meaning of the state. For what can the state mean to us if not the means by which that social process described just now is to be fused and to be guaranteed in its unimpeded continuance. Be the sociable instinct in individual man as strong as it may it is only the iron clamp of the state that constrains the large masses upon one another in such a fashion that a chemical decomposition of society with its pyramid like superstructure is bound to take place. Wents however originates this sudden power of the state whose aim lies much beyond the insight and beyond the egoism of the individual how did the slave the blind mole of culture originate. The Greeks in their instinct relating to the law of nations have betrayed it to us in an instinct which even in the ripest fullness of their civilization and humanity never ceased to utter as out of a brazen mouth such words as do the victor belongs the vanquished with wife and child life and property. Power gives the first right and there is no right which at bottom is not presumption usurpation violence. Here again we see with what pitiless inflexibility nature in order to arrive at society forges for herself the cruel tool of the state namely that conqueror with the iron hand who is nothing else than the objectivation of the instinct indicated by the indefinable greatness and power of such conquerors the spectator feels that they are only the means of an intention manifesting itself through them and yet hiding itself from them. The weaker forces attach themselves to them with such mysterious speed and transform themselves so wonderfully in the sudden swelling of that violent avalanche under the charm of that creative kernel into an affinity hitherto not existing that it seems as if a magic will were emanating from them. Now when we see how little the vanquished trouble themselves after a short time about the horrible origin of the state so that history informs us of no class of events worse than the origins of those sudden violent bloody and at least in one point inexplicable usurpations when hearts involuntarily go out towards the magic of the growing state with the presentiment of an invisible deep purpose where the calculating intellect is enabled to see an addition of forces only when now the state is even contemplated with fervor as the goal and ultimate aim of the sacrifices and duties of the individual then out of all that speaks the enormous necessity of the state without which nature might not succeed in coming through society to her deliverance in semblance in the mirror of the genius. What discernments does the instinctive pleasure in the state not overcome? One would indeed feel inclined to think that a man who looks into the origin of the state will henceforth seek his salvation at an awful distance from it and where can one not see the monuments of its origin, devastated lands, destroyed cities, brutalized men, devouring hatred of nations, the state of ignominiously low birth for the majority of men are continually flowing source of hardship at frequently recurring periods the consuming torch of mankind and yet a word at which we forget ourselves a battle cry which has filled men with enthusiasm for innumerable really heroic deeds perhaps the highest and most venerable object for the blind and egoistic multitude which only in the tremendous moments of state life has the strange expression of greatness on its face. We have however to consider the Greeks with regard to the unique sun height of their art as the political men in themselves and certainly history knows of no second instance of such an awful un-chaining of the political passion such an unconditional emulation of all other interests in the service of this state instinct. At the best, one might distinguish the men of the Renaissance and Italy with a similar title for like reasons and by way of comparison. So overloaded is that passion among the Greeks that it begins ever anew to rage against itself and to strike its teeth into its own flesh. This bloody jealousy of city against city of party against party, this murderous greed of those little wars, the tiger like triumph over the corpse of the slain enemy in short the incessant renewal of those Trojan scenes of struggle and horror in the spectacle of which as a genuine Helene, Homer stands before us absorbed with delight with or does this naive barbarism of the Greek state point. What is the excuse before the tribunal of eternal justice, proud and calm the state steps before this tribunal and by the hand it leads the flower of blossoming womanhood. The Greek society for this Helena, the state waged those wars and what gray bearded judge could hear condemn. Under this mysterious connection which we hear divine between state and art, political greed and artistic creation, battlefield and work of art we understand by the state as already remarked only the cramp iron which compels the social process whereas without the state in the natural Bellum Omnium Contra Omnus, society cannot strike rooted all on a larger scale and beyond the reach of the family. Now after states have been established almost everywhere that bent of the Bellum Omnium Contra Omnus concentrates itself from time to time into a terrible gathering of war clouds and discharges itself as it were in rare but so much the more violent shocks and lightning flashes. But in consequence of the effect of that Bellum an effect which is turned inwards and compressed society is given time during the intervals to germinate and burst into leaf in order as soon as warmer days come to let the shining blossoms of genius sprout forth. In face of the political world of the Helens I will not hide those phenomena of the present in which I believe I discern dangerous atrophies of the political sphere equally critical for art and society. If there should exist men who as it were through birth are placed outside the national and state instincts who consequently have to esteem the state only in so far as they can see that it coincides with their own interest then such men will necessarily imagine as the ultimate political aim the most undisturbed collateral existence of great political communities possible in which they might be permitted to pursue their own purposes without restriction. With this idea in their heads they will promote that policy which will offer the greatest security to these purposes whereas it is unthinkable that they against their intentions guided perhaps by an unconscious instinct should sacrifice themselves for the state tendency unthinkable because they lack that very instinct. All other citizens of the state are in the dark about what nature intends with her state instinct within them and they follow blindly only those who stand outside this instinct know what they want from the state and what the state is to grant them. Therefore it is almost unavoidable that such men should gain great influence in the state because they are allowed to consider it as a means whereas all the others under the sway of those unconscious purposes of the state are themselves only means for the fulfillment of the state purpose. In order now to attain through the medium of the state the highest furtherance of their selfish aims it is above all necessary that the state be holy freed from those awfully incalculable war convulsions so that it may be used rationally. And thereby they strive with all their might for a condition of things in which war is an impossibility for that purpose the thing to do is first to curtail and to enfeeble the political separatisms and factions and through the establishment of large equi-poised state bodies and the mutual safeguarding of them to make the successful result of an aggressive war and consequently war itself the greatest improbability. As on the other hand they will endeavor to rest the question of war and peace from the decision of individual lords in order to be able rather to appeal to the egoism of the masses or their representatives for which purpose they again need slowly to dissolve the monarchic instincts of the nations. This purpose they attain best through the most general promulgation of the liberal optimistic view of the world which has its roots in the doctrines of French rationalism and the French revolution that is in a wholly un-Germanic genuinely neo-Latin shallow and unmetaphysical philosophy. I cannot help seeing in the prevailing international movements of the present day and the simultaneous promulgation of universal suffrage the effects of the fear of war above everything else. Yay, I behold behind these movements those truly international homeless money hermits as the really alarmed who with their natural lack of the state instinct have learned to abuse politics as a means of the exchange and stayed in society as an apparatus for their own enrichment. Against the deviation of the state tendency into a money tendency to be feared from this side the only remedy is war and once again war in the emotions of which this at least becomes obvious that the state is not founded upon the fear of the war demon as a protective institution for egoistic individuals but in love to fatherland and prince it produces an ethical impulse indicative of a much higher destiny. If I therefore designate as a dangerous and characteristic sign of the present political situation the application of revolutionary thought in the service of a selfish stateless money aristocracy if at the same time I conceive of the enormous dissemination of liberal optimism as the result of modern financial affairs fallen into strange hands and if I imagine all evils of social conditions together with the necessary decay of the arts to have either germinated from that route or grown together with it one will have to pardon my occasionally chanting a PN on war. Horribly clangs its silvery bow and although it comes along like the night war is nevertheless Apollo the true divinity for consecrating and purifying the state. First of all, however, as is said in the beginning of the Iliad he lets fly his arrow on the mules and dogs then he strikes the men themselves and everywhere pires break into flames. Be it then pronounced that war is just as much a necessity for the state as the slave is for society and who can avoid this verdict if he honestly asks himself about the causes of the never equal Greek art perfection. He who contemplates war and its uniformed possibility the soldier's profession with respect to the hitherto describe nature of the state must arrive at the conviction that through war and in the profession of arms is placed before our eyes and image or even perhaps the prototype of the state. Here we see as the most general effect of the war tendency and immediate decomposition and division of the chaotic mass into military castes out of which rises pyramid shaped on an exceedingly broad base of slaves the edifice of the martial society. The unconscious purpose of the whole movement constrains every individual under its yoke and produces also in heterogeneous natures as it were a chemical transformation of their qualities until they are brought into affinity with that purpose. In the highest castes one perceives already a little more of what in this internal process is involved at the bottom naming the creation of the military genius with whom we have become acquainted as the original founder of states. In the case of many states as for example in the lie surgeon constitution of Sparta one can distinctly perceive the own press of that fundamental idea of the state that of the creation of the military genius. If we now imagine the military primal state in its greatest activity that is proper labor and if we fix our glance upon the whole technique of war we cannot avoid correcting our notions picked up from everywhere as to the dignity of man and the dignity of labor by the question whether the idea of dignity is applicable also to that labor which has as its purpose the destruction of the dignified man as well as to the man who is entrusted with that dignified labor or whether in this warlike task of the state those mutually contradictory ideas do not neutralize one another. I should like to think the warlike man to be a means of the military genius and his labor again only a tool in the hands of that same genius and not to him as absolute man and non-genius but to him as a means of the genius whose pleasure also can be to choose his tools destruction as a mere pawn sacrificed on the strategist chessboard is due a degree of dignity of that dignity namely to have been deemed worthy of being a means of the genius. But what is shown here in a single instance is valid in the most general sense every human being with his total activity only has dignity in so far as he is a tool of the genius consciously or unconsciously from this we may immediately deduce the ethical conclusion that man in himself the absolute man possesses neither dignity nor rights nor duties only as a wholly determined being serving unconscious purposes can man excuse his existence. Plato's perfect state is according to these considerations certainly something still greater than even the warm-blooded among his admirers believe not to mention the smiling mean of superiority with which our historically educated refuse such a fruit of antiquity. The proper aim of the state, the Olympian existence and ever renewed procreation and preparation of the genius compared which all other things are only tools, expedience and factors towards realization is here discovered with a poetic intuition and painted with firmness. Plato saw through the awfully devastated herma of the then existing state life and perceived even then something divine in its interior. He believed that one might be able to take out this divine image and that the grim and barbarically distorted outside and chill did not belong to the essence of the state. The whole fervor and sublimity of his political passion threw itself upon this belief upon that desire and in the flames of this fire he perished that in his perfect state he did not place at the head the genius in his general meaning but only the genius of wisdom and of knowledge that he altogether excluded the inspired artist from his state. That was a rigid consequence of the Socratic judgment on art which Plato's struggling against himself had made his own. This more external almost incidental gap must not prevent our recognizing and the total conception of the Platonic state, the wonderfully great hieroglyph of a profound and eternally to be interpreted esoteric doctrine of the connection between state and genius. What we believed we could divine of this cryptograph we have said in this preface. End of section two. Section three of early Greek philosophy and other essays by Frederick Nietzsche. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Section three. The Greek woman fragment 1871. Just as Plato from disguises and obscurities brought to light the innermost purpose of the state so also he conceived the chief cause of the position of the Hellenic woman with regard to the state. In both cases he saw in what existed around him the image of the ideas manifested to him. And of these ideas of course the actual was only a hazy picture and phantasmagoria. He who according to the usual custom considers the position of the Hellenic woman to be altogether unworthy and repugnant to humanity must also turn with this reproach against the platonic conception of this position. For as it were the existing forms were only precisely set forth in this latter conception. Here therefore our question repeats itself should not the nature and the position of the Hellenic woman have a necessary relation to the goals of the Hellenic will. Of course there is one side of the platonic conception of woman which stands in abrupt contrast with Hellenic custom Plato gives to woman a full share in the rights, knowledge and duties of man and considers woman only as the weaker sex in that she will not achieve remarkable success in all things without however disputing this sexist title to all those things. We must not attach more value to this strange notion than to the expulsion of the artist out of the ideal state. These are sidelines daringly misdrawn aberrations as it were of the hand otherwise so sure and of the so calmly contemplating I which at times into the influence of the deceased master becomes dim and dejected in this mood he exaggerates the master's paradoxes and in the abundance of his love gives himself satisfaction by very eccentrically intensifying the latter's doctrines even to fool hardiness. The most significant word however that Plato as a Greek could say on the relation of woman to the state was that so objectionable demand that in the perfect state the family was to cease. At present let us take no account of his abolishing even marriage in order to carry out this demand fully and of his substituting solemn nuptials arranged by order of the state between the bravest men and the noblest women for the attainment of beautiful offspring. In that principal proposition however he has indicated most distinctly indeed to distinctly offensively distinctly an important preparatory step of the Hellenic will towards the procreation of the genius but in the customs of the Hellenic people the claim of the family on man and child was extremely limited. The man lived in the state, the child grew up for the state and was guided by the hand of the state. The Greek will took care that the need of culture could not be satisfied in the seclusion of a small circle. From the state the individual has to receive everything in order to return everything to the state. Woman accordingly means to the state what sleep does to man. In her nature lies the healing power which replaces that which has been used up the beneficial rest in which everything in moderate confines itself the eternal same by which the excessive and the surplus regulate themselves. In her the future generation dreams woman is more closely related to nature than man and in all her essentials she remains ever herself. Culture is with her always something external as something which does not touch the kernel that is eternally faithful to nature. Therefore the culture of woman might well appear to the Athenian as something indifferent, yay, if one only wanted to conjure it up in one's mind as something ridiculous. He who at once feels himself compelled from that to infer the position of women among the Greeks as unworthy and all too cruel should not indeed take as his criterion the culture of modern woman and her claims against which it is sufficient just to point out the Olympian women together with Penelope Antigone Electra. Of course it is true that these are ideal figures but who would be able to create such ideals out of the present world. Further indeed is to be considered what sons these women have born and what women they must have been to have given birth to such sons. The Hellenic woman as mother had to live in obscurity because the political instinct together with its highest aim demanded it. She had to vegetate like a plant in the narrow circle as a symbol of the Epicurean wisdom. Lathabiosis again in more recent times with the complete disintegration of the principle of the state. She had to step in as helper. The family as a makeshift for the state is her work and in the sense the artistic aim of the state had to abase itself to the level of a domestic art. Thereby it has been brought about that the passion of love as the one realm wholly accessible to women regulates our art to the very core. Similarly home education considers itself so to speak as the only natural one and suffers state education only as a questionable infringement upon the right of home education. All this is right as far as the modern state only is concerned. With that the nature of woman with all remains unaltered but her power is according to the position which the state takes up with regard to women a different one. Women have indeed really the power to make good to a certain extent the deficiencies of the state ever faithful to their nature which I have compared to sleep. In Greek antiquity they held that position which the most supreme will of the state assigned to them. For that reason they have been glorified as never since. The goddesses of Greek mythology are their images the Pythia and the Sybil as well as the Socratic diotema are the priestesses out of whom divine wisdom speaks. Now one understands why the proud resignation of the Spartan woman at the news of her son's death in battle can be no fable. Woman in relation to the state felt herself in her proper position. Therefore she had more dignity than woman has ever had since. Plato who through abolishing family and marriage still intensifies the position of woman feels now so much reverence towards them that oddly enough he is misled by a subsequent statement of their equality with man to abolish again the order of rank which is their due the highest triumph of the woman of antiquity to have seduced even the wisest. As long as the state is still in an embryonic condition woman as mother preponderates and determines the grade and the manifestations of culture in the same way as woman is destined to compliment the disorganized state. What Tacitus says of German women in Nessa, Quinn, Etiam, Sanctum, Alecquid, Edpro, Witten, Putan, Neck, Out, Concilia Aram, Aspernaan, Tour, Out, Response, Negligent applies on the whole to all nations not yet arrived at the real state. In such stages one feels only the more strongly that which at all times becomes again manifest that the instincts of woman as the bulwark of the future generation are invincible and that in her care for the preservation of the species nature speaks out of these instincts very distinctly. How far this divining power reaches is determined it seems by the greater or lesser consolidation of the state in disorderly and more arbitrary conditions where the whim or the passion of the individual man carries along with itself whole tribe then woman suddenly comes forward as the warning prophetess. But in Greece too there was a never slumbering care that the terribly overcharged political instinct might splinter into dust and atoms the little political organisms before they attained their goals in any way. Here the Hellenic will created for itself ever new implements by means of which it spoke adjusting moderating warning. Above all it is in the Pythia that the power of woman to compensate the state manifested itself so clearly as it has never done since that a people split up thus into small tribes and municipalities was yet at bottom whole and was performing the task of its nature within its faction was assured by that wonderful phenomenon the Pythia and the Delphian Oracle for always as long as Hellenism created its great works of art it spoke out of one mouth and as one Pythia we cannot hold back the portentous discernment that to the will individuation means much suffering and that in order to reach those individuals it needs an enormous step ladder of individuals. It is true our brains reel with the consideration whether the will in order to arrive at art has perhaps if used itself out into these worlds stars bodies and atoms at least it ought to become clear to us then that art is not necessary for the individuals but for the will itself a sublime outlook at which we shall be permitted to glance once more from another position. End of section three section four of early Greek philosophy and other essays by Frederick Nietzsche this LibriVox recording is in the public domain section four on music and words fragment 1871 what we here have asserted of the relationship between language and music must be valid to for equal reasons concerning the relationship of mind to music the mind to as the intensified symbolism of man's gestures is measured by the eternal significance of music only a simile which brings into expression the innermost secret of music but very superficially namely on the substratum of the passionately moved human body but if we include language also in the category of bodily symbolism and compare the drama according to the canon advanced with music then I venture to think a proposition of Schopenhauer will come into the clearest light to which reference must be made again later on it might be admissible although a purely musical mind does not demand it to join and adapt words or even a clearly represented action to the pure language of tones although the latter being self-sufficient needs no help so that our perceiving and reflecting intellect which does not like to be quite idle may meanwhile have light and analogous occupation also by this concession to the intellect man's attention adheres even more closely to music by this at the same time too is placed underneath that which the tones indicate in their general matter for less language of the heart a visible picture as it were a schema as an example illustrating a general idea indeed such things will even heighten the effect of music Schopenhauer Perra Ga too on the metaphysics of the beautiful and aesthetics paragraph two hundred and twenty four if we disregard the naturalistic external motivation according to which our perceiving and reflecting intellect does not like to be quite idle when listening to music and attention led by the hand of an obvious action follows better than the drama in relation to music has been characterized by Schopenhauer for the best reasons as a schema as an example illustrating a general idea and when he adds indeed such things will even heighten the effect of music than the enormous universality and originality of vocal music of the connection of tone with metaphor and idea guarantee the correctness of this utterance the music of every people begins and closes connection with lyricism and long before absolute music can be thought of the music of a people in that connection passes through the most important stages of development if we understand this primal lyricism of a people as indeed we must to be an imitation of the artistic typifying nature then as the original prototype of that union of music and lyricism must be regarded the duality in the essence of language already typified by nature now after discussing the relation of music to metaphor we will fathom deeper this essence of language in the multiplicity of languages the fact it once manifests itself that word and thing do not necessarily coincide with one another completely but that the word is a symbol but what does the word symbolize most certainly only conceptions be these now conscious ones or as in the greater number of cases unconscious for how should our word symbol correspond to that innermost nature of which we and the world are images only as conceptions we know that kernel only in this metaphorical expressions are we familiar with it beyond that point there is nowhere a direct bridge which could lead us to it the whole life of impulses to the play of feelings sensations, emotions, volitions is known to us as I'm forced to insert here in opposition to Schopenhauer after a most rigid self-examination not according to its essence but merely as conception and we may well be permitted to say that even Schopenhauer's will is nothing else but the most general phenomenal form of a something otherwise absolutely indecipherable if therefore we must acquiesce in the rigid necessity of getting nowhere beyond the conceptions we can nevertheless again distinguish two main species within their realm the one species manifests themselves to us as pleasure and displeasure sensations and accompany all other conceptions as a never lacking fundamental basis this most general manifestation out of which and by which alone we understand all becoming and all willing and for which we will retain the name will has now too in language its own symbolic sphere and in truth this sphere is equally fundamental to the language as that manifestation is fundamental to all other conceptions all degrees of pleasure and displeasure expressions of one primal cause unfathomable to us symbolize themselves in the tone of the speaker whereas all the other conceptions are indicated by the gesture symbolism of the speaker insofar as that primal cause is the same in all men the tonal subsoil is also the common one comprehensible beyond the difference of language out of it now develops the more arbitrary gesture symbolism which is not wholly adequate for its basis and with which begins the diversity of languages whose multiplicity we are permitted to consider to use a simile as a strophic text to that primal melody of the pleasure and displeasure language the whole realm of the consonental and vocal we believe we may reckon only under gesture symbolism consonants and vowels without that fundamental tone which is necessary above all else are nothing but positions of the organs of speech in short gestures as soon as we imagine the word proceeding out of the mouth of man then first of all the root of the word and the basis of that gesture symbolism the tonal subsoil the echo of the pleasure and displeasure sensations originate as our whole corporate reality stands in relation to that original phenomenon the will so the word built out of its consonants and vowels stands in relation to its tonal basis this original phenomenon the will with its scale of pleasure and displeasure sensations attains in the development of music an ever more adequate symbolic expression and to this historical process the continuous effort of lyric poetry runs parallel the effort to transcribe music into metaphors exactly as this double phenomenon according to the just completed disquisition lies typified in language he who has followed us into these difficult contemplations readily attentively and with some imagination and with kind indulgence where the expression has been too scanty or too unconditional will now have the advantage with us of laying before himself more seriously and answering more deeply than is usually the case some stirring points of controversy of present day aesthetics and still more of contemporary artists let us think now after all our assumptions what an undertaking it must be to set music to a poem that is to illustrate a poem by music in order to help music thereby to obtain a language of ideas what a perverted world a task that appears to my mind like that of a son wanting to create his father music can create metaphors out of itself which will always however be but schemata instances as it were of her intrinsic general contents but how should the metaphor, the conception create music out of itself much less could the idea or as one has said the poetical idea do this as certainly as a bridge leads out of the mysterious castle of the musician into the free land of the metaphors and the lyric poet steps across it as certainly is it impossible to go the contrary way although some are said to exist who fancy they have done so one might people the air with the fantasy of a Raphael one might see Susie as he does listening enraptured to the harmonies of the choirs of angels no tone issues from this world apparently lost in music even if we imagine that that harmony in reality as by a miracle began to sound for us wither would still see Paul and Magdalena disappear from us wither even the singing choir of angels we should have once ceased to be Raphael and as in that picture the earthly instruments lie shattered on the ground so our painter's vision defeated by the hire would fade and die away how nevertheless could the miracle happen how should the Apollonian world of the eye quite engrossed in contemplation be able to create out of itself the tone which on the contrary symbolizes a sphere which is excluded and conquered just by that very Apollonian absorption in appearance the delight at appearance cannot raise out of itself the pleasure at non appearance the delight of perceiving is delight only by the fact that nothing reminds us of a sphere in which individuation is broken and abolished if we have characterized at all correctly the Apollonian in opposition to the Dionysian then the thought which attributes to the metaphor the idea, the appearance in some way the power of producing out of itself the tone must appear to us strangely wrong we will not be referred in order to be refuted to the musician who writes music to existing lyric poems for after all that has been said we shall be compelled to assert that the relationship between the lyric poem and its setting must in any case be a different one from that between a father and his child then what exactly here now we may be met on the ground of a favorite aesthetic notion with the proposition it is not the poem which gives birth to this setting but the sentiment created by the poem I do not agree with that the more subtle or powerful stirring up of that pleasure and displeasure subsoil is in the realm of productive art the element which is in artistic in itself indeed only its total exclusion makes the complete self absorption and disinterested perception of the artist possible here perhaps one might retaliate that I myself just now predicated about the will that a music will came to an ever more adequate symbolic expression my answer condensed into an aesthetic axiom is this the will is the object of music but not the origin of it that is the will in its very greatest universality as the most original manifestation under which is to be understood all becoming that which we call feeling is with regard to this will already permeated and saturated with conscious and unconscious conceptions and is therefore no longer directly the object of music it is unthinkable then that these feelings should be able to create music out of themselves take for instance the feelings of love fear and hope music can no longer do anything with them in a direct way every one of them is already so filled with conceptions on the contrary these feelings can serve to symbolize music as the lyric poet does who translates for himself into the simile world of feelings that conceptually and metaphorically unapproachable realm of the will the proper content and object of music the lyric poet resembles all those hearers of music who are conscious of an effect of music on their emotions the distant and removed power of music appeals with them to an intermediate realm which gives to them as it were a foretaste a symbolic preliminary conception of music proper it appeals to the intermediate realm of the emotions one might be permitted to say about them with respect to the will the only object of music that they bear the same relation to this will as the analogous morning dream according to Schopenhauer's theory bears to the dream proper to all those however who are unable to get at music except with their emotions is to be said that they will ever remain in the entrance hall and will never have access to the sanctuary of music which as I said, emotion cannot show but only symbolize with regard however to the origin of music I've already explained that that can never lie in the will but must rather rest in the lap of that force which under the form of the will creates out of itself a visionary world the origin of music lies beyond all individuation a proposition which after our discussion on the Dionysian is self-evident at this point I take the liberty of setting forth again comprehensively side by side those decisive propositions which the antithesis of the Dionysian and an Apollonian dealt with has compelled us to enunciate the will as the most original manifestation is the object of music in this sense music can be called imitation of nature but of nature in its most general form the will itself and the feelings manifestations of the will already permeated with conceptions are wholly incapable of creating music out of themselves just as on the other hand it is utterly denied to music to represent feelings or to have feelings as its object while will is its only object he who carries away feelings as effects of music has within them as it were a symbolic intermediate realm which can give him a foretaste of music but excludes him at the same time from her innermost sanctuaries the lyric poet interprets music to himself through the symbolic world of emotions whereas he himself in the calm of the Apollonian contemplation is exempted from those emotions when therefore the musician writes a setting to a lyric poem he is moved as musician neither through the images nor through the emotional language in the text but a musical inspiration coming from quite a different sphere chooses for itself that song text as allegorical expression there cannot therefore be any question as to a necessary relation between poem and music for the two worlds brought here into connection are too strange to one another to enter into more than a superficial alliance the song text is just a symbol and stands to music in the same relation as the Egyptian hieroglyph of bravery did to the brave warrior himself during the highest revelations of music we even feel involuntarily the crudeness of every figurative effort and of every emotion dragged in for purposes of analogy for example, the last quartets of Beethoven quite put to shame all illustration and the entire realm of empiric reality the symbol in face of the God really revealing himself has no longer any meaning no over it appears as an offensive superficiality one must not think any the worst of us for considering from this point of view one item so that we may speak about it without reserve namely the last movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony a movement which is unprecedented and unanalyzable in its charms to the dithirambic world the redeeming exaltation of this music Schiller's poem to Joy is holy in congruence yea like cold moonlight pales beside that sea of flame who would rob me of this sure feeling yea who would be able to dispute that feeling during the hearing of this music does not find expression in a screen only because we wholly impotent through music metaphor and word already hear nothing at all from Schiller's poem all that noble sublimity yea the grandeur of Schiller's verses has beside the truly naive innocent folk melody of joy a disturbing troubling even crude and offensive effect only the ever fuller development of the choir song and the masses of the orchestra preventing us from hearing them keep from us that sensation of incongruity what therefore shall we think of that awful aesthetic superstition that Beethoven himself made a solemn statement as to his belief in the limits of absolute music in that fourth movement of the ninth symphony yea that he as it were with it unlocked the portals of a new art within which music had been enabled to represent even metaphor and idea and whereby music had been opened to the conscious mind and what does Beethoven himself tell us when he has choir song introduced by our rest of the teeth the last friends let us intonate not these tones but more pleasing and joyous ones more pleasing and joyous ones for that he needed the convincing tone of the human voice for that he needed the music of innocence in the folk song not the word but the more pleasing sound not the idea but the most heartfelt joyful tone was chosen by the sublime master in his longing for the most soul thrilling ensemble of his orchestra and how could one misunderstand him rather may the same be said of this movement as Richard Wagner says of the great Missa Solemnus which he calls a pure symphonic work of the most genuine Beethoven spirit Beethoven page 42, the voices are treated here quite in the sense of human instruments in which sense Schopenhauer quite rightly wanted these human voices to be considered the text underlying them is understood by us in these great church compositions not in its conceptual meaning but it serves in the sense of the musical work of art merely as material for vocal music and does not stand to our musically determined sensation in a disturbing position simply because it does not incite in us any rational conceptions but as its ecclesiastical character conditions to only touches us with the impression of well-known symbolic creeds. Besides I do not doubt that Beethoven had he written the 10th symphony of which drafts are still extent would have composed just the 10th symphony. Let us now approach after these preparations the discussion of the opera so as to be able to proceed afterwards from the opera to its counterpart in the Greek tragedy. What we had to observe in the last movement of the ninth that is on the highest level of modern music development these that the word content goes down unheard in the general sea of sound is nothing isolated and peculiar but the general and eternally valid norm in the vocal music of all times the norm which alone is adequate to the origin of lyric song. The man in a state of Dionysian excitement has a listener just as little as the orgiastic crowd a listener to whom he might have something to communicate a listener as the epic narrator and generally speaking the Apollonian artist to be sure presupposes. It is rather in the nature of the Dionysian art that it has no consideration for the listener. The inspired servant of Dionysos is as I said in a former place understood only by his compiers. But if we now imagine a listener at those endemic outbursts of Dionysian excitement then we shall have to prophesy for him a fate similar to that which Pentheus the discovered eaves dropper suffered namely to be torn to pieces by the mean ads. The lyric musician sings as the bird sings alone. Out of innermost compulsion when the listener comes to him with a demand he must become dumb. Therefore it would be altogether unnatural to ask from the lyric musician that one should also understand the text words of his song unnatural because here a demand is made by the listener who has no right at all during the lyric outburst to claim anything. Now with the poetry of the great ancient lyric poets in your hand put the question honestly to yourself whether they can have even thought of making themselves clear to the mass of the people standing around and listening clear with their world of metaphors and thoughts answer this serious question with a look at Pindar and the Escalian choir songs these most daring and obscure intricacies of thought this world of metaphors ever impetuously reproducing itself this oracular tone of the whole which we without the diversion of music and orchestration so often cannot penetrate even with the closest attention was this whole world of miracles transparent as glass to the Greek crowd yay a metaphorical conceptual interpretation of music and with such mysteries of thought as are to be found in Pindar do you think the wonderful poet could have wished to elucidate the music already strikingly distinct should we hear not be forced to an insight into the very nature of the lyricist the artistic man who to himself must interpret music through the symbolism of metaphors and emotions but who has nothing to communicate to the listener an artist who in complete aloofness even forgets those who stand eagerly listening near him and as the lyricist his hymns so the people sing the folk song for themselves out of in most impulse unconcerned whether the word is comprehensible to him who does not join in the song let us think of our own experiences in the realm of higher art music what did we understand of the text of a mass the Palestrina of a cantata a Bach of an oratoria of handle if we ourselves perhaps did not join in singing only for him who joins in singing do lyric poetry and vocal music exist the listener stands before it as before absolute music but now the opera begins according to the clearest testimonies with the demand of the listener to understand the word what the listener demands the word is to be understood but to bring music into the service of a series of metaphors and conceptions to use it as a means to an end to the strengthening and elucidation of such conceptions and metaphors such a peculiar presumption as is found in the concept of an opera reminds me of that ridiculous person who endeavors to lift himself up into the air with his own arms that which this fool and which the opera according to that idea attempt are absolute impossibilities that idea of the opera does not demand perhaps an abuse from music but as I said and impossibility music never can become a means when they push, screw, torture it as tone, as role of the drum in its crudest and simplest stages it still defeats poetry and abases the latter to its reflection the opera as a species of art according to that concept is therefore not only an aberration of music but an erroneous conception of aesthetics if I herewith after all justify the nature of the opera for aesthetics I am of course far from justifying at the same time bad opera music or bad opera verses the worst music can still mean as compared with the best poetry the Dionysian world subsoil and the worst poetry can be mirror image and reflection of this subsoil if together with the best music as certainly, namely as the single tone against the metaphor is already Dionysian and the single metaphor together with idea and word against music is already Apollonian yet even bad music together with bad poetry can still inform as to the nature of music and poetry when therefore Schopenhauer felt Bellini's Norma for example, as the fulfillment of tragedy with regard to that opera's music and poetry then he in Dionysian Apollonian emotion and self-forgetfulness was quite entitled to do so because he perceived music and poetry in their most general as it were philosophical value as music and poetry but with that judgment he showed a poorly educated taste for good taste always has historical perspective to us who intentionally in this investigation avoid any question of the historic value of an art phenomenon and endeavor to focus only the phenomenon itself in its unaltered eternal meaning and consequently in its highest type too to us the art species of the opera seems to be justified as much as the folk song in so far as we find in both that union of the Dionysian and Apollonian and are permitted to assume for the opera namely for the highest type of the opera and origin analogous to that of the folk song only in so far as the opera historically known to us has a completely different origin from that of the folk song do we reject this opera which stands in the same relation to that generic notion just defended by us as the marionette does to a living human being it is certain music never can become a means in the service of the text but must always defeat the text yet music must become bad when the composer interrupts every Dionysian force rising within himself by an anxious regard for the words and gestures of his marionettes if the poet of the opera text has offered him nothing more than the usual schematized figures with their Egyptian regularity than the freer, more unconditional, more Dionysian is the development of the music and the more she despises all dramatic requirements so much the higher will be the value of the opera in this sense it is true the opera is at its best good music and nothing but music whereas the jugglery performed at the same time is as it were only a fantastic disguise of the orchestra above all of the most important instruments the orchestra has the singers and from this jugglery the judicious listener turns away laughing if the mass is diverted by this very jugglery and only permits the music with it then the mob fares as all those do who value the frame of a good picture higher than the picture itself who treats such naive operations with a serious or even pathetic reproach but what will the opera mean as dramatic music in its possibly farthest distance from pure music efficient in itself and purely Dionysian let us imagine a passionate drama full of incidents which carries away the spectator and which is already sure of success by its plot what will dramatic music be able to add if it does not take away something firstly it will take away much for in every moment where for once the Dionysian power of music strikes the listener the eye is dimmed that sees the action the eye that became absorbed in the individuals appearing before it the listener now forgets the drama and becomes alive again to it only when the Dionysian spell over him has been broken in so far however as music makes the listener forget the drama it is not yet dramatic music but what kind of music is that which is not allowed to exercise any Dionysian power over the listener and how is it possible it is possible as purely conventional symbolism out of which convention has sucked all natural strength as music which has diminished two symbols of remembrance and its effect aims at reminding the spectator of something which at the sight of the drama must not escape him lest he should misunderstand it as a trumpet signal is an invitation for the horse to try lastly before the drama commenced and in interludes or during tedious passages doubtful as to dramatic effect yay even in its highest moments there would still be permitted another species of remembrance music no longer purely conventional namely emotional music as a stimulant to dull or weary nerves I'm able to distinguish in the so-called dramatic music these two elements only a conventional rhetoric and remembrance music and a sensational music with an effect essentially physical and thus it basulates between the noise of the drum and the signal horn like the mood of the warrior who goes into the battle but now the mind regaling itself on pure music and educated through comparison demands a masquerade for those two wrong tendencies of music remembrance and emotion are to be played but in good music which must be in itself enjoyable yay valuable what despair for the dramatic musician who must mask the big drum by good music which however must nevertheless have no purely musical but only a stimulating effect and now comes the great Philistine public nodding its thousand heads and enjoys this dramatic music which is ever ashamed of itself enjoys it to the very last morsel without perceiving anything of its shame and embarrassment rather the public feels its skin agreeably tickled for indeed homage is being rendered in all forms and ways to the public to the pleasure hunting dull-eyed sensualist who needs excitement to the conceited educated person who has accustomed himself to good drama and good music as to good food without after all making much out of it to the forgetful and absent-minded egoist who must be led back to the work of art with force and with signal horns because selfish plans continually pass through his mind aiming at gain or pleasure will be gone dramatic musicians drawn near and view your patrons faces the half are coarse the half are cold why should you rack poor foolish bars for ends like these the gracious muses and that the muses are tormented even tortured and flayed these voracious miserable ones do not themselves deny we had assumed a passionate drama carrying away the spectator which even without music would be sure of its effect I fear that that in it which is poetry and not action proper will stand in relation to true poetry as dramatic music to music in general it will be remembrance and emotional poetry poetry will serve as a means in order to recall in a conventional fashion feelings and passions the expression of which has been found by real poets and has become celebrated yay normal with them further this poor true will be expected in dangerous moments to assist the proper action whether a criminalistic horror story or an exhibition of witchery mad with shifting the scenes and to spread a covering veil over the crudeness of the action itself shamefully conscious that the poetry is only masquerade which cannot bear the light of day such a dramatic rhyme jingle clamors now for dramatic music as on the other hand again the poet Taster of such dramas as met after one fourth of the way by the dramatic musician with his talent for the drum and the signal horn and his shyness of genuine music trusting itself and self-sufficient and now they see one another and these Apollonian and Dionysian caricatures this part nobile fraud drum embrace one another end of section four section five of early Greek philosophy and other essays by Frederick Nietzsche this LibriVox recording is in the public domain section five Homer's contest preface to an unwritten book 1872 when one speaks of humanity the notion lies at the bottom that humanity is that which separates and distinguishes man from nature but such a distinction does not in reality exist the natural qualities and the properly called human ones have grown up inseparably together man in his highest and noblest capacities is nature and bears in himself her awful two fold character his abilities generally considered dreadful and inhuman are perhaps indeed the fertile soil out of which alone can grow forth all humanity in emotions actions and works thus the Greeks the most humane men of ancient times having themselves a trait of cruelty of tiger like pleasure in destruction a trait which in the grotesque manified image of the Helene in Alexander the Great is very plainly visible which however in their whole history as well as in their mythology must terrify us who meet them with the emasculate idea of modern humanity when Alexander has the feet of bodice the brave defender of Gaza board through and binds the living body to his chariot in order to drag him about exposed to the scorn of his soldiers that is a sickening caricature of Achilles who at night it will use as Hector's corpse by a similar trailing but even this trait has for us something offensive something which inspires horror it gives us a peep into the abysses of hatred with the same sensation perhaps we stand before the bloody and insatiable self-laceration of two Greek parties as for example in the Corsairian revolution when the victory in a fight of the cities according to the law of warfare executes the whole male population and sells all the women and children into slavery we see in the sanction of such a law that the Greek deemed it a positive necessity to allow his hatred to break forth unimpeded in such moments the compressed and swollen feeling relieved itself the tiger bounded forth of eluptuous cruelty shown out of his fearful eye why had the Greek sculptor to represent again and again war and fights in innumerable repetitions extended human bodies whose sinews are tightened through hatred or through the recklessness of triumph fighters wounded and writhing with pain or the dying with the last rattle in their throat why did the whole Greek world exalt in the fighting scenes of the Iliad I'm afraid we do not understand them enough in Greek fashion and that we should even shudder if for once we did understand them thus but what lies as the mother wound of the Hellenic behind the Homeric world in the latter by the extremely artistic definiteness and the calm and purity of the lines we are already lifted for above the purely material amalgamation its colors by an artistic deception appear lighter, milder, warmer its men in this colored warm illumination appear better and more sympathetic but where do we look if no longer guided and protected by Homer's hand we step backwards into the free Homeric world only in tonight and horror into the products of a fancy accustomed to the horrible what earthly existence is reflected in the loathsome awful theologian or lore a life sweet only by the children of the night striped, amorous desires, deception, age and death let us imagine the suffocating atmosphere of Iciad's poem still thickened and darkened and without all the mitigations and purifications which poured over Hellas from Delphi and the numerous seats of the gods if we mix this thickened B-ocean air with the grim voluptuousness of the Etruscans then such a reality would extort from us a world of myths within which Uranus, Cronus and Zeus and the struggles of the Titans would appear as a relief combat in this brooding atmosphere is salvation and safety the cruelty of victory is the summit of life's glories and just as in truth the idea of Greek law has developed from murder and expiation of murder so also nobler civilization takes her first wreath of victory from the altar of the expiation of murder behind that bloody age stretches a wave furrow deep into Hellenic history the names of Orpheus of Museus and their cults indicate to what consequences the uninterrupted sight of a world of warfare and cruelty led to the loathing of existence to the conception of this existence as a punishment to be born to the end, to the belief and the identity of existence and indebtedness but these particular conclusions are not specifically Hellenic through them Greece comes into contact with India and the Orient generally the Hellenic genius had ready yet another answer to the question what does a life of fighting and of victory mean and gives this answer in the whole breadth of Greek history in order to understand the latter we must start from the fact that the Greek genius admitted the existing fearful impulse and deemed it justified whereas in the Orphic phase of thought was contained the belief that life with such an impulse as its root would not be worth living strife and the pleasure of victory were acknowledged and nothing separates the Greek world more from ours than the coloring derived hands of some ethical ideas for example of Eris and of Endi when the traveler Pausanius during his wanderings through Greece visited the Helicon a very old copy of the first didactic poem of the Greeks the works and days of Hesiod was shown to him inscribed upon plates of lead and severely damaged by time and weather however he recognized this much that unlike the usual copies it had not at its head that little himness on Zeus that began at once with the declaration to Eris goddesses are on earth this is one of the most noteworthy Hellenic thoughts and worthy to be impressed on the newcomer immediately at the entrance gate of Greek ethics one would like to praise the one Eris just as much as the blame the other if one uses one's reason for these two goddesses have quite different dispositions for the one the cruel one furthers the evil war and feud no mortal likes her but under the yoke of need one pays honor to the burdensome Eris according to the decree of the immortals she as the elder gave birth to Black Knight Zeus the high ruling one however placed the other Eris upon the roots of the earth and among men as a much better one she urges even the unskilled man to work and if one who lacks property beholds another who is rich then he hastens to so in similar fashion and to plant and to put his house in order the neighbor vies with the neighbor who strives after a fortune good is this Eris to men the potter also has a grudge against the potter and the carpenter against the carpenter the beggar envies the beggar and the singer the singer those two last verses which treat of the odium figu linen appear to our scholars to be incomprehensible in this place according to their judgment the predicates grudge and envy fit only the nature of the evil Eris and for this reason they do not hesitate to designate these verses as spurious or thrown by chance into this place for that judgment however a system of ethics other than the Hellenic must have inspired these scholars unawares for in these verses to the good Eris Aristotle finds no offense and not only Aristotle but the whole Greek antiquity thinks of spite and envy otherwise than we do and agrees with E.C. it who first designates as an evil one that Eris who leads men against one another to a hostile war of extermination and secondly praises another Eris as the good one who as jealousy spite envy incites men to activity but not to the action of war to the knife but to the action of contest the Greek is envious and conceives of this quality not as a blemish but as the effect of a beneficent deity what a golf of ethical judgment between us and him because he is envious he also feels with every superfluity of honor, riches, splendor and fortune the envious eye of a God resting on himself and he fears this envy in this case the latter reminds him of the transitoriness of every human lot he dreads his very happiness and sacrificing the best of it he bows before the divine envy this conception does not perhaps estrange him from his gods their significance on the contrary is expressed by the thought that with them man in whose soul jealousy is incandled against every other living being is never allowed to venture into contest in the fight of Thamiris with the muses of Marsiris with Apollo in the heart moving fate of Nairobi appears the horrible opposition of the two powers who must never fight with one another, man and God the greater and more sublime however a Greek is the brighter in him appears the ambitious flame devouring everybody who runs with him on the same track Aristotle once made a list of such contests on a large scale among them as the most striking instance how even a dead person can still incite a living one to consuming jealousy thus for example Aristotle designates the relation between the colophonian xenophonies and Homer we do not understand this attack on the national hero of poetry in all its strength if we do not imagine as later on also with Plato the root of this attack to be the ardent desire to step into the place of the overthrown poet and to inherit his fame every great Helene hands on the torch of the contest at every great virtue a new light is kindled if the young Thamistocles could not sleep at the thought of the laurels of miltiades so his early awakened bent released itself only in the long emulation with Aristides in that uniquely noteworthy purely instinctive genius of his political activity which Thucydides describes how characteristic are both question and answer when a notable opponent of Pericles is asked whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler in the city and he gives the answer even if I throw him down he denies that he has fallen attains his purpose and convinces those who saw him fall if one wants to see that sentiment unashamed in its naive expressions the sentiment as to the necessity of contests lest the state's welfare be threatened one should think of the original meaning of ostracism as for example the Ephesians pronounced it at the banishment of hermador among us nobody shall be the best if however someone is the best then that can be so elsewhere and among others why should not someone be the best because with that the contest would fail and the eternal life basis of the Hellenic state would be in danger later on ostracism receives quite another position with regard to the contest it is applied when the danger becomes obvious that one of the great contesting politicians and party leaders feels himself urged on in the heat of the conflict towards harmful and destructive measures and dubious coup d'etat the original sense of this peculiar institution however is not that of a safety valve but that of a stimulant the all-excelling individual was to be removed in order that the contest of forces might reawaken a thought which is hostile to the exclusiveness of genius in the modern sense but which assumes that in the natural order things there are always several geniuses which incite one another to action as much also as they hold one another within the bounds of moderation that is the kernel of the Hellenic contest conception it abominates autocracy and fears its dangers it desires as a preventive against the genius a second genius every natural gift must develop itself by contest thus the Hellenic national pedagogy demands whereas modern educators fear nothing as much as the unchanging of the so-called ambition here one fears selfishness as the evil in itself with the exception of the Jesuits who agree with the ancients and who possibly for that reason are the most deficient educators of our time they seem to believe that selfishness that is the individual element is only the most powerful agents for that it obtains its character as good and evil essentially from the aims towards which it strives to the ancients however the aim of the agonistic education was the welfare of the whole of the civic society every Athenian for instance was to cultivate his ego in contest so far that it should be of the highest service to Athens and should do the least harm it was not unmeasured and immeasurable as modern ambition generally is the youth thought of the welfare of his native town when he vied with others in running throwing or singing it was for glory that he wanted to increase with his own it was to his town's gods that he dedicated the wreaths which the umpires as a mark of honor set upon his head every greek from childhood felt within himself the burning wish to be in the contest of the towns an instrument for the welfare of his own town in this his selfishness was kindled into flame by this his selfishness was bridled and restricted therefore the individuals in antiquity were freer because their aims were nearer and more tangible modern man on the contrary is everywhere hampered by infinity like the fleet-footed Achilles in the allegory of the Eliette Zeno infinity impedes him he does not even overtake the tortoise but as the youths to be educated were brought up struggling against one another so their educators were in turn in emulation amongst themselves distrustfully jealous the great musical masters pindar and simonides stepped side by side in rivalry the sophist the higher teacher of antiquity meets his fellow sophist even the most universal kind of instruction through the drama was imparted to the people only under the form of an enormous wrestling of the great musical and dramatic artists how wonderful and even the artist has a grudge against the artist and the modern man dislikes in an artist nothing so much as the personal battle feeling whereas the greek recognizes the artist only in such a personal struggle there where the modern suspects weakness of the work of art the helene seeks the source of his highest strength that which by way of example in Plato is of special artistic importance in his dialogues is usually the result of an emulation with the art of the orators of the sophists of the dramatists of his time invented deliberately in order that at the end he could say behold i can also do what my great rivals can yeah i can do it even better than they no protagoras has composed such beautiful myths as i no dramatists such a spirited and fascinating whole as the symposium no orator penned such an oration as i put up in the georgias and now i reject all that together and condemn all imitative art only the contest made me a poet a sophist an orator what a problem unfolds itself there before us if we ask about the relationship between the contest and the conception of the work of art if on the other hand we remove the contest from greek life then we look at once into the free Homeric abyss of horrible savagery hatred and pleasure in destruction this phenomenon alas shows itself frequently when a great personality was owing to an enormously brilliant deed suddenly withdrawn from the contest and became poor to conquer according to his and his fellow citizens judgment almost without exception the effect is awful and if one usually draws from these consequences the conclusion that the greek was unable to bear glory and fortune one should say more exactly that he was unable to bear fame without further struggle and fortune at the end of the contest there is no more distinct instance than the fate of milteides placed upon a solitary height and lifted far above every fellow combatant through his incomparable success at marathon he feels a low thirsting for revenge awakened within himself against a citizen of power with whom he had been at enmity long ago to satisfy his desire he misuses reputation the public exchequer and civic honor and disgraces himself conscious of his ill success he falls into unworthy machinations he forms a clandestine and godless connection with thymos a priestess of the meter and enters at night the sacred temple from which every man was excluded after he has leaped over the wall and comes ever nearer the shrine of the goddess the dreadful horror of a panic like terror suddenly seizes him almost prostrate and unconscious he feels himself driven back and leaping the wall once more he falls down paralyzed and severely injured the siege must be raised in a disgraceful death impresses its seal upon a brilliant heroic career in order to darken it for all posterity after the battle at marathon the envy of the celestials has caught him and this divine envy breaks into flames when it beholds man without rival without opponent on the solitary hide of glory he now has beside him only the gods and therefore he has them against him these however betray him into a deed of the hubris and under it he collapses let us well observe that just as multi these parishes so the noblest greek states perish when they by merit and fortune have arrived from the race course at the temple of nike Athens which had destroyed the independence of her allies and avenged with severity the rebellions of her subjective foes sparta which after the battle of egos pata moe used her preponderance over helis in a still harsher and more cruel fashion both these as in the case of miltaides brought about their ruin through deeds of the hubris as a proof that without envy jealousy and contesting ambition the helenic state like the helenic man degenerates he becomes bad and cruel thirsting for revenge and godless in short he becomes pre-homeric and then it needs only a panic in order to bring about his fall into crushing sparta and Athens surrendered to persia as the mystic lesion alcibiades have done they betray helenism after they have given up the noblest helenic fundamental thought the contest and alexander the course in copy and abbreviation of greek history now invents the cosmopolitan helene and the so-called helenism in a section five