 Chapter 21 of the Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 21. Gliding back from these hortitive tones into the mood which befits the contemplative man, I repeat that it can only be learned from the Greeks what such a sudden and miraculous awakening of tragedy must signify for the essential basis of a people's life. It is the people of the tragic mysteries who fight the battles with the Persians. And again the people who wage such wars required tragedy as a necessary healing potion who would have imagined that there was still such a uniformly powerful effusion of the simplest political sentiments, the most natural domestic instincts and the primitive manly delight in strife in this very people after it had been shaken to its foundations for several generations by the most violent convulsions of the Dionysian demon. If at every considerable spreading of the Dionysian commotion, one always perceives that the Dionysian loosing from the shackles of the individual makes itself felt, first of all, in an increased encroachment on the political instincts to the extent of indifference, yea, even hostility. It is certain on the other hand that the state-forming Apollo is also the genius of the Principium Indewidju Attionis and that the state and domestic sentiment cannot live without an assertion of individual personality. There's only one way from orgasm for a people. The way to Indian Buddhism, which in order to be at all endured with its longing for nothingness requires the rare ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time and the individual just as these in turn demand a philosophy which teaches how to overcome the indescribable depression of the intermediate states by means of a fancy. With the same necessity owing to the unconditional dominance of political impulses a people drifts into a path of extremist secularization, the most magnificent but also the most terrible expression of which is the Roman Imperium. Placed between India and Rome and constrained to a seductive choice, the Greeks succeeded in devising a classical purity, still a third form of life, not indeed for long private use, but just on that account of immortality. For it holds true in all things that those whom the gods love die young, but on the other hand it holds equally true that they then live eternally with the gods. One must not demand of what is most noble that it should possess the durable toughness of leather. The staunch durability which for instance was inherent in the national character of the Romans does not probably belong to the indispensable predicates of perfection. But if we ask by what physics it was possible for the Greeks in their best period notwithstanding the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political impulses, neither to exhaust themselves by ecstatic brooding nor by a consuming scramble for empire and worldly honor, but to attain the splendid mixture which we find in a noble, inflaming and contemplatively disposing wine. We must remember the enormous power of tragedy, exciting, purifying and disburning the entire life of a people. The highest value of which we shall divine only when, as in the case of the Greeks, it appears to us as the essence of all the prophylactic healing forces as the mediator arbitrating between the strongest and most inherently fateful characteristics of a people. Tragedy absorbs the highest musical orgasm into itself so that it absolutely brings music to perfection among the Greeks as among ourselves, but it then places alongside thereof tragic myth and the tragic hero who like a mighty titan takes the entire Dionysian world on his shoulders and disburdens us thereof. While on the other hand it is able by means of this same tragic myth in the person of the tragic hero to deliver us from the intense longing for this existence and reminds us with warning hand of another existence and a higher joy for which the struggling hero prepares himself pre-sentiently by his destruction, not by his victories. Tragedy sets a sublime symbol, namely the myth between the universal authority of its music and the receptive Dionysian hero, and produces in him the illusion that music is only the most effective means for the animation of the plastic world of myth. Relying upon this noble illusion, she can now move her limbs for the ditherambic dance and abandon herself unhesitatingly to an orgiastic feeling of freedom in which she could not venture to indulge as music itself without this illusion. The myth protects us from the music while on the other hand it alone gives the highest freedom there too. By way of return for the service music imparts to tragic myth such an impressive and convincing metaphysical significance as could never be attained by word and image without this unique aid and the tragic spectator in particular experiences thereby the sure presentiment of supreme joy to which the path through destruction and negation leads so that he thinks he hears as it were the innermost abyss of things speaking audibly to him. If in these last propositions, I've succeeded in giving perhaps only a preliminary expression intelligible to few at first to this difficult representation I must not hear desist from stimulating my friends to a further attempt or cease from beseeching them to prepare themselves by a detached example of our common experience for their perception of the universal proposition. In this example I must not appeal to those who make use of the pictures of the scenic processes, the words and the emotions of the performers in order to approximate thereby to musical perception for none of these speak music as their mother tongue and in spite of the aids in question do not get farther than the precincts of musical perception without ever being allowed to touch us in a most shrines. Some of them, like Gervinas, do not even reach the precincts by this path. I've only to address myself to those who being immediately allied to music have it as it were for their mother's lap and are connected with things almost exclusively by unconscious musical relations. I ask the question of these genuine musicians whether they can imagine a man capable of hearing the third act of Tristan Unt Isolde without any aid of word or scenery purely as a vast symphonic period without expiring by a spasmodic distention of all the wings of the soul, a man who has thus so to speak put his ear to the heart chamber of the cosmic will who feels the furious desire for existence issuing therefrom as a thundering stream or most gently dispersed brook into all the veins of the world would he not collapse all at once. Could he endure in the wretched fragile tenement of the human individual to hear the re-echo of countless cries of joy and sorrow from the vast void of cosmic night without flying irresistibly towards his primitive home at the sound of this pastoral dance song of metaphysics. But if nevertheless such a work can be heard as a whole without a renunciation of individual existence if such a creation could be created without demolishing its creator, where are we to get the solution of this contradiction? Here there interposed between our highest musical excitement and the music in question, the tragic myth and the tragic hero in reality only as symbols of the most universal facts of which music alone can speak directly. If, however, we felt as purely Dionysian beings, myth as a symbol would stand by us absolutely ineffective and unnoticed and would never for a moment prevent us from giving ear to the re-echo of the Universalia Ante Rem. Here, however, the Apollonian power with a view to the restoration of the well-nigh shattered individual bursts forth with the healing balm of a blissful illusion. All of a sudden we imagine we see only Tristan motionless with hushed voice saying to himself, the old tune, why does it wake me? And what formerly interested us like a hollow sigh from the heart of being seems now only to tell us how waste and void is the sea. And when breathless we thought to expire by a convulsive distention of all our feelings and only a slender tie bound us to our present existence, we now hear and see only the hero wounded to death and still not dying with his despairing cry, longing, longing, in dying still longing, for longing not dying. And if formerly after such a surplus and superabundance of consuming agonies, the jubilation of that born rent our hearts almost like the very acme of agony, the rejoicing curve and all now stands between us and that jubilation as such, with face turned toward the ship which carries the solda. However, powerfully fellow suffering encroaches upon us, it nevertheless delivers us in that manner from the primordial suffering of the world, just as the simple image of the myth delivers us from the immediate perception of the highest cosmic idea, just as the thought and word deliver us from the unchecked diffusion of the unconscious will. The glorious Apollonian illusion makes it appear as if the very realm of tones presented itself to us as a plastic cosmos, as if even the fate of Tristan and his solda had been merely formed and molded therein as out of some most delicate and impressible material. Thus does the Apollonian rest us from Dionysian universality and fills us with rapture for individuals. Do these at rivets are a sympathetic emotion? Through these it satisfies the sense of beauty, which longs for great and sublime forms. It brings before us biographical portraits and incites us to a thoughtful apprehension of the essence of life contained therein, with the immense potency of the image, the concept, the ethical teaching and the sympathetic emotion. The Apollonian influence uplifts man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and beguiles him concerning the universality of the Dionysian process into the belief that he is seeing a detached picture of the world, for instance, Tristan and his solda, and that through music he will be unable to see it still more clearly and intrinsically. What can the healing magic of Apollo not accomplish when it can even excite in us the illusion that the Dionysian is actually in the service of the Apollonian, the effects of which it is capable of enhancing, the idea that music is essentially the representative art for an Apollonian substance. With the pre-established harmony which obtains between perfect drama and its music, the drama attains the highest degree of conspicuousness, such as is usually unattainable in mere spoken drama. As all the animated figures of the scene in the independently evolved lines of melody simplify themselves before us to the distinctness of the catenary curve, the coexistence of these lines is also audible in the harmonic change which sympathizes in a most delicate manner with the evolved process through which change, the relations of things become immediately perceptible to us in a sensible and not at all abstract manner as we likewise perceive thereby that it is only in these relations that the essence of a character and of a line of melody manifests itself clearly. And while music thus compels us to see more extensively and more intrinsically than usual and makes us spread out the curtain of the scene before ourselves like some delicate texture, the world of the stage is as infinitely expanded for our spiritualized introspective eye as it is illumined outwardly from within. How can the word poet furnish anything analogous who strives to attain this internal expansion and illumination of the visible stage world by a much more imperfect mechanism and an indirect path proceeding as he does from word and concept? Albeit musical tragedy likewise avails itself of the word it is at the same time able to place alongside thereof its basis and source and can make the unfolding of the word from within outwards obvious to us. Of the process just set forth however it could still be said as decidedly that it is only a glorious appearance namely the aforementioned Apollonian illusion through the influence of which we are to be delivered from the Dionysian abtrusion and dexess. In point of fact the relation of music to drama is precisely the reverse. The music is the adequate idea of the world. Drama is but the reflex of this idea a detached umbrage thereof. The identity between the line of melody and the lining form between the harmony and the character relations of this form is true in a sense antithetical to what one would suppose on the contemplation of musical tragedy. We may agitate and enliven the form in the most conspicuous manner and enlighten it from within but it still continues merely phenomenon from which there is no bridge to lead us into the true reality into the heart of the world. Music however speaks out of this heart and though countless phenomena of the kind might be passing manifestations of this music they could never exhaust its essence but would always be merely its externalized copies. Of course as regards this intricate relation of music and drama nothing can be explained while all may be confused by the popular and thoroughly false antithesis of soul and body but the unphilosophical crudeness of this antithesis seems to have become who knows for what reasons a readily accepted article of faith with our estheticians while they have learned nothing concerning an antithesis of phenomenon and thing in itself or perhaps for reasons equally known have not cared to learn anything thereof. Should it have been established by our analysis that the Apollonian element in tragedy has by means of its illusion gained a complete victory over the Dionysian primordial element of music and has made music itself subservient to its end namely the highest and clearest elucidation of the drama. It would certainly be necessary to add the very important restriction but at the most essential point this Apollonian illusion is dissolved and annihilated. The drama which by the aid of music spreads out before us with such inwardly illuminated distinctness in all its movements and figures that we imagine we see the texture unfolding on the loom as the shuttle flies to and fro attains as a whole an effect which transcends all Apollonian artistic effects. In the collective effect of tragedy the Dionysian gets the upper hand once more tragedy ends with a sound which could never emanate from the realm of Apollonian art and the Apollonian illusion is thereby found to be what it is the assiduous veiling during the performance of tragedy of the intrinsically Dionysian effect which however is so powerful that it finally forces the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to talk with Dionysian wisdom and even denies itself and its Apollonian conspicuousness thus then the intricate relation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy will really be symbolized by a fraternal union of the two deities. Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, Apollo however finally speaks the language of Dionysus and so the highest goal of tragedy and of art in general is attained. End of chapter 21 Chapter 22 of the birth of tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche Let the attentive friend picture to himself purely and simply according to his experiences the effect of a true musical tragedy. I think I have so portrayed the phenomenon of this effect in both its phases that he will now be able to interpret his own experiences. For he will recollect that with regard to the myth which passed before him he felt himself exalted to a kind of omniscience as if his visual faculty were no longer merely a surface faculty but capable of penetrating into the interior and as if he now saw before him with the aid of music the ebolicions of the will, the conflict of motives and the swelling stream of the passions almost sensibly visible like a plenitude of actively moving lines and figures and could thereby dip into the most tender secrets of unconscious emotions. Well he thus becomes contemplated while he thus becomes conscious of the highest exaltation of his instincts for conspicuousness and transfiguration he nevertheless feels with equal definiteness that this long series of Apollonian artistic effects still does not generate the blissful continuance in will-less contemplation which the plasticist and the epic poet that is to say the strictly Apollonian artists produce in him by their artistic productions to wit the justification of the world of the indi-wid duatio attained in this contemplation which is the object and essence of Apollonian art he beholds the transfigured world of the stage and nevertheless denies it he sees before him the tragic hero in epic clearness and beauty and nevertheless delights in his annihilation he comprehends the incidents of this scene in all their details and yet loves to flee into the incomprehensible he feels the actions of the hero to be justified and is nevertheless still more elated when these actions annihilate their originator he shudders at the sufferings which will befall the hero and yet anticipates therein a higher and much more overpowering joy he sees more extensively and profoundly than ever and yet wishes to be blind whence must we derive this curious internal dissension this collapse of the Apollonian apex if not from the Dionysian spell which though apparently stimulating the Apollonian emotions to their highest pitch can nevertheless force this superabundance of Apollonian power into its service tragic myth is to be understood only as a symbolization of Dionysian wisdom by means of the expedience of Apollonian art the mythus conducts the world a phenomena to its boundaries where it denies itself and seeks to flee back again into the bosom of the true and only reality where it then like Isolde seems to strike up its metaphysical swan song Indus vana meris vo gendem schwaal Inder duft velen ternenden schaal Indus indes vel tatems behendem all er trinken versinken un be wust herk sta lust in the sea of pleasures billowing roll in the ether waves, knelling and toll in the world breaths, wavering whole, to drown in, go down in lost in swoon, greatest boon we thus realize to ourselves and the experiences of the truly aesthetic here the tragic artist himself when he proceeds like a luxuriously fertile divinity of individuation to create his figures in which senses work can hardly be understood as an imitation of nature and when on the other hand his vast Dionysian impulse then absorbs the entire world a phenomena in order to anticipate beyond it and through its annihilation the highest artistic primal joy in the bosom of the primordial unity of course our esthetes have nothing to say about this return in fraternal union of the two art deities to the original home nor of either the Apollonian or Dionysian excitement of the hearer while they are indefatigable in characterizing the struggle of the hero with fate the triumph of the moral order of the world or the dis burdenment of the emotions through tragedy as the properly tragic and indefatigableness which makes me think that they are perhaps not aesthetically excitable men at all but only to be regarded as moral beings when hearing tragedy never since Aristotle has an explanation of the tragic effect been proposed by which an aesthetic activity of the here could be inferred from artistic circumstances at one time fear and pity are supposed to be forced to an alleviating discharge through the serious procedure at another time we are expected to feel elevated and inspired at the triumph of good and noble principles at the sacrifice of the hero in the interest of a moral conception of things and however certainly I believe that for countless men precisely this and only this is the effect of tragedy it as obviously follows there from that all these together with their interpreting esthetes have had no experience of tragedy as the highest art the pathological discharge the catharsis of Aristotle which philologists are at a loss whether to include under medicinal or moral phenomena recalls a remarkable anticipation of Gerda without a lively pathological interest he says I too have never yet succeeded in elaborating a tragic situation of any kind and hence I rather avoided than sought it can it perhaps have been still another of the merits of the ancients that the deepest pathos was with them merely aesthetic play whereas with us the truth of nature must operate in order to produce such a work we can now answer in the affirmative this latter profound question after our glorious experiences in which we have found to our astonishment in the case of musical tragedy itself that the deepest pathos can in reality be merely aesthetic play and therefore we are justified in believing that now for the first time the proto phenomenon of that tragic can be portrayed with some degree of success he who now will still persist in talking only of those vicarious effects proceeding from ultra aesthetic spheres and does not feel himself raised above the pathologically moral process may be left to despair of his aesthetic nature for which we recommend to him by way of innocent equivalent the interpretation of Shakespeare after the fashion of Gervinas and the diligent search for poetic justice thus with the rebirth of tragedy the aesthetic here is also born anew in whose place in the theater a curious quid pro quote was want to sit with half moral and half learned pretensions the critic in his sphere hitherto everything has been artificial and merely glossed over with the semblance of life the performing artist was in fact at a loss what to do with such a critically comforting here and hence he as well as the dramatist or operatic composer who inspired him searched anxiously for the last remains of life in a being so pretentiously barren and incapable of enjoyment such critics however have hitherto constituted the public the student the schoolboy yay even the most harmless womanly creature were already unwittingly prepared by education and by journals for a similar perception of works of art the nobler natures among the artists counted upon exciting the moral religious forces in such a public in the appeal to a moral order the world operated vicariously when in reality some powerful artistic spell should have enraptured the true here or again some imposing or at all events exciting tendency of the contemporary political and social world was presented by the dramatist with such vividness that the here could forget his critical exhaustion and abandoned himself to similar emotions as in patriotic or war like moments before the tribune of parliament or at the condemnation of crime and vice an estrangement of the true aims of art which could not but lead directly now and then to a cult of tendency but here there took place what has always taken place in the case of factitious arts an extraordinary rapid deprivation of these tendencies so that for instance the tendency to employ the theater as a means for the moral education of the people which in Schiller's time was taken seriously is already reckoned among the incredible antiquities of a surmounted culture while the critic got the upper hand in the theater and concert hall the journalist in the school and the press in society art degenerated into a topic of conversation of the most trivial kind and aesthetic criticism was used as the cement of a vein distracted selfish or more over piteously unoriginal sociality the significance of which is suggested by the Schopenhauer and parable of the porcupine so that there has never been so much gossip about art and so little esteem for it but is it still possible to have intercourse with a man capable of conversing on Beethoven or Shakespeare let each answer this question according to his sentiments he will at any rate show by his answer his conception of culture provided he tries at least to answer the question and has not already grown mute with astonishment on the other hand many are one nobly and delicately endowed by nature though he may have gradually become a critical barbarian in that manner described could tell of the unexpected as well as totally unintelligible effect which a successful performance of lo and grin for example exerted on him except that perhaps every warning and interpreting hand was lacking to guide him so that the incomprehensibly heterogeneous and altogether incomparable sensation which then affected him also remained isolated and became extinct like a mysterious star after a brief brilliancy he then divined what the aesthetic here is end of chapter 22 chapter 23 of the birth of tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche this LibriVox recording is in the public domain chapter 23 is to test himself rigorously as to how he is related to the true aesthetic here or whether he belongs rather to the community of the so-called critical man as only to inquire sincerely concerning the sentiment with which he accepts the wonder represented on the stage whether he feels his historical sense which insists on strict psychological causality insulted by it whether with benevolent concession he as it were wonder as a phenomenon intelligible to childhood but relinquished by him or whether he experiences anything else thereby for he will thus be enabled to determine how far he is on the whole capable of understanding myth that is to say the concentrated picture of the world which as a breviature of phenomena cannot dispense with wonder it is probable however that nearly everyone upon close examination feels so disintegrated by the critical historical spirit of our culture that he can only perhaps make the former existence of myth credible to himself by learned means through intermediary abstractions without myth however every culture loses its healthy creative natural power it is only a horizon encompassed with myths which rounds off to unity a social movement it is only by myth that all the powers of the imagination and of the Apollonian dream are freed from their random rovings the mythical figures have to be the invisibly omnipresent genii under the care of which the young soul grows to maturity by the signs of which the man gives a meaning to his life and struggles and the state itself knows no more powerful unwritten law than the mythical foundation which vouches for its connection with religion and its growth from mythical ideas let us now place alongside thereof the abstract man proceeding independently of myth the abstract education the abstract usage the abstract right the abstract state let us picture to ourselves the lawless roving of the artistic imagination not bridled by any native myth let us imagine a culture which has no fixed and sacred primitive seat but is doomed to exhaust all its possibilities and has to nourish itself wretchedly from the other culture such is the present as the result of Socrates which is bent on the destruction of myth and now the mythless man remains eternally hungering among all the bygones and digs and grubs for roots though he have to dig for them even among the remotest antiquities the stupendous historical exigency of the unsatisfied modern culture the gathering around one of countless other cultures the consuming desire for knowledge what does all this point to if not to the loss of myth the loss of the mythical home the mythical source let us ask ourselves whether the feverish and so uncanny stirring of this culture is ought but the eager seizing and snatching at food of the hungerer and who would care to contribute anything more to a culture which cannot be appeased by all it devours and in contact with which the most vigorous and wholesome nourishment is want to change into history and criticism we should also have to regard our German character with despair and sorrow if it had already become inextricably entangled in or even identical with this culture in a similar manner as we can observe it to our horror to be the case in civilized France and that which for a long time was the great advantage of France and the cause of her vast preponderance to this very identity of people and culture might compel us at the sight thereof to congratulate ourselves that this culture of ours which is so questionable has hitherto had nothing in common with the noble colonel of the character of our people all our hopes on the contrary stretch out longingly towards the perception that beneath this restlessly palpitating civilized life there is no convulsion there is concealed a glorious intrinsically healthy primeval power which to be sure stirs vigorous the only at intervals and stupendous moments and then dreams on again in view of a future awakening it is from this abyss that the German Reformation came forth in the choral hem of which the future melody of German music first resounded so deep courageous and so breathing so exuberantly good to this choral of Luther sound as the first Dionysian luring call which breaks forth from dense thickets at the approach of spring to it responded with emulative echo the solemnly wanton procession of Dionysian revelers to whom we are indebted for German music and to whom we shall be indebted for the rebirth of German myth I know that I must now lead the sympathizing and attentive friend to an elevated position of lonesome contemplation where he will have but few companions and I call out encouragingly to him that we must hold fast to our shining guides the Greeks for the rectification of our aesthetic knowledge we previously borrowed from them the two divine figures each of which sways a separate realm of art and concerning whose mutual contact and exaltation we have acquired a notion through Greek tragedy through a remarkable disruption of both these primitive artistic impulses the ruin of Greek tragedy seemed to be necessarily brought about with which process a degeneration and a transmutation of the Greek national character was strictly in keeping summoning us to earnest reflection as to how closely and necessarily art and the people myth and custom tragedy in the state have coalesced in their base seas the ruin of tragedy was at the same time the ruin of myth until then the Greeks have been involuntarily compelled immediately to associate all experiences with their myths indeed had to comprehend them only through this association where about even the most immediate present necessarily appear to them subspeciee turn I and in a certain sense as timeless into this current of the timeless however the state as well as art plunged in order to find repose from the burden and eagerness of the moment and a people for the rest also a man is worth just as much only as its ability to impress on its experiences the seal of eternity for it is thus as it were de secularized and reveals its unconscious inner conviction of the relativity of time and of the true that is the metaphysical significance of life the contrary happens when a people begins to comprehend itself historically and to demolish the mythical bulwarks around it with which there is usually connected a marked secularization a breach with the unconscious metaphysics of its earlier existence in all ethical consequences Greek art and especially Greek tragedy delayed above all the annihilation of myth it was necessary to annihilate these also to be able to live detached from the native soil unbridled in the wilderness of thought custom and action even in such circumstances this metaphysical impulse still endeavors to create for itself a form of apotheosis we can no doubt in the Socrates of science urging to life but on its lower stage this same impulse led only to a feverish search which gradually merged into a pandemonium of myths and superstitions accumulated from all quarters in the midst of which nevertheless the Helene sat with a yearning heart till he contrived as Greikulus to mask his fever with Greek cheerfulness and Greek levity or to narcotize himself completely with a gloomy oriental superstition we have approached this condition in the most striking manner since the reawakening of the Alexander Roman antiquity in the 15th century after a long not easily describable interlude on the heights there is the same exuberant love of knowledge the same as insatiate happiness of the discoverer the same stupendous secularization and together with these a homeless roving about an eager intrusion at foreign tables a frivolous deification of the present or a dull senseless estrangement or subspecies cycli of the present time which same symptoms lead one to infer the same defect at the heart of this culture the annihilation of myth it seems hardly possible to transplant a foreign myth with permanent success without dreadfully injuring the tree through this transplantation which is perhaps occasionally strong enough and sound enough to eliminate the foreign element after a terrible struggle but must ordinarily consume itself in a languishing and stunted condition or in cycli luxuriance our opinion of the pure and vigorous kernel of the German being is such that we venture to expect of it and only of it this elimination of forcibly ingrafted foreign elements and we deem it possible that the German spirit will reflect anew on itself perhaps many are one will be of opinion that the spirit must begin its struggle with the elimination of the romantic element for which it might recognize an external preparation and encouragement in the victorious bravery and bloody glory of the late war but must seek the inner constraint in the emulative zeal to be forever worthy of the time protagonists on this path of Luther as well as our great artists and poets but let him never think he can fight such battles without his household gods without his mythical home without a restoration of all German things and if the German should look timidly around for a god to lead him back to his long lost home the ways and paths of which he knows no longer let him but listen to the delightfully luring call of the Neesean bird which hovers above him and would feign point out to him the way the end of chapter 23 chapter 24 of the birth of tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche this LibriVox recording is in the public domain chapter 24 among the peculiar artistic effects of musical tragedy we had to emphasize an apollonian illusion through which we are to be saved from immediate oneness with the Dionysian music while our musical excitement is able to discharge itself on an apollonian domain and in an interposed visible middle world it thereby seemed to us that precisely through this discharge the middle world of theatrical procedure the drama generally became visible and intelligible from within in a degree unattainable in the other forms of apollonian art so that here where this art was as it were winged and borne aloft by the spirit of music we had to recognize the highest exaltation of its powers and consequently in the fraternal union of Apollo and Dionysus the climax of the apollonian as well as of the Dionysian artistic aims of course the apollonian light picture did not precisely with this inner illumination through music attain the peculiar effect of the weaker grades of apollonian art what the epose and the animated stone can do constrain the contemplating eye to calm the light in the world of the individuality could not be realized here in the form of animation and distinctness we contemplated the drama and penetrated with piercing glance into its inner agitated world of motives and yet it seemed as if only a symbolic picture passed before us the profound significance of which we almost believed we had divine and which we desired to put aside like our curtain in order to behold the original behind it the greatest distinctness of the picture did not suffice us for it seemed to reveal as well as veil something and while it seemed with its symbolic revelation to invite the rending of the veil for the disclosure of the mysterious background this illumined all conspicuousness itself enthralled the eye and prevented it from penetrating more deeply he who has not experienced this to have to view and at the same time to have a longing beyond the viewing will hardly be able to conceive how clearly and definitely these two processes coexist in the contemplation of tragic myth and art felt to be conjoined while the truly aesthetic expectators will confirm my assertion that among the peculiar effects of tragedy this conjunction is the most noteworthy now let this phenomenon of the aesthetic spectator be transferred to an analogous process in the tragic artist and the genesis of tragic myth will have been understood it shares with the apollonian sphere of art the full delight in appearance and contemplation and at the same time it denies this delight and finds a still higher satisfaction in the annihilation of the visible world of existence the substance of tragic myth is first of all an epic event involving the glorification of the fighting hero the wence originates the essentially enigmatic trait that the suffering in the fate of the hero the most painful victories the most agonizing contrasts of motives in short the exemplification of the wisdom of salinas or aesthetically expressed the ugly and discordant is always represented too in such countless forms with such predilection and precisely in the most youthful and exuberant age of a people unless there's really a higher delight experienced in all this for the fact that things actually take such a tragic course would least of all explain the origin of a form of art provided that art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature placed alongside thereof for its conquest tragic myth and so far as it really belongs to art also fully participates in this transfiguring metaphysical purpose of art in general what does it transfigure however when it presents the phenomenal world in the guise of the suffering hero least of all the reality of this phenomenal world for it says to us look at this look carefully it is your life it is the our hand of your clock of existence and myth has displayed this life in order thereby to transfigure it to us if not how shall we account for the aesthetic pleasure with which we make even these representations pass before us I am inquiring concerning the aesthetic pleasure and I'm well aware that many of these representations may moreover occasionally create even a moral delectation say under the form of pity or of a moral triumph but he who would derive the effect of the tragic exclusively from these moral sources as was usually the case for too long in aesthetics let him not think that he has done anything for art thereby for art must above all insist on purity in her domain for the explanation of tragic myth the very first requirement is that the pleasure which characterizes it must be sought in the purely aesthetic sphere without encroaching on the domain of pity fear or the morally sublime how can the ugly and the discordant the substance of tragic myth excite an ecstatic pleasure here it is necessary to raise ourselves with a daring bound into a metaphysics of art I repeat therefore the former proposition that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world appear justified and in this sense it is precisely the function of tragic myth to convince us that even the ugly and discordant is an artistic gain which the will in the eternal fullness of his joy plays with itself but this not easily comprehensible proto phenomenon of Dionysian art becomes in a direct way singularly intelligible and is immediately apprehended in the wonderful significance of musical dissonance just as in general it is music alone placed in contrast to the world which can give us an idea as to what is meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon the joy that the tragic myth excites has the same origin as the joyful sensation of dissonance and music the Dionysian with its primitive joy experienced in pain itself is the common source of music and tragic myth is it not possible that by calling to our aid the musical relation of dissonance the difficult problem of tragic effect may have meanwhile been materially facilitated for we now understand what it means to wish to view tragedy and at the same time to have a longing beyond the viewing our frame of mind which as regards the artistically employed dissonance we should simply have to characterize by saying that we desire to hear at the same time have a longing beyond the hearing that's driving for the infinite the opinion flapping of longing accompanying the highest light in the clearly perceived reality remind one that in both states we have to recognize a Dionysian phenomenon which again and again reveals to us anew the playful upbuilding and demolishing of the world of individuals as the efflux of a primitive delight in like manner as when Heraclitus the obscure compares the world building power to a playing child which places stones here and there and builds sandhills only to overthrow them again hence in order to form a true estimate of the Dionysian capacity of a people it would seem that we must think not only of their music but just as much of their tragic myth the second witness of this capacity considering this most intimate relationship between music and myth we may now in like manner suppose that a degeneration and deprivation of the one involves the deterioration of the other if it be true at all that the weakening of the myth is generally expressive of a debilitation of the Dionysian capacity concerning both however a glance at the development of the German genius should not leave us in any doubt in the opera just as in the abstract character of our mythless existence in an art sunk to past time just as in our life guided by concepts the inartistic as well as life consuming nature of Socratic optimism had revealed itself to us yet there have been indications to console us that nevertheless in some inaccessible abyss the German spirit still rests in dreams undestroyed in glorious health profundity and Dionysian strength like a night sunk in slumber from which abyss the Dionysian song rises to us to let us know that this German night even still dreams of primitive Dionysian myth in blissfully earnest visions let no one believe that the German spirit has forever lost its mythical home when it still understands so obviously the voices of the birds which tell of that home someday it will find itself awaken all the morning freshness of a deep sleep then it will slay the dragons by the malignant dwarfs and waken Brunhilde and woe tan spear itself will be unable to obstruct its course my friends you who believe in Dionysian music you know also what tragedy means to us there we have tragic myth born anew from music and in this latest birth you can hope for everything and forget what is most deflecting what is most deflecting to all of us however is the prolonged degradation of which the German genius strange from house and home in the service of malignant dwarfs he understand my illusion as he will also in conclusion understand my hopes end of chapter 24 chapter 25 of the birth of tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche this LibriVox recording is in the public domain chapter 25 tragic and tragic myth are equally the expression of the Dionysian capacity of a people and are inseparable from each other both originate in an ultra apollonian sphere of art both transfigure a region in the delightful accords of which all dissonance just like the terrible picture of the world dies charmingly away both play with the sting of displeasure trusting their most potent magic both justify thereby the existence even of the worst world here the Dionysian as compared with the apollonian exhibits itself as the eternal and original artistic force which in general calls into existence the entire world of phenomena in the midst of which a new transfiguring appearance becomes necessary in order to keep alive the animated world of individuation if we could concede an incarnation of dissonance and what is man but that then to be able to live this dissonance would require a glorious illusion which would spread a veil of beauty over its peculiar nature this is the true function of apollo as deity of art in whose name we comprise all the countless manifestations of the fair realm of illusion which each moment render life in general worth living and make one impatient for the experience of the next moment at the same time just as much of this basis of all existence the Dionysian substratum of the world is allowed to enter into the consciousness of human beings as can be surmounted again by the apollonian transfiguring power so that these two art impulses are constrained to develop their powers and strictly mutual proportion according to the law of eternal justice when the Dionysian powers rise with such vehemence as we experience at present there can be no doubt that veiled in a cloud apollo has already descended to us whose grandest beautifying influences a coming generation will perhaps behold that this effect is necessary however each one would most surely perceive by intuition if once he found himself carried back even in a dream into an old Hellenic existence in walking under high ionic colonnades looking upwards to a horizon defined by clear and noble lines with reflections of his transfigured form by his side in shining marble and around him solemnly marching or quietly moving men with harmoniously sounding voices and rhythmical pantomime would he not in the presence of this perpetual influx of beauty have to raise his hand to apollo and exclaim blessed race of Hellenes how great Dionysus must be among you when the Deleon god deems such charms necessary to cure you of your ditherambic madness to one in this frame of mind however an aged Athenian looking up to him with a sublime eye of Ischolus might answer say also this thou curious stranger what sufferings this people must have undergone in order to be able to become thus beautiful but now follow me to a tragic play and sacrifice with me in the temple of both the deities end of chapter 25 end of the birth of tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche translated by W. A. Hausmann