'Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche' (1887-89)

Friedrich Nietzsche - Hymnus an das Leben [Hymn of Life]

A selection from the letters of Friedrich Nietzsche written between 1887 and 1889.






[Forthcoming]

'Destiny and History' and 'Freedom of Will and Destiny' Frederick Nietzsche (1862).

Nietzsche, June 1862.

A selection from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche while he was 17years old on his Easter vacation.



Freedom of Will and Destiny

Generally, "submission to God's will" and "humility" are often nothing more than excuses for cowardly fear of boldly facing destiny.

Free will is... an abstract concept and means the capability to act consciously, while, by destiny, we refer to the principle that guides us in our conscious acting.


In freedom of will, there lies for the individual the principle of separation, of separation from the whole, of the absolute freedom from limits and boundaries; destiny, in turn, organically reconnects man with the overall development and forces him, by seeking to dominate him, to freely develop his own strength against it; absolute free will without destiny would turn man into God, and the fatalistic principle would turn him into an automaton.

Destiny and History

Free will appears as that which is not chained, as that which is deliberate; it is the infinitely free, roaming, the mind. Destiny, however, is a necessity if we do not want to believe that world history is made up of dream-like meanderings, that the unspeakable pain of humanity is a fidget of the imagination... . Destiny is the infinite force of resistance against free will, fee will without destiny is... inconceivable... since, after all, a certain quality or trait is always the product of contrasts.

Perhaps, free will is nothing but the highest potential of destiny. [...] If we consider the word world history in the most encompassing way, then it would (have to be considered) the history of matter. After all, there still have to exist higher principles in the face of which all differences have to flow together into a great unity, prior to which everything is in development, where everything flows towards a gigantic ocean, where all developments of the world find themselves again, united, merged, all one.

'Untimely Meditations' by Frederick Nietzsche (1876)

A selection from Frederick Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations, 1876.







On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.

'Twilight of the Idols' by Friederich Nietzsche (1889)

[Incomplete]


In all ages one has wanted to 'improve' men: this above all is what morality has meant.  But one word can conceal the most divergent tendencies.  Both the taming of the beast man and the breeding of a certain species of man has been called 'improvement': only these zoological termini express realities - realities, to be sure, of which the typical 'improver', the priest, knows nothing - wants to know nothing... . To call the taming of an animal its 'improvement' is in our ears almost a joke.  Whoever knows what goes on in menageries is doubtful whether the beasts in them are 'improved'.  They are weakened, they are made less harmful, they become sickly beasts through the depressive emotion of fear, through pain, through injuries, through hunger. - It is no different with the tamed human being whom the priest has 'improved'.  In the early Middle Ages, when the Church was in fact above all a menageries, one everywhere hunted down the fairest specimens of the 'blond beast' [note: see the story of Gregory the Great at the slave market in Beedes Eclessiatical History,]- one 'improved', for example, the noble Teutons. But what did such a Teuton afterwards look like when he had been 'improved' and led into a monastery? Like a caricature of a human being, like an abortion: he had become a 'sinner', he was in a cage, one had imprisoned him behind nothing but sheer terrifying concepts.... There he lay now, sick, miserable, filled with ill-will towards himself; full of hatred for the impulses towards life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy.  In short, a 'Christian'.... In physiological terms: in the struggle with the beast, making it sick can be the only means of making it weak.  This the Church understood: it corrupted the human being, it weakened him - but it claimed to have 'improved' him...

One draws a breath of relief when coming out of the Christian sick-house and dungeon atmosphere into this healthier, higher, wider world.

'Beyond Good and Evil' by Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)

A selection from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886.


[Work in Progress]

PREFACE

Supposing truth is a woman - what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have failed to understand women? That the terrible seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman's heart?

CHAPTER V

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS

190

There is something in the morality of Plato which does not really belong to Plato, but which only appears in his philosophy, one might say, in spite of him: namely, Socratism, for which he himself was too noble. 

193

Quidquid luce fuit, tenebris agit [That which happens in the light persists in the dark]: but also contrawise. What we experience in dreams, provided we experience if often, pertains at last just as much to the general belongings of our soul as anything "actually" experienced; by virtue thereof we are richer or poorer, we have a need more or less, and finally, in broad daylight, and even in the brightest moments of our waking life, we are ruled to some extent by the nature of our dreams.

195

The Jews – a people “born for slavery” as Tacitus [Historiae, V, 8.] and the entire ancient world say of them, “the people chosen of all peoples” as they themselves say and think – the Jews have performed the miracle of the inversion of values, by means of which life on earth took on a new and dangerous charm for several millennia: – their prophets fused together “rich,” “godless,” “evil,” “violent,” “sensual” and for the first time coined an insult out of the word “world.” The significance of the Jewish people lies in this inversion of values (which includes using the word “poor” as a synonym for “saint” and “friend”): the slave revolt in morality begins with the Jews.

197

The beast of prey and the man of prey (for instance, Caesar Borgia) are fundamentally misunderstood, 'nature' is misunderstood, so long as one seeks a "morbidness" in the constitution of these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or even an innate "hell" in them-- as almost all moralists have done hitherto. Does it not seem that there is a hatred of the virgin forest and of the tropics among moralists? And that the "tropical man" must be discredited at all costs, whether as disease and degeneration of mankind, or as his own hell and self-torture? And why? In favour of the "temperate zones"? In favour of the temperate men? Of "moralists"? The mediocre?-- This for the chapter: "Morals as Timidity."

201

Whoever examines the conscience of the present-day European, will always elicit the same imperative from its thousand moral folds and hidden recesses, the imperative of the timidity of the herd: "we wish that some time or other there may be nothing more to fear!" ...the will and the way thereto is nowadays called "progress" all over Europe.

'On the Genealogy of Morals' by Friedrich Nietzsche (1887)

A selection from Zur Genealogie der Moral Eine Streitschrift ('On the Genealogy of Morals', or, 'On the Genealogy of Morality', subtitled 'A Polemic') by Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887.

[Editors note: This selection has been taken from Golffing's 1956 translation, although Diethe's, Kaufmann's, and Smiths translations have also been drawn upon, to help lend the text clarity and fluidity. The German edition has not been consulted in this process.]

 

[Work in Progress]

First Essay: "'Good and Evil', 'Good and Bad'"
I

The English psychologists to whom we owe the only attempts that have thus far been made to write a genealogy of morals provide us with a small riddle in the form of themselves; in fact, I admit that as living riddles they have a significant advantage over their books – they are actually interesting! [...] You always find them at the same task, whether they want to or not, pushing the partie honteuse of our inner world to the foreground, and looking for what is really effective, guiding and decisive for our development where man’s intellectual pride would least wish to find it... – what is it that actually drives these psychologists in precisely this direction all the time? A secret, malicious desire to belittle humanity, which they do not acknowledge even to themselves? A pessimistic suspicion, the mistrust of disillusioned, surly idealists who have turned poisonous and green?


II

One thing is certain... they have been quite deserted by the true spirit of history. They all... think unhistorically, as is the age-old custom among philosophers. [Note: see the second aphorism of Human, All-Too-Human, called "Original error of the philosopher": "All philosophers share this common error: they proceed from contemporary man and think they can reach their goal through an analysis of this man. Automatically they think of "man" as an eternal verity, as something abiding in the whirlpool, as a sure measure of things. Everything that the philosopher says about man, however, is at bottom no more than a testimony about the man of a very limited period. Lack of a historical sense is the original error of all philosophers... ."





The origin of the opposites good and bad is to be found in the pathos of nobility and distance, representing the dominant temper of a higher, ruling class in relation to a lower, dependent one. [...] Such an origin would suggest that there is no a priori necessity for associating the word good with altruistic deeds, as those moral psychologists are fond of claiming.


IV

The clue to the correct explanation was furnished me by the question "What does the etymology of the terms for good in various languages tell us?" I discovered that all these terms lead us back to the same conceptual transformation. The basic concept is always noble in the hierarchical, class sense, and from this has developed, by historical necessity, the concept of good embracing nobility of mind, spiritual distinction. This development is strictly parallel to that other which eventually converted the notions common, plebeian, base into the notion bad. Here we have an important clue to the actual genealogy of morals... .


V


...it is of interest to note that many of the words and roots denominating good still, to this day, carry overtones of the meanings according to which the nobility regarded themselves as possessing the highest moral rank. It is true that, most often, they described themselves simply in terms of their superior power (as the rulers, lords, sovereigns) or else in terms of the visible signs of their superiority, as the rich, the possessors...; but also in terms of a typical character trait... . They speak of themselves as "the truthful"... . The word they used was esthlos, meaning one who is, who has true reality, who is true. By a subjective turn the true later became the truthful.


VI


Granting that political supremacy always gives rise to notions of spiritual supremacy, it at first creates no difficulties (though difficulties might arise later) if the ruling caste is also the priestly caste and elects to characterize itself by a term which reminds us of its priestly function. In this context we encounter for the first time concepts of pure and impure opposing each other as signs of class... . [...] The pure man was originally one who washed himself, who refused to eat certain foods entailing skin diseases, who did not sleep with the unwashed plebeian women, who held blood in abomination-- hardly more than that. At the same time, given the peculiar nature of a priestly aristocracy, it becomes clear why the value opposites would early turn inward and become dangerously exacerbated; and in fact the tension between such opposites has opened abysses between man and man, over which not even an Achilles of free thought would leap without a shudder. There is from the very start something unwholesome about such priestly aristocracies, about their way of life, which is turned away from action and swings between brooding and emotional explosions: a way of life which may be seen as responsible for the morbidity and neurasthenia of priests of all periods. Yet are we not right in maintaining that the cures which they have developed for their morbidities have proved a hundred times more dangerous than the ills themselves? Humanity is still suffering from the after-effects of those priestly cures. Think, for example, of certain forms of diet (abstinence from meat), fasting, sexual continence, escape "into the desert"; think further of the whole anti-sensual metaphysics of the priests... . [...] In all fairness it should be added, however, that only on this soil, the precarious soil of priestly existence, has man been able to develop into an interesting creature; that only here has the human mind grown both profound and evil; and it is in these two respects, after all, that man has proved his superiority over the rest of creation.


VII

By now the reader will have got some notion how readily the priestly system of valuations can branch off from the aristocratic and develop into its opposite. [...] The chivalrous and aristocratic valuations presuppose a strong physique, blooming, even exuberant health, together with all the conditions that guarantee its preservation: combat, adventure, the cahse, the dance, war games, etc. The value system of the priestly aristocracy is founded on different pressuppositions. So much the worse for them when it becomes a question of war! As we all know, priests are the most evil enemies to have-- why should this be so? Because they are the most impotent. It is their impotence which makes their hate so violent and sinister, so cerebral and poisonous. The greatest haters in history-- but also the most intelligent haters-- have been priests. Beside the brilliance of priestly vengeance all other brilliance faces. Human history would be a dull and stupid thing without the intelligence furnished by its impotents. Let us begin with the most striking example. Whatever else has been done to damage the powerful and great of this earth seems trivial compared with what the Jews have done, that priestly people who succeeded in avenging themselves on their enemies and oppressors by radically inverting all their values, that is, by an act of spiritual vengeance. This was a stratergy entirely appropriate to a priestly people in whom vindictiveness had gone most deeply underground. It was the Jew who, with frightening consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equations good/noble/powerful/beautiful/happy/favored-of-the-gods and maintain, with the furious hatred of the underpriviliged and impotent, that "only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed. But you noble and mighty ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the godless, and thus the cursed and damned!"... We know who has fallen heir to this Jewish inversion of values. ...it was the Jews who started the slave revolt in morals; a revolt with two millennia of history behind it, which we have lost sight of today simply because it has triumphed so completely.


VIII


You find that difficult to understand? You have no eyes for something that took two millennia to prevail? ... There is nothing strange about this: all long developments are difficult to see in the round. From the tree trunk of Jewish vengeance and hatred-- the deepest and sublimest hatred in human history, since it gave birth to ideals and a new set of values-- grew a branch that was equally unique: a new love, the deepest and sublimest of loves. From what other trunk could this branch have sprung? But let no one surmise that this love represented a denial of the thirst for vengeance, that it contravened the Jewish hatred. Exactly the opposite is true. Love grew out of hatred as the tree's crown, spreading triumphantly in the purest sunlight, yet having, in its high and sunny realm, the same aims-- victory, aggrandizement, temptation-- which hatred pursued by digging its roots ever deeper into all that was profound and evil. Jesus of Nazareth, the gospel of love made flesh, the "redeemer," who brought blessing and victory to the poor, the sick, the sinners-- what was he but temptation in its most sinister and irresistible form, bringing men by a roundabout way to precisely those Jewish values and renovations of the ideal? Has not Israel, precisely by the detour of this "redeemer," this seeming antagonist and destroyer of Israel, reached the final goal of its sublime vindictiveness? [...] What could equal in debilitating narcotic power the symbol of the "holy cross," the ghastly paradox of a crucified god, the unspeakably cruel mystery of God's self-crucification for the benefit of mankind? One thing is certain, that in this sign Israel has by now triumphed over all other, nobler values.


IX


--"But what is all this talk about nobler values? Let us face facts: the people have triumphed--or the slaves, the mob, the herd, whatever you wish to call them-- and if the Jews brought it about, then no nation ever had a more universal mission on this earth. The lords are a thing of the past, and the ethics of the common man is completely triumphant. I don't deny that this triumph might be looked upon as a kind of blood poisoning, since it has resulted in a mingling of the races, but there can be no doubt that the intoxication has succeeded. The 'redemption of the human race (from the lords, that is) is well under way; everything is rapidly becoming Judaized, or Christianized, or mob-ized-- the word makes no difference."
This was a "freethinker's" reaction to my argument-- an honest fellow, as he has abundantly proved, and a democrat to boot.



X


The slave revolt in morals begins by rancor turning creative and giving birth to values-- the rancor of beings who, deprived of the direct outlet of action, compensates by an imaginary vengeance. All truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics, on the other hand, begins by saying no to an 'outside,' an 'other,'... and that no is its creative act. This reversal of direction of the evaluating look... is a fundamental feature of rancor. Slave ethics requires for its inception a sphere different from and hostile to its own. Physiologically speaking, it requires an outside stimulus in order to act at all; all its action is reaction. The opposite is true of aristocratic valuations: such values grow and act spontaneously, seeking out their contraries only in order to affirm themselves even more gratefully and delightedly. [...] ...the emotion of contempt, of looking down,... is nothing compared with the... suppressed hatred, impotent vindictiveness... . There is in all contempt too much casualness and nonchalance,... too much inborn gaiety for it ever to make of its object a downright caricature and monster. [...] The "wellborn" really felt that they were also the "happy." They did not have to construct their happiness factitiously by looking at their enemies, as all rancorous men are wont to do, and being fully active, energetic people they were incapable of divorcing happiness from action.

All this stands in utter contrast to what is called happiness among the impotent and oppressed, who are full of bottled-up aggression. [...] His soul squints; his mind loves hide-outs, secret paths, and back doors; everything that is hidden seems to him his own world, his security, his comfort; he is expert in silence, in long memory, in waiting, in provisional self-depreciation, and in self-humiliation. A race of such men will, in the end, inevitably be cleverer than a race of aristocrats, and it will honor sharp-wittedness to a much greater degree, i.e., as an absolutely vital condition for its existence. Among the noble, mental acuteness always tends slightly to suggest luxury and over-refinement. [...] It is a sign of strong, rich temperaments that they cannot for long take seriously their enemies. [...] The noble person will respect his enemy... . Indeed, he requires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction, nor could he tolerate any other enemy than one in whom he finds nothing to despise and much to esteem. Imagine, on the other hand, the "enemy" as conceived by the rancorous man! For this is his creative achievement: he has conceived the "evil enemy," the Evil One, as a fundamental idea, and then as a pendant he has conceived a Good One-- himself.

XI




XIV


"No doubt you were right; they are transmuting weakness into merit."
"Go on."
"Impotence, which cannot retaliate, into kindness; pusillanimity into humility; submission before those one hates into obedience to One of whom they say that he has commanded this submission-- they call him God."

"Go on."
"Now they tell me that not only are they better than the mighty of this earth, whose spittle they must lick (not from fear-- by no means-- but because God commands us to honor our superiors), but they are even better off, or at least they will be better off someday."

"They call the thing they seek not retribution but the triumph of justice...."

"And what do they call that which comforts them in all their sufferings-- their phantasmagoria of future bliss?"
"Do I hear correctly? They call it Judgement Day, the coming of their kingdom, the 'Kingdom of God.' Meanwhile they live in 'faith,' in 'love,' in 'hope.'"


XV


There can be no doubt that these weaklings, too, want a chance to be strong, to have their kingdom come. [...] ...in what, precisely, does the bliss of that paradise consist?

...a triumphant Father of the Church, Tertullian,... wishes to to dissuade his Christians from the cruel debauch of public spectacles-- on what grounds? "Our faith offers us so much more," he writes in De spectaculis, ch. 29 ff., "and something so much stronger. Having been redeemed, joys of quite a different kind are ours. We have martyrs instead of athletes. If we crave blood, we have the blood of Christ... . But think what awaits us on the day of his triumph!" And the rapt visionary continues: "Yes, and there are still to come other spectacles-- that last, that eternal Day of Judgement, that Day which the Gentiles never believed would come, that Day they laughed at, when this old world and all its generations shall be consumed in one fire. How vast the spectacle that day, and how wide! What sight shall wake my wonder, what my laughter, my joy and exultation as I see all those kings, those great kings, welcomed (we are told) in heaven, along with Jove, along with those who told of their ascent, groaning in the depths of darkness! And the magistrates who persecuted the name of Jesus, liquefying in fiercer flames than they kindled in their rage against the Christians!..."


XVI

Let us conclude. The two sets of valuations have waged a terrible battle on this earth, lasting many millennia... . It might... be claimed that by being raised to a higher plane the battle has become much more profound. Perhaps there is today not a single intellectual worth his salt who is not divided on that issue, a battleground for those opposites. The watchwords of the battle, written in characters which have remained legible thought human history, read: 'Rome vs. Israel, Israel vs Rome.' No battle has ever been more momentous that this one. Rome viewed Israel as a monstrosity; the Romans regarded the Jews as convicted of hatred against the whole of mankind... . But how did the Jews, on their part, feel about Rome? A thousand indications point to the answer. It is enough to read once more the Revelations of St. John, the most rabid outburst of vindictiveness in all recorded history. [...] The Romans were the strongest and most noble people who ever lived. [...] The Jews, on the contrary, were the priestly, rancorous nation par excellence, though possessed of an unequal ethical genius... . Has the victory so far been gained by the Romans or by the Jews? Rome, without a doubt, has capitulated. It is true that during the Renaissance men witnessed a strange and splendid awakening of the classical ideal; like one buried alive, Rome stirred under the weight of a new Judaic Rome that looked like an ecumenical synagogue and was called the Church. But presently Israel triumphed once again, thanks to the plebeian rancour of the German and English Reformation, together with its natural corollary, the restoration of the Church- which also meant the restoration of ancient Rome to the quiet of the tomb. In an even more decisive sense did Israel triumph over the classical ideal through the French Revolution. For then the last political nobleness Europe had known, that of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, collapsed under the weight of vindictive popular instincts. A wilder enthusiasm was never seen. And yet, in the midst of it all, something tremendous, something wholly unexpected happened: the ancient classical ideal appeared incarnate and in unprecedented splendour before the eyes and conscience of mankind. [...] Like a last sign post to an alternative route Napoleon appeared, most isolated and anachronistic of men, the embodiment of the noble ideal.

XVII

Was it all over then? Had that greatest conflict of ideals been shelved for good? Or had it only been indefinitely adjourned? might not the smouldering fire start up again one day, all the more terrible because longer and more secretly nourished? [...] If the reader at this point begins to develop his own train of thought, he is not likely to soon to come to the end of it.


Second Essay: "'Guilt', 'Bad Conscience', and the Like"


IV

But how about the origin of that other phenomenon, the consciousness of guilt, "bad conscience"? Would you turn to our genealogists of morals for illumination? Let me say once again, they are worthless. Completely absorbed in "modern" experience, with no real knowledge of the past, no desire even to understand it, no historical instincts whatever, they presume, all the same, to write the history of ethics!






VII

The sky overhead has always grown darker in proportion as man has grown ashamed... . The tired, pessimistic look, discouragement in face of life's riddle, the icy no of the man who loathes life... . These phenomena are like marsh plants; they presuppose a bog-- the bog of morbid finickiness and moralistic drivel which has alienated man from his natural instincts. On the way to becoming an ‘angel’, man has upset his stomach and developed a furry tongue so that he finds not only the naive joy and innocence of the animal disgusting, but even life itself; so that at times he stops his nose against himself and recites with Pope Innocent the Third ("impure conception, loathsome feeding in the mother's womb, wretchedness of physical substance, vile stench, discharge of spittle, urine, and faeces").




XII

There is no set of maxims more important for an historian than this: that the actual causes of a thing's origin and its eventual uses, the manner of its incorporation into a system of purposes, are worlds apart.



XVI



I take bad conscience to be a deep-seated malady to which man succumbed under the pressure of the most profound transformation he ever underwent-- the one that made him once and for all a sociable and pacific creature. Just as happened in the case of those sea creatures who were forced to become land animals in order to survive, these semi-animals, happily adapted to the wilderness, to war, free roaming, and adventure, were forced to change their nature. Of a sudden they found all their instincts devalued, unhinged. They must walk on legs and carry themselves, where before the water had carried them: a terrible heaviness weighed upon them. They felt inapt for the simplest manipulations, for in his new, unknown world they could no longer count on the guidance of their unconscious drives. They were forced to think, deduce, calculate, weigh cause and effect-- unhappy people, reduced to their weakest, most fallible organ, their consciousness! I doubt that there has ever been on earth such a feeling of misery, such a leaden discomfort. It was not that those old instincts had abruptly ceased making their demands; but now their satisfaction was rare and difficult. For the most part they had to depend on new, covert satisfactions. All instincts that are not allowed free play turn inward. This is what I call man's interiorization; it alone provides the soil for the growth of what is later called man's soul. Man's interior world, originally meager and tenuous, was expanding in every dimension, in proportion as the outward discharge of his feelings was curtailed. 






Third Essay: What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?II


VII

...the philosopher abhors marriage..., for he sees the married state as an obstacle to fulfillment. What great philosopher has ever been married? ...moreover, it is impossible to imagine any of them married. ...a married philosopher belongs in comedy... . Every philosopher would speak as Buddha spoke when he was told that a son had been born to him: "Rahula has been borne to me; a fetter has been forged for me" (Rahula means "little daemon"). Every free spirit would be set thinking, provided he had ever stopped thinking, just as it once happened to Buddha: "'Close and oppressive is life in a house, a place of impurity; to leave the house is freedom' and, thus meditating, he left the house." The ascetic ideal suggests so many bridges to independence that a philosopher cannot help rejoicing as he listens to the story of all those resolute men who one day made up their minds to say "no" to every form of servitude and went forth into a desert... . What, then, does the ascetic ideal betoken in a philosopher? [...] Asceticism provides him with the condition most favorable to the exercise of his intelligence.


VIII


...freedom from constraint, interference, noise, business, duties, worries; a clear head, the free, joyous play of the mind; a bracing air, thing, clear, free, dry as mountain air, in which all animal being becomes sublimated and takes wing; peace in the basements; all the dogs well chained, no baying of enmity and bushy rancor; no pangs of frustrated ambition; modest and submissive bowels, industrious as mill wheels, but remote; a heart estranged, distant, turned to the future, posthumous. In short, theirs is the serene asceticism of a divinely winged animal that soars above life but does not alight on it. We all know the three mighty slogans of the ascetic ideal: poverty, humility, chastity, and when we examine the lives of the great productive spirits closely, we are bound to find all three present in some degree. [...] It might very well be that their dominant intellectual discipline had first to curb a boundless and sensitive pride, or a reckless sensuality, or that they found it difficult at first to maintain their will to seclusion in the face of a taste for luxury and refinement, or a prodigality of heart and hand. But, being their dominant instinct, that sense of discipline will always prevail in the end and succeed in controlling all other instincts. There is nothing "virtuous" about all this. By the way, that "desert" into which strong, independent minds like to withdraw is very different from the image our pseudo-intellectuals have of it; in fact, often enough our pseudo-intellectuals are themselves that desert. And it is a foregone conclusion that mere mimes of the intellect could not endure it for a moment, for it is not romantic or Syrian enough for them, not sufficiently stagey. (Though there is no lack of camels in it, to be sure.)


IX

...a certain asceticism, that is to say a strict yet high-spirited continence, is among the necessary conditions of strenuous intellectual activity as well as one of its natural consequences.

...measured by the Greek standard, our whole modern existence, insofar as it is not weakness but power and the consciousness of power, looks like sheer hubris and impiety: things exactly contrary to the ones we reverence today had for the longest time conscience on their side and God for their guardian. Our whole attitude toward nature, our violation of nature with the help of machines and the heedless ingenuity of technicians and engineers, is hubris... .



XI


An observer viewing our terrestrial existence from another planet might easily be persuaded that this earth is strictly an ascetic star, the habitation of disgruntled, proud, repulsive creatures, unable to rid themselves of self-loathing, hatred of the earth and of all living things.... . [...] Surely it must be a necessity of the first rank that makes this anti-biological species emerge and thrive again and again; if such a contradiction in terms does not die out, it must surely be in the interest of life itself. For an ascetic life is indeed a contradiction in terms. Here we find rancor without parallel, the rancor of an insatiable power-drive which would dominate, not a single aspect of life, but life itself, its deepest and strongest foundations. Here we witness an attempt to use energy to block the very sources of energy. [...] All this is paradoxical to the highest degree. We are face to face with a deliberate split, which gloats on its own discomfiture and grows more self-assured and triumphant the more its biological energy decreases. The ascetic ideal has always fought under the banner bearing the motto, "triumph in agony." This tempting riddle, this image of rapturous pain, has always been its source of illumination, its pledge of final victory. Crux, nux, lux- for the ascetic these three invariably go together.


XIII

The kind of inner split we have found in the ascetic, who pits "life against life," is nonsense, not only in psychological terms, but also physiologically speaking. Such a split can only be apparent; it must be a kind of provisional expression, a formula, an adaptation, a psychological misunderstanding of something for which terms have been lacking to designate its true nature. A mere stopgap to fill a hiatus in human understanding. Let me state what i consider to be the actual situation. [....] It points to a partial physiological blocking and exhaustion, against which the deepest vital instincts, still intact, are battling doggedly and resourcefully. The ascetic ideal is one of their weapons. The situation, then, is exactly the opposite from what the worshipers of that ideal believe it to be. Life employs asceticism in its desperate struggle against death; the ascetic ideal is a dodge for the preservation of life. The ubiquitiousness and power of that ideal, especially wherever men have adopted civilized forms of life, should impress upon us one great, palpable fact: the persistent morbidity of civilized man, his biological struggle against... taedium vitae, exhaustion, the longing for "the end." The ascetic priest is an incarnation of the wish to be... elsewhere; he is that wish, raised to its highest power, it most passionate intensity. And it is precisely the intensity of his wishing that forges the fetter binding him to this earth. At the same time he becomes an instrument for bettering the human condition, since by this intenisty he is enabled to maintain in life the vast flock of defeated, disgruntled sufferers and self-tormentors, whom he leads instinctively like a shepherd. In other words, the ascetic priest, seemingly life's enemy and great negator, is in truth one of the major conserving and affirmative forces...
But what about the sources of man's morbidity? For certainly man is sicker, less secure, less stable, less firmly anchored than any other animal; he is the sick animal. But has he not also been more daring, more defiant, more inventive than all the other animals together?  ...man, unconquered to this day, still unrealized, so agitated by his own teeming energy that his future digs like spurs into the flesh of every present moment... How could such a brave and resourceful animal but be the most precarious, the most profoundly sick of all the sick beasts of the earth?


XIV

The more regular morbidity becomes among the members of the human race, the more grateful we should be for the rare "windfalls"-- men fortunate enough to combine a sound physical organization with intellectual authority. [...] One who smells not only with his nose but also with his eyes and ears will notice everywhere these days an air as of a lunatic asylum or sanatorium. [...] It is the diseased who imperil mankind, and not the "beasts of prey." [...] Is there anyone who has not encountered the veiled, shuttered gaze of the misfit, that introverted gaze which saddens us and makes us imagine how such a man must speak to himself? [...] In the marshy soil of such self-contempt every poisonous plant will grow... . Here the worms of vindictiveness and arrierepensee teem, the air stinks of secretiveness and pent-up emotion; here a perennial net of malicious conspiracy is woven-- the conspiracy of the suffers against the happy and succesful... . [...] They walk among us as warnings and reprimands incarnate, as though to say that health, soundness, strength, and pride are vicious things for which we shall one day pay dearly; and how eager they are, at bottom, to be the ones to make us pay! How they long to be the executioners! [...] Is there any place today where the sick do not with to exhibit some form of superiority and to exercise their tyranny over the strong? Especially the sick females, who have unrivaled resources for dominating, oppressing, tyrannizing. [...] What would these men, so tireless in their masquerades, so insatiable in their thirst for vengeance, require in order to see themselves as triumphant? Nothing less than to succeed in implanting their own misery, and all misery, in the consciences of the happy, so as to make the happy one day say to one another, "It is a disgrace to be happy! There is too much misery in the world!" But no greater and more disastrous misunderstanding could be imagined than for the strong and happy to begin doubting their right to happiness. Let us have done with such topsy-turviness, with such dreadful emasculation of feeling. Our first rule on this earth should be that the sick must not contaminate the healthy. But this requires that the healthy be isolated from the sick, be separated by the sight of the sick, lest they mistake that foreign sickness for their own. Or is it their task, perhaps, to be medical attendants and doctors? There could be no worse way for them to misjudge their role. [...] Then let us have fresh air, and at any rate get far away from all lunatic asylums and nursing homes of culture! And let us have good company, our own company! Or solitude, if need be.



XXI

Simply ask the alienists what happens when the human system is contantly subjected to the cruel teasings of penance, to paroxysms of contrition, to an obsession with being saved. Likewise consult history, and you will find that wherever the ascetic priest has been able to enforce his treatment, the sickness has increased alarmingly... . What has its "success" consisted of? A shattered nervous system... . In the wake of every collective penance-workout we find huge epileptic epidemics, such as the St. Vitus' and St. John's dances of the Middle Ages; terrible paralyses and permanent depressions resulting in some cases, in the complete change of temperament of an entire people or city (Geneva, Basel); phenomena like the witch craze and a kind of mass somnambulism... . We also find those agonized mass deliriums whose ghastly cry "Evviva la more!" ['Long live Death!'] once echoed through large parts of Europe... . (Religious neurosis appears to be a form of evil, I have no doubt. But what is it really?) The ascetic ideal, with its sublime moral cult,... has etched itself on the memory of mankind terribly and unforgettably. I can think of no development that has had a more pernicious effect upon the health of the race, and especially the European race, than this. It may be called, without exaggeration, the supreme disaster in the history of European man's health.


XXIII

The ascetic ideal expresses a will: where do we find a contrary ideal expressing a contrary will? [...] [The ascetic ideal] orients epochs, nations, individuals inexorably toward that one goal, permitting no alternative interpretation or goal. It rejects, denies, affirms, confirms exclusively in terms of its own interpretation-- and has there ever been a system of interpretation more consistently reasoned out? It submits to no other power but believes in its absolute superiority, convinced that no power exists on earth but receives meaning and value from it... Where do we find the antithesis to this closed system? Why are we unable to find it?... People say to me that such a counter-ideal exists, that not only has it waged a long, successful battle against asceticism but to all intents and purposes triumphed over it. The whole body of modern scholarship is cited in support of this. [...] But such noisy propaganda talk quite fails to impress me. [...] The case is exactly the opposite of what is claimed here: scholarship today... represents not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but, in fact, its noblest and latest form.


XXV

No, let no one cite the scientist or scholar when I ask for the natural antagonist of the ascetic ideal... . [...] Learning and inquiry are far from antagonistic to the ascetic ideal; indeed we may say that this ideal is their motive force. Whenever they oppose it, their opposition is not really to the ideal itself but only to certain external aspects of it.... . [...] ...inquiry and the ascetic ideal have grown from the same soil... . [...] ...does anyone seriously believe that the defeat of, say, theological astronomy spelled the defeat of the ideal? [...] Has not man's determination to belittle himself developed apace precisely since Copernicus? Alas, his belief that he was unique and irreplaceable in the hierarchy of beings had been shattered for good: he had become an animal, quite literally and without reservations; he who, according to his earlier belief, had been almost God ("child of God," "God's own image"). Ever since Copernicus man has been rolling down an incline, faster and faster, away from the center-- whither? Into the void? Into the "piercing sense of his emptiness"? But has not this been precisely the most direct route to his old ideal? All science...is now determined to talk man out of his former respect for himself, as though that respect had been nothing but a bizarre presumption. We might even say that man's hard-won self-contempt has brought with it its own special brand of pride, an austere form of stoic ataraxia, his last and most serious claim to a sense of respect (for in disrespecting we show that we still maintain a sense of respect). Can this really be called opposition to the ascetic ideal? [...] ...does anybody now hold it against the agnostics, those admirers of mystery and the unknown, that they worship the question mark itself as their god?



XXVII

...in all places where a strict, potent, scrupulous spirit is at work every trace of this ideal seems to have vanished-- the popular term for such abstinence is atheism-- except for its will to truth. Yet that will, this remnant of the ideal, is the strictest and most spiritual formulation of the ideal, absolutely esoteric, divested of all externals, and thus not so much its remnant as its core. Honest and intransigent atheism (and this is the only air which we more spiritual men of this age breathe!) is thus not opposed to asceticism, all appearances to the contrary, rather it is one of the last phases in the development of that ideal, one of its ultimate forms and inherent logical conclusions. It is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a discipline in truth that has lasted for two millennia and which now forbids itself the lie entailed in the belief in God. (The same development has gone on in India, quite independently of our own, thus affording substantiating proof. There the identical ideal compelled the identical conclusion; the decisive point having already been reached five centuries before the Christian era, with Buddha... .)

'The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music' by Friedrich Nietzsche (1872).

Starry Sky, 1909.

A selection from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, 1872.


When the Italian philosopher Giulio Preti directly confronted Foucault with the question, "Which Nietzsche do you like?" Foucault replied, "Obviously, not the one of Zarathustra, but the one of The Birth of Tragedy, of the Genealogy of Morals."

Foucault characterizes Histoire de la folie as a study composed "under the sun of the great Nietzschean inquiry." [...] According to Foucault, Nietzsche revealed the tragedy of the Western world to be the refusal of the tragic, and, therefore, the refusal of the sacred. (Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject, Michael Mahon, 200-).

From the preface to Histoire de la folie:

Nietzsche [showed] that the tragic structure from which the history of the Western world is made is nothing other than the refusal, the forgetting and the silent collapse of tragedy. Around that experience, which is central as it knots the tragic to the dialectic of history in the very refusal of tragedy by history, many other experiences gravitate.  

This selection is drawn from Golffings 1956 translation.

Apollo of Belvedere.

In 1967 the art historian Kenneth Clarke compared this statue with a tribal mask from Africa and said: "whatever its merits as a work of art, I dont think there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilization than the mask."

In the late 18th Century, Philip Pinel, sometimes styled the father of psychiatry, saw in the Apollo of the Belvedere an ideal model of human form against which its various deficiencies and excesses could be measured (in a prototype of the science of phrenology, which is really a kind of medical art of physiognomy). He quotes Winkelman:

"Of all the productions of art which have escaped the ravages of time, the statue of the Apollo is beyond dispute the most astonishing. The artist has conceived his image after an ideal model, and has used no materials but what were necessary to execute and to represent his conception. Its height is above that of life, and its attitude is full of majesty. At the sight of this prodigy, I am disposed to forget the world. I put myself in a more majestic attitude in order to contemplate it with dignity. From admiration I sink into ecstasy."

And then adds:

"of this statue, which has lately become by conquest the property of France [Napoleon stole it from Italy], and which is now placed in the museum at Paris, I am not a less passionate admirer than Winkelman. But I wish to refer to it in this place with all the coolness of reason. Under that impression, I beg to add my humble opinion to that of many better judges, that its head unites the best proportions and the most harmonious lines that are possible to be met with in the most perfect configurations of life."

The Theatre of Epidaurus

Comedy and Tragedy mask from a mosaic found at Hadrians Villa just outside of Rome, circa 2nd Century AD.

A Critical Backward Glance ('preface or epilogue')

 

I

-From music? Music and tragedy? The Greeks and dramatic music? The Greeks and pessimistic art? The Greeks: this most beautiful and accomplished, this thoroughly sane, universally envied species of man- was it conceivable that they, of all people, should have stood in need of tragedy… ?

[…] Is pessimism inevitably a sign of decadence, …weakened instincts… as it is now with us modern Europeans? Or is there such a thing as a strong pessimism? […] A penchant… for what is hard, terrible, evil, dubious in existence, arising from a plethora of health, plenitude of being? Could it be, perhaps, that the very feeling of superabundance created its own kind of suffering: a temerity of penetration, hankering for the enemy (the worth-while enemy) so as to prove its strength, to experience at last what it means to fear something? […]

Or one might look at it the other way round. Those agencies that had proved fatal to tragedy: Socratic ethics, dialectics, the temperance and cheerfulness of the pure scholar—couldn’t these, rather than their opposites, be viewed as symptoms of decline, fatigue, distemper, of instincts caught in anarchic dissolution? Or the “Greek serenity” of the later period as, simply, the glow of a sun about to set? […] And as for “disinterested inquirey,” so-called: what, in the last analysis, did inquiry come to when judged as a symptom of the life process? Might it be that the “inquiring mind” was simply the human mind terrified by pessimism and trying to escape from it, a clever bulwark erected against the truth? Something craven and false, if one wanted to be moral about it? Or, if one preferred to put it amorally, a dodge? Had this perhaps been your secret, great Socrates?

 

II

 

For the first time in history somebody had come to grips with scholarship—and what a formidable, perplexing thing it turned out to be! But the book, crystallizing of my youthful courage and suspicions, was an impossible book; since the task required fully matured powers it could scarcely be anything else. Built from precocious, purely personal insights, all but incommunicable; conceived in terms of art (for the issue of scholarly inquiry cannot be argued on its own terms), this book addressed itself to artists… . […] ... the question is still [now, sixteen years later] what it was then, how to view scholarship from the vantage of the artist and art from the vantage of life.

 

III

 

 

…as I look at it today my treatise strikes me as quite impossible. It is poorly written, heavy-handed, embarrassing. The imagery is both frantic and confused. …it lacks logical nicety and is so sure of its message that it dispenses with any kind of proof. Worse than that, it suspects the very notion of proof, being a book written for initiates… . […] Both the curious and the hostile had to admit that here [in this book] was an unfamiliar voice, the disciple of an unrecognized god, hiding his identity (for the time being) under the skullcap of the scholar… . […] What a pity that I could not tell as a poet what demanded to be told! […] …the Greeks will continue to remain totally obscure, unimaginable beings until we have found an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of the Dionysiac spirit?”

 

IV

 

How… are we to define the “Dionysiac spirit”? […] Talking of the matter today, I would doubtless use more discretion and less eloquence; the origin of Greek tragedy is both too tough and too subtle an issue to wax eloquent over. […] Should we attribute the ever increasing desire of the Greeks for beauty, in the form of banquets, ritual ceremonies, new cults, to some fundamental lack—a melancholy disposition perhaps or an obsession with pain? […] What, in short, made the Greek mind turn to tragedy? […] What does the union of god and goat, expressed in the figure of the satyr, really mean? What was it that prompted the Greeks to embody the Dionysiac reveller- primary man- in a shape like that? Turning next to the origin of the tragic chorus: did those days of superb somatic and psychological health give rise, perhaps, to endemic trances, collective visions, and hallucinations? […] Was it not Plato who credited frenzy with all the superlative blessings of Greece? Contrawise, was it not precisely during their period of dissolution and weakness that the Greeks turned to optimism, frivolity, histrionics; that they began to be mad for logic and rational cosmology; that they grew at once “gayer” and “more scientific”? Why, is it possible to assume… that the great optimist-rationalist-utilitarian victory, together with democracy, its political contemporary, was at bottom nothing other than a symptom of declining strength, approaching senility, somatic exhaustion—it, and not its opposite, pessimism? […]

The reader can see now what a heavy pack of questions this book was forced to carry. Let me add here the heaviest question of all, What kind of figure does ethics cut once we decide to view it in the biological perspective?

 

V

 

In the preface… I claimed that art, rather than ethics, constituted the essential metaphysical activity of man… . As a matter of fact, throughout the book I attributed a purely esthetic meaning—whether implied or overt—to all process: a kind of divinity if you like, God as the supreme artist, amoral, recklessly creating and destroying, realizing himself indifferently in whatever he does or undoes, ridding himself by his acts of the embarrassment of his riches and the strain of his internal contradictions. Thus the world was made to appear, at every instant, as a successful solution of God’s own tensions… . […] …in its essential traits [That whole esthetic metaphysics] prefigured that spirit of deep distrust and defiance which, later on, was to resist to the bitter end any moral interpretation of existence whatsoever. It is here that one could find—perhaps for the first time in history-- … a philosophy which dared place ethics among the phenomena (and so “demote” it)… . […]

The depth of this anti-moral bias may best be gauged by noting the wary and hostile silence I observed on the subject of Christianity—Christianity being the most extravagant set of variations ever produced on the theme of ethics. No doubt, the purely esthetic interpretation and justification of the world I was propounding in those pages placed them at the opposite pole from Christian doctrine, a doctrine entirely moral in purport, using absolute standards: God’s absolute truth, for example, which relegates all art to the realm of falsehood and in so doing condemns it. […] From the very first, Christianity spelled life loathing itself, and that loathing was simply disguised, tricked out, with notions of an “other” and “better” life. A hatred of the “world,” a curse on the affective urges, a fear of beauty and sensuality, a transcendence rigged up to slander mortal existence, a yearning for extinction, cessation of all effort until the great “sabbath of sabbaths”—this whole cluster of distortions… had always struck me as… a sign of profound sickness, moroseness, exhaustion, biological etiolation. […]

As for morality… could it be anything but a will to deny life, a secret instinct of destruction,… a reductive agent—the beginning of the end?—and, for that reason, the Supreme Danger? Thus it happened that in those days, with this problem book, my vital instincts turned against ethics and founded a radical counterdoctrine, slanted esthetically, to oppose the Christian libel on life.

 

VI

 

What a pity… that I did not yet have the courage (or shall I say the immodesty?) to risk a fresh language in keeping with the hazard, the radical novelty of my ideas, that I fumbled along, using terms borrowed from the vocabularies of Kant and Schopehauer to express value judgements which were in flagrant contradiction to the spirit or taste of these men!

Preface to Richard Wagner

 

Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life... [where does this passage fit in?]

 

 The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music

 

Much will have been gained for esthetics once we have succeeded in apprehending directly-- rather than ascertaining ['through logical reasoning']-- that art owes its continuous evolution to the Apollonian-Dionysiac duality,... their constant conflicts and periodic acts of reconciliation. [...] The two creative tendencies developed alongside one another, usually in fierce opposition, each by its taunts forcing the other to more energetic production, both perpetuating in a discordant concord that agon which the term art but feebly denominates: until at last, by the thaumaturgy of an Hellenic act of will, the pair accepted the yoke of marriage and, in this condition, begot Attic tragedy... .

To reach a closer understanding of these tendencies, let us begin by viewing them as the separate art realms of dream and intoxication, two physiological phenomena standing toward once another in much the same relationship as the Apollonian and the Dionysiac. It was in a dream, according to Lucretius, that the marvellous gods and goddesses first present themselves to the minds of men.

The fair illusion of the dream sphere... is a precondition of all plastic art... . Here we enjoy an immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak to us directly, nothing seems indifferent or redundant. Despite the higher intensity with which these dream realities exist for us, we still have a residual sensation that they are illusions. [...] Men of philosophical disposition are known for their constant premonition that our everyday reality, too, is an illusion, hidding another, totally different kind of reality. It was Schopenhauer who [inspired by the Upanishads] considered the ability to view at certain times all men and things as mere phantoms or dream images to be the true mark of philosophic talent. The person who is responsive to the stimuli of art behaves toward the reality of dream much the way the philosopher behaves toward the reality of existence:  he observes exactly and enjoys his observations, for it is by these images that he interprets life, by these processes that he rehearses it.  Nor is it by pleasant images only that such plausible connections are made: the whole divine comedy of life, including its somber aspects, its sudden balking's, impish accidents, anxious expectations, moves past him, not quite like a shadow play-- for it is he himself, after all, who lives and suffers through these scenes-- yet never without giving a fleeting sense of illusion; and I imagine that many persons have reassured themselves amidst the perils of dream by calling out, "It is a dream! I want it to go on." [...] This deep and happy sense of the necessity of dream experiences was expressed by the Greeks in the image of Apollo. Apollo is at once the god of all plastic powers and the soothsaying god. He who is etymologically the "lucent" one, the god of light, reigns also over the fair illusion of our inner world of fantasy. ...our profound awareness of nature's healing powers during the interval of sleep and dream furnishes a symbolic analogue to the soothsaying faculty and quite generally to the arts... . But the image of Apollo must incorporate that thin line which the dream image may not cross, under penalty of becoming pathological, of imposing itself on us as crass reality: a discreet limitation, a freedom from all extravagant urges, the sapient tranquillity of the plastic god. His eye must be sunlike, in keeping with his origin. Even at those moments when he is angry and ill-tempered there lies upon him the consecration of fair illusion. ...one might say, of Apollo what Schopenhauer says, in the first part of The World as Will and Idea, of man caught in the veil of Maya:

 

    Even as on an immense, raging sea, assailed by huge wave crests, a man sits in a little rowboat trusting his frail craft, so, amidst the furious torments of this world, the individual sits tranquilly, supported by the principium individuationis and relying on it.

 

One might say that the unshakable confidence in that principle has received its most magnificent expression in Apollo, and that Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvellous divine image of the principium individuationis, whose looks and gestures radiate the full delight, wisdom, and beauty of "illusion."

 In the same context Schopenhauer has described for us the tremendous awe which seizes man when he suddenly begins to doubt the cognitive modes of experience, in other words, when in a given instance the law of causation seems to suspend itself. If we add to this awe the glorious transport which arises in man, even from the very depths of nature, at the shattering of the principium individuationis, then we are in a position to apprehend the essence of Dionysian rapture, whose closest analogy is furnished by physical intoxication. Dionysian stirrings arise either through the influence of those narcotic potions of which all primitive races speak in their hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, which penetrates with joy the whole frame of nature. So stirred, the individual forgets himself completely. It is the same Dionysian power which in medieval Germany drove ever increasing crowds of people singing and dancing from place to place; we recognize in these St. John's and St. Vitus' dancers the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, who had their precursors in Asia Minor and as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. There are people who, either from lack of experience or out of sheer stupidity, turn away from such phenomena, and, strong in the sense of their own sanity, label them either mockingly or pityingly "endemic diseases." These benighted souls have no idea how cadaverous and ghostly their "sanity" appears as the intense throng of Dionysian revellers sweeps past them.

Not only does the bond between man and man come to be forged once more by the magic of the Dionysian rite, but nature itself, long alienated or subjugated, rises again to celebrate the reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth offers its gifts voluntarily, and the savage beasts of mountain and desert approach in peace. The chariot of Dionysus is bedecked with flowers and garlands; panthers and tigers stride beneath his yoke. [...] Now the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered. [...] ... as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness. Man now expresses himself through song and dance as the member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk, how to speak, and is on the brink of taking wing as he dances. [...] He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dreams. No longer the artist, he has himself become a work of art: the productive power of the whole universe is now manifest in his transport.... . ... accompanied by the cry of the Eleusinian mystagogues: "Do you fall on your knees, multitudes, do you divine your creator?"

We might picture how [one of these], in a state of Dionysiac intoxication and mystical self-abrogation, wandering apart from the revelling throng, sinks upon the ground, and how there is then revealed to him his own condition- complete oneness with the essence of the universe- in a dream similitude.

Throughout the range of ancient civilizations (leaving the newer civilizations out of account for the moment) we find evidence of Dionysiac celebrations which stand to the Greek type in much the same relation as the bearded satyr, whose name and attributes are derived from the he-goat, stands to the god Dionysos. The central concern of such celebrations was, almost universally, a complete sexual promiscuity overriding every form of established tribal law; all the savage urges of the mind were unleashed on those occasions until they reached that paroxysm of lust and cruelty... the "witches' cauldron" par excellence. It would appear that the Greeks were for a while quite immune from these feverish excesses which must have reached them by every known land or sea route. What kept Greece safe was the proud, imposing image of Apollo, who in holding up the head of the Gorgon to those brutal and grotesque Dionysiac forces subdued them. Doric art has immortalized Apollo's majestic rejection of all license. But resistance became difficult, even impossible, as soon as similar urges began to break forth from the deep substratum of Hellenism itself. Soon the function of the Delphic god developed into something quite different and much more limited: all he could hope to accomplish now was to wrest the destructive weapon, by a timely gesture of pacification, from his opponent's hand. That act of pacification represents the most important event in the history of Greek ritual; every department of life now shows symptoms of a revolutionary change. The two great antagonists have been reconciled. Each feels obliged henceforth to keep to his bounds, each will honour the other by the bestowal of periodic gifts, while the cleavage remains fundamentally the same. And yet, if we examine what happened to the Dionysiac powers under the pressure of that treaty we notice a great difference: in the place of the Babylonian Sacaea, with their throwback of men to the condition of apes and tigers, we now see entirely new rites celebrated: rites of universal redemption, of glorious transfiguration. [...] That terrible witches' brew concocted of lust and cruelty has lost all power under the new conditions. [...] For now in every exuberant joy there is heard an undertone of terror, or else a wistful lament over an irrecoverable loss. It is as though in these Greek festivals a sentimental trait of nature were coming to the fore, as though nature were bemoaning the fact of her fragmentation, her decomposition into separate individuals. [...] ... music had long been familiar to the Greeks as an Apollonian art, as a regular beat like that of waves lapping the shore, a plastic rhythm expressly developed for the portrayal of Apollonian conditions. Apollo's music was a Doric architecture of sound - of barely hinted sounds such as are proper to the cithara. Those very elements which characterize Dionysiac music and, after it, music quite generally: the heart shaking power of tone, the uniform stream of melody, the incomparable resources of harmony - all those elements had been carefully kept at a distance as being inconsonant with the Apollonian norm. In the Dionysiac dithyramb man is incited to strain his symbolic faculties to the utmost; something quite unheard of is now clamouring to be heard: the desire to tear asunder the veil of Maya, to sink back into the original oneness of nature; the desire to express the very essence of nature symbolically. [...] In order to comprehend this total emancipation of all the symbolic powers one must have reached the same measure of inner freedom those powers themselves were making manifest; which is to say that the votary of Dionysos could not be understood except by his own kind. It is not difficult to imagine the awed surprise with which the Apollonian Greek must have looked on him. And that surprise would be further increased as the latter realized, with a shudder, that all this was not so alien to him after all, that his Apollonian consciousness was but a thin veil hiding from him the whole Dionysiac realm.

 

In order to comprehend this we must take down the elaborate edifice of Apollonian culture stone by stone until we discover its foundations. At first the eye is struck by the marvellous shapes of the Olympian gods who stand upon its pediments, and whose exploits, in shining bas relief, adorn its friezes.

 Now the Olympian magic mountain opens itself before us, showing us its very roots. The Greeks were keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to be able to live at all they had to place before them the shining fantasy of the Olympians. Their tremendous distrust of the titanic forces of nature: Moira, mercilessly enthroned beyond the knowable world; the vulture which fed upon the great philanthropist Prometheus; the terrible lot drawn by wise Oedipus; the curse on the house of Atreus which brought Orestes to the murder of his mother: that whole Panic philosophy, in short, with its mythic examples, by which the gloomy Etruscans perished, the Greeks conquered - or at least hid from view - again and again by means of this artificial Olympus. In order to live at all the Greeks had to construct these deities. The Apollonian need for beauty had to develop the Olympian hierarchy of joy by slow degrees from the original titanic hierarchy of terror, as roses are seen to break from a thorny thicket. [...] The same drive which called art into being as a completion and consummation of existence, and as a guarantee of further existence, gave rise also to that Olympian realm which acted as a transfiguring mirror to the Hellenic will. The gods justified human life by living it themselves - the only satisfactory theodicy ever invented.

 

Whenever we encounter "naïveté" in art, we are face to face with the ripest fruit of Apollinian culture-- which must always triumph first over Titans, kill monsters, and overcome the somber contemplation of actuality, the intense susceptibility to suffering, by means of illusions strenuously and zestfully entertained. But how rare are the instances of true naïveté, of that complete identification with the beauty of appearance! It is this achievement which makes Homer so magnificent-- Homer, who, as a single individual, stood to Apollonian popular culture in the same relation as the individual dream artist to the oneiric capacity of a race and of nature generally. The naïveté of Homer must be viewed as a complete victory of Apollonian illusion. Nature often uses illusions of this sort in order to accomplish its secret purposes. The true goal is covered over by a phantasm. We stretch out our hands to the latter, while nature, aided by our deception, attains the former. In the case of the Greeks it was the will wishing to behold itself in the work of art, in the transcendence of genius; but in order so to behold itself its creatures had first to view themselves as glorious, to transpose themselves to a higher sphere, without having that sphere of pure contemplation either challenge them or upbraid them with insufficiency. It was in that sphere of beauty that the Greeks saw the Olympians as their mirror images; it was by means of that aesthetic mirror that the Greek will opposed suffering and the somber wisdom of suffering which always accompanies artistic talent. As a monument to its victory stands Homer, the naïve artist. We can learn something about that naïve artist through the analogy of dream. We can imagine the dreamer as he calls out to himself, still caught in the illusion of his dream and without disturbing it, "This is a dream, and I want to go on dreaming," and we can infer, on the one hand, that he takes deep delight in the contemplation of his dream, and, on the other, that he must have forgotten the day, with its horrible importunity, so to enjoy his dream. Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, will furnish the clue to what is happening here. Although of the two halves of life- the waking and the dreaming- the former is generally considered not only the more important but the only one which is truly lived, I would, at the risk of sounding paradoxical, propose the opposite view. The more I have come to realize in nature those omnipotent formative tendencies and, with them, an intense longing for illusion, the more I feel inclined to the hypothesis that the original Oneness, the ground of Being, ever suffering and contradictory, time and again has need of rapt vision and delightful illusion to redeem itself.

 

If this apotheosis of individuation is to be read in normative terms, we may infer that there is one norm only: the individual- or, more precisely, the observance of the limits of the individual: sophrosyne. As a moral deity Apollo demands self-control from his people and, in order to observe such self-control, a knowledge of self. And so we find that the aesthetic necessity of beauty is accompanied by the imperatives, "Know thyself," and "Nothing too much." Conversely, excess and hubris come to be regarded as the hostile spirits of the non-Apollonian sphere, hence as properties of the pre-Apollonian era- the age of Titans- and the extra-Apollonian world, that is to say the world of the barbarians.

 

The effects of the Dionysian spirit struck the Apollonian Greeks as titanic and barbaric; yet they could not disguise from themselves the fact that they were essentially akin to those deposed Titans and heroes. They felt more than that: their whole existence, with its temperate beauty, rested upon a base of suffering and knowledge which had been hidden from them until the reinstatement of Dionysos uncovered it once more. And lo and behold! Apollo found it impossible to live without Dionsysos. The elements of titanism and barbarism turned out to be quite as fundamental as the Apollonian element. And now let us imagine how the ecstatic sounds of the Dionysian rites penetrated ever more enticingly into that artificially restrained and discreet world of illusion,... and then let us imagine how the Apollonian artist with his thin, monotonous harp music must have sounded beside the demoniac chant of the multitude! [....] The individual, with his limits and moderations, forgot himself in the Dionysian vortex and became oblivious to the laws of Apollo. [...] Wherever the Dionysian voice was heard, the Apollonian norm seemed suspended or destroyed. [...] The only way I am able to view Doric art and the Doric state is as a perpetual military encampment of the Apollonian forces. An art so defiantly austere, so ringed about with fortifications--an education so military and exacting--a polity so ruthlessly cruel--could endure only in a continual state of resistance against the titanic and barbaric menace of Dionysus.

 

....from the Iron Age, with its battles of Titans and its austere popular philosophy, there developed under the aegis of Apollo the Homeric world of beauty;... this "naive" splendor was then absorbed once more by the Dionysian torrent,... face to face with this new power, the Apollonian code rigidified into the majesty of Doric art and contemplation.

 

VI

 

The cosmic symbolism of music resists any adequate treatment by language, for the simple reason that music, in referring to primordial contradiction and pain, symbolizes a sphere which is both earlier than appearance and beyond it. Once we set it over against music, all appearance becomes a mere analogy. So it happens that language, the organ and symbol of appearance, can never succeed in bringing the innermost core of music to the surface.

 

VII

 

[A valuable] insight into the significance of the chorus was furnished by Schiller in the famous preface to his Bride of Messina, where the chorus is seen as a living wall which tragedy draws about itself in order to achieve insulation from the actual world, to preserve its ideal ground and its poetic freedom.

Schiller used this view as his main weapon against... the illusionistic demand made upon dramatic poetry. [....] Schiller was not content to have what constitutes the very essence of poetry merely tolerated as 'poetic license'.

 

It is certainly true, as Schiller saw, that the Greek chorus of satyrs, the chorus of primitive tragedy, moved on ideal ground, a ground raised high above the common path of mortals. The Greek has built for his chorus the scaffolding of a fictive chthonic realm and placed thereon fictive nature spirits. ...the world of tragedy is by no means a world arbitrarily projected between heaven and earth; rather it is a world having the same reality and credibility as Olympus possessed for the devout Greek ["It grew out of the poetical aspect of real life" (the preface of Schiller's Bride of Messina)]. The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. [...] ...the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus ['as a lamplight by daylight'], and in the next development of Greek tragedy..., all that separated man from man gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity which led back into the heart of nature.

 

VIII

 

For the Greek the satyr expressed nature in a rude, uncultivated state... . ...a prophet of wisdom born out of nature's womb; a symbol of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek was accustomed to view with reverent wonder. [...] Our tricked-out, contrived shepherd would have offended him, but his eyes rested with sublime satisfaction on the open, undistorted limnings of nature. Here archetypal man was cleansed of the illusion of culture, and what revealed itself was authentic man, the bearded satyr jubilantly greeting his god. Before him cultured man dwindled to a false cartoon. Schiller is also correct as regards these beginnings of the tragic art: the chorus is a living wall against the onset of reality ecause it depicts reality more truthfully and more completely than does civilized man, who ordinarily considers himself the only reality. Poetry does not lie outside the world as a fantastic impossibility begotten of the poet's brain; it seeks to be the exact opposite, an unvarnished expression of truth, and for this reason must cast away the trumpery garments worn by the supposed reality of civilized man. The contrast between this truth of nature and the pretentious lie of civilization is quite similar to that between the eternal core of things and the entire phenomenal world. [...] The idyllic shepherd of modern man is but a replica of the sum of cultural illusions which he mistakes for nature. The Dionysiac Greek, desiring truth and nature at their highest power, sees himself metamorphosed into the satyr.

 

Enchantment is the precondition of all dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysiac reveler sees himself as satyr, and as satyr, in turn, he sees the god. In his transformation he sees a new vision, which is the Apollonian completion of his state. And by the same token this new vision completes the dramatic act.

Thus we have come to interpret Greek tragedy as a Dionysiac chorus which again and again discharges itself in Apollonian images. [...] This substratum of tragedy irradiates... a vision on the one hand completely of the nature of Apollonian dream-illusion and therefore epic, but on the other hand, as the objectification of a Dionysiac condition, tending toward the shattering of the individual and his fusion with the original Oneness.

 

Whereas we... find it hard to conceive how the chorus of the Greeks should have been older [and thus] more central than the dramatic action proper...; and whereas we have never been quite able to reconcile with this position of importance the fact that the chorus was composed of such lowly beings as-- originally-- goatlike satyrs; and whereas, further, the orchaestra in front of the stage has always seemed a riddle to us-- we now realize that the stage with its action was originally conceived as pure vision and that the only reality was the chorus, who created that vision out of itself and proclaimed it through the medium of dance, music, and spoken word. Since, in this vision, the chorus beholds its lord and master Dionysos, it remains forever an attending chorus; it sees how the god suffers and transforms himself.

 

IX

 

It is Apolo who tranquilizes the individual by drawing boundary lines, and who, by enjoining again and again the practice of self-knowledge, reminds him of the holy, universal norms. But lest the Apollonian tendency freeze all form into Egyptian rigidity,... the Dionysiac flood tide periodically destroys all the little circles in which the Apollonian will would confine Hellenism.

 

X

 

…the one true Dionysos appears in a multiplicity of characters [on the Greek stage]… . The god ascends the stage in the likeness of a striving and suffering individual. That he can appear at all with this clarity and precision is due to dream interpreter Apollo, who projects before the chorus its Dionsiac ondition in this analogical figure. Yet in truth that hero is the suffering Dionysos of the mysteries. He of whom the wonderful myth relates that as a child he was dismembered by Titans now experiences in his own person the pains of individuation, and in this condition is worshiped as Zagreus. We have here an indication that dismemberment—the truly Dionysiac suffering—was like a separation into air, water, earth, and fire, and that individuation should be regarded as the source of all suffering, and rejected. […] Every hope of the Eleusinian initiates pointed to a rebirth of Dionysos, which we can now interpret as meaning the end of individuation… . […]

I have said earlier that the Homeric epic was the poetic expression of Olympian culture, its victory song over the terrors of the battle of the Titans. Now, under the overwhelming influence of tragic poetry, the Homeric myths were... transformed and show in this metamorphosis that since then the Olympian culture has also been overcome by an even deeper philosophy. The contumacious Titan, Prometheus, now announced to his Olympian tormentor that unless the latter promptly joined forces with him, his reign would be in supreme danger.[...] Thus we find the earlier age of Titans brought back from Tartarus and restored to the light of day. A philosophy of wild, naked nature looks with the bold countenance of truth upon the flitting myths of the Homeric world: they pale and tremble before the lightening eye of this goddess, until the… Dionysiac artist forces them into the service of a new divinity. The Dionysian truth takes over the entire realm of myth as symbolic language for its own insights, which it expresses partly in the public rite of tragedy and partly in the secret celebrations of dramatic mysteries, but always under the old mythic veil. […] It is the sure sign of the death of a religion when its mythic presuppositions become systematized, under the severe, rational eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a ready sum of historical events, and when… the feeling for myth withers and its place is taken by a religion claiming historical foundations. This decaying myth was now seized by the newborn genius of Dionysiac music, in whose hands it flowered once more, with new colors and a fragrance that aroused a wistful longing for a metaphysical world. […] It was through tragedy that myth achieved its profoundest content, its most expressive form.

 

XI

 

The death of Greek tragedy... created a tremendous vacuum that was felt far and wide. ...[there] could be heard ringing now through the entire Greek world these painful cries: "Tragedy is dead! And poetry has perished with it! Away with you, punny, spriritless imitators! Away with you to Hades... !"

 

The death struggle of tragedy had been fought by Euripides, while the later art is known as the New Attic comedy [Editors note: characterized by its concern with the everyday world rather than the mythic]. Tragedy lived on there in a degenerate form, a monument to its painful and laborious death.

 

Cont. p70-75

 

Euripides sat in the theatre pondering, a troubled spectator. In the end he had to admit to himself that he did not understand his great predecessors. But since he looked upon reason as the fountainhead of all doing and enjoying, he had to find out whether anybody shared these notions of his… . […] In this tormented state of mind, Euripides discovered his second spectator—one who did not understand tragedy and for that reason spurned it.

 

XII

 

Before giving a name to that other spectator, let us stop a moment… . […] Euripides basic intention… is to eliminate from tragedy the primitive and pervasive Dionysiac element, and to rebuild the drama on a foundation of non-Dionysiac art…. .

Euripides himself, towards the end of his life, propounded the question of the value and significance of this tendency to his contemporaries in a myth. Has the Dionysiac spirit any right at all to exist? Should it not, rather, be brutally uprooted from the Hellenic soil? Yes, it should, the poet tells us, if only it were possible, but the god Dionysos is too powerful: even the most intelligent opponent , like Pentheus in the Bacchae, is unexpectedly enchanted by him, and in his enchantment runs headlong to destruction. […] …a poet who all his life had resisted Dionysos heroically, only to end his career with a glorification of his opponent and with suicide… . The Bacchae acknowledges the failure of Euripides dramatic intentions when, in fact, these had already succeeded: Dionysos had already been driven from the tragic stage by a daemonic power speaking through Euripides. For in a certain sense Euripides was but a mask, while the divinity which spoke through him was neither Dionysos nor Apollo but a brand new daemon called Socrates. Thenceforward the real antangonism was to be between the Dionysiac spirit and the Socratic, and tragedy was to perish in the conflict. […]

Let us now look more closely at the Socratic tendency by means of which Euripides… conquered Aeschylean tragedy. […] One it was no longer begotten by music, in the mysterious Dionysiac twilight, what form could drama conceivably take? Only that of the dramatized epic, an Apollonian form which precluded tragic effect. […] …the power of the epic Apollonian spirit is such that it transfigures the most horrible deeds before our eyes by the charm of illusion, and redemption through illusion.

[…]

The Euripidean prologue may serve to illustrate the efficacy of that rationalistic method. Nothing could be more at odds with our dramaturgic notions than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. To have a character appear at the beginning of the play, tell us who he is, what preceeded the action, what has happened so far, even what is about to happen in the course of the play—a modern writer for the theatre would rejet all this as a wanton and unpardonable dismissal  of the element of suspense. […] But Euripides reasoned quite otherwise. According to him, the effect of tragedy never resided in epic suspense, in a teasing uncertainty as to what was going to happen next. It resided, rather, in those great scenes of lyrical rhetoric in which the passion and dialectic of the protagonist reached heights of eloquence. Everything portended pathos, not action. […] The tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles had used the subtlest dvices to furnish the spectator in the early scenes, and as if by chance, with all the necessary information. They had shown an admirable skill in distinguishing the necessary structural features and making them accidental. […]

With regard to his poetic procedure, which was both critical and creative, he must often have felt that he was applying to drama the opening words of Anaxogoras’ treatise: “In the beginning all things were mixed together; then reason came and introduced order.” And even as Anaxogoras, with his concept of reason, seems like the first sober philosopher in a company of drunkards, so Euripides may have appeared to himself as the first rational maker of tragedy. Everything was mixed together in a chaotic stew so long as reason, the sole principle of universal order, remained excluded from the creative act. Being of this opinion, Euripides had necessarily to reject his less rational peers. Euripides would never have endorsed Sophocles’ statement about Aeschylus—that this poet was doing the right thing, but unconsciously; instead he would have claimed that since Aeschylus created unconsciously he couldn’t help doing the wrong thing. […] Euripides set out, as Plato was to do, to show the world the opposite of the “irrational” poet: his esthetic axiom, “whatever is to be beautiful must be conscious” is strictly parallel to the Socratic “whatever is to be good must be conscious.” We can hardly go wrong then in calling Euripides the poet of esthetic Socratism. But Socrates was precisely that second spectator, incapable of understanding the older tragedy and therefore scorning it, and it was in his company that Euripides dared to usher in a new era of poetic activity. If the old tragedy was wrecked, esthetic Socratism is to blame, and to the extent that the target of the innovators was the Dionysiac principle of the older art we may call Socrates the god’s chief opponent, the new Orpheus who, though destined to be torn to pieces by the maenads of Athenian judgement, succeeded in putting the overmastering god to flight.

 

XIII

The fact that the aims of Socrates and Euripides were closely allied did not escape the attention of their contemporaries. We have an eloquent illustration of this in the rumor, current at the time in Athens, that Socrates was helping Euripides with his writings. […] It is certainly significant in this connection that Socrates, being a sworn enemy of the tragic art, is said never to have attended the theatre except when a new play of Euripides was mounted.

 

Who was this man who dared, singlehanded, to challenge the entire world of Hellenism... which commands our highest reverence? Who was this daemon daring to pour out the magic philter in the dust? this demigod to whom the noblest spirits of mankind must call out:

 

 

    Alas!

 

    With ruthless hand

    You have destroyed

    This fair edifice:

 

    It falls and decays!

 

We are offered a key to the mind of Socrates in that remarkable phenomenon known as his daimonion. In certain critical situations, when even his massive intellect faltered, he was able to regain his balance through the agency of a divine voice, which he heard only at such moments. The voice always spoke to dissuade. The instinctual wisdom of this anomalous character manifests itself from time to time as a purely inhibitory agent, ready to defy his rational judgement. Whereas in all truly productive men instinct is the strong, affirmative force and reason the dissuader and critic, in the case of Socrates the roles are reversed: instinct is the critic, consciousness the creator. Truly a monstrosity! Because of this lack of every mystical talent Socrates emerges as the perfect pattern of the non-mystic, in whom the logical side has become, through superfetation, as overdeveloped as has the instinctual side in the mystic.

 

XIV

 

Let us now imagine Socrates' great Cyclops' eye-- that eye which never glowed with the artist's divine frenzy-- turned upon tragedy.

 

 

    I exemplify the use of poetry:

    To convey to those who are a bit backward

    The truth in a simile

 

 

The fact is that for Socrates tragic art failed even to "convey the truth," although it did address itself “to those who were a bit backward," which is to say to non-philosophers... . Like Plato, he reckoned it among the beguiling arts... . His success was such that the young tragic poet Plato burned all his writings in order to qualify as a student of Socrates.

 

Plato has furnished for all posterity the pattern of a new art form... in which poetry played the... subordinate role with regard to dialectic philosophy as that same philosophy was to play for many centuries with regard to theology. This, then, was the new status of poetry, and it was Plato who, under the pressure of daemonic Socrates, had brought it about.

 

The Apollonian tendency now appears disguised as logical schematism... . Socrates [is] the dialectic hero of the Platonic drama... . [...] ...the optimistic element in... dialectics... sees a triumph in every syllogism and can breathe only in an atmosphere of calm, conscious clarity. Once that optimistic element had entered tragedy, it overgrew its Dionysiac regions and brought about their annihilation… . Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims: “Virtue is knowledge; all sins arise from ignorance; only the virtuous are happy”—these three basic formulations of optimism spell the death of tragedy. […] Aeschylus’ transcendental concept of justice [is] reduced to the brash and shallow principle of poetic justice with its regular deus ex machina.

[…] Optimistic dialectics took up the whip of its syllogisms and drove music out of the tragedy. It entirely destroyed the meaning of tragedy... .

 

 

 

It appears that this despotic logician had from time to time a sense of void, loss, unfulfilled duty with regard to art. In prison he told his friends how, on several occasions, a voice had spoken to him in a dream, saying "Practice music, Socrates!" ...in order to unburden his conscience he finally agreed, in prison, to undertake that music which hitherto he had held in low esteem. In this frame of mind he composed a poem on Apollo and rendered several Aesopian fables in verse. What prompted him to these exercises was something very similar to that warning voice of his daimonion: an Apollonian perception that, like a barbarian king, he had failed to comprehend the nature of a divine effigy, and was in danger of offending his own god through ignorance. These words heard by Socrates in his dream are the only indication that he ever experienced any uneasiness about the limits of his logical universe. He may have asked himself: "Have I been too ready to view what was unintelligible to me as being devoid of meaning? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom, after all, from which the logician is excluded? Perhaps art must be seen as the necessary complement to rational discourse?”

 

XV

 

...the influence of Socrates [is] like a shadow cast by the evening sun, ever lengthening into the future... .

 

...Socrates... [is] the prototype of an entirely new mode of existence. He is the great exemplar of that theoretical man whose significance and aims we must now attempt to understand.

...we find a deep seated illusion, first manifested in Socrates: the illusion that thought, guided by the thread of causality, might plumb the farthest abysses of being and even correct it. This grand metaphysical illusion has become integral to the scientific endeavour and again and again leads science to those far limits of its inquiry where it becomes art- which, in this mechanism, is what is really intended.

...Socrates... strikes us as the first who was able not only to live under the guidance of that instinctive scientific certainty but to die by it, which is much more difficult.

 

...a common net of knowledge was spread over the whole globe... the monumental pyramid of present-day knowledge,... Socrates [is] the vortex and turning point of Western civilization.

 

...Socrates represents the archetype of the theoretical optimist, who, strong in the belief that nature can be fathomed, considers knowledge to be the true panacea and error to be radical evil. To Socratic man the one noble and truly human occupation was that of laying bare the workings of nature, of separating true knowledge from illusion and error.

 

Whoever has tasted the delight of a Socratic perception, experienced how it moves to encompass the whole world of phenomena in ever widening circles, knows no sharper incentive to life than his desire to complete the conquest, to weave the net absolutely tight. To such a person the Platonic Socrates appears as the teacher of an entirely new form of "Greek serenity" and affirmation. [...] ...science, spurred on by its energetic notions, approaches irresistibly those outer limits where the optimism implicit in logic must collapse. For the periphery of science has an infinite number of points. Ever noble and gifted man has... come up against some point of the periphery that defied his understanding... . When the inquirer, having pushed to the circumference, realizes how logic in that place curls about itself and bites its own tail, he is struck with a new kind of perception: a tragic perception, which requires, to make it tolerable, the remedy of art. 

 

The chances are that almost every one of us, upon close examination, will have to admit that he is able to approach the once-living reality of myth only by means of intellectual constructs. Yet every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural, healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of the imagination and Apollonian dream are saved only by a horizon ringed about by myth from indiscriminate ramblings. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggle. [...] Over against this, let us consider abstract man stripped of myth, abstract education, abstract mores, abstract law, abstract government; the random vagaries of the artistic imagination unchanneled by any native myth; a culture without any fixed and consecrated place of origin, condemned to exhaust all possibilities and feed miserably and parasitically on every culture under the sun. Here we have our present age, the result of a Socratism bent on the extermination of myth. Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his past and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities. What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless other cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb? Let us ask ourselves whether our feverish and frightening agitation is anything but the greedy grasping for food of a hungry man. And who would care to offer further nourishment to a culture which, no matter how much it consumes, remains insatiable and which converts the strongest and most wholesome food into "history" and "criticism"?

 

All our hopes centre on the fact that underneath the hectic movements of our civilization there dwells a marvellous ancient power, which arouses itself mightily only at certain grand moments and then sinks back to dream again of the future [c.f. Jung on Wotan]. Out of this subsoil grew the German Reformation, in whose choral music the future strains of German music sounded for the first time. Luther's chorales, so inward, courageous, spiritual, and tender, are like the first Dionysiac cry from the thicket at the approach of spring. They are answered antiphonally by the sacred and exuberant procession of Dionysiac enthusiasts to whom we are indebted for German music, to whom we shall one day be indebted for the rebirth of German myth.

I realize that I must now conduct the sympathetic reader to a mountain peak of lonely contemplation where he will have few companions, and I would call out to him by way of encouragement that we must hold fast to our luminous guides, the Greeks. [...]

 

...people had to destroy the firmament of myth in order to be able to live detached from their home soil, unrestrained in a wilderness of thought, custom, and action. But now that metaphysical drive still tries to create,... in the Socratism of science which pushes forward into life. But on the lower steps this very drive led only to a feverish search, which gradually lost itself in a pandemonium of myths and superstitions from all over the place, all piled up together, in the middle of which, nonetheless, the Hellene sat with an unquenched heart, until he understood to mask that fever with Greek cheerfulness and Greek negligence, in the form of Graeculus, or to plunge completely into some stupefying oriental superstition or other. [...] ...Greek tragedy declined through a curious sundering of the two sources that nourished it, a process which went hand in hand with the degeneration of the Greek national character and which should make us consider how inextricably bound up with one another are art and the people, myth and custom, tragedy and the commonwealth. The disappearance of tragedy also spelled the disappearance of myth. Heretofore the Greeks had felt an instinctive need to relate their experience at once to their myth, indeed to understand it only through that connection. In this way even the immediate present appeared to them sub specie aeternitatis and in a certain sense as timeless. The commonwealth, as well as art, submerged itself in that timeless stream in order to find respite from the burden and avidity of the immediate moment. [...] Only by [giving "to quotidian experience the stamp of the eternal"] can it express... the metaphysical meaning of life. The opposite happens when a nation begins to view itself historically and to demolish the mythical bulwarks that surround it. The result is usually a definite secularization, a break with the unconscious metaphysic of its earlier mode of existence, with all the accompanying dismal moral consequences. Greek art, and specifically Greek tragedy, were the factors preventing the destruction of myth; they too had to be destroyed if one were to live recklessly, out of touch with the native soul, in a wilderness of thought, custom, and action. Even so, the metaphysical urge endeavoured to create for itself a weaker embodiment through the intense Socratism of science, but on that pedestrian plane it led only to a feverish search, dissipating itself by degrees in a pandemonium of myths and superstitions collected at random. In the midst of these the Greek remained unsatisfied, until he finally learned to dissemble, as Graeculus, his fever under Greek jollity and frivolity or else to drug himself in some crass oriental superstition.

 

Today we experience the same extravagant thirst for knowledge, the same insatiable curiosity, the same drastic secularization, the nomadic wandering, the greedy rush to alien tables, the frivolous apotheosis of the present or the stupefied negation of it, and all sub specie saeculi- like symptoms, pointing to a comparable lack in our own culture, which has also destroyed myth. It seems scarcely possible to graft an alien myth onto a native culture without damaging the tree beyond repair in the process. Occasionally the tree proves strong and healthy enough to eliminate the foreign element after a prolonged struggle, but as a rule it must wither or continue in a state of morbid growth. We have a sufficiently high opinion of the pure and vigorous substance of the German spirit to entertain the hope that it will eliminate those elements grafted on it by force and remember its own true nature. [...] But no one should think that such battles can be fought without one's household gods, one's mythic roots, without a true 'recovery' of all things German. And if the German should despond in his endeavour to find his way back to his lost homeland, whose familiar paths he has forgotten, he has only to listen to the call of the Dionysiac bird, which hovers above his head and will show him the way.