 Chapter 13 of the Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 13. That Socrates stood in close relationship to Euripides in the tendency of his teaching did not escape the notice of contemporaneous antiquity. The most eloquent expression of this felicitous insight being the tale current in Athens, that Socrates was accustomed to help Euripides in poetizing. Both names were mentioned in one breath by the adherents of the good old time, whenever they came to enumerating the popular agitators of the day, whose influence they attribute to the fact that the old Marathonian stalwart capacity of body and soul was more and more being sacrificed to a dubious enlightenment involving progressive degeneration of the physical and mental powers. It is in this tone, half indignantly and half contemptuously, that Aristophanic comedy is want to speak of both of them to the consternation of modern men who would indeed be willing enough to give up Euripides but cannot suppress their amazement that Socrates should appear in Aristophanes as the first and head sophist as the mirror and epitome of all sophistical tendencies and the connection with which it offers the single consolation of putting Aristophanes himself in the pillory as a rake-ish lying alcibiades of poetry. Without here defending the profound instincts of Aristophanes against such attacks I shall now indicate by means of the sentiments of the time with this purpose in view it is especially to be remembered that Socrates as an opponent of tragic art did not ordinarily patronize tragedy but only appeared among the spectators when a new play of Euripides was performed. The most noted thing however is the close juxtaposition of the two names in the Delphic Oracle which designated Socrates as the wisest of men but at the same time decided that the second prize in the contest of wisdom was due to Euripides. Sophocles was designated as the third in the scale of rank he who could pride himself that in comparison with Aeschylus he did what was right and did it moreover because he knew what was right. It is evidently just a degree of clearness of this knowledge which distinguishes these three men in common as the three knowing ones of their age. The most decisive word however for this new and unprecedented esteem of knowledge and insight was spoken by Socrates when he found that he was the only one who acknowledged to himself that he knew nothing while in his critical pilgrimage through Athens and calling on the greatest statesmen, orators, poets and artists he discovered everywhere the conceit of knowledge. He perceived to his astonishment that all these celebrities were without a proper and accurate insight even with regard to their own callings and practiced them only by instinct. Only by instinct with this phrase we touch upon the heart and core of the Socratic tendency. Socrates condemns therewith existing art as well as existing ethics wherever Socrates turns its searching eyes it beholds the lack of insight and the power of illusion and from this lack infers the inner perversity and objectionableness of existing conditions. From this point onwards Socrates believed that he was called upon to correct existence and with an air of disregard and superiority as the precursor of an altogether different culture, art and morality he enters single handed into a world of which if we reverently touch the hem we should count it our greatest happiness. Here is the extraordinary hesitancy which always seizes upon us with regard to Socrates and again and again invites us to ascertain the sense and purpose of this most questionable phenomenon of antiquity. Who is it that ventures single handed to disown the Greek character which as Homer, Pindar and Aeschylus, as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia and Dionysus as the deepest abyss and the highest height is sure of our wondering admiration. What demoniac power is it which would presume to spill this magic draft in the dust? What demigod is it to whom the chorus of spirits of the noblest of mankind must call out They, they, do hast thee their sturt, Dea, sharna, vellt, mit, mechtighe, taust, ze, sturt, zea, zeer, for the woe, woe, Thou hast it destroyed, the beautiful world, with powerful fists, in ruin, tis hurled. A key to the character of Socrates is presented to us by the surprising phenomenon designated as a dimonium of Socrates. In special circumstances when his gigantic intellect began to stagger, he got a secure support in the utterances of a divine voice which then spake to him. This voice, whenever it comes, always dissuades. In this totally abnormal nature, instinctive wisdom only appears in order to hinder the progress of conscious perception here and there. While in all productive men, it is instinct which is the creatively affirmative force, consciousness only, comporting itself critically and dissuasively. With Socrates it is instinct which becomes critic. It is consciousness which becomes creator, a perfect monstrosity pair defectum. And we do indeed observe here a monstrous defectus of all mystical attitude so that Socrates might be designated as the specific non-mystic and the logical nature is developed through a super-fetation to the same access as instinctive wisdom is developed in the mystic. On the other hand, however, the logical instinct which appeared in Socrates was absolutely prohibited from turning against itself. In its unchecked flow, it manifests a native power such as we meet with our shocking surprise only among the very greatest instinctive forces. He who has experienced even a breath of the divine naivete and security of the Socratic course of life in the platonic writings will also feel that the enormous driving wheel of logical Socrates is in motion as it were behind Socrates and that it must be viewed through Socrates as through a shadow and that he himself had a voting of this relation is apparent from the dignified earnestness with which he everywhere and even before his judges insisted on his divine calling to refute him here was really as impossible as true a proof of his instinct disintegrating influence due of this indissoluble conflict when he had at last been brought before the form of the Greek state there was only one punishment demanded namely exile he might have been sped across the borders as something thoroughly enigmatic here rubricable and inexplicable and so posterity would have been quite unjustified in charging the Athenians with a deed of ignominy but that the sentence of death and not mere exile was pronounced upon him seems to have been brought about by Socrates himself with perfect knowledge of the circumstances and without the natural fear of death he met his death with the calmness with which according to the description of Plato he leaves the symposium at break of day as the last of the revelers to begin a new day while the sleepy companions remain behind on the benches and the floor to dream of Socrates the true eroticist the dying Socrates became the new ideal of the noble Greek youth an ideal they had never yet beheld and above all the typical Hellenic youth Plato prostrated himself before this scene with all the fervent devotion of his visionary soul End of Chapter 13 Chapter 14 of The Birth of Tragedy by Fredrich Nietzsche this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Chapter 14 let us now imagine the one great Cyclopean eye of Socrates fixed on tragedy that eye in which the fine frenzy of artistic enthusiasm had never glowed let us think how it was denied to this eye to gaze with pleasure into the Dionysian abysses what could it not but see in the sublime and greatly lauded tragic art as Plato called it something very absurd with causes that seem to be without effects and effects apparently without causes the whole moreover so motley and diversified that it could not but be repugnant to a thoughtful mind a dangerous incentive however to sensitive and irritable souls we know what was the soul kind of poetry which he comprehended the Esopian fable and he did this no doubt with that smiling complacence with which the good honors galert sings the praise of poetry in the fable of the bee and the hen do seist amir vosusia nerdst dem der Nick wheel wir stammt besitzt der warheit durch einbild zu sagen in me thou seist its benefit to him who hath but little wit through parables to tell the truth but then it seemed to Socrates that tragic art did not even tell the truth not to mention the fact that it addresses itself to him who hath but little wit consequently not to the philosopher a twofold reason why it should be avoided like Plato you recommended among the seductive arts which only represent the agreeable not the useful and hence he required of his disciples abstinence and strict separation from such unphilosophical allurements with such success that the youthful tragic poet Plato first of all burned his poems to be able to become a scholar of Socrates but where unconquerable native capacities bore up against the Socratic maxims their power together with the momentum of his mighty character still suffice to force poetry itself into new and hitherto unknown channels an instance of this is the aforesaid Plato he who in the condemnation of tragedy and of art in general certainly did not fall short of the naive cynicism of his master was nevertheless constrained by sheer artistic necessity to create a form of art which is inwardly related even to the then existing forms of art which he repudiated Plato's main objection to the old art that it is the imitation of a phantom and hence belongs to a sphere still lower than the empiric world could not at all apply to the new art and so we find Plato endeavoring to go beyond reality and attempting to represent an idea which underlies this pseudo-reality but Plato the thinker thereby arrived by a roundabout road just at the point where he had always been at home as poet and from which Sophocles and all the old artists had solemnly protested against that objection if tragedy absorbed into itself all the earlier varieties of art the same could again be said in an unusual sense of platonic dialogue which engendered by a mixture of all the then existing forms and styles hovers midway between narrative, lyric and drama between prose and poetry and has also thereby broken loose from the older strict law of unity of linguistic form a movement which was carried still farther by the cynic writers who in the most promiscuous style oscillating to and fro between prose and metrical forms realized also the literary picture of the raving Socrates whom they were want to represent in life Platonic dialogue was as it were the vote in which the shipwrecked ancient poetry saved herself together with all her children crowded into a narrow space intimately obsequious to the one Steersman Socrates they now launched into a new world which never tired of looking at the fantastic spectacle of this procession in very truth Plato has given to all posterity the prototype of a new form of art the prototype of the novel which must be designated as the infinitely evolved esopian fable in which poetry owes the same rank with reference to dialectic philosophy as the same philosophy held for many centuries with reference to theology namely the rank of Ancilla this was the new position of poetry into which Plato forced it under the pressure of the demon inspired Socrates here philosophic thought over grows art and compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectics the Apollonian tendency has crystallized in the logical schematism just as something analogous in the case of Euripides and more over a translation of the Dionysian into the naturalistic emotion was forced upon our attention Socrates the dialectical hero in platonic drama reminds us of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero who has to defend his actions by arguments and counter arguments and thereby so often runs the risk of forefitting our tragic pity for who could mistake the optimistic element in the essence of dialectics which celebrates a jubilee in every conclusion and can breathe only in cruel clearness and consciousness the optimistic element which having once forced his way into tragedy must gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions and necessarily impel it to self-destruction even to the deathly and into the bourgeois drama Let us but realize the consequences of the Socratic maxims, virtue is knowledge man only sends from ignorance these three fundamental forms of optimism involve the death of tragedy for the virtuous hero must now be a dialectician visible connection between virtue and knowledge between belief and morality the transcendental justice of the plot Inescalus is now degraded to the superficial and audacious principle of poetic justice with its usual Deus ex machina How does the chorus and in general the so musical substratum of tragedy now appear in the light of this new Socrato optimistic stage world as something accidental as a readily dispensable reminiscence of the origin of tragedy while we have in fact seen that the chorus can be understood only as the cause of tragedy and of the tragedy generally this perplexity with respect to the chorus first manifests itself in Sophocles an important sign that the Dionysian basis of tragedy already begins to disintegrate with him he no longer ventures to entrust to the chorus the main share of the effect but limits its sphere to such an extent that it now appears almost coordinate with the actors just as if it were elevated from the orchestra to the scene whereby of course its character is completely destroyed notwithstanding that Aristotle countenance says this very theory of the chorus this alteration of the position of the chorus which Sophocles at any rate recommended by his practice and according to tradition even by a treatise is the first step towards the annihilation of the chorus as of which follow one another with alarming rapidity in Euripides Agathon and the new comedy optimistic dialectics drives music out of tragedy with the scourge of its syllogisms that is it destroys the essence of tragedy which can be explained only as a manifestation and illustration of Dionysian states as the visible symbolization of music as the dream world of Dionysian ecstasy if therefore we are to assume an anti Dionysian tendency operating even before Socrates which received in him only an unprecedented grand expression we must not shrink from the question as to what a phenomenon like that of Socrates indicates whom in view of the platonic dialogues we are certainly not entitled to regard as a purely disintegrating negative power and though there can be no doubt whatever that the most immediate effective Socratic impulse tended to the dissolution of Dionysian tragedy yet a profound experience of Socrates own life compels us to ask whether there is necessarily only antipodal relation between Socrates and art and whether the birth of an artistic Socrates is in general something contradictory in itself for that despotic logician had now and then the feeling of a gap or void a sentiment of semi reproach as of a possibly neglected with respect to art there often came to him as he tells his friends in prison one and the same dream apparition which kept constantly repeating to him Socrates practice music up to his very last days he solaces himself with the opinion that his philosophizing is the highest form of poetry and finds it hard to believe that a deity will remind him of a common popular music finally when in prison he consents to practice also this despised music in order thoroughly to unburden his conscience and in this frame of mind he composes a poem under Apollo and turns a few Esopian fables into verse it was something similar to the demonian morning voice which urged him to these practices it was because of his apollonian insight that like a barbaric king he did not understand the noble image of a god and was in danger of sinning against the deity through ignorance the prompting voice of the Socratic green vision is the only sign of doubtfulness as to the limits of logical nature perhaps thus he had to ask himself what is not intelligible to me is not therefore unreasonable perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is banished perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of and supplement to science end of chapter 14 chapter 15 of the birth of tragedy in the sense of these last portentous questions it must now be indicated how the influence of Socrates extending to the present moment indeed to all futurity have spread over posterity like an ever-increasing shadow in the evening sun and how this influence again and again necessitates a regeneration of art yay of art already with metaphysical broadest and profoundest sense and its own eternity guarantees also the eternity of art before this could be perceived before the intrinsic dependence of every art on the Greeks the Greeks from Homer to Socrates was conclusively demonstrated it had to happen to us with regard to these Greeks as it happened to the Athenians with regard to Socrates nearly every age and stage of culture has at some time or other sought with deep displeasure to free itself from the Greeks and in their presence everything self-achieved sincerely admired and apparently quite original seemed all of a sudden to lose life and color and shrink to an abortive copy even to caricature and so hardy indignation breaks forth time after time against this presumptuous little nation which dared to designate as barbaric for all time who are they one asks one's self who though they possessed only an ephemeral historical splendor ridiculously restricted institutions a dubious excellence in their customs and were even branded with ugly vices yet lay claim to the dignity and singular position among the peoples to which genius is entitled among the masses what a pity one has not been so fortunate as to find the cup of hemlock with which such an affair could be disposed of without ado for all the poison which envy Calumni and rankling resentment engendered within themselves have not suffice to destroy that self-sufficient grandeur and so one feels ashamed and afraid in the presence of the Greeks unless one prize truth above all things and dare also to acknowledge to one self this truth that the Greeks as charioteers hold in their hands the reins of our own and of every culture but that almost always charied in horses or of too poor material and in commensurate with the glory of their guides who then will deem its sport to run such a team into an abyss which they themselves clear with the leap of Achilles in order to assign also to Socrates the dignity of such a leading position it will suffice to recognize in him the type of an unheard of form of existence the type of the theoretical man with regard to whose meaning and purpose it will be our next task to attain an insight like the artist the theorist also finds an infinite satisfaction in what is and like the former he is shielded by this satisfaction from the practical ethics of pessimism with its links eyes which shine only in the dark for if the artist in every unveiling of truth always cleaves with raptured eyes only to that which still remains veiled after the unveiling the theoretical man on the other hand enjoys and contends himself with the cast off veil and finds the consummation of his pleasure in the process of a continuously successful unveiling through his own unaided efforts there would have been no science if it had only been concerned about that one naked goddess and nothing else for then its disciples would have been obliged to feel like those who propose to dig a hole straight through the earth one of whom perceives that with the utmost lifelong exertion is able to excavate only a very little of the enormous depth which is again filled up before his eyes by the labors of his successor so that a third man seems to do well when on his own account he selects a new spot for his attempts at tunneling if now someone proves conclusively that the antipodal goal cannot be attained in this direct way who will still care to toil on in the old depths unless he has learned to content himself in the meantime with finding precious stones or discovering natural laws for that reason lessing the most honest theoretical man ventured to say that he cared more for the search after truth than for truth itself in saying which he revealed the fundamental secret of science to the astonishment and indeed to the vexation of scientific men well to be sure there stands alongside of this detached perception as an excess of honesty if not of presumption a profound illusion which first came to the world in the person of Socrates the imperturbable belief that by means of the clue of causality thinking reaches to the deepest abysses of being and that thinking is able not only to perceive being but even to correct it this sublime metaphysical illusion is added as an instinct to science and again and again leads the latter to its limits where it must change into art which is really the end to be attained by this mechanism if we now look at Socrates in the light of this thought he appears to us as the first who could not only live but what is far more also die under the guidance of this instinct of science and hence the picture of the dying Socrates as the man delivered from the fear of death by knowledge and argument is the escutcheon above the entrance to science which reminds every one of its mission namely to make existence appear to be comprehensible and therefore to be justified for which purpose if arguments do not suffice myth also must be used which I just now designated even as the necessary consequence yay as the end of science he who once makes intelligible to himself how after the death of Socrates the mystic of science one philosophical school succeeds another like wave upon wave how an entirely unforeshadowed universal development of the thirst for knowledge in the widest compass of the cultured world and as the specific task for every one highly gifted led science on to the high sea from which since then it is never again been able to be completely ousted how through the universality of this movement a common net of thought was first stretched over the entire globe with prospects moreover of conformity to law in an entire solar system he who realizes all this together with the amazingly high pyramid of our present day knowledge cannot fail to see in Socrates the turning point and vortex of so called universal history for if one were to imagine the whole incalculable sum of energy which has been used up by that universal tendency employed not in the service of knowledge but for the practical that is egoistical ends of individuals and peoples then probably the instinctive love of life would be so much weakened in universal wars of destruction and incessant migrations of peoples that owing to the practice of suicide the individual would perhaps feel the last remnant of a sense of duty when like the native of the Fiji islands as son he strangles his parents and as friend his friend a practical pessimism which might even give rise to a horrible ethics of general slaughter out of pity which for the rest exists and has existed wherever art in one form or another especially as science and religion has not appeared as a remedy and preventive of that pestilential breath in view of this practical pessimism Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist who in the above indicated belief in the fathomableness of the nature of things attributes to knowledge and perception the power of a universal medicine and sees in error and evil to penetrate into the depths of the nature of things and to separate true perception from error and delusion appeared to the sarcastic man the noblest and even the only truly human calling just as from the time of Socrates onwards the mechanism of concepts judgments and inferences was devised above all other capacities as the highest activity and the most admirable gift of nature even the sublimest moral acts the stirrings of pity of self-sacrifice of heroism and that tranquility of soul so difficult of attainment which the Apollonian Greek called Saphrosine were derived by Socrates and his like minded up to the present day from the dialectics of knowledge and were accordingly designated as teachable he who has experienced in himself the joy of a sarcastic perception and felt how it seeks to embrace in constantly widening circles the entire world of phenomena will thence forth find no stimulus which could urge him to existence more forcible than the desire to complete that conquest and to knit the net impenetrably close to a person thus minded the Patonic Socrates then appears as the teacher of an entirely new form of Greek cheerfulness and felicity of existence which seeks to discharge itself in actions and will find its discharge for the most part in myerotic and pedagogic influences on noble use with a view to the ultimate production of genius but now science spurred on by its powerful illusion hastens irresistibly to its limits on which its optimism hidden in the essence of logic is wrecked for the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points and while there is still no telling how this circle can ever be completely measured yet the noble and gifted man even before the middle of his career inevitably comes into contact with those extreme points of the periphery where he stares at the inexplicable when he here sees to his dismay how logic coils round itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail then the new form of perception discloses itself namely tragic perception which in order even to be assured requires art as a safeguard and remedy if with eyes strengthened and refreshed at the side of the Greeks we look upon the highest spheres of the world that surrounds us we behold the avidity of the insatiate optimistic knowledge of which Socrates is the typical representative transformed into tragic resignation and the need of art well to be sure this same tragedy in its lower stages has to exhibit itself as antagonistic to art and must especially have an inward detestation of downy so tragic art as was exemplified in the opposition of Socrates to Escalian tragedy here then with agitated spirit we knock at the gates of the present and the future will that transforming lead to ever new configurations of genius and especially the music practicing Socrates will the net of art which is spread over existence whether under the name of religion or of science be knit always more closely and delicately or is it destined to be torn to shreds under the restlessly barbaric activity and world which is called the present day anxious yet not disconsolate and aloof for a little while as the spectators who are permitted to be witnesses of these tremendous struggles and transitions alas it is the charm of these struggles that he who beholds them must also fight them end of chapter 15 chapter 16 of the birth of tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche this Libervox recording is in the public domain chapter 16 by this elaborate historical example we have endeavored to make it clear that tragedy perishes as surely by having a sense of the spirit of music as it can be born only out of this spirit in order to qualify the singularity of this assertion and on the other hand to disclose the source of this inside of ours we must now confront with clear vision the analogous phenomena of the present time we must enter into the midst of these struggles which as I said just now are being carried on in the highest spheres of our present world between the insatiative optimistic perception and the tragic need of art in so doing I shall leave out of consideration Friedrich Nietzsche at all times oppose art especially tragedy in which it present again extend their sway triumphantly to such an extent that of the theatrical arts only the farce and the ballet for example put forth their blossoms which perhaps not everyone cares to smell intolerably rich luxuriance I will speak only of the most illustrious opposition of the things and by this I mean essentially optimistic science with its ancestor Socrates at the head of it presently also the forces will be designated which seem to me to guarantee a rebirth of tragedy and who knows what other blessed hopes for the German genius before we plunge into the midst of these struggles let us array ourselves in the armor of our hitherto acquired knowledge in contrast to all those who are intent on deriving the arts from one exclusive principle as the necessary vital source of every work of art I keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks Apollo and Dionysus and recognizing them the living and conspicuous representatives of two worlds of art which differ in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims Apollo stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the Principium in David G. Arteonis through which alone the redemption and appearance is to be truly attained while by the mystical cheer of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken and the way lies open to the mothers of being to the innermost heart of things this extraordinary antithesis which opens up beyondingly between plastic art as the Apollonian and music as the Dionysian art has become manifest to only one of the great thinkers to such an extent that even without this key to the symbolism of the Hellenic divinities he allowed to music a different character and origin in advance of all the other arts because unlike them it is not a copy of the phenomenon but a direct copy of the will itself and therefore represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, the thing in itself of every phenomenon Schopenhauer, Weltalsbille, und der Stelung Book 1, 310 to this most important perception of aesthetics with which taken in a serious sense aesthetics properly commences Richard Wagner by way of confirmation of its eternal truth affixed his seal when he asserted in his Beethoven that music must be judged according to aesthetic principles quite different from those which apply to the plastic arts and not in general according to the category of beauty although an erroneous aesthetic inspired by a mislead and degenerate art has by virtue of the concept of beauty prevailing in the plastic domain accustomed itself to demand of music in effect analogous to that of the works of plastic art namely the cessitating delight in beautiful forms upon perceiving this extraordinary antithesis I felt a strong inducement to approach the essence of Greek tragedy and by means of it the profoundest revelation of Hellenic genius for I at last thought myself to be in possession of a charm to enable me far beyond the phrase theology of our usual aesthetics to represent vividly to my mind the primitive problem of tragedy whereby such an astounding insight into the Hellenic character was afforded me that it necessarily seemed as if our proudly comporting classical Hellenic science had thus far contrived to subsist almost exclusively on phantasmagoria and externalities perhaps we may lead up to this primitive problem with the question what aesthetic effect results when the intrinsically separate art powers the Apollonian and Dionysian enter into concurrent actions of music related to image and concept with a special reference to this point that credits with an unsurpassable clearness and perspicuity of exposition expresses himself most copiously on the subject in the following passage which I shall cite here at full length book one page 309 according to all this we may regard the phenomenal world of nature music has two different expressions of the same thing which is therefore itself the only medium of the analogy between these two expressions so that the knowledge of this medium is required in order to understand that analogy music therefore if regarded as an expression of the world is in the highest degree a universal language which is related indeed to the universality of concepts much as these are related to the particular things its universality however is by no means the empty universality of abstraction but of quite a different kind and is united with thorough and distinct definiteness in this respect resembles geometrical figures and numbers which are the universal forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all a priority and yet are not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly determinate all possible efforts excitements and manifestations of will all that goes on in the heart of man the wide negative concept of feeling may be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies but always in the universality of mere form without the material always according to the thing in itself not the phenomenon of which they reproduce the very soul in essence as it were without the body this deep relation which music bears to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any scene action event or surrounding seems to disclose its most secret meaning and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it as also the fact that whoever gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony seems to see all the possible events of life in the world take place in himself nevertheless upon reflection he can find no likeness between the music and the things that pass before his mind for as we have said music is distinguished from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon or more accurately the adequate objectivity of the will but the direct copy of the will itself and therefore represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world and the thing in itself of every phenomenon we might therefore just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will and this is the reason why music makes every picture and indeed every scene of real life and of the world at once appear with higher significance all the more so to be sure in proportion as its melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon it rests upon this that we are able to set upon the music as a song or a perceptible representation as a pantomime or both as an opera such particular pictures of human life set to the universal language of music are never bound to it or correspond to it with stringent necessity but stand to it only in the relation of an example chosen at will to a general concept in the determinateness of the real they represent that which music expresses in the universality of mere form for melodies are to a certain extent like general concepts and abstraction from the actual this actual world then the world of particular things affords the object of perception the special and the individual the particular case both to the universality of concepts and to the universality of the melodies but these two universalities are in a certain respect opposed to each other for the concepts contain only the forms which are first of all abstracted from perception the separated outward shell of things as it were and hence they are in the strictest sense of the term abstract the music on the other hand gives the in those colonel which precedes all forms or the heart of things this relation may be very well expressed in the language of the schoolman by saying the concepts of the universalia post rem but music gives the universalia anti-rem in the real world in the universalia in ray but that in general a relation is possible between a composition and a perceptible representation rest as we have said upon the fact that both are simply different expressions of the same inner being of the world when now in the particular case such a relation is actually given that is to say when the composer has been able to express in the universal language of music the emotions of will which constitute the heart of an event the opera is expressive but the analogy discovered by the composer between the two must have proceeded from the direct knowledge of the nature of the world unknown to his reason and must not be an imitation produced with conscious intention by means of conceptions otherwise the music does not express the inner nature of the will itself but merely gives an inadequate imitation of its phenomenon all especially imitative music does this we have therefore according to the doctrine of Schopenhauer an immediate understanding of music as the language of the will and feel our imagination stimulated to give form to this invisible and yet so actively stirred spirit world which speaks to us and prompted to embody it in an analogous example on the other hand image and concept under the influence of a truly conformable music acquire a higher significance down easy and art therefore is want to exercise two kinds of influences on the apollonian art faculty first the insights to the symbolic intuition of down easy and universality and secondly it causes the symbolic image to stand forth in its fullest significance from these facts intelligible in themselves and not inaccessible to profounder observation I am further capacity of music to give birth to myth that is to say the most significant exemplar and precisely tragic myth the myth which speaks of Dionysian knowledge and symbols in the phenomenon of the artist I have set forth that in him music strives to express itself with regard to its nature in apollonian images if now we reflect that music in its highest potency must seek to attain also to its highest symbolization we must deem it possible that it also knows how to find the symbolic expression of its inherent down easy and wisdom and where shall we have to seek for this expression if not in tragedy and in general in the conception of the tragic for the nature of art as it is ordinarily conceived according to the single category of appearance and beauty the tragic cannot be honestly deduced at all it is only through the spirit of music that we understand the joy in the annihilation of the individual for in the particular examples of such annihilation only is the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art made clear to us which gives expression to the will in its omnipotence as it were behind the perincipium in David the eternal life beyond all phenomena and in spite of all annihilation the metaphysical delight in the tragic is a translation of the instinctively unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of the scene the hero of the highest manifestation of the will is disavowed for our pleasure because he is only phenomenon and because the eternal life of the will is not affected by his annihilation we believe in eternal life tragedy exclaims while music is the approximate idea of this life plastic art has an altogether different object here Apollo vanquishes the suffering of the individual by the radiant glorification of the eternity of the phenomenon here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life pain is in a manner surreptitiously obliterated from the features of nature in Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism the same nature speaks to us with its true undisempled voice be as I am amidst the ceaseless change of phenomena the eternally creative primordial mother eternally impelling to existence self-satisfying eternally with this change of phenomena end of chapter 16 chapter 17 of the birth of tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche this LibriVox recording is in the public domain chapter 17 Dionysian art seeks to convince us of the eternal joy of existence only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena but behind phenomena we are to perceive how all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end we are compelled to look into the tears of individual existence yet we are not to become torpid a metaphysical comfort that brings us momentarily from the bustle of the transforming figures we are really for brief moments primordial being itself and feel its indomitable desire for being and joy in existence the struggle the pain the destruction of phenomena now appear to us as something necessary considering the surplus of innumerable forms of existence from and push one another into life considering the exuberant fertility of the universal will we are pierced by the maddening sting of these pains at the very moment when we have become as it were one with the immeasurable primordial joy in existence and when we anticipate in Dionysian ecstasy the indestructibility and eternity of this joy in spite of fear and pity we are the happy living beings not as individuals but as the one living being with whose procreative joy we are blended the history of the rise of Greek tragedy now tells us with luminous precision that the tragic art of the Greeks was really born of the spirit of music with which conception we believe we have done justice for the first time the original and most astonishing significance of the chorus at the same time however we must admit that the import of tragic myth as set forth above never became transparent with sufficient lucidity to the Greek poets let alone the Greek philosophers their heroes speak as it were more superficially than they act the myth does not at all and its adequate objectification in the spoken word the structure of the scenes and the conspicuous images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can put into words and concepts the same being also observed in Shakespeare whose Hamlet for instance in an analogous manner talks more superficially than he acts the previous they mentioned lesson of Hamlet is to be gathered not from his words but from a more profound contemplation and survey of the whole with respect to Greek tragedy which of course presents itself to us only as word drama I have even intimated that the incongruance between myth and expression might easily tempt us to regard it as shallower and less significant than it really is and accordingly to postulate for it a more superficial effect than it must have had according to the testimony of the ancients for how easily one forgets that what the word poet did not succeed in doing namely realizing the highest spiritualization and ideality of myth he might succeed in doing every moment as creative musician we require to be sure almost by philological method to reconstruct ourselves the ascendancy of musical influence in order to receive something of the incomparable comfort which must be characteristic of true tragedy even this musical ascendancy however would only have been felt by us as such had we been Greeks well in the entire development of Greek music as compared with the infinitely richer music known and familiar to us we imagine we hear only the youthful song of the musical genius entoned with a feeling of diffidence the Greeks are as the Egyptian priests say eternal children and in tragic art also they are only children who do not know what a sublime play thing has originated under their hands and is being demolished that striving of the spirit of music for symbolic and mythical manifestation which increases from the beginnings of lyric poetry to attic tragedy breaks off all of a sudden immediately after attaining luxuriant development and disappears as it were from the surface of Hellenic art while the Dionysian view of things born of this striving lives on mysteries and in its strangest metamorphoses and debasements does not cease to attract earnest natures will it not one day rise again as art out of its mystic depth here the question occupies us whether the power by the counteracting influence of which tragedy has for all time strength enough to prevent the artistic reawaking of tragedy and of the tragic things if ancient tragedy was driven from its course by the dialectical desire for knowledge and the optimism of science it might be inferred that there is an eternal conflict between the theoretic and the tragic view of things and only after the spirit of science has been led to its boundaries and its claim to universal validity has been destroyed by the evidence of these boundaries can we hope for a rebirth of tragedy for which form of culture we should have to use the symbol of the music practicing Socrates in the sense spoken of above in this contrast I understand by the spirit of science the belief which first came to light in the person of Socrates the belief in the fathomableness of nature and in knowledge as a panacea he who recalls the immediate consequences of this restlessly onward pressing spirit of science we'll realize it once that myth was annihilated by it and that in consequence of this annihilation poetry was driven as a homeless being from her natural ideal soil if we have rightly assigned to music the capacity to reproduce myth from itself we may in turn expect to find the spirit of science on the path where it inimically opposes this mythopeic power of music this takes place in the development of the new attic Dithiram the music of which no longer expressed the inner essence the will itself but only rendered the phenomenon insufficiently in an imitation by means of concepts from which intrinsically degenerate music the truly musical natures turned away with the same repugnance that they felt for the art destroying tendency of Socrates the unerring instinct of Aristophanes surely did the proper thing when it comprised Socrates himself the tragedy of Euripides and the music of the new Dithiram be poets in the same feeling of hatred and perceived in all three phenomena the symptoms of a degenerate culture by this new Dithiram music has in an outrageous manner then made the imitative portrait of phenomena for instance of a battle or a storm at sea and has thus of course been entirely deprived of its mythopeic power for if it endeavors to excite our delight only by compelling us to seek external analogies between a vital or natural process and certain rhythmical figures and characteristic sounds of music if our understanding is expected to satisfy itself with the perception of these analogies we are reduced to a frame of mind in which the reception of the mythical is impossible for the myth as a unique exemplar of generality and truth towering into the infinite desires to be conspicuously perceived the truly Dionysian music presents itself to us as such a general mirror of the universal will the conspicuous event which is refracted in this mirror expands at once for our consciousness to the copy of an eternal truth conversely such a conspicuous event is at once divested of every mythical character by the tone painting of the new Dithiram music has here become a wretched copy of the phenomenon and therefore infinitely poor than the phenomenon itself through which poverty it still further reduces even the phenomenon for our consciousness so that now for instance a musically imitated battle of this sort exhausts itself in marches signal sounds etc and our imagination is arrested precisely by these superficialities tone painting is therefore in every respect the counterpart of true music with its mytho peak power through it the phenomenon poor in itself is made still poor well through an isolated Dionysian music the phenomenon is evolved and expanded into a picture of the world it was an immense triumph of the non-Dionysian spirit when in the development of the new Dithiram it had estranged music from itself and reduced it to be the slave of phenomena Euripides who albeit in a higher sense must be designated as a thoroughly unmusical nature is for this very reason a passionate adherent of the new Dithirambic music and with the liberality of a freebooter employs all its effective turns and mannerisms in another direction also we see it work the power of this un-Dionysian myth opposing spirit when we turn our eyes to the prevalence of character representation and psychological refinement from Sophocles onwards the character must no longer be expanded into an eternal type but on the contrary must operate individually through artistic bitrates and shadings through the nicest precision of all lines in such a manner that the spectator is in general no longer conscious of the myth but of the mighty nature myth and the imitative power of the artist here also we observe the victory of the phenomenon over the universal and the delight in the particular quasi anatomical preparation we actually breathe the air of a theoretical world in which scientific knowledge is valued more highly than the artistic reflection of a universal law the movement along the line of the representation of character proceeds rapidly while Sophocles still delineates complete characters and employs myth for the refined development Euripides already delineates only prominent individual traits of character which can express themselves in violent bursts of passion in the new attic comedy however there are only masks with one expression frivolous old men duped pandas and cunning slaves in untiring repetition where now is the myth of the spirit of music what is still left now of music is either excitatory music or souvenir music that is either a stimulant for dull and used up nerves or a tone painting as regards the former it hardly matters about the text said to it the heroes and choruses of Euripides are already disillute enough when once they begin to sing to what past must things have come with his brazen successors the new and Dionysian spirit however manifests itself most clearly in the denouement of the new dramas in the old tragedy one could feel at the close the metaphysical comfort without which the delight in tragedy cannot be explained at all the conciliating tones from another world sound purist perhaps in the edopus at Kalanas now that the genius of music has fled from tragedy tragedy is strictly speaking dead for from whence could one now draw the metaphysical comfort one sought therefore for an earthly unravelment of the tragic dissonance the hero after he had been sufficiently tortured by fate reaped a deserved reward through a superb marriage or divine tokens of favor the hero had turned gladiator on whom after being liberally battered about and covered with wounds freedom was occasionally bestowed the day is ex machina took the place of metaphysical comfort I will not say that the tragic view of things was everywhere completely destroyed by the intruding spirit of the undionysian we only know that it was compelled to flee from art into the underworld as it were in the degenerate form of a secret cult over the widest extent of the Hellenic character however there raged the consuming blast of this spirit which manifests itself in the form of Greek cheerfulness which we've already spoken of as a senile unproductive love of existence this cheerfulness is the counterpart of the splendid naive way of the earlier Greeks which according to the characteristic indicated above must be conceived as the blossom of the Apollonian culture growing out of a dark abyss as the victory which the Hellenic will through its mirroring of beauty obtains over suffering and the wisdom of suffering the noblest manifestation of that other form of Greek cheerfulness the Alexandrine is the cheerfulness of the theoretical man it exhibits the same symptomatic characteristics as I have just inferred concerning the spirit of the undionysian it combats Dionysian wisdom and art it seeks to dissolve myth it substitutes for metaphysical comfort and earthly consonants in fact a deus ex machina of its own namely the god of machines and crucibles that is the powers of the genii of nature recognized and employed in the service of higher egoism it believes in amending the world by knowledge in guiding life by science and that it can really confine the individual within a narrow sphere of solvable problems where he cheerfully says to life I desire the it is worthwhile to know the end of chapter 17 chapter 18 of the birth of tragedy by Gersh, Nietzsche, Elizabeth Brevoch's recording is in the public domain chapter 18 it is an eternal phenomenon the avidious will can always by means of an illusion spread over things detain its creatures in life and compel them to live on one is chained by the socratic love of knowledge and the vain hope of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence there is ensnared by arts seductive veil of beauty fluttering before his eyes still another by the metaphysical comfort that eternal life flows on indestructibly beneath the world of phenomena to say nothing of the more ordinary and almost more powerful illusions which the will has always at hand these three specimens of the illusion are on the whole designed only more nobly endowed natures who in general feel profoundly the weight and burden of existence and must be deluded into forgetfulness of their displeasure by exquisite stimulants all that we call culture is made up of these stimulants and according to the proportion of the ingredients we have either a specially socratic or artistic or tragic culture the historical exemplifications are wanted there is either an Alexandrine or a Hellenic or a Buddhistic culture our whole modern world is entangled in the meshes of Alexandrine culture and recognizes as its ideal the theorist equipped with the most potent means of knowledge and laboring in the service of science of whom the archetype and progenitor is Socrates all our educational methods have originally this ideal in view every other form of existence must struggle to onwards we're a assembly beside it as something tolerated but not intended in an almost alarming manner the cultured man was here found for a long time only in the form of the scholar even our political arts have been forced to evolve from learned imitations and in the main effect of the rhyme we still recognize the origin of our poetic form from artistic experiments with a non-native and thoroughly learned language how unintelligible must Faust the modern cultured man who is in himself intelligible have appeared to a true Greek Faust storming discontentedly through all the faculties devoted to magic and the devil from a desire for knowledge whom we have only to place alongside of Socrates the purpose of comparison in order to see that modern man begins to divine the boundaries of this socratic love of perception and long for a coast in the wide waste of the ocean of knowledge when Gerta on one occasion said to Ekerman with reference to Napoleon yes my good friend there is also a productiveness of deeds he reminded us in a charmingly naive manner that the non theorist is something incredible and astounding to modern man so that the wisdom of Gerta is needed once more in order to discover that such a surprising form of existence is comprehensible may even pardonable now we must not hide from ourselves what is concealed in the heart of this socratic culture optimism deeming itself absolute well we must not be alarmed if the fruits of this optimism ripen if society live into the very lowest strata by this kind of culture that begins to tremble through wanton agitations and desires if the belief in the earthly happiness of all if the belief in the possibility of such a general intellectual cultures gradually transformed into the threatening demand for such an alexandrian earthly happiness into the conjuring of a european deus ex machina let us mark this well the alexandrian culture requires a slave class to be able to exist permanently in its optimistic view of life it denies the necessity of such a class and consequently when the effect of its beautifully selective and tranquilizing utterances about the dignity of man and the dignity of labor is spent it gradually drifts towards a dreadful destination there is nothing more terrible than a barbaric slave class who have learned to regard their existence as an injustice and now prepared to take vengeance not only for themselves but for their personal generations in the face of such threatening storms who dares to appeal with confident spirit to our pale and exhausted religions which even in their foundations have degenerate into scholastic religions so that myth the necessary prerequisite of every religion is already paralyzed everywhere and even in this domain the optimistic spirit which we have just designated as the annihilating germ of society has attained while the evil slumbering in the heart of theoretical culture gradually begins to describe modern man it makes him anxiously ransacked the stores of his experience for means to avert the danger though not believing very much in these means while he therefore begins to divine the consequences his position involves great universally gifted natures have contrived with an incredible amount of thought to make use of the apparatus of science itself in order to point out the limits and the relativity of knowledge generally and thus definitely to deny the claim of science to universal validity and universal ends with which demonstration the illusory notion was for the first time recognized as such which pretends with the aid of causality to be able to fathom the innermost essence of things the extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer have succeeded in gaining the most difficult victory the victory over the optimism hidden in the essence of logic which optimism in turn is the basis of our culture while this optimism resting on apparently an objectionable eterni-wary-tatis believed in the intelligibility and solvability of all the riddles of the world and treated space-time and causality as totally unconditioned laws of universal validity Kant on the other hand served in reality only to elevate the mere phenomenon the work of Maya to the soul and highest reality putting it in place of the innermost and true essence of things thus making the actual knowledge of this essence impossible that is according to the expression of Schopenhauer to lull the dreamer still more soundly asleep with this knowledge a culture is inaugurated which I venture to designate as a tragic culture the most important characteristic of which is that wisdom takes the place of science as the highest end wisdom which uninfluenced by the seductive distractions of the sciences turns with unmoved eye to the comprehensive view of the world and seeks to apprehend therein the eternal suffering as its own poetic feelings of love let us imagine a rising generation with this undauntedness of vision with this heroic desire for the prodigious let us imagine the bold step of these dragon slayers the proud and daring spirit with which they turn their backs on all the effeminate doctrines of optimism in order to live resolutely in the whole and in the full would it not be necessary for the tragic man of this culture to listen to earnestness and terror to desire a new art the art of metaphysical comfort namely tragedy as the Helena belonging to him and that he should exclaim with Faust und salt ich nickt zähn zuck tickster gewalt in sleben zähn dir ein zickster gestalt but now that the Socratic culture has been shaken from two directions and is only able to hold the scepter of its infallibility with trembling hands once by the fear of its own conclusions which it at length begins to surmise and again because it is no longer convinced with its former naive trust of the eternal validity of its foundation it is a sad spectacle to behold how the dance of its thought always rushes longingly on new forms to embrace them and then shuttering lets them go of a sudden as Mephistopheles does the seductive lammy eye it is certainly the symptom of the breach which all art want to speak up as the primordial suffering of modern culture that the theoretical man alarmed and dissatisfied at his own conclusions no longer dares to entrust himself to the terrible ice stream of existence he runs timidly up and down the bank he no longer wants to have anything entire with all the natural cruelty of things so thoroughly has he been spoiled by his optimistic contemplation besides he feels that a culture built up on the principles of science must perish when it begins to grow illogical that is to avoid its own conclusions our art reveals this universal trouble in vain does one seek help by imitating all the great productive in vain does one accumulate the entire world literature around modern man for his comfort in vain does one place himself in the midst of the art styles and artists of all ages so that one may give names to them as Adam did to the bees one still continues the eternal hungerer the critic without joy and energy the alexandrian man who is in the main a librarian and corrector of proofs and who pitiable wretch goes blind from the dust of books and printers errors end of chapter 18 19 of the birth of tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche this LibriVox recording is in the public domain chapter 19 we cannot designate the intrinsic substance of culture more distinctly than by calling it the culture of the opera for it is in this department that culture has expressed itself with special naivete concerning its terms and perceptions which is sufficiently surprising when we compare the genesis of the opera and the facts of operatic development with the eternal truths of the Apollonian and Avnisian I call to mind first of all the origin of the stillo rapprocentativo and the recitativ is it credible that this thoroughly externalized operatic music incapable of devotion could be received and reached with enthusiastic favor as a rebirth as it were of all true music by the very age in which the ineffably sublime and sacred music of Palestrina had originated and who on the other hand would think of making only the diversion craving luxuriousness of those florentine circles and the vanity of their dramatic singers responsible for the love of the opera which spread with such rapidity that in the same age even among the same people this passion for half musical mode of speech should awaken alongside of the vaulted structure of palestrine harmonies which the entire Christian middle age had been building up I can explain to myself only by cooperating extra artistic tendency in the essence of the recitati the listener who insists on distinctly hearing the words under the music has his wishes met by the singer in that he speaks rather than sings and intensifies the pathetic expression of the words in this half song by this intensification of the pathos he facilitates the understanding of the words and surmounts the remaining half of the music the specific danger which now presents him is that in some unguarded moment he may give undo importance to music which would forthwith result in the destruction of the pathos of the speech and the distinctness of the words while on the other hand he always feels himself impelled to musical delivery and to virtue OC exhibition of vocal talent here the poet comes to his aid who knows how to provide him with abundant opportunities for lyrical interjections repetitions of words and sentences etc at which place is the singer now in the purely musical element can rest himself without minding the words this alternation of emotionally impressive yet only half sung speech and holy sung interjections which is characteristic of the stealer representativo this rapidly changing endeavor to operate now on the conceptual and representative faculty of the hearer now on his musical sense is something so thoroughly unnatural with also intrinsically contradictory both to the apollonian and a Nicean artistic impulses that one has to infer an origin of the recitativ foreign to all artistic instincts the recitativ must be defined according to this description as the combination of epic and lyric delivery not indeed as an intrinsically stable combination which could not be attained in the case of such totally disparate elements but an entirely superficial mosaic conglutination such as is totally unprecedented in the domain of nature and experience but this was not the opinion of the inventors of the recitativ they themselves and their age with him believed rather that the mystery of antique music had been solved by the stealer representativo in which as they thought the only explanation of the enormous influence of an Orpheus and Amphion and even of Greek tragedy was to be found the new style was regarded by them as the reawakening of the most effective music the old Greek music indeed with the universal and popular conception of the Homeric world as the primitive world they could abandon themselves to the dream of having descended once more into the paradysike beginnings of mankind where in music also must needs have had the purity power and innocence of which the poets could give such touching accounts in their pastoral plays here we see into the internal process of development of this thoroughly modern variety of art the opera a powerful need here acquires an art but it is a need of an unesthetic kind the yearning for the idol the belief in the prehistory existence of the artistic good man the recitativ was regarded as the rediscovered language of this primitive man the opera as the recovered land of this idealically or heroically good creature who in every action follows at the same time a natural artistic impulse who sings a little along with all he has to say in order to sing immediately with full voice on the slightest emotional excitement it is now a matter of indifference to us that the humanists of those days combated the old ecclesiastical representation of man as naturally corrupt and lost this new created picture of the paradysike artist so that opera may be understood as the oppositional dogma of the good man whereby however a solace was at the same time found for the pessimism to which precisely the seriously disposed men of that time were most strongly incited owing to the frightful uncertainty of all conditions of life it is enough to have perceived that the intrinsic charm and therefore the genesis of this new form of art lies in the gratification of an altogether unaesthetic need in the optimistic glorification of man as such in the conception of the primitive man as the man naturally good and artistic a principle of the opera which has gradually changed into a threatening and terrible demand which in face of the socialistic movements of the present time we can no longer ignore the good primitive man once his rights what paradysike prospects I hear placed by way of parallel still another equally obvious confirmation of my view that opera is built up on the same principles as our Alexandrine culture opera is the birth of the theoretical man of the critical layman not of the artist one of the most surprising facts in the whole history of art it was the demand of thoroughly unmusical hearers that the words must above all be understood so that according to them a rebirth of music is only to be expected when some mode of singing has been discovered in which the text word lords over the counterpoint as the master over the servant for the words it is argued are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul is nobler than the body it was in accordance with the lay acly on musical crudeness of these views that the combination of music picture and expression was effected in the beginnings of the opera in the spirit this aesthetics the first experiments were also made in the leading lake circles of Florence by the poets and singers patronized there the man incapable of art creates for himself a species of art precisely because he is the in artistic man as such because he does not divine the Dionysian depth of music he changes his musical taste into appreciation of the understandable word and tone of the rhetoric of the passions in the still representative and into the voluptuousness of the arts of song because he is unable to behold a vision he forces the machinist and the decorative artist into his service because he cannot apprehend the true nature of the artist he conjures up the artistic primitive man to suit his taste that is the man who sings and recites verses under the influence of passion he dreams himself into a time when passion suffices to generate songs and poems as if emotion had ever been able to create anything artistic the postulate of the opera is a false belief concerning the artistic process in fact the idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist in the sense of this belief opera is the expression of the taste of the laity and art who dictate their laws with the cheerful optimism of the theorist should we desire to unite in one the two conceptions that are set forth as influential in the origin of opera it would only remain for us to speak of an idyllic tendency of the opera in which connection we may avail ourselves exclusively of the phrase theology and illustration of Schiller nature and the ideal he says are either objects of grief when the former is represented as lost the latter unattained or both are objects of joy and that they are represented as real the first case furnishes the ideology in its narrower signification the second the idyll in its widest sense here we must at once call attention to the common characteristic of these two conceptions in operatic genesis namely that in them the ideal is not regarded as unattained or nature is lost agreeably to this sentiment there was a primitive age of man when he lay close to the heart of nature and owing to this naturalness the ideal of mankind in a paradisiac goodness and artists organization from which perfect primitive man all of us were supposed to be descended whose faithful copy we were in fact still said to be only we had to cast off some few things in order to recognize ourselves once more as this primitive man on the strength of a voluntary renunciation of superfluous learnedness of super abundant culture to such a concord of nature in the ideal to an idyllic reality that the cultured man of the Renaissance suffered himself to be led back by his operatic imitation of Greek tragedy he made use of this tragedy as Dante made use of Virgil in order to be led up to the gates of paradise well from this point he went on without assistance and passed over from an imitation of the highest form of Greek art to a restoration of all things to an imitation of man's original art world what delightfully naive hopefulness of these daring endeavors in the very heart of theoretical culture solely to be explained by the comforting belief that man in himself is the eternally virtuous hero of the opera the eternally fluting or singing shepherd who must always in the end rediscover himself as such if he has at any time really lost himself solely the fruit of the optimism which here rises like a Swedish least seductive column of vapor of the depth of the socratic conception of the world the features of the opera therefore do not by any means exhibit the elegiac sorrow of an eternal loss but rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery the indolent delight in an idyllic reality which one can at least represent to oneself each moment as real and in so doing one will perhaps surmise someday that this supposed reality is nothing but a fantastically silly dawdling concerning which everyone who could judge it by the terrible earnestness of true nature and compare it with the actual primitive scenes of the beginnings of mankind would have to call out with loathing away with the phantom nevertheless one would err if one thought it possible to frighten away merely by a vigorous shout such a dawdling thing as the opera as if it were a specter he who would destroy the opera must join issue with Alexandrine cheerfulness which expresses itself so naively therein concerning its favorite representation of which in fact it is the specific form of art but what is to be expected for art itself from the operation of a form of art the beginnings of which do not at all lie in the aesthetic province which has rather stolen over from a half moral sphere into the artistic domain and has been able only now and then to delude us concerning this hybrid origin but what SAP is this subject opera concern nourished if not by that of true art must we not suppose that the highest and indeed the truly serious task of art to free the eye from its glance into the horrors of night and to deliver the subject by the healing balm of appearance from the spasms of volitional agitations will degenerate under the influence of its idyllic seductions and Alexandrine adulation to an empty dissipating tendency to pass time what will become of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and Apollonian in such an amalgamation of styles as I have exhibited in the character of the Stilo Rapa Zantativo where music is regarded as the servant the text as the master where music is compared with the body the text with the soul where at best the highest aim will be the realization of a parafrastic tone painting just as in the new attic Ditheram where music is completely alienated from its true dignity of being the Dionysian mirror of the world so that the only thing left to it is as a slave of phenomenon to imitate the formal character thereof and to excite an external pleasure in the play of lines and proportions on close observation this fatal influence of the opera on music is seen to coincide absolutely with the universal development of modern music the realism lurking in the genesis of the opera and in the essence of culture represented thereby has with alarming rapidity succeeded in divesting music of its downy so cosmic mission and in impressing on it a playfully formal and pleasurable character a change with which perhaps only the metamorphosis of the East Galean man into the cheerful Alexandrine man could be compared if however in the exemplification herewith indicated we have rightly initiated the evanescence of the Dionysian spirit with a most striking but hitherto unexplained transformation and degeneration of the Halene what hopes must revive in us when the most trustworthy auspices guarantee the reverse process the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit in our modern world it is impossible for the divine strength of Heracles to languish forever in voluptuous bondage to Amphali out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a power has arisen which has nothing in common with the primitive conditions of Sycratic culture and can either be explained or excused thereby but is rather regarded by this culture as something terribly inexplicable and overwhelmingly hostile in dash namely German music as we have to understand it especially in its vast solar orbit from Bach to Beethoven from Beethoven to Wagner what even under the most favorable circumstances can be knowledge craving soquitism of our days do with this demon rising from unfathomable depths neither by means of the zigzag and arabesque work of operatic melody nor with the aid of the erythmetical counting board of fugue and contrapental dialectics is the formula to be found in the trebly powerful light of which one can subdue this demon and compel it to speak what a spectacle when our esthete's with a net of beauty to themself's now pursue and clutch at the genius of music romping about before them within comprehensible life and in so doing display activities which are not to be judged by the standard of eternal beauty any more than by the standard of the sublime let us but observe these patrons of music as they are at close range when they call out so indefatigably beauty beauty to discover whether they have the marks of nature's darling children who are unfundled in the lap of the beautiful or whether they do not rather seek a disguise for their own rudeness and aesthetical pretext for their own unemotional incipidity i am thinking here for instance of atoyan but let the liar and the hypocrite beware of our german music for in the midst of all our culture it is really the only genuine pure and purifying fire spirit from which and towards which as in the teaching of the great heraclitus of us all things move in a double orbit all that we now call culture education civilization must appear some day before the unerring judge Dionysus let us recollect furthermore how can't and sharpen heart made it possible for the spirit of german philosophy streaming from the same sources to annihilate the satisfied delight in existence of scientific Socrates by the delimitation of the boundaries thereof how through this delimitation an infinitely profounder and more serious view of ethical problems and of art was inaugurated which we may unhesitatingly designate as Dionysian wisdom comprised in concepts to what then does the mystery of this oneness of german music and philosophy point if not to a new form of existence concerning the substance of which we can only inform ourselves presentially from Hellenic analogies for to us who stand on the boundary line between two different forms of existence the Hellenic prototype retains the immeasurable value that there in all these transitions and struggles are imprinted in a classically instructive form except that we as it were experience analogically in reverse order the chief epics of the Hellenic genius and seem now for instance to pass backwards from the alexandrian age to the period of tragedy at the same time we have the feeling that the birth of a tragic age the tokens only a return to itself of the german spirit a blessed self-rediscovering after excessive and urgent external influences have for a long time compelled it living as it did in helpless barbaric formlessness to servitude under their form it may at last after returning to the primitive source of its being venture to stalk along boldly and freely before all nations without knowing the leading strings of a romantic civilization if only it can learn implicitly of one people the Greeks of whom to learn at all is itself a high honor and a rare distinction and when did we require these highest of all teachers more than at present when we experience a rebirth of tragedy and are in danger alike of not knowing whence it comes and of being unable to make clear to ourselves whether it is the end of chapter 19 chapter 20 of the birth of tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche this LibriVox recording is in the public domain chapter 20 it may be weighed someday before an impartial judge in what time and in what men the german spirit has thus far of the Greeks and if we confidently assume that this unique praise must be accorded to the noblest intellectual efforts of Goethe, Schiller and Winklmann it will certainly have to be added that since their time and subsequently to the more immediate influences of these efforts the endeavor to attain to culture and to the Greeks by this path has in an incomprehensible manner grown Schiller and Fiebler in order not to despair altogether of the German spirit must we not infer there from that possibly in some essential matter even these champions could not penetrate into the core of the Hellenic nature and were unable to establish a permanent friendly alliance between German and Greek culture so that perhaps an unconscious perception of this shortcoming might raise also in more serious minds the disheartening doubt as to whether after such predecessors they could advance still farther on this path of culture or could reach the goal at all accordingly we see the opinions concerning the value of Greek contribution to culture to generate since that time in the most alarming manner the expression of compassionate superiority may be heard in the most heterogeneous intellectual camps and elsewhere a totally ineffective declamation dales with Greek harmony Greek beauty Greek cheerfulness and in the very circles whose dignity it might be to draw indefatigably from the Greek channel for the good of German culture in the circles of the teachers in the higher educational institutions they have learned best to compromise with the Greeks in good time and on easy terms to the extent often of a skeptical abandonment of the Hellenic ideal and a total perversion of the true purpose of antiquarian studies if there be any one at all in these circles who has not completely exhausted himself in the endeavor to be a trustworthy corrector of old texts or a natural history micro scoppist of language he perhaps seeks also to appropriate Grecian antiquity historically along with other antiquities and in any case according to the method and with the supercilious air of our present cultured historiography when therefore the intrinsic efficiency of the higher educational institutions has never perhaps been lower or febler than at present when the journalist the paper slave of the day has triumphed over the academic teacher in all matters pertaining to culture and there only remains to the letter the often previously experienced metamorphosis of now fluttering also as a cheerful cultured butterfly in the idiom of the journalist with the light elegance peculiar there too with what painful confusion must the cultured persons of a period like the present gaze at the phenomenon which can perhaps be comprehended analogically only by means of the profoundest principle of the hitherto unintelligible Hellenic genius of the reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the rebirth of tragedy never has there been another art period in which so-called culture and true art have been so estranged and opposed as is so obviously the case at present we understand why so feeble a culture hates true art it fears destruction thereby but must not an entire domain of culture namely the Socratic Alexandrine have exhausted its powers after contriving to culminate in such a daintly tapering point as our present culture when it was not permitted to heroes like Gerta and Schiller to break open the enchanted gate which leads into the Hellenic magic mountain when with their most endless driving they did not get beyond the longing gaze which the girthian if a genia cast from barbaric Taurus to her home across the ocean what could the epigenes of such heroes hope for if the gate should not open to them suddenly of its own chord in an entirely different position quite overlooked in all endeavors of culture hitherto amidst the mystic tones of reawakened tragic music let no one attempt to weaken our faith in an impending rebirth of Hellenic antiquity for in it alone we find our hope of our renovation and purification of the German spirit through the fire magic of music what else do we know of amidst the present desolation and culture which could awaken any comforting expectation for the future we look in vain for one single vigorously branching route for a speck of fertile and healthy soil there is dust and torpidness and languishing everywhere under such circumstances a cheerless solitary wanderer could choose for himself no better assemble than the night with death and the devil as Durer has sketched him for us the male cloud night and stern a visage who is able and perturbed by his gruesome companions and yet hopelessly to pursue his terrible path with horse and hound alone our Schopenhauer was such a durian night he was destitute of all hope but he sought the truth there is not his equal but how suddenly this gloomily depicted wilderness of our exhausted culture changes when the Dionysian magic touches it a hurricane everything decrepit decaying collapsed and stunted wraps it whirlingly into a red cloud of dust and carries it like a vulture into the air confused thereby our glances seek for what has vanished for what they see is something risen to the golden light as from a depression so full and green so luxuriously alive so ardently infinite tragedy sits in the midst of this exuberance of life sorrow and joy in sublime ecstasy she listens to a distant doleful song it tells of the mothers of being whose names are van de la beha madness will woe yes my friends believe with me in Dionysian life and in the rebirth of tragedy the time of the Socratic man has passed crown yourselves with ivy taken your hands the thurses and do not marvel if tigers and panthers lie down fawning at your feet dare now to be tragic men for ye are to be redeemed e are to accompany the Dionysian festive procession from India to Greece equip yourselves for severe conflict but believe in the wonders of your god end of chapter 20