The Birth of Tragedy (Chap. 22)

An attentive friend should remind himself in a pure and unconfused manner, from his own experience, of a truly musical tragedy. I think I have described what this effect is like, attending to both aspects of it in such a way that he will now know how to interpret his own experience for himself. For he will recall how, confronted with the myth unfolding in front of him, he felt himself raised up to some sort of omniscience, as if now the visual power of his eyes was not merely a force dealing with surfaces but was capable of penetrating within, and as if, with the help of the music, he could now see in front him the turbulent feelings of the will, the war of motives, the growing storm of passions as something which is, as it were, sensuously present, like an abundance of living lines and figures in motion, and thus as if he could plunge into the most delicate secrets of unknown emotions.

As he becomes conscious of the highest intensification of his instincts which aim for clarity and transfiguration, nonetheless he feels with equal certainty that this long series of Apollonian artistic effects does not produce that delightful resignation of will-less contemplation which the sculptor andthe epic poet, in other words, the genuine Apollonian artists, bring out in him with their works of art, that is, the justification of the world of the individuatio [individual] attained in that contemplation, which is the peak and essence of Apollonian art. He looks at the transfigured world of the stage and yet denies it. He sees the tragic hero in front of him in epic clarity and beauty and, nonetheless, takes pleasure in his destruction. He understands the events on stage to their innermost core and joyfully flies off into the incomprehensible. He feels the actions of the hero as justified and is, nonetheless, still more uplifted when these actions destroy the one who initiated them. He shudders in the face of the suffering which the hero is about to encounter and, nonetheless, because of it has a premonition of a higher, much more overpowering joy. He perceives more things and more profoundly than ever before and yet wishes he were blind.

Where would we be able to derive this miraculous division of the self, this collapse of the Apollonian climax, if not from Dionysian magic, which, while it apparently excites the Apollonian feelings to their highest point, nevertheless can still force this exuberance of Apollonian art into its service? The tragic myth can only be understood as a symbolic picture of Dionysian wisdom by means of Apollonian art.

It leads the world of appearances to its limits, where it denies itself and once again seeks to fly back into the womb of the true and single reality, at which point it seems, with Isolde, to sing its metaphysical swan song.

In the surging torrents
of seas of my desires,
in resounding tones
of fragrant waves,
in the blowing All
of the world’s breath—
to drown, to sink down,
to lose consciousness—
the highest joy.1

In this way we recall, from the experiences of the truly aesthetic listener, the tragic artist himself, as he, like a voluptuous divinity of individuatio [individuation] , creates his forms, in which sense his work can scarcely be understood as an “imitation of nature”— but then as his immense Dionysian drive devours this entire world of appearances in order to allow us, through its destruction, to have a premonition behind it of the primal and highest artistic joy in the womb of the primordial One.

Of course, our aestheticians don’t know what to write about this return journey to our original home, about the fraternal bond of the two brother gods of art in tragedy, any more than they do about the Apollonian or the Dionysian excitement of the listener, while they never weary of characterizing as the essential feature of the tragic the struggle of the hero with fate, the victory of a moral world order, or the purging of the emotions achieved by tragedy. Such tireless efforts lead me to the thought that in general they may be men incapable of aesthetic excitement, so that when they hear a tragedy perhaps they think of themselves only as moral beings.

Since Aristotle, there has not yet been an explanation of the tragic effect which could justify it on the basis of artistic conditions, of the aesthetic capability of the listener. Sometimes pity and fear are supposed to be pushed by the serious action to a discharge which brings relief. At other times, we are supposed to feel enthusiastic and elevated because of the victory of good and noble principles, by the sacrifice of the hero, taking that as a moral observation about the world. And just as I have no doubt that for countless men that and only that is precisely the effect of tragedy, so it’s equally clear this reveals that all these people, together with their interpreting aetheticians, have experienced nothing of tragedy as a supreme art . That pathological purgation, the catharsis of Aristotle, which the philologists are uncertain whether to count a medical or a moral phenomenon, brings to mind a remarkable feeling of Goethe’s. “Without a lively pathological interest,” he says, “I have also never succeeded in working on any kind of tragic situation, and therefore I have preferred to avoid it rather than seek it out. Could it perhaps be the case that among the merits of the ancients the highest degree of the pathetic was also only aesthetic play for them, while with us the truth of nature must be there as well, in order for such a work to be produced?”

After our marvellous experiences we can now answer yes to this profound question, once we have experienced with wonder precisely this musical tragedy, how truly the highest degree of the pathetic can be, for all that, only an aesthetic game. For that reason, we are entitled to think that only now can the primordial phenomenon of the tragic be described with some success. Anyone who nowadays still provides explanations only in terms of those surrogate effects from spheres beyond aesthetics and does not sense that he has risen above the pathological and moralistic processes may well despair altogether of his aesthetic nature. For that condition we recommend as an innocent substitute the interpretation of Shakespeare the way Gervinus does it and the diligent search for “poetic justice.”

So with the rebirth of tragedy the aesthetic listener is also born again, in whose place up to this point a strange quid pro quo habitually sat in the theatre space, with half moral and half scholarly demands — the “critic.” In his sphere so far everything has been synthetic and merely whitewashed with the appearance of life. The performing artist, in fact, did not know any more what he could begin to do with such a listener who behaved critically, and therefore he, together with the dramatist or opera composer who inspired him, peered anxiously for the last remnants of life in this demanding, barren creature incapable of enjoying itself.

But up to this point the general public has consisted of this sort of “critic.” Through education and the press, the student, the school child, indeed even the most harmless female creature has already been prepared, without being aware of it, to perceive a work of art in a similar manner. The more noble natures among the artists, faced with such a public, counted on exciting moral and religious forces, and the call for “a moral world view” stepped in vicariously, where, in fact, a powerful artistic magic should have entranced the real listener. Alternatively, dramatists brought out a splendid and at least exciting trend in contemporary political and social issues so vividly that the listener could forget his critical exhaustion and let himself go with feelings similar to those in patriotic or militaristic moments or in front of the speaker’s desk in parliament or in judicial sentences for crimes and vices. And that alienation from true artistic purposes necessarily led here and there directly to a culture of bias.

But here there stepped in, what in all artificial arts up to now has intervened, a rapaciously quick loss of that very tendency, so that, for example, the view that the theatre should be used as an institution for the moral education of a people, something taken seriously in Schiller’s day, is already counted among the incredible antiquities of an education which has been superceded. As the critic came to rule in the theatre and concert, the journalist in the schools, and the press in society, art degenerated into an object of entertainment of the basest sort, and the aesthetic critic was used as a way of binding together a vain, scattered, selfish, and, beyond that, pitifully unoriginal social group, the meaning of which we can understand from that parable of the porcupines in Schopenhauer, so there has never been a time when people have chattered so much about art and thought so little of it. But cannot we still associate with someone able to entertain himself with Beethoven and Shakespeare? Let everyone answer this question according to his own feelings: with his answer he will at any rate demonstrate what he imagines by the word “culture,” provided he seeks to answer the question at all and has not already been struck dumb with astonishment.

By contrast, many with a nobler and more naturally refined ability, even if they also have gradually turned into critical barbarians in the manner described above, could say something about an effect, as unexpected as it is entirely incomprehensible, of the sort which a work like a happily successful production of Lohengrin has had on them, except perhaps they lacked any hand which could assist them with advice and interpretation; thus, that incredibly different and totally incomparable sensation which so shook them at the time remained a single example and, after a short period of illumination, died out, like a mysterious star.1 That was the moment they had a presentiment of what an aesthetic
listener is.

Footnotes:

1These lines come from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, Act III.

1Lohengrin: an opera by Richard Wagner first produced in 1848.