No More Learning

103 (#145) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
103
remembered that Socrates, as an opponent of
tragic art, did not ordinarily patronise tragedy, but
only appeared among the spectators when a new
play of Euripides was performed. The most
noted thing, however, is the close juxtaposition
of the two names in the Delphic oracle, which
designated Socrates as the wisest of men, but at
the same time decided that the second prize in
the contest of wisdom was due to Euripides.
Sophocles was designated as the third in this
scale of rank; he who could pride himself that,
in comparison with Æschylus, he did what was
right, and did it, moreover, because he knew what
was right. It is evidently just the degree of
clearness of this knowledge, which distinguishes
these three men in common as the three “knowing
ones” of their age.
The most decisive word, however, for this
new and unprecedented esteem of knowledge and
insight was spoken by Socrates when he found
that he was the only one who acknowledged to
himself that he knew nothing; while in his critical
pilgrimage through Athens, and calling on the
greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, he
discovered everywhere the conceit of knowledge.
He perceived, to his astonishment, that all these
celebrities were without a proper and accurate
insight, even with regard to their own callings,
and practised them only by instinct. “Only by
instinct”: with this phrase we touch upon the
heart and core of the Socratic tendency. Socrat. . .
ism condemns therewith existing art as well as
existing ethics; wherever Socratism turns its


## p. 104 (#146) ############################################

104 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
searching eyes it beholds the lack of insight and
the power of illusion; and from this lack infers
the inner perversity and objectionableness of
existing conditions. From this point onwards,
Socrates believed that he was called upon to
correct existence; and, with an air of disregard
and superiority, as the precursor of an altogether
different culture, art, and morality, he enters
single-handed into a world, of which, if we
reverently touched the hem, we should count it
our greatest happiness.
Here is the extraordinary hesitancy which
always seizes upon us with regard to Socrates,
and again and again invites us to ascertain
the sense and purpose of this most question-
able phenomenon of antiquity. Who is it that
ventures single-handed to disown the Greek char-
acter, which, as Homer, Pindar, and Æschylus,
as Phidias, as Pericles, as Pythia and Dionysus,
as the deepest abyss and the highest height, is
sure of our wondering admiration? What de-
moniac power is it which would presume to spill
this magic draught in the dust? What demigod
is it to whom the chorus of spirits of the noblest
of mankind must call out: “Weh! Weh! Du
hast sie zerstört, die schöne Welt, mit mächtiger
Faust; sie stürzt, sie zerfällt! "*

troyed,
* Woe! Woe!
Thou has
The be
With p
In ruin
Faust
ard Ta


## p. 105 (#147) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 105
A key to the character of Socrates is presented
to us by the surprising phenomenon designated
as the "daimonion" of Socrates. In special
circumstances, when his gigantic intellect began
to stagger, he got a secure support in the utter-
ances of a divine voice which then spake to him.
This voice, whenever it comes, always dissuades.
In this totally abnormal nature instinctive wisdom
only appears in order to hinder the progress of
conscious perception here and there. While in
all productive men it is instinct which is the
creatively affirmative force, consciousness only
comporting itself critically and dissuasively; jvith
Socrates it is instinct which becomes critic, it is
_ consciousness which becomes creator—a perfect
monstrosity per defectum! And we do indeed
observe here a monstrous defectus of all mystical
aptitude, so that Socrates might be designated as
. the spsciSiQjlli^mysii^ in whom the logical nature
is developed, through a superfoetation, to the
same excess as instinctive wisdom is developed
in the mvstic. On the other hand, however, the
logical instinct which appeared in Socrates was
absolutely prohibited from turning against itself;
in its unchecked flow it manifests a native power
such as we meet with, to our shocking surprise,
only among the very greatest instinctive forces.
He who has experienced even a breath of the
divine naivete and security of the Socratic course
of life in the Platonic writings, will also feel that
the enormous driving-wheel of logical Socratism
is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates, and that
it must be viewed through Socrates as through a


## p. 106 (#148) ############################################

106
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
shadow. And that he himself had a boding of
this relation is apparent from the dignified earnest-
ness with which be everywhere, and even before
his judges, insisted on his divine calling. To
refute him here was really as impossible as to
approve of his instinct-disintegrating influence.
In view of this indissoluble conflict, when he had
at last been brought before the forum of the Greek
state, there was only one punishment demanded,
namely exile; he might have been sped across
the borders as something thoroughly enigmatical,
irrubricable and inexplicable, and so posterity would
have been quite unjustified in charging the Athenians
with a deed of ignominy. But that the sentence of
death, and not mere exile, was pronounced upon
him, seems to have been brought about by Socrates
himself, with perfect knowledge of the circum-
stances, and without the natural fear of death: he
met his death with the calmness with which,
according to the description of Plato, he leaves
the symposium at break of day, as the last of the
revellers, to begin a new day; while the sleepy
companions remain behind on the benches and
the floor, to dream of Socrates, the true eroticist.
The dying Socrates became the new ideal of the
noble Greek youths, -an ideal they had never
yet beheld,—and above all, the typical Hellenic
youth, Plato, prostrated himself before this scene
with all the fervent devotion of his visionary
soul.


## p. 107 (#149) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 10?
14.
Let us now imagine the one great Cyclopean
eye of Socrates fixed on tragedy, that eye in which
the fine frenzy of artistic enthusiasm had never
glowed—let us think how it was denied to this
eye to gaze with pleasure into the Dionysian
abysses—what could it not but see in the " sublime
and greatly lauded" tragic art, as Plato called it?
Something very absurd, with causes that seemed
to be without effects, and effects apparently with-
out causes; the whole, moreover, so motley and
diversified that it could not but be repugnant to a
thoughtful mind, a dangerous incentive, however,
to sensitive and irritable souls. We know what
was the sole kind of poetry which he compre-
hended: the Aisopian fable: and he did this no
doubt with that smiling complaisance with which
the good honest Gellert sings the praise of poetry
in the fable of the bee and the hen :—
"Du siehst an mir, wozu sie nutzt,
Dem, der nicht viel Verstand besitzt,
Die Wahrheit durch ein Bild zu sagen. " *
But then it seemed to Socrates that tragic art did
not eveaJitell the trutli": not to mention the
fact that it addresses itself to him who " hath but

little wit"; consequently not to the philosopher:
a twofold reason why it should be avoided. Like
* In me thou seest its benefit,—
To him who hath but little wit,
Through parables to tell the truth.


## p. 108 (#150) ############################################

108,
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
Plato, he reckoned it among the seductive arts
which only represent the agreeable, not the useful,
and hence he required of his disciples abstinence
and strict separation from such unphilosophical
allurements; with such success that the youthful
tragic poet Plato first of all burned his poems to
be able to become a scholar of Socrates. But
where unconquerable native capacities bore up
against the Socratic maxims, their power, to-
gether with the momentum of his mighty character,
still sufficed to force poetry itself into new and
hitherto unknown channels.
An instance of this is the aforesaid Plato: he,
who in the condemnation of tragedy and of art
in general certainly did not fall short of the naïve
cynicism of his master, was nevertheless constrained
by sheer artistic necessity to create a form of art
which is inwardly related even to the then exist-
ing forms of art which he repudiated. Plato's
main objection to the old art—that it is the
imitation of a phantom,* and hence belongs to
a sphere still lower than the empiric world—could
not at all apply to the new art: and so we find
Plato endeavouring to go beyond reality and
attempting to represent the idea which underlies
this pseudo-reality. But Plato, the thinker,
thereby arrived by a roundabout road just at
the point where he had always been at home as
poet, and from which Sophocles and all the old
artists had solemnly protested against that objec-
tion. If tragedy absorbed into itself all the
* Scheinbild=Eldodov. -TR.


## p. 109 (#151) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
109

earlier varieties of art, the same could again be
said in an unusual sense of Platonic dialogue,
which, engendered by a mixture of all the
then existing forms and styles, hovers midway
between narrative, lyric and drama, between prose ---
and poetry, and has also thereby broken loose
from the older strict law of unity of linguistic
form; a movement which was carried still farther
by the cynic writers, who in the most promiscuous
style, oscillating to and fro betwixt prose and
metrical forms, realised also the literary picture
of the “ raving Socrates” whom they were wont
to represent in life. Platonic dialogue was as it
were the boat in which the shipwrecked ancient
poetry saved herself together with all her children:
crowded into a narrow space and timidly obse-
quious to the one steersman, Socrates, they now
launched into a new world, which never tired of
looking at the fantastic spectacle of this procession.
In very truth, Plato has given to all posterity
the prototype of a new form of art, the prototype bas
of the novel : which must be designated as the
infinitely evolved Æsopian fable, in which poetry
holds the same rank with reference to dialectic
philosophy as this same philosophy held for many
centuries with reference to theology : namely, the
rank of ancilla. This was the new position of
poetry into which Plato forced it under the
pressure of the demon-inspired Socrates.
Here philosophic thought overgrows art and
compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectics.
The Apollonian tendency has chrysalised in the
logical schematism ; just as something analogous


## p. 110 (#152) ############################################

110
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
in the case of Euripides (and moreover a trans-
lation of the Dionysian into the naturalistic
emotion) was forced upon our attention. Socrates,
the dialectical hero in Platonic drama, reminds us
of the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero, who
has to defend his actions by arguments and
counter-arguments, and thereby so often runs the
risk of forfeiting our tragic pity; for who could
mistake the optimistic element in the essence of
dialectics, which celebrates a jubilee in every con-
clusion, and can breathe only in cool clearness
and consciousness: the optimistic element, which,
having once forced its way into tragedy, must
gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions, and
necessarily impel it to self-destruction—even to
the death-leap into the bourgeois drama. Let us
but realise the consequences of the Socratic
maxims: “Virtue is knowledge; man only sins
from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy":
these three fundamental forms of optimism involve
the death of tragedy. For the virtuous hero
must now be a dialectician; there must now be
a necessary, visible connection between virtue and
knowledge, between belief and morality; the
transcendental justice of the plot in Æschylus is
now degraded to the superficial and audacious
principle of “poetic justice” with its usual deus ex
machina.
How does the chorus, and, in general, the
entire Dionyso-musical substratum of tragedy,
now appear in the light of this new Socrato-
optimistic stage-world? As something accidental,
as a readily dispensable reminiscence of the origin



## p. 111 (#153) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
III
of tragedy; while we have in fact seen that the
chorus can be understood only as the cause of
tragedy, and of the tragic generally. This per-
plexity with respect to the chorus first manifests
itself in Sophocles—an important sign that the
Dionysian basis of tragedy already begins to
disintegrate with him. He no longer ventures
to entrust to the chorus the main share of the
effect, but limits its sphere to such an extent
that it now appears almost co-ordinate with the
actors, just as if it were elevated from the orchestra
into the scene: whereby of course its character
is completely destroyed, notwithstanding that
Aristotle countenances this very theory of the
chorus. This alteration of the position of the
chorus, which Sophocles at any rate recommended
by his practice, and, according to tradition, even
by a treatise, is the first step towards the annihila-
tion of the chorus, the phases of which follow one
another with alarming rapidity in Euripides,
Agathon, and the New Comedy. Optimistic
dialectics drives music out of tragedy with the
scourge of its syllogisms: that is, it destroys the
essence of tragedy, which can be explained only
as a manifestation and illustration of Dionysian
states, as the visible symbolisation of music, as
the dream-world of Dionysian ecstasy.
If, therefore, we are to assume an anti-Diony-
sian tendency operating even before Socrates,
which received in him only an unprecedentedly
grand expression, we must not shrink from the
question as to what a phenomenon like that
of Socrates indicates : whom in view of the


## p. 112 (#154) ############################################

112 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
Platonic dialogues we are certainly not entitled
to regard as a purely disintegrating, negative
power. And though there can be no doubt
whatever that the most immediate effect of the
Socratic impulse tended to the dissolution of
Dionysian tragedy, yet a profound experience of
Socrates' own life compels us to ask whether
there is necessarily only an antipodal relation
between Socratism and art, and whether the birth
of an " artistic Socrates" is in general something
contradictory in itself.
For that despotic logician had now and then
the feeling of a gap, or void, a sentiment of semi-
reproach, as of a possibly neglected duty with
respect to art. There often came to him, as he
tells his friends in prison, one and the same
dream-apparition, which kept constantly repeating
to him: "Socrates, practise music. " Up to his
very last days he solaces himself with the opinion
that his philosophising is the highest form of
poetry, and finds it hard to believe that a deity
will remind him of the "common, popular music. "
Finally, when in prison, he consents to practise
also this despised music, in order thoroughly to
unburden his conscience. And in this frame of
mind he composes a poem on Apollo and turns
a few . <Esopian fables into verse. It was some-
thing similar to the demonian warning voice which
urged him to these practices ; it was because of his
Apollonian insight that, like a barbaric king, he
did not understand the noble image of a god and
was in danger of sinning against a deity—through
ignorance. The prompting voice of the Socratic


## p. 113 (#155) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. H$
dream-vision is the only sign of doubtfulness as
to the limits of logical nature. "Perhaps "—thus
he had to ask himself—" what is not intelligible
to me is not therefore unreasonable? Perhaps
there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician
is banished? Perhaps art is even a necessary
correlative of and supplement to science? "
IS.
In the sense of these last portentous questions
it must now be indicated how the influence of . .
Socrates (extending to the present moment, indeed,
to all futurity) has spread over posterity like an
ever-increasing shadow in the evening sun, and
how this influence again and again necessitates a i
regeneration of art,—yea, of art already with meta-
physical, broadest and profoundest sense,—and
its own eternity guarantees also the eternity of art.
Before this could be perceived, before the in-
trinsic dependence of every art on the Greeks,
the Greeks from Homer to Socrates, was con-
clusively demonstrated, it had to happen to us
with regard to these Greeks as it happened to
the Athenians with regard to Socrates. Nearly
every age and stage of culture has at some time
or other sought with deep displeasure to free u
itself from the Greeks, because in their presence |
everything self-achieved, sincerely admired and
apparently quite original, seemed all of a sudden
to lose life and colour and shrink to an abortive
copy, even to caricature. And so hearty in-
dignation breaks forth time after time against
H


## p. 114 (#156) ############################################

\\4 THE BIRTH Of TRAGEDY.
;' this presumptuous little nation, which dared to
designate as "barbaric" for all time everything
hot native: who are they, one asks one's self,
who, though they possessed only an ephemeral
historical splendour, ridiculously restricted institu-
tions, a dubious excellence in their customs, and
were even branded with ugly vices, yet lay claim
to the dignity and singular position among the
peoples to which genius is entitled among the
masses. What a pity one has not been so fortunate
as to find the cup of hemlock with which such an
affair could be disposed of without ado: for
all the poison which envy, calumny, and rankling
resentment engendered within themselves have
not sufficed to destroy that self-sufficient grandeur!
And so one feels ashamed and afraid in the
presence of the Greeks: unless one prize truth
above all things, and dare also to acknowledge to
one's self this truth, that the. Greeks, as charioteers,
hold in their hands the reins of our own and_pf—
every culture, but that almost always chariot and
horses are of too poor material and incom-
mensurate with the glory of their guides, who
then will deem it sport to run such a team into
an abyss: which they themselves clear with the
leap of Achilles.
^ In order to assign alsojto Socrates the dignity
of such a leading position, it will suffice to recog-
nise in him the type of an unheard-of form of
v existence, . the type of the theoretical man, with
regard to whose meaning and purpose it will be
our next task to attain an insight. Like the artist,
y, . the theorist also finds an infinite satisfaction in


## p. 115 (#157) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 115
whfit tir-and, like the former, he is shielded by this
satisfaction from the practical ethics of pessimism
with its lynx eyes which shine only in the dark.
For if the artist in every unveiling of truth always
cleaves with raptured eyes only to that which still
remains veiled after the unveiling, the theoretical
man, nn the other hand, enjoys and contents
himself with the cast-off veil, and finds the con-
summation of his pleasure in the process of a
. continuously successful unveiling through his
own unaided efforts. There would have been no
science it it had only been concerned about that
one naked goddess and nothing else. For then
its disciples would have been obliged to feel like
those who purposed to dig a hole straight through
the earth: each one of whom perceives that with
the utmost lifelong exertion he is able to excavate
only a very little of the enormous depth, which is
again filled up before his eyes by the labours of
his successor, so that a third man seems to do
well when on his own account he selects a new
spot for his attempts at tunnelling. If now some
one proves conclusively that the antipodal goal
cannot be attained in this direct way, who will
still care to toil on in the old depths, unless he
has learned to content himself in the meantime
with finding precious stones or discovering natural
laws? For that reason Lessing, the most honest
theoretical man, ventured to say that he cared
more for the search after truth than for truth
itself: in saying which he revealed the funda-
mental secret of science, to the astonishment, and
indeed, to the vexation of scientific men. Well,


## p. 116 (#158) ############################################

116
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
to be sure, there stands alongside of this detached
perception, as an excess of honesty, if not of
presumption, a profound illusion which first came
to the world in the person of Socrates, the im-
perturbable belief that, by means of the clue of
causality, thinking reaches to the deepest abysses
of being, and that thinking is able not only to
perceive being but even to correct it. This sublime
metaphysical illusion is added as an instinct to
science and again and again leads the latter to
its limits, where it must change into art; which is
really the end to be attained by this mechanism.
If we now look at Socrates in the light of this
thought, he appears to us as the first who could
not only live, but—what is far more—also die
under the guidance of this instinct of science:
and hence the picture of the dying Socrates, as
the man delivered from the fear of death by
knowledge and argument, is the escutcheon above
the entrance to science which reminds every one
of its mission, namely, to make existence appear
to be comprehensible, and therefore to be justified:
for which purpose, if arguments do not suffice,
myth also must be used, which I just now desig-
nated even as the necessary consequence, yea,
as the end of science.
He who once makes intelligible to himself how,
after the death of Socrates, the mystagogue of
science, one philosophical school succeeds another,
like wave upon wave,-how an entirely unfore-
shadowed universal development of the thirst for
knowledge in the widest compass of the cultured
world (and as the specific task for every one






## p. 117 (#159) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 117
highly gifted) led science on to the high sea from
which since then it has never again been able to
be completely ousted; how through the universality
of this movement a common net of thought was
first stretched over the entire globe, with prospects,
moreover, of conformity to law in an entire solar
system;—he who realises all this, together with
the amazingly high pyramid of our present-day
knowledge, cannot fail to see in Socrates the
turning-point and vortex of so-called universal
history. For if one were to imagine the whole
incalculable sum of energy which has been used
up by that universal tendency,—employed, not in
the service of knowledge, but for the practical, i. e. ,
egoistical ends of individuals and peoples,—then
probably the instinctive love of life would be so
much weakened in universal wars of destruction
and incessant migrations of peoples, that, owing
to the practice of suicide, the individual would
perhaps feel the last remnant of a sense of duty,
when, like the native of the Fiji Islands, as son
he strangles his parents and, as friend, his friend:
a practical pessimism which might even give rise I . . .
to a horrible ethics of general slaughter out of
pity—which, for the rest, exists and has existed
wherever art in one form or another, especially as
science and religion, has not appeared as a remedy
and preventive of that pestilential breath.
In view of this practical pessimism, Socrates is
the archetype of the theoretical optimist, who in
the above-indicated belief in the fathomableness of
the nature of things, attributes to knowledge and
perception the power of a universal medicine, and


## p. 118 (#160) ############################################

Il8 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
sees in error evil in itself. To penetrate into the
depths of the nature of things, and to separate
true perception from error and illusion, appeared
to the Socratic man the noblest and even the only
truly human calling: just as from the time of
Socrates onwards the mechanism of concepts, judg-
ments, and inferences was prized above all other
capacities as the highest activity and the most
admirable gift of nature. Even the sublimest
moral acts, the stirrings of pity, of self-sacrifice, of
heroism, and that tranquillity of soul, so difficult
of attainment, which the Apollonian Greek called
Sophrosyne, were derived by Socrates, and his
like-minded successors up to the present day, from
the dialectics of knowledge, and were accordingly
designated as teachable. He who has experienced
in himself the joy of a Socratic perception, and
felt how it seeks to embrace, in constantly widening
circles, the entire world of phenomena, will thence-
forth find no stimulus which could urge him to
existence more forcible than the desire to complete
that conquest and to knit the net impenetrably
close. To a person thus minded the Platonic
Socrates then appears as the teacher of an entirely
new form of "Greek cheerfulness" and felicity of
existence, which seeks to discharge itself in actions,
and will find its discharge for the most part in
maieutic and pedagogic influences on noble youths,
with a view to the ultimate production of genius.
But now science, spurred on by its powerful
illusion, hastens irresistibly to its limits, on which
its optimism, hidden in the essence of logic, is
wrecked. For the periphery of the circle of


## p. 119 (#161) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 110,
science has an infinite number of points, and
while there is still no telling how this circle can
ever be completely measured, yet the noble and
gifted man, even before the middle of his career,
inevitably comes into contact with those extreme
points of the periphery where he stares at the
inexplicable. . When he here sees to his dismay
how logic coils round jfir1f Qf these limitr nnA
^finally hires its own tail—then the new form of
perception discloses itself, namely tragic perception,
which, IrTorder even to be endured, requires art as
a safeguard and remedy.
If, with eyes strengthened and refreshed at the
sight of the Greeks, we look upon the highest
spheres of the world that surrounds us, we behold
the avidity of the insatiate optimistic knowledge,
of which Socrates is the typical representative,
transformed into tragic resignation and the need
s>{ art: while, to be sure, this same avidity, in its
lower stages, has to exhibit itself as antagonistic to
art, and must especially have an inward detestation
of Dionyso-tragic art, as was exemplified in the
opposition of Socratism to ^Eschylean tragedy.
Here then with agitated spirit we knock at
the gates of the present and the future: will that
"transforming" lead to ever new configurations
of genius, and especially of the music-practising
Socrates} Will the net of art which is spread
over existence, whether under the name of religion
or of science, be knit always more closely and
delicately, or is it destined to be torn to shreds
under the restlessly barbaric activity and whirl
which is called "the present day" ? —Anxious,


## p. 120 (#162) ############################################

120 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
yet not disconsolate, we stand aloof for a little
while, as the spectators who are permitted
to be witnesses of these tremendous struggles
and transitions. Alas! It is the charm of these
struggles that he who beholds them must also
fight them!
16.
By this elaborate historical example we have
endeavoured to make it clear that . tragedy perishes
as surely by the evanescence of the spirit of music. .
as it can be. born only out of this spirit. In order
to qualifythe singularity ol this assertion, and,
on the other hand, to disclose the source of this
insight of ours, we must now confront with clear
vision the analogous phenomena of the present
time; we must enter into the midst of these
struggles, which, as I said just now, are being
carried on in the highest spheres of our present
world between the insatiate optimistic perception
and the tragic need of art. In so doing I shall
leave out of consideration all other antagonistic
tendencies which at all times oppose art, especially
tragedy, and which at present again extend their
sway triumphantly, to such an extent that of the
theatrical arts only the farce and the ballet, for
example, put forth their blossoms, which perhaps
not every one cares to smell, in tolerably rich
luxuriance. I will speak only of the Most Illus-
trious Opposition to the tragic conception of things and by this I mean essentially optimistic
. science, with its ancestor Socrates at the head of
it Presently also the forces will be designated
,


## p. 121 (#163) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 121
which seem to me to guarantee a re-birth of
tragedy—and who knows what other blessed hopes
for the German genius!
Before we plunge into the midst of these
struggles, let us array ourselves in the armour of
our hitherto acquired knowledge. In contrast to
all those who are intent on deriving the arts from
one exclusive principle, as the necessary vital
source of every work of art, I keep my eyes fixed
on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo
and Dionysus, and recognise in them the living
and conspicuous representatives of two worlds of
art which differ in their intrinsic essence and in
their highest aims. Apollo stands before me as
the transfiguring genius of the principium indi-
viduationis through which alone the redemption
in appearance is to be truly attained, while by the
mystical cheer of Dionysus the spell of individua-
tion is broken, and the way lies open to the
Mothers of Being,* to the innermost heart of
things. This extraordinary antithesis, which
"Opens up yawningly between plastic art as the
Apollonian and music as the Dionysian art, has
become manifest to only one of the great thinkers,
to such an extent that, even without this key
to the symbolism of the Hellenic divinities, he
allowed to Tmusic a different character and origin
,in advance, of all the . ather arts, because, unlike
them, it is not a copy of the phenomenon, but a
_direct_co2y_pT the wilt itself, and therefore. repre-
sents the metaphysical of everything physical in the
* Cf. Faust, Part II. Act. I. —Tr.



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122 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
world, the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon.
(Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,
I. 310. ) To this most important perception of
aesthetics (with which, taken in a serious sense,
aesthetics properly commences), Richard Wagner,
by way of confirmation of its eternal truth, affixed
his seal, when he asserted in his Beethoven that
music must be judged according to aesthetic prin-
ciples quite different from those which apply to
the plastic arts, and not, in general, according to~
. the category ot beauty": although" ah erroneous
aesthetics, inspired by a misled and degenerate art,
has by virtue of the concept of beauty prevailing
in the plastic domain accustomed itself to demand
of music an effect analogous to that of the works
of plastic art, namely the suscitating of delight
in beautiful forms. Upon perceiving this extra-
ordinary antithesis, I felt a strong inducement to
approach the essence of Greek tragedy, and, by
means of it, the profoundest revelation of Hellenic
genius: for I at last thought myself to be in posses-
sion of a charm to enable me—far beyond the
phraseology of our usual aesthetics—to represent
vividly to my mind the primitive problem of
tragedy: whereby such an astounding insight into
the Hellenic character was afforded me that it
necessarily seemed as if our proudly comporting
classico-Hellenic science had thus far contrived
to subsist almost exclusively on phantasmagoria
and externalities.
Perhaps we may lead up to this primitive
problem with the question: what aesthetic effect
results when the intrinsically separate art-powers,


## p. 123 (#165) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 123
the Apollonian and the Dionysian, enter into con-
current actions? Or, in briefer form: how is
music related to image and concept? —Schopen-
hauer, whom Richard Wagner, with especial
reference to this point, accredits with an unsur-
passable clearness and perspicuity of exposition,
expresses himself most copiously on the subject
in the following passage which I shall cite here at
full length * (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I.
p. 309): "According to all this, we may regard
the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as
two different eyprp^inns nf the same thing. f which
is therefore itself the only medium of the analogy
between these two expressions, so that a know-
ledge of this medium is required in order to
understand that analogy. Music, therefore, if
regarded as an expression of the world, is in
the highest degree a universal language, which
is related indeed to the universality of concepts,
much as these are related to the particular things.
Its universality, however, is by no means the
empty universality of abstraction, but of quite a
different kind, and is united with thorough and
distinct definiteness. In this respect it resembles
geometrical figures and numbers, which are the
universal forms of all possible objects of experience
and applicable to them all a priori, and yet are
not abstract but perceptible and thoroughly
determinate. All possible efforts, excitements
* Cf. World and Will as Idea, 1. p. 339, trans, by Haldane
and Kemp.
+ That is " the will" as understood by Schopenhauer. —
Tr.



## p. 124 (#166) ############################################

124
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the
heart of man and that reason includes in the wide,
negative concept of feeling, may be expressed
by the infinite number of possible melodies, but
always in the universality of mere form, without
the material, always according to the thing-in-
itself, not the phenomenon, of which they repro-
duce the very soul and essence as it were, without
the body. This deep relation which music bears
to the true nature of all things also explains the .
fact that suitable music played to any scene,
action, event, or surrounding seems to disclose
to us its most secret meaning, and appears as
the most accurate and distinct commentary upon
it; as also the fact that whoever gives himself
up entirely to the impression of a symphony
seems to see all the possible events of life and
the world take place in himself: nevertheless
upon reflection he can find no likeness between
the music and the things that passed before his
mind. For, as we have said, music is distinguished
from all the other arts by the fact that it is not
a copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately,
the adequate objectivity of the will, but is the
direct copy of the will itself, and therefore
represents the metaphysical of everything physical
in the world, and the thing-in-itself of every
phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as well
call the world embodied music as embodied will:
and this is the reason why music makes every
picture, and indeed every scene of real life and of
the world, at once appear with higher significance;
all the more so, to be sure, in proportion as its



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
125
melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the
given phenomenon. It rests upon this that we
are able to set a poem to music as a song, or a
perceptible representation as a pantomime, or both
as an opera. Such particular pictures of human
life, set to the universal language of music, are
never bound to it or correspond to it with
stringent necessity, but stand to it only in the
relation of an example chosen at will to a general
concept. In the determinateness of the real
they represent that which music expresses in the
universality of mere form. For melodies are to
a certain extent, like general concepts, an abstrac-
tion from the actual. This actual world, then,
the world of particular things, affords the object
of perception, the special and the individual, the
particular case, both to the universality of con-
cepts and to the universality of the melodies.
But these two universalities are in a certain respect
opposed to each other; for the concepts contain
only the forms, which are first of all abstracted
from perception,—the separated outward shell of
things, as it were,—and hence they are, in the
strictest sense of the term, abstracta; music, on
the other hand, gives the inmost kernel which
precedes all forms, or the heart of things. This
relation may be very well expressed in the
language of the schoolmen, by saying: the con-
cepts are the universalia post rem, but music gives
the universalia ante rem, and the real world the
universalia in re. But that in general a relation
is possible between a composition and a perceptible
representation rests, as we have said, upon the


## p. 126 (#168) ############################################

126 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
fact that both are simply different expressions of
the same inner being of the world. When now,
in the particular case, such a relation is actually
given, that is to say, when the composer has been
able to express in the universal language of music
the emotions of will which constitute the heart of
an event, then the melody of the song, the music
'of the opera, is expressive. . But__the analogy
, , discovered by the composer bet weentruftwo must
1 _>(c have proceeded from the direct TaibwTecTge ot the
'"i . j^ature of the world unknown to his reason, and
must not be an imitation proaucea with conscious
intention by means ot conceptions j otherwise the
music does not express the inner nature of the
will itself, but merely gives an inadequate imita-
tion of its phenomenon: all specially imitative
music does this. "
We have therefore, according to the doctrine of
Schopenhauer, an immediate understanding of
music as the language of the will, and feel our
imagination stimulated to give form to this
invisible and yet so actively stirred spirit-world
which speaks to us, and prompted to embody it
in an analogous example. On the other hand,
image and concept, under the influence of a truly
conformable music, acquire a higher significance.
. Dionysian art therefore is wont to exercise two
kinds of influences on the Apollonian art-faculty:
music firstly incites to the symbolic intuition of
Dionysian universality, and, secondly, it causes the
symbolic image to stand forth in its fullest signific-
ance. From these facts, intelligible in themselves
and not inaccessible to profounder observation,



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 127
I infer the capacity of music to give birth to myth, *"'
that is to say, the most significant exemplar, and
precisely tragic myth: the myth which speaks of . | ^
Dionysian knowledge in symbols. In the pheno-'
menon of the lyrist, I have set forth that in him
music strives to express itself with regard to its
nature in Apollonian images. If now we reflect
that music in its highest potency must seek to
attain also to its highest symbolisation, we must
deem it possible that it also knows how to find
the symbolic expression of its inherent Dionysian
wisdom; and where shall we have to seek for this
expression if not in tragedy and, in general, in the
conception of the tragic?
From the nature of art, as it is ordinarily con-
ceived according to the single category of appear-
ance and beauty, the tragic cannot be honestly
deduced at all; it is only through the spirit of
music that we understand the joy in the annihila-
tion of the individual. For in the particular
examples of such annihilation only is the eternal
phenomenon of Dionysian art made clear to us,
which gives expression to the will in its omnipo-
tence, as it were, behind the principium individua-
tions, the eternal life beyond all phenomena, and
in spite of all annihilation. The metaphysical
delight in the tragic is a translation of the instinct-
ively unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the
language of the scene: the hero, the highest
manifestation of the will, is disavowed for our
pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and
because the eternal life of the will is not affected
by his annihilation. "We believe in eternal life. "


## p. 128 (#170) ############################################

128
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
tragedy exclaims; while music is the proximate
idea of this life. Plastic art has an altogether
different object : here Apollo vanquishes the
suffering of the individual by the radiant glorifica-
tion of the eternity of the phenomenon; here beauty
triumphs over the suffering inherent in life; pain
is in a manner surreptitiously obliterated from the
features of nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic
symbolism the same nature speaks to us with its
true undissembled voice: “Be as I am! Amidst
the ceaseless change of phenomena the eternally
creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to
existence, self-satisfying eternally with this change
of phenomena! ”
17.
Dionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of the
eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this
joy not in phenomena, but behind phenomena.
We are to perceive how all that comes into being
must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are com-
pelled to look into the terrors of individual exist-
ence—yet we are not to become torpid: a meta-
physical comfort tears us momentarily from the
bustle of the transforming figures. We are really
for brief moments Primordial Being itself, and feel
its indomitable desire for being and joy in existence;
the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena,
now appear to us as something necessary, consider-
ing the surplus of innumerable forms of existence
which throng and push one another into life, con-
sidering the exuberant fertility of the universal
will. We are pierced by the maddening sting of



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
129
these pains at the very moment when we have
become, as it were, one with the immeasurable
primordial joy in existence, and when we antici-
pate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and
eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we
are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but
as the one living being, with whose procreative joy
we are blended.
The history of the rise of Greek tragedy now
tells us with luminous precision that the tragic art
of the Greeks was really born of the spirit of music:
with which conception we believe we have done
justice for the first time to the original and most
astonishing significance of the chorus. At the
same time, however, we must admit that the im-
port of tragic myth as set forth above never
became transparent with sufficient lucidity to the
Greek poets, let alone the Greek philosophers;
their heroes speak, as it were, more superficially
than they act; the myth does not at all find its
adequate objectification in the spoken word. The
structure of the scenes and the conspicuous images
reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can
put into words and concepts: the same being also
observed in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for in-
stance, in an analogous manner talks more super-
ficially than he acts, so that the previously mentioned
lesson of Hamlet' is to be gathered not from his
words, but from a more profound contemplation
and survey of the whole. With respect to Greek
tragedy, which of course presents itself to us only
as word-drama, I have even intimated that the
incongruence between myth and expression might



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130
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
easily tempt us to regard it as shallower and less
significant than it really is, and accordingly to
postulate for it a more superficial effect than it
must have had according to the testimony of the
ancients: for how easily one forgets that what
the word-poet did not succeed in doing, namely
realising the highest spiritualisation and ideality
of myth, he might succeed in doing every moment
as creative musician! We require, to be sure,
almost by philological method to reconstruct for
ourselves the ascendency of musical influence in
order to receive something of the incomparable
comfort which must be characteristic of true
tragedy. Even this musical ascendency, however,
would only have been felt by us as such had we
been Greeks: while in the entire development of
Greek music—as compared with the infinitely
richer music known and familiar to us—we imagine
we hear only the youthful song of the musical
genius intoned with a feeling of diffidence. The
Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, eternal
children, and in tragic art also they are only
children who do not know what a sublime play-
thing has originated under their hands andis
being demolished.
That striving of the spirit of music for symbolic
and mythical manifestation, which increases from
the beginnings of lyric poetry to Attic tragedy,
breaks off all of a sudden immediately after attain-
ing luxuriant development, and disappears, as it
were, from the surface of Hellenic art: while the
Dionysian view of things born of this striving lives
on in Mysteries and, in its strangest metamorphoses


## p. 131 (#173) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
131
and debasements, does not cease to attract earnest
natures. Will it not one day rise again as art out
of its mystic depth ?
Here the question occupies us, whether the power
by the counteracting influence of which tragedy
perished, has for all time strength enough to pre-
vent the artistic reawaking of tragedy and of the
tragic view of things. If ancient tragedy was
driven from its course by the dialectical desire for
knowledge and the optimism of science, it might
be inferred that there is an eternal conflict betweenii
the theoretic and the tragic view of things, and only IL
after the spirit of science has been led to its
boundaries, and its claim to universal validity has
been destroyed by the evidence of these boundaries,
can we hope for a re-birth of tragedy; for which
form of culture we should have to use the symbol
of the music-practising Socrates in the sense spoken
of above. In this contrast, I understand by the
spirit of science the belief which first came to light !
in the person of Socrates,—the belief in the fathom-
ableness of nature and in knowledge as a panacea.
He who recalls the immediate consequences of
this restlessly onward-pressing spirit of science
will realise at once that myth was annihilated by_ !
it, and that, in consequence of this annihilation,
poetry was driven as a homeless being from her
natural ideal soil. If we have rightly assigned to
music the capacity to reproduce myth from itself,
we may in turn expect to find the spirit of science on
the path where it inimically opposes this mythopoeic
power of music. This takes place in the develop-
ment of the New Attic Dithyramb, the music of




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132
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
.
which no longer expressed the inner essence, the
will itself, but only rendered the phenomenon in-
sufficiently, in an imitation by means of concepts;
from which intrinsically degenerate music the truly
musical natures turned away with the same re-
pugnance that they felt for the art-destroying
tendency of Socrates. The unerring instinct of
Aristophanes surely did the proper thing when
it, comprised Socrates himself, the tragedy of
Euripides, and the music of the new Dithyrambic
poets in the same feeling of hatred, and perceived in
all three phenomena the symptoms of a degenerate
culture. By this New Dithyramb, music has in an
outrageous manner been made the imitative portrait
of phenomena, for instance, of a battle or a storm
at sea, and has thus, of course, been entirely
deprived of its mythopoeic power. For if it
endeavours to excite our delight only by com-
pelling us to seek external analogies between a
vital or natural process and certain rhythmical
figures and characteristic sounds of music; if our
understanding is expected to satisfy itself with
the perception of these analogies, we are reduced
to a frame of mind in which the reception of the
mythical is impossible; for the myth as a unique
exemplar of generality and truth towering into
the infinite, desires to be conspicuously perceived.
The truly Dionysian music presents itself to us as
such a general mirror of the universal will : the
conspicuous event which is refracted in this mirror
expands at once for our consciousness to the copy
of an eternal truth. Conversely, such a con-
spicious event is at once divested of every mythical



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
133
character by the tone-painting of the New
Dithyramb; music has here become a wretched
copy of the phenomenon, and therefore infinitely
poorer than the phenomenon itself: through which
poverty it still further reduces even the phenomenon
for our consciousness, so that now, for instance,
a musically imitated battle of this sort exhausts
itself in marches, signal-sounds, etc. , and our
imagination is arrested precisely by these super-
ficialities. Tone-painting is therefore in every
respect the counterpart of true music with its
mythopoeic power : through it the phenomenon,
poor in itself, is made still poorer, while through
an isolated Dionysian music the phenomenon is
evolved and expanded into a picture of the world.
It was an immense triumph of the non-Dionysian
spirit, when, in the development of the New
Dithyramb, it had estranged music from itself and
reduced it to be the slave of phenomena. Euripides,
who, albeit in a higher sense, must be designated
as a thoroughly unmusical nature, is for this very
reason a passionate adherent of the New Dithy-
rambic Music, and with the liberality of a freebooter
employs all its effective turns and mannerisms.
In another direction also we see at work the
power of this un-Dionysian, myth-opposing spirit,
when we turn our eyes to the prevalence of
character representation and psychological refine-
ment from Sophocles onwards. The character
must no longer be expanded into an eternal type,
but, on the contrary, must operate individually
through artistic by-traits and shadings, through
the nicest precision of all lines, in such a manner


## p. 134 (#176) ############################################

134
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
that the spectator is in general no longer conscious
of the myth, but of the mighty nature-myth and
the imitative power of the artist. Here also we
observe the victory of the phenomenon over the
Universal, and the delight in the particular quasi-
anatomical preparation; we actually breathe the
air of a theoretical world, in which scientific
knowledge is valued more highly than the artistic
reflection of a universal law. The movement
along the line of the representation of character
proceeds rapidly: while Sophocles still delineates
complete characters and employs myth for their
refined development, Euripides already delineates
only prominent individual traits of character, which
can express themselves in violent bursts of passion;
in the New Attic Comedy, however, there are only
masks with one expression : frivolous old men,
duped panders, and cunning slaves in untiring re-
petition. Where now is the mythopoeic spirit of
music? What is still left now of music is either
excitatory music or souvenir music, that is, either
a stimulant for dull and used-up nerves, or tone-
painting. As regards the former, it hardly matters
about the text set to it: the heroes and choruses
of Euripides are already dissolute enough when
once they begin to sing; to what pass must things
have come with his brazen successors ?
The new un-Dionysian spirit, however, manifests
itself most clearly in the dénouements of the new
dramas. In the Old Tragedy one could feel at the
close the metaphysical comfort, without which the
delight in tragedy cannot be explained at all; the
conciliating tones from another world sound purest,




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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
135
perhaps, in the dipus at Colonus. Now that the
genius of music has fled from tragedy, tragedy is,
strictly speaking, dead: for from whence could one
now draw the metaphysical comfort ? One sought
therefore, for an earthly unravelment of the tragic
dissonance; the hero, after he had been sufficiently
tortured by fate, reaped a well-deserved reward
through a superb marriage or divine tokens of
favour. The hero had turned gladiator, on whom,
after being liberally battered about and covered
with wounds, freedom was occasionally bestowed.
The deus ex machina took the place of metaphysical
comfort. I will not say that the tragic view of
things was everywhere completely destroyed by the
intruding spirit of the un-Dionysian: we only know
that it was compelled to flee from art into the
under-world as it were, in the degenerate form of a
secret cult. Over the widest extent of the Hellenic
character, however, there raged the consuming
blast of this spirit, which manifests itself in the form
of “Greek cheerfulness," which we have already
spoken of as a senile, unproductive love of exists
ence; this cheerfulness is the counterpart of the
splendid “naïveté" of the earlier Greeks, which, ac-
cording to the characteristic indicated above, must be
conceived as the blossom of the Apollonian culture
growing out of a dark abyss, as the victory which
the Hellenic will, through its mirroring of beauty,
obtains over suffering and the wisdom of suffering.
The noblest manifestation of that other form of
“Greek cheerfulness,” the Alexandrine, is the cheer-
fulness of the theoretical man: it exhibits the same
symptomatic characteristics as I have just inferred



## p. 136 (#178) ############################################

I36 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
f
concerning the spirit of the un-Dionysian :—it com-
bats Dionysian wisdom and art, it seeks to dissolve
myth, it substitutes for metaphysical comfort an
earthly consonance, in fact, a deus ex machina of its
own, namely the god of machines and crucibles,
that is, the powers of the genii of nature recognised
and employed in the service of higher egoism; it
believes in amending the world by knowledge, in
guiding life by science, and that it can really con-
fine the individual within a narrow sphere of solv-
able problems, where he cheerfully says to life: "I
desire thee: it is worth while to know thee. "
18.
It is an eternal phenomenon: the avidious will
can always, by means of an illusion spread over
things, detain its creatures in life and compel them
to live on. One is chained by the Socratic love of
,knowledge and the vain hope of being able thereby
to heal the eternal wound of existence; another. is
ensnared by art's seductive veil of beauty. ilutt£ring
before his eyes; still anothrr hy the rn eta physical
comfort that eternal life flows on indestructibly
beneath the whirl of phenomena. ! , to say nothing
of the more ordinary and almost more powerful
illusions which the will has always at hand. These
three specimens of illusion are on thewhole designed
only for the more nobly endowed natures, who in
general feel profoundly the weight and burden of
existence, and must be deluded into forgetfulness
of their displeasure by exquisite stimulants. All
that we call culture is made up. of these stimulant;



## p. 137 (#179) ############################################

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
137
and, according to the proportion of the ingredients,
we have either a specially Socratic or artistic or
tragic culture: or, if historical exemplifications are
wanted, there is either an Alexandrine or a Hele
lenic or a Buddhistic culture.
Our whole modern world is entangled in the
meshes of Alexandrine culture, and recognises as
its ideal the theorist equipped with the most potent
means of knowledge, and labouring in the service
of science, of whom the archetype and progenitor
is Socrates. All our educational methods have
originally this ideal in view : every other form
of existence must struggle onwards wearisomely
beside it, as something tolerated, but not intended.
In an almost alarming manner the cultured man
was here found for a long time only in the form of
the scholar: even our poetical arts have been forced b
to evolve from learned imitations, and in the main
effect of the rhyme we still recognise the origin of
our poetic form from artistic experiments with a
non-native and thoroughly learned language. How
unintelligible must Faust, the modern cultured man,
who is in himself intelligible, have appeared to a true
Greek,—Faust, storming discontentedly through all
the faculties, devoted to magic and the devil from a
desire for knowledge, whom we have only to place
alongside of Socrates for the purpose of comparison,
in order to see that modern man begins to divine
the boundaries of this Socratic love of perception
and longs for a coast in the wide waste of the ocean
of knowledge. When Goethe on one occasion said
to Eckermann with reference to Napoleon : "Yes,
my good friend, there is also a productiveness of


## p. 138 (#180) ############################################

138 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
deeds," he reminded us in a charmingly naive
manner that the non-theorist is something incred-
ible and astounding to modern man; so that the
wisdom of Goethe is needed once more in order to
discover that such a surprising form of existence is
comprehensible, nay even pardonable.
Now, we must not hide from ourselves what is
concealed in the heart of this Socratic culture: Op-
timism, deeming itself absolute! Well, we must not
be alarmed if the fruits of this optimism ripen,—
if society, leavened to the very lowest strata by this
kind of culture, gradually begins to tremble through
wanton agitations and desires. jf. Jhr hrliof in thr
earthly happiness of all, if the belief in the possi-
bility of such a general intellectual culture is gradu-
^ ally transformed into the threatening• dernand for
such an Alexandrine earthly happiness, into the
conjuring of a Euripidean dj>u* pr. mnj. Mnn. Let
us mark this well: the Alexandrine culturerequires
a slave class, to be able to exist permanently: but,
in its optimistic view of life, it denies the necessity
of such a class, and conse
of its beautifully seductive and tranquillising utter-
dances about the ^dignity of man " ancfthe" dignity"
of labour" is spent, it gradually drifts towards a )
dreadful destination. There is nothing more terrible
than a barbaric slave class, who have learned to
regard their existence as an injustice, and now pre-
pare to take vengeance, not only for themselves, but
for all generations. In the face of such threaten-
ing storms, who dares to appeal with confident
spirit to our pale and exhausted religions, which
even in their foundations have degenerated into



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
139
scholastic religions ? —so that myth, the necessary
prerequisite of every religion, is already paralysed
everywhere, and even in this domain the optimistic
spirit—which we have just designated as the anni-
hilating germ of society-has attained the mastery.
While the evil slumbering in the heart of theor-
etical culture gradually begins to disquiet modern
man, and makes him anxiously ransack the stores
of his experience for means to avert the danger,
though not believing very much in these means ;
while he, therefore, begins to divine the conse-
quences his position involves : great, universally
gifted natures have contrived, with an incredible
amount of thought, to make use of the apparatus
of science itself, in order to point out the limits
and the relativity of knowledge generally, and thus
definitely to deny the claim of science to universal
validity and universal ends: with which demon-
stration the illusory notion was for the first time
recognised as such, which pretends, with the aid
of causality, to be able to fathom the innermost
essence of things. The extraordinary courage
and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer have suc-
ceeded in gaining the most difficult victory, the
victory over the optimism hidden in the essence
of logic, which optimism in turn is the basis of our
culture. While this optimism, resting on apparently
unobjectionable æternæ veritates, believed in the
intelligibility and solvability of all the riddles of L.
the world, and treated space, time, and causality
as totally unconditioned laws of the most universal
validity, Kant, on the other hand, showed that
these served in reality only to elevate the mere



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140
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
phenomenon, the work of Mâyâ, to the sole and
highest reality, putting it in place of the inner-
most and true essence of things, thus making the
actual knowledge of this essence impossible, that
is, according to the expression of Schopenhauer,
to lull the dreamer still more soundly asleep (Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung, l. 498). With this
knowledge a culture is inaugurated which I venture
to designate as a tragic culture; the most import-
! ant characteristic of which is that wisdom takes
the place of science as the highest end-wisdom,
which, uninfluenced by the seductive distractions
of the sciences, turns with unmoved eye to the
comprehensive view of the world, and seeks to
apprehend therein the eternal suffering as its own
with sympathetic feelings of love. Let us imagine
a rising generation with this undauntedness of
vision, with this heroic desire for the prodigious,
let us imagine the bold step of these dragon-
slayers, the proud and daring spirit with which
they turn their backs on all the effeminate doctrines
of optimism in order “to live resolutely” in the
Whole and in the Full: would it not be necessary
for the tragic man of this culture, with his self-
discipline to earnestness and terror, to desire a
new art, the art of metaphysical comfort,—namely,
tragedy, as the Hellena belonging to him, and that
he should exclaim with Faust:

Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt? *
* Cf. Introduction, p. 14.



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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 141
But now that the Socratic culture has been
shaken from two directions, and is only able to
hold the sceptre of its infallibility with trembling
hands,—once by the fear of its own conclusions
which it at length begins to surmise, and again,
because it is no longer convinced with its former
naive trust of the eternal validity of its foundation,
—it is a sad spectacle to behold how the dance of
its thought always rushes longingly on new forms,
to embrace them, and then, shuddering, lets them
go of a sudden, as Mephistopheles does the seduc-
tive Lamiae. It is certainly the symptom of the
"breach" which all are wont to speak of as the
primordial suffering of modern culture that the
theoretical man, alarmed and dissatisfied at his
own conclusions, no longer dares to entrust him-
self to the terrible ice-stream of existence: he runs
timidly up and down the bank. He no longer
wants to have anything entire, with all the natural
cruelty of things, so thoroughly has he been
spoiled by his optimistic contemplation. Besides,
he feels that a culture built up on the principles
of science must perish when it begins to grow
illogical, that is, to avoid its own conclusions.
Our art reveals this universal trouble: in vain does
one seek help by imitating all the great productive
periods and natures, in vain does one accumulate
the entire " world-literature" around modern man
for his comfort, in vain does one place one's self in
the midst of the art-styles and artists of all ages,
so that one may give names to them as Adam
did to the beasts: one still continues the eternal
hungerer, the " critic " without joy and energy, the


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142
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
Alexandrine man, who is in the main a librarian
and corrector of proofs, and who, pitiable wretch
goes blind from the dust of books and printers'
errors.
19.
We cannot designate the intrinsic substance of
Socratic culture more distinctly than by calling it
the culture of the opera : for it is in this depart-
ment that culture has expressed itself with special
naïveté concerning its aims and perceptions,
which is sufficiently surprising when we compare
the genesis of the opera and the facts of operatic
development with the eternal truths of the
Apollonian and Dionysian. I call to mind first
of all the origin of the stilo rappresentativo and
the recitative. Is it credible that this thoroughly
externalised operatic music, incapable of devotion,
could be received and cherished with enthusiastic
favour, as a re-birth, as it were, of all true music,
by the very age in which the ineffably sublime
and sacred music of Palestrina had originated ?
And who, on the other hand, would think of
making only the diversion-craving luxuriousness
of those Florentine circles and the vanity of their
dramatic singers responsible for the love of the
opera which spread with such rapidity? That in
the same age, even among the same people, this
passion for a half-musical mode of speech should
awaken alongside of the vaulted structure of
Palestrine harmonies which the entire Christian
Middle Age had been building up, I can explain


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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 143
to myself only by a co-operating extra-artistic
tendency in the essence of the recitative.
The listener, who insists on distinctly hearing
the words under the music, has his wishes met by
the singer in that he speaks rather than sings,
and intensifies the pathetic expression of the
words in this half-song: by this intensification of
the pathos he facilitates the understanding of the
words and surmounts the remaining half of the
music. The specific danger which now threatens
him is that in some unguarded moment he may
give undue importance to music, which would
forthwith result in the destruction of the pathos
of the speech and the distinctness of the words:
while, on the other hand, he always feels himself
impelled to musical delivery and to virtuose
exhibition of vocal talent. Here the "poet"
comes to his aid, who knows how to provide him
with abundant opportunities for lyrical inter-
jections, repetitions of words and sentences, etc. ,
—at which places the singer, now in the purely
musical element, can rest himself without mind-
ing the words. This alternation of emotionally
impressive, yet only half. sung speech and wholly
sung interjections, which is characteristic of the
stilo rappresentativo, this rapidly changing en-
deavour to operate now on the conceptional and
representative faculty of the hearer, now on his
musical sense, is something so thoroughly un-
natural and withal so intrinsically contradictory
both to the Apollonian and Dionysian artistic
impulses, that one has to infer an origin of the
recitative foreign to all artistic instincts. The


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144 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
f
recitative must be defined, according to this
description, as the combination of epic and lyric
delivery, not indeed as an intrinsically stable
combination which could not be attained in the
case of such totally disparate elements, but an
entirely superficial mosaic conglutination, such as
is totally unprecedented in the domain of nature
and experience. But this was not the opinion of
the inventors of the recitative: they themselves, and
their age with them, believed rather that the
mystery of antique music had been solved by
this stilo rappresentativo, in which, as they thought,
the only explanation of the enormous influence of
an Orpheus, an Amphion, and even of Greek
tragedy was to be found. The new style was
regarded by them as the re-awakening of the
most effective music, the Old Greek music:
indeed, with the universal and popular conception
of the Homeric world as the primitive world, they
could abandon themselves to the dream of having
descended once more into the paradisiac beginnings
of mankind, wherein music also must needs have
had the unsurpassed purity, power, and innocence
of which the poets could give such touching
accounts in their pastoral plays. Here we see
into the internal process of development of this
thoroughly modern variety of art, the opera: a
powerful need here acquires an art, but it is a
need of an unaesthetic kind: the yearning for the
idyll, the belief in the prehistoric existence of the
artistic, good man. The recitative was regarded
as the redisgpvrrpd language of this primitive
man; the- ^ppra. . as the recovered land of this


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THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
145
idyllically or heroically good creature, who in
every action follows at the same time a natural
artistic impulse, who sings a little along with all
he has to say, in order to sing immediately with
full voice on the slightest emotional excitement.
It is now a matter of indifference to us that
the humanists of those days combated the old
ecclesiastical representation of man as naturally
corrupt and lost, with this new-created picture of
the paradisiac artist : so that opera may be under-
stood as the oppositional dogma of the good man,
whereby however a solace was at the same time
found for the pessimism to which precisely the
seriously-disposed men of that time were most
strongly incited, owing to the frightful uncertainty
of all conditions of life. It is enough to have
perceived that the intrinsic charm, and therefore
the genesis, of this new form of art lies in the
gratification of an altogether unæsthetic need, in
the optimistic glorification of man as such, in the
conception of the primitive man as the man
naturally good and artistic: a principle of the
opera which has gradually changed into a
threatening and terrible demand, which, in face of
the socialistic movements of the present time, we
can no longer ignore. The "good primitive man”
wants his rights : what paradisiac prospects !
I here place by way of parallel still another
equally obvious confirmation of my view that
opera is built up on the same principles as our v
Alexandrine culture. Opera is the birth of the i
theoretical man, of the critical layman, not of the v
artist: one of the most surprising facts in the v


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146
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.
whole history of art. It was the demand of
thoroughly unmusical hearers that the words must
above all be understood, so that according to
them a re-birth of music is only to be expected
when some mode of singing has been discovered
in which the text-word lords over the counter-
point as the master over the servant. For the
words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the
accompanying harmonic system as the soul is
nobler than the body. It was in accordance with
the laically unmusical crudeness of these views that
the combination of music, picture and expression
was effected in the beginnings of the opera : in the
spirit of this æsthetics the first experiments were
also made in the leading laic circles of Florence
by the poets and singers patronised there. The
man incapable of art creates for himself a species
of art precisely because he is the inartistic man as
such. Because he does not divine the Dionysian
depth of music, he changes his musical taste into
appreciation of the understandable word-and-tone-
rhetoric of the passions in the stilo rappresentativo,
and into the voluptuousness of the arts of song;
because he is unable to behold a vision, he forces
the machinist and the decorative artist into his
service; because he cannot apprehend the true
nature of the artist, he conjures up the "artistic
primitive man" to suit his taste, that is, the man
who sings and recites verses under the influence
of passion. He dreams himself into a time when
passion suffices to generate songs and poems : as
if emotion had ever been able to create anything
artistic.