{"schema_version":1,"access":"public","rights":"Public-domain or compatibly licensed source editions; provenance is retained per record.","work":{"slug":"birth-of-tragedy","title":"The Birth of Tragedy","author":"Friedrich Nietzsche","tradition":"european","language":"de","genre":"philosophy","period":"1872","source_url":"https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_VaA7AAAAYAAJ","original":{"text":"### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 1\n\nWas auch diesem fragwürdigen Buche zu Grunde liegen mag: es muss eine Frage ersten Ranges und Reizes gewesen sein, noch dazu eine tief persönliche Frage,—Zeugniss dafür ist die Zeit, in der es entstand, *trotz* der es entstand, die aufregende Zeit des deutsch-französischen Krieges von 1870/71. Während die Donner der Schlacht von Wörth über Europa weggiengen, sass der Grübler und Räthselfreund, dem die Vaterschaft dieses Buches zu Theil ward, irgendwo in einem Winkel der Alpen, sehr vergrübelt und verräthselt, folglich sehr bekümmert und unbekümmert zugleich, und schrieb seine Gedanken über die *Griechen* nieder,—den Kern des wunderlichen und schlecht zugänglichen Buches, dem diese späte Vorrede (oder Nachrede) gewidmet sein soll. Einige Wochen darauf: und er befand sich selbst unter den Mauern von Metz, immer noch nicht losgekommen von den Fragezeichen, die er zur vorgeblichen „Heiterkeit“ der Griechen und der griechischen Kunst gesetzt hatte; bis er endlich, in jenem Monat tiefster Spannung, als man in Versailles über den Frieden berieth, auch mit sich zum Frieden kam und, langsam von einer aus dem Felde heimgebrachten Krankheit genesend, die „Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik“ letztgültig bei sich feststellte.—Aus der Musik? Musik und Tragödie? Griechen und Tragödien-Musik? Griechen und das Kunstwerk des Pessimismus? Die wohlgerathenste, schönste, bestbeneidete, zum Leben verführendste Art der bisherigen Menschen, die Griechen—wie? gerade sie hatten die Tragödie *nöthig*? Mehr noch—die Kunst? Wozu—griechische Kunst?…\n\nMan erräth, an welche Stelle hiermit das grosse Fragezeichen vom Werth des Daseins gesetzt war. Ist Pessimismus *nothwendig* das Zeichen des Niedergangs, Verfalls, des Missrathenseins, der ermüdeten und geschwächten Instinkte?—wie er es bei den Indern war, wie er es, allem Anschein nach, bei uns, den „modernen“ Menschen und Europäern ist? Giebt es einen Pessimismus der *Stärke*? Eine intellektuelle Vorneigung für das Harte, Schauerliche, Böse, Problematische des Daseins aus Wohlsein, aus überströmender Gesundheit, aus *Fülle* des Daseins? Giebt es vielleicht ein Leiden an der Ueberfülle selbst? Eine versucherische Tapferkeit des schärfsten Blicks, die nach dem Furchtbaren *verlangt*, als nach dem Feinde, dem würdigen Feinde, an dem sie ihre Kraft erproben kann? an dem sie lernen will, was „das Fürchten“ ist? Was bedeutet, gerade bei den Griechen der besten, stärksten, tapfersten Zeit, der *tragische* Mythus? Und das ungeheure Phänomen des Dionysischen? Was, aus ihm geboren, die Tragödie?—Und wiederum: das, woran die Tragödie starb, der Sokratismus der Moral, die Dialektik, Genügsamkeit und Heiterkeit des theoretischen Menschen—wie? könnte nicht gerade dieser Sokratismus ein Zeichen des Niedergangs, der Ermüdung, Erkrankung, der anarchisch sich lösenden Instinkte sein? Und die „griechische Heiterkeit“ des späteren Griechenthums nur eine Abendröthe? Der epikurische Wille *gegen* den Pessimismus nur eine Vorsicht des Leidenden? Und die Wissenschaft selbst, unsere Wissenschaft—ja, was bedeutet überhaupt, als Symptom des Lebens angesehen, alle Wissenschaft? Wozu, schlimmer noch, *woher*—alle Wissenschaft? Wie? Ist Wissenschaftlichkeit vielleicht nur eine Furcht und Ausflucht vor dem Pessimismus? Eine feine Nothwehr gegen—die *Wahrheit*? Und, moralisch geredet, etwas wie Feig- und Falschheit? Unmoralisch geredet, eine Schlauheit? Oh Sokrates, Sokrates, war das vielleicht *dein* Geheimniss? Oh geheimnissvoller Ironiker, war dies vielleicht deine—Ironie?— —\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 2\n\nWas ich damals zu fassen bekam, etwas Furchtbares und Gefährliches, ein Problem mit Hörnern, nicht nothwendig gerade ein Stier, jedenfalls ein *neues* Problem: heute würde ich sagen, dass es das *Problem der Wissenschaft* selbst war—Wissenschaft zum ersten Male als problematisch, als fragwürdig gefasst. Aber das Buch, in dem mein jugendlicher Muth und Argwohn sich damals ausliess—was für ein *unmögliches* Buch musste aus einer so jugendwidrigen Aufgabe erwachsen! Aufgebaut aus lauter vorzeitigen übergrünen Selbsterlebnissen, welche alle hart an der Schwelle des Mittheilbaren lagen, hingestellt auf den Boden der *Kunst*—denn das Problem der Wissenschaft kann nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft erkannt werden—, ein Buch vielleicht für Künstler mit dem Nebenhange analytischer und retrospektiver Fähigkeiten (das heisst für eine Ausnahme-Art von Künstlern, nach denen man suchen muss und nicht einmal suchen möchte…), voller psychologischer Neuerungen und Artisten-Heimlichkeiten, mit einer Artisten-Metaphysik im Hintergrunde, ein Jugendwerk voller Jugendmuth und Jugend-Schwermuth, unabhängig, trotzig-selbstständig auch noch, wo es sich einer Autorität und eignen Verehrung zu beugen scheint, kurz ein Erstlingswerk auch in jedem schlimmen Sinne des Wortes, trotz seines greisenhaften Problems, mit jedem Fehler der Jugend behaftet, vor allem mit ihrem „Viel zu lang“, ihrem „Sturm und Drang“: andererseits, in Hinsicht auf den Erfolg, den es hatte (in Sonderheit bei dem grossen Künstler, an den es sich wie zu einem Zwiegespräch wendete, bei Richard Wagner) ein *bewiesenes* Buch, ich meine ein solches, das jedenfalls „den Besten seiner Zeit“ genug gethan hat. Darauf hin sollte es schon mit einiger Rücksicht und Schweigsamkeit behandelt werden; trotzdem will ich nicht gänzlich unterdrücken, wie unangenehm es mir jetzt erscheint, wie fremd es jetzt nach sechzehn Jahren vor mir steht,—vor einem älteren, hundert Mal verwöhnteren, aber keineswegs kälter gewordenen Auge, das auch jener Aufgabe selbst nicht fremder wurde, an welche sich jenes verwegene Buch zum ersten Male herangewagt hat,—*die Wissenschaft unter der Optik des Künstlers zu sehen, die Kunst aber unter der des Lebens*….\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 3\n\nNochmals gesagt, heute ist es mir ein unmögliches Buch,—ich heisse es schlecht geschrieben, schwerfällig, peinlich, bilderwüthig und bilderwirrig, gefühlsam, hier und da verzuckert bis zum Femininischen, ungleich im Tempo, ohne Willen zur logischen Sauberkeit, sehr überzeugt und deshalb des Beweisens sich überhebend, misstrauisch selbst gegen die *Schicklichkeit* des Beweisens, als Buch für Eingeweihte, als „Musik“ für Solche, die auf Musik getauft, die auf gemeinsame und seltene Kunst-Erfahrungen hin von Anfang der Dinge an verbunden sind, als Erkennungszeichen für Blutsverwandte in artibus,—ein hochmüthiges und schwärmerisches Buch, das sich gegen das profanum vulgus der „Gebildeten“ von vornherein noch mehr als gegen das „Volk“ abschliesst, welches aber, wie seine Wirkung bewies und beweist, sich gut genug auch darauf verstehen muss, sich seine Mitschwärmer zu suchen und sie auf neue Schleichwege und Tanzplätze zu locken. Hier redete jedenfalls—das gestand man sich mit Neugierde ebenso als mit Abneigung ein—eine *fremde* Stimme, der Jünger eines noch „unbekannten Gottes“, der sich einstweilen unter die Kapuze des Gelehrten, unter die Schwere und dialektische Unlustigkeit des Deutschen, selbst unter die schlechten Manieren des Wagnerianers versteckt hat; hier war ein Geist mit fremden, noch namenlosen Bedürfnissen, ein Gedächtniss strotzend von Fragen, Erfahrungen, Verborgenheiten, welchen der Name Dionysos wie ein Fragezeichen mehr beigeschrieben war; hier sprach—so sagte man sich mit Argwohn—etwas wie eine mystische und beinahe mänadische Seele, die mit Mühsal und willkürlich, fast unschlüssig darüber, ob sie sich mittheilen oder verbergen wolle, gleichsam in einer fremden Zunge stammelt. Sie hätte *singen* sollen, diese „neue Seele“—und nicht reden! Wie schade, dass ich, was ich damals zu sagen hatte, es nicht als Dichter zu sagen wagte: ich hätte es vielleicht gekonnt! Oder mindestens als Philologe:—bleibt doch auch heute noch für den Philologen auf diesem Gebiete beinahe Alles zu entdecken und auszugraben! Vor allem das Problem, *dass* hier ein Problem vorliegt,—und dass die Griechen, so lange wir keine Antwort auf die Frage „was ist dionysisch?“ haben, nach wie vor gänzlich unerkannt und unvorstellbar sind…\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 4\n\nJa, was ist dionysisch?—In diesem Buche steht eine Antwort darauf,—ein „Wissender“ redet da, der Eingeweihte und Jünger seines Gottes. Vielleicht würde ich jetzt vorsichtiger und weniger beredt von einer so schweren psychologischen Frage reden, wie sie der Ursprung der Tragödie bei den Griechen ist. Eine Grundfrage ist das Verhältniss des Griechen zum Schmerz, sein Grad von Sensibilität,—blieb dies Verhältniss sich gleich? oder drehte es sich um?—jene Frage, ob wirklich sein immer stärkeres *Verlangen nach Schönheit*, nach Festen, Lustbarkeiten, neuen Culten, aus Mangel, aus Entbehrung, aus Melancholie, aus Schmerz erwachsen ist? Gesetzt nämlich, gerade dies wäre wahr—und Perikles (oder Thukydides) giebt es uns in der grossen Leichenrede zu verstehen -: woher müsste dann das entgegengesetzte Verlangen, das der Zeit nach früher hervortrat, stammen, das *Verlangen nach dem Hässlichen*, der gute strenge Wille des älteren Hellenen zum Pessimismus, zum tragischen Mythus, zum Bilde alles Furchtbaren, Bösen, Räthselhaften, Vernichtenden, Verhängnissvollen auf dem Grunde des Daseins,—woher müsste dann die Tragödie stammen? Vielleicht aus der *Lust*, aus der Kraft, aus überströmender Gesundheit, aus übergrosser Fülle? Und welche Bedeutung hat dann, physiologisch gefragt, jener Wahnsinn, aus dem die tragische wie die komische Kunst erwuchs, der dionysische Wahnsinn? Wie? Ist Wahnsinn vielleicht nicht nothwendig das Symptom der Entartung, des Niedergangs, der überspäten Cultur? Giebt es vielleicht—eine Frage für Irrenärzte—Neurosen der *Gesundheit*? der Volks-Jugend und -Jugendlichkeit? Worauf weist jene Synthesis von Gott und Bock im Satyr? Aus welchem Selbsterlebniss, auf welchen Drang hin musste sich der Grieche den dionysischen Schwärmer und Urmenschen als Satyr denken? Und was den Ursprung des tragischen Chors betrifft: gab es in jenen Jahrhunderten, wo der griechische Leib blühte, die griechische Seele von Leben überschäumte, vielleicht endemische Entzückungen? Visionen und Hallucinationen, welche sich ganzen Gemeinden, ganzen Cultversammlungen mittheilten? Wie? wenn die Griechen, gerade im Reichthum ihrer Jugend, den Willen zum Tragischen hatten und Pessimisten waren? wenn es gerade der Wahnsinn war, um ein Wort Plato's zu gebrauchen, der die *grössten* Segnungen über Hellas gebracht hat? Und wenn, andererseits und umgekehrt, die Griechen gerade in den Zeiten ihrer Auflösung und Schwäche, immer optimistischer, oberflächlicher, schauspielerischer, auch nach Logik und Logisirung der Welt brünstiger, also zugleich „heiterer“ und „wissenschaftlicher“ wurden? Wie? könnte vielleicht, allen „modernen Ideen“ und Vorurtheilen des demokratischen Geschmacks zum Trotz, der Sieg des *Optimismus*, die vorherrschend gewordene *Vernünftigkeit*, der praktische und theoretische *Utilitarismus*, gleich der Demokratie selbst, mit der er gleichzeitig ist,—ein Symptom der absinkenden Kraft, des nahenden Alters, der physiologischen Ermüdung sein? Und gerade *nicht*—der Pessimismus? War Epikur ein Optimist—gerade als *Leidender*?— —Man sieht, es ist ein ganzes Bündel schwerer Fragen, mit dem sich dieses Buch belastet hat,—fügen wir seine schwerste Frage noch hinzu! Was bedeutet, unter der Optik des *Lebens* gesehn,—die Moral?…\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 5\n\nBereits im Vorwort an Richard Wagner wird die Kunst—und *nicht* die Moral—als die eigentlich *metaphysische* Thätigkeit des Menschen hingestellt; im Buche selbst kehrt der anzügliche Satz mehrfach wieder, dass nur als ästhetisches Phänomen das Dasein der Welt *gerechtfertigt* ist. In der That, das ganze Buch kennt nur einen Künstler-Sinn und -Hintersinn hinter allem Geschehen,—einen „Gott“, wenn man will, aber gewiss nur einen gänzlich unbedenklichen und unmoralischen Künstler-Gott, der im Bauen wie im Zerstören, im Guten wie im Schlimmen, seiner gleichen Lust und Selbstherrlichkeit inne werden will, der sich, Welten schaffend, von der *Noth* der Fülle und *Ueberfülle*, vom *Leiden* der in ihm gedrängten Gegensätze löst. Die Welt, in jedem Augenblicke die *erreichte* Erlösung Gottes, als die ewig wechselnde, ewig neue Vision des Leidendsten, Gegensätzlichsten, Widerspruchreichsten, der nur im *Scheine* sich zu erlösen weiss: diese ganze Artisten-Metaphysik mag man willkürlich, müssig, phantastisch nennen -, das Wesentliche daran ist, dass sie bereits einen Geist verräth, der sich einmal auf jede Gefahr hin gegen die *moralische* Ausdeutung und Bedeutsamkeit des Daseins zur Wehre setzen wird. Hier kündigt sich, vielleicht zum ersten Male, ein Pessimismus „jenseits von Gut und Böse“ an, hier kommt jene „Perversität der Gesinnung“ zu Wort und Formel, gegen welche Schopenhauer nicht müde geworden ist, im Voraus seine zornigsten Flüche und Donnerkeile zu schleudern,—eine Philosophie, welche es wagt, die Moral selbst in die Welt der Erscheinung zu setzen, herabzusetzen und nicht nur unter die „Erscheinungen“ (im Sinne des idealistischen terminus technicus), sondern unter die „Täuschungen“, als Schein, Wahn, Irrthum, Ausdeutung, Zurechtmachung, Kunst. Vielleicht lässt sich die Tiefe dieses *widermoralischen* Hanges am besten aus dem behutsamen und feindseligen Schweigen ermessen, mit dem in dem ganzen Buche das Christenthum behandelt ist,—das Christenthum als die ausschweifendste Durchfigurirung des moralischen Thema's, welche die Menschheit bisher anzuhören bekommen hat. In Wahrheit, es giebt zu der rein ästhetischen Weltauslegung und Welt-Rechtfertigung, wie sie in diesem Buche gelehrt wird, keinen grösseren Gegensatz als die christliche Lehre, welche *nur* moralisch ist und sein will und mit ihren absoluten Maassen, zum Beispiel schon mit ihrer Wahrhaftigkeit Gottes, die Kunst, *jede* Kunst in's Reich der Lüge verweist,—das heisst verneint, verdammt, verurtheilt. Hinter einer derartigen Denk- und Werthungsweise, welche kunstfeindlich sein muss, so lange sie irgendwie ächt ist, empfand ich von jeher auch das *Lebensfeindliche*, den ingrimmigen rachsüchtigen Widerwillen gegen das Leben selbst: denn alles Leben ruht auf Schein, Kunst, Täuschung, Optik, Nothwendigkeit des Perspektivischen und des Irrthums. Christenthum war von Anfang an, wesentlich und gründlich, Ekel und Ueberdruss des Lebens am Leben, welcher sich unter dem Glauben an ein „anderes“ oder „besseres“ Leben nur verkleidete, nur versteckte, nur aufputzte. Der Hass auf die „Welt“, der Fluch auf die Affekte, die Furcht vor der Schönheit und Sinnlichkeit, ein Jenseits, erfunden, um das Diesseits besser zu verleumden, im Grunde ein Verlangen in's Nichts, an's Ende, in's Ausruhen, hin zum „Sabbat der Sabbate“—dies Alles dünkte mich, ebenso wie der unbedingte Wille des Christenthums, *nur* moralische Werthe gelten zu lassen, immer wie die gefährlichste und unheimlichste Form aller möglichen Formen eines „Willens zum Untergang“, zum Mindesten ein Zeichen tiefster Erkrankung, Müdigkeit, Missmuthigkeit, Erschöpfung, Verarmung an Leben,—denn vor der Moral (in Sonderheit christlichen, das heisst unbedingten Moral) *muss* das Leben beständig und unvermeidlich Unrecht bekommen, weil Leben etwas essentiell Unmoralisches *ist*,—*muss* endlich das Leben, erdrückt unter dem Gewichte der Verachtung und des ewigen Nein's, als begehrens-unwürdig, als unwerth an sich empfunden werden. Moral selbst—wie? sollte Moral nicht ein „Wille zur Verneinung des Lebens“, ein heimlicher Instinkt der Vernichtung, ein Verfalls-, Verkleinerungs-, Verleumdungsprincip, ein Anfang vom Ende sein? Und, folglich, die Gefahr der Gefahren?… *Gegen* die Moral also kehrte sich damals, mit diesem fragwürdigen Buche, mein Instinkt, als ein fürsprechender Instinkt des Lebens, und erfand sich eine grundsätzliche Gegenlehre und Gegenwerthung des Lebens, eine rein artistische, eine *antichristliche*. Wie sie nennen? Als Philologe und Mensch der Worte taufte ich sie, nicht ohne einige Freiheit—denn wer wüsste den rechten Namen des Antichrist?—auf den Namen eines griechischen Gottes: ich hiess sie die *dionysische*.—\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 6\n\nMan versteht, an welche Aufgabe ich bereits mit diesem Buche zu rühren wagte?… Wie sehr bedauere ich es jetzt, dass ich damals noch nicht den Muth (oder die Unbescheidenheit?) hatte, um mir in jedem Betrachte für so eigne Anschauungen und Wagnisse auch eine *eigne Sprache* zu erlauben,—dass ich mühselig mit Schopenhauerischen und Kantischen Formeln fremde und neue Werthschätzungen auszudrücken suchte, welche dem Geiste Kantens und Schopenhauers, ebenso wie ihrem Geschmacke, von Grund aus entgegen giengen! Wie dachte doch Schopenhauer über die Tragödie? „Was allem Tragischen den eigenthümlichen Schwung zur Erhebung giebt—sagt er, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 495—ist das Aufgehen der Erkenntniss, dass die Welt, das Leben kein rechtes Genügen geben könne, mithin unsrer Anhänglichkeit *nicht werth sei*: darin besteht der tragische Geist -, er leitet demnach zur *Resignation* hin“. Oh wie anders redete Dionysos zu mir! Oh wie ferne war mir damals gerade dieser ganze Resignationismus!—Aber es giebt etwas viel Schlimmeres an dem Buche, das ich jetzt noch mehr bedauere, als mit Schopenhauerischen Formeln dionysische Ahnungen verdunkelt und verdorben zu haben: dass ich mir nämlich überhaupt das grandiose *griechische Problem*, wie mir es aufgegangen war, durch Einmischung der modernsten Dinge *verdarb*! Dass ich Hoffnungen anknüpfte, wo Nichts zu hoffen war, wo Alles allzudeutlich auf ein Ende hinwies! Dass ich, auf Grund der deutschen letzten Musik, vom „deutschen Wesen“ zu fabeln begann, wie als ob es eben im Begriff sei, sich selbst zu entdecken und wiederzufinden—und das zu einer Zeit, wo der deutsche Geist, der nicht vor Langem noch den Willen zur Herrschaft über Europa, die Kraft zur Führung Europa's gehabt hatte, eben letztwillig und endgültig *abdankte* und, unter dem pomphaften Vorwande einer Reichs-Begründung, seinen Uebergang zur Vermittelmässigung, zur Demokratie und den „modernen Ideen“ machte! In der That, inzwischen lernte ich hoffnungslos und schonungslos genug von diesem „deutschen Wesen“ denken, insgleichen von der jetzigen *deutschen Musik*, als welche Romantik durch und durch ist und die ungriechischeste aller möglichen Kunstformen: überdies aber eine Nervenverderberin ersten Ranges, doppelt gefährlich bei einem Volke, das den Trunk liebt und die Unklarheit als Tugend ehrt, nämlich in ihrer doppelten Eigenschaft als berauschendes und zugleich *benebelndes* Narkotikum.—Abseits freilich von allen übereilten Hoffnungen und fehlerhaften Nutzanwendungen auf Gegenwärtigstes, mit denen ich mir damals mein erstes Buch verdarb, bleibt das grosse dionysische Fragezeichen, wie es darin gesetzt ist, auch in Betreff der Musik, fort und fort bestehen: wie müsste eine Musik beschaffen sein, welche nicht mehr romantischen Ursprungs wäre, gleich der deutschen,—sondern *dionysischen*?…\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 7\n\n—Aber, mein Herr, was in aller Welt ist Romantik, wenn nicht *Ihr* Buch Romantik ist? Lässt sich der tiefe Hass gegen „Jetztzeit“, „Wirklichkeit“ und „moderne Ideen“ weiter treiben, als es in Ihrer Artisten-Metaphysik geschehen ist?—welche lieber noch an das Nichts, lieber noch an den Teufel, als an das „Jetzt“ glaubt? Brummt nicht ein Grundbass von Zorn und Vernichtungslust unter aller Ihrer contrapunktischen Stimmen-Kunst und Ohren-Verführerei hinweg, eine wüthende Entschlossenheit gegen Alles, was „jetzt“ ist, ein Wille, welcher nicht gar zu ferne vom praktischen Nihilismus ist und zu sagen scheint „lieber mag Nichts wahr sein, als dass *ihr* Recht hättet, als dass *eure* Wahrheit Recht behielte!“ Hören Sie selbst, mein Herr Pessimist und Kunstvergöttlicher, mit aufgeschlossnerem Ohre eine einzige ausgewählte Stelle Ihres Buches an, jene nicht unberedte Drachentödter-Stelle, welche für junge Ohren und Herzen verfänglich-rattenfängerisch klingen mag: wie? ist das nicht das ächte rechte Romantiker-Bekenntniss von 1830, unter der Maske des Pessimismus von 1850? hinter dem auch schon das übliche Romantiker-Finale präludirt,—Bruch, Zusammenbruch, Rückkehr und Niedersturz vor einem alten Glauben, vor dem alten Gotte… Wie? ist Ihr Pessimisten-Buch nicht selbst ein Stück Antigriechenthum und Romantik, selbst etwas „ebenso Berauschendes als Benebelndes“, ein Narkotikum jedenfalls, ein Stück Musik sogar, *deutscher* Musik? Aber man höre:\n\n„Denken wir uns eine heranwachsende Generation mit dieser Unerschrockenheit des Blicks, mit diesem heroischen Zug in's Ungeheure, denken wir uns den kühnen Schritt dieser Drachentödter, die stolze Verwegenheit, mit der sie allen den Schwächlichkeitsdoktrinen des Optimismus den Rücken kehren, um im Ganzen und Vollen „resolut zu leben“: *sollte es nicht nöthig sein*, dass der tragische Mensch dieser Cultur, bei seiner Selbsterziehung zum Ernst und zum Schrecken, eine neue Kunst, die *Kunst des metaphysischen Trostes*, die Tragödie als die ihm zugehörige Helena begehren und mit Faust ausrufen muss:\n\n„Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,\nIn's Leben zieh'n die einzigste Gestalt?“\n\n„Sollte es nicht *nöthig* sein?“… Nein, drei Mal nein! ihr jungen Romantiker: es sollte *nicht* nöthig sein! Aber es ist sehr wahrscheinlich, dass es so *endet*, dass *ihr* so endet, nämlich „getröstet“, wie geschrieben steht, trotz aller Selbsterziehung zum Ernst und zum Schrecken, „metaphysisch getröstet“, kurz, wie Romantiker enden, *christlich*… Nein! Ihr solltet vorerst die Kunst des *diesseitigen* Trostes lernen,—ihr solltet *lachen* lernen, meine jungen Freunde, wenn anders ihr durchaus Pessimisten bleiben wollt; vielleicht dass ihr darauf hin, als Lachende, irgendwann einmal alle metaphysische Trösterei zum Teufel schickt—und die Metaphysik voran! Oder, um es in der Sprache jenes dionysischen Unholds zu sagen, der *Zarathustra* heisst:\n\n„Erhebt eure Herzen, meine Brüder, hoch, höher! Und vergesst mir auch die Beine nicht! Erhebt auch eure Beine, ihr guten Tänzer, und besser noch: ihr steht auch auf dem Kopf!\n\n„Diese Krone des Lachenden, diese Rosenkranz-Krone: ich selber setzte mir diese Krone auf, ich selber sprach heilig mein Gelächter. Keinen Anderen fand ich heute stark genug dazu.\n\n„Zarathustra der Tänzer, Zarathustra der Leichte, der mit den Flügeln winkt, ein Flugbereiter, allen Vögeln zuwinkend, bereit und fertig, ein Selig-Leichtfertiger:—\n\n„Zarathustra der Wahrsager, Zarathustra der Wahrlacher, kein Ungeduldiger, kein Unbedingter, Einer, der Sprünge und Seitensprünge liebt: ich selber setzte mir diese Krone auf!\n\n„Diese Krone des Lachenden, diese Rosenkranz-Krone: euch, meinen Brüdern, werfe ich diese Krone zu! Das Lachen sprach ich heilig: ihr höheren Menschen, *lernt* mir—lachen!“\n\n*Also sprach Zarathustra*, vierter Theil S. 87.\n\n### Preface to Richard Wagner\n\nUm mir alle die möglichen Bedenklichkeiten, Aufregungen und Missverständnisse ferne zu halten, zu denen die in dieser Schrift vereinigten Gedanken bei dem eigenthümlichen Character unserer aesthetischen Oeffentlichkeit Anlass geben werden, und um auch die Einleitungsworte zu derselben mit der gleichen beschaulichen Wonne schreiben zu können, deren Zeichen sie selbst, als das Petrefact guter und erhebender Stunden, auf jedem Blatte trägt, vergegenwärtige ich mir den Augenblick, in dem Sie, mein hochverehrter Freund, diese Schrift empfangen werden: wie Sie, vielleicht nach einer abendlichen Wanderung im Winterschnee, den entfesselten Prometheus auf dem Titelblatte betrachten, meinen Namen lesen und sofort überzeugt sind, dass, mag in dieser Schrift stehen, was da wolle, der Verfasser etwas Ernstes und Eindringliches zu sagen hat, ebenfalls dass er, bei allem, was er sich erdachte, mit Ihnen wie mit einem Gegenwärtigen verkehrte und nur etwas dieser Gegenwart Entsprechendes niederschreiben durfte. Sie werden dabei sich erinnern, dass ich zu gleicher Zeit, als Ihre herrliche Festschrift über Beethoven entstand, das heisst in den Schrecken und Erhabenheiten des eben ausgebrochnen Krieges mich zu diesen Gedanken sammelte. Doch würden diejenigen irren, welche etwa bei dieser Sammlung an den Gegensatz von patriotischer Erregung und aesthetischer Schwelgerei, von tapferem Ernst und heiterem Spiel denken sollten: denen möchte vielmehr, bei einem wirklichen Lesen dieser Schrift, zu ihrem Erstaunen deutlich werden, mit welchem ernsthaft deutschen Problem wir zu thun haben, das von uns recht eigentlich in die Mitte deutscher Hoffnungen, als Wirbel und Wendepunkt hingestellt wird. Vielleicht aber wird es für eben dieselben überhaupt anstössig sein ein aesthetisches Problem so ernst genommen zu sehn, falls sie nämlich in der Kunst nicht mehr als ein lustiges Nebenbei, als ein auch wohl zu missendes Schellengeklingel zum „Ernst des Daseins“ zu erkennen im Stande sind: als ob Niemand wüsste, was es bei dieser Gegenüberstellung mit einem solchen „Ernste des Daseins“ auf sich habe. Diesen Ernsthaften diene zur Belehrung, dass ich von der Kunst als der höchsten Aufgabe und der eigentlich metaphysischen Thätigkeit dieses Lebens im Sinne des Mannes überzeugt bin, dem ich hier, als meinem erhabenen Vorkämpfer auf dieser Bahn, diese Schrift gewidmet haben will.\n\n*Basel*, Ende des Jahres 1871.\n\n### Section 1\n\nWir werden viel für die ästhetische Wissenschaft gewonnen haben, wenn wir nicht nur zur logischen Einsicht, sondern zur unmittelbaren Sicherheit der Anschauung gekommen sind, dass die Fortentwickelung der Kunst an die Duplicität des *Apollinischen* und des *Dionysischen* gebunden ist: in ähnlicher Weise, wie die Generation von der Zweiheit der Geschlechter, bei fortwährendem Kampfe und nur periodisch eintretender Versöhnung, abhängt. Diese Namen entlehnen wir von den Griechen, welche die tiefsinnigen Geheimlehren ihrer Kunstanschauung zwar nicht in Begriffen, aber in den eindringlich deutlichen Gestalten ihrer Götterwelt dem Einsichtigen vernehmbar machen. An ihre beiden Kunstgottheiten, Apollo und Dionysus, knüpft sich unsere Erkenntniss, dass in der griechischen Welt ein ungeheurer Gegensatz, nach Ursprung und Zielen, zwischen der Kunst des Bildners, der apollinischen, und der unbildlichen Kunst der Musik, als der des Dionysus, besteht: beide so verschiedne Triebe gehen neben einander her, zumeist im offnen Zwiespalt mit einander und sich gegenseitig zu immer neuen kräftigeren Geburten reizend, um in ihnen den Kampf jenes Gegensatzes zu perpetuiren, den das gemeinsame Wort „Kunst“ nur scheinbar überbrückt; bis sie endlich, durch einen metaphysischen Wunderakt des hellenischen „Willens“, mit einander gepaart erscheinen und in dieser Paarung zuletzt das ebenso dionysische als apollinische Kunstwerk der attischen Tragödie erzeugen.\n\nUm uns jene beiden Triebe näher zu bringen, denken wir sie uns zunächst als die getrennten Kunstwelten des *Traumes* und des *Rausches*; zwischen welchen physiologischen Erscheinungen ein entsprechender Gegensatz, wie zwischen dem Apollinischen und dem Dionysischen zu bemerken ist. Im Traume traten zuerst, nach der Vorstellung des Lucretius, die herrlichen Göttergestalten vor die Seelen der Menschen, im Traume sah der grosse Bildner den entzückenden Gliederbau übermenschlicher Wesen, und der hellenische Dichter, um die Geheimnisse der poetischen Zeugung befragt, würde ebenfalls an den Traum erinnert und eine ähnliche Belehrung gegeben haben, wie sie Hans Sachs in den Meistersingern giebt:\n\nMein Freund, das grad’ ist Dichters Werk,\ndass er sein Träumen deut’ und merk’.\nGlaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn\nwird ihm im Traume aufgethan:\nall’ Dichtkunst und Poëterei\nist nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei.\n\nDer schöne Schein der Traumwelten, in deren Erzeugung jeder Mensch voller Künstler ist, ist die Voraussetzung aller bildenden Kunst, ja auch, wie wir sehen werden, einer wichtigen Hälfte der Poesie. Wir geniessen im unmittelbaren Verständnisse der Gestalt, alle Formen sprechen zu uns, es giebt nichts Gleichgültiges und Unnöthiges. Bei dem höchsten Leben dieser Traumwirklichkeit haben wir doch noch die durchschimmernde Empfindung ihres *Scheins*: wenigstens ist dies meine Erfahrung, für deren Häufigkeit, ja Normalität, ich manches Zeugniss und die Aussprüche der Dichter beizubringen hätte. Der philosophische Mensch hat sogar das Vorgefühl, dass auch unter dieser Wirklichkeit, in der wir leben und sind, eine zweite ganz andre verborgen liege, dass also auch sie ein Schein sei; und Schopenhauer bezeichnet geradezu die Gabe, dass Einem zu Zeiten die Menschen und alle Dinge als blosse Phantome oder Traumbilder vorkommen, als das Kennzeichen philosophischer Befähigung. Wie nun der Philosoph zur Wirklichkeit des Daseins, so verhält sich der künstlerisch erregbare Mensch zur Wirklichkeit des Traumes; er sieht genau und gern zu: denn aus diesen Bildern deutet er sich das Leben, an diesen Vorgängen übt er sich für das Leben. Nicht etwa nur die angenehmen und freundlichen Bilder sind es, die er mit jener Allverständigkeit an sich erfährt: auch das Ernste, Trübe, Traurige, Finstere, die plötzlichen Hemmungen, die Neckereien des Zufalls, die bänglichen Erwartungen, kurz die ganze „göttliche Komödie“ des Lebens, mit dem Inferno, zieht an ihm vorbei, nicht nur wie ein Schattenspiel—denn er lebt und leidet mit in diesen Scenen—und doch auch nicht ohne jene flüchtige Empfindung des Scheins; und vielleicht erinnert sich Mancher, gleich mir, in den Gefährlichkeiten und Schrecken des Traumes sich mitunter ermuthigend und mit Erfolg zugerufen zu haben: „Es ist ein Traum! Ich will ihn weiter träumen!“ Wie man mir auch von Personen erzählt hat, die die Causalität eines und desselben Traumes über drei und mehr aufeinanderfolgende Nächte hin fortzusetzen im Stande waren: Thatsachen, welche deutlich Zeugniss dafür abgeben, dass unser innerstes Wesen, der gemeinsame Untergrund von uns allen, mit tiefer Lust und freudiger Nothwendigkeit den Traum an sich erfährt.\n\nDiese freudige Nothwendigkeit der Traumerfahrung ist gleichfalls von den Griechen in ihrem Apollo ausgedrückt worden: Apollo, als der Gott aller bildnerischen Kräfte, ist zugleich der wahrsagende Gott. Er, der seiner Wurzel nach der „Scheinende“, die Lichtgottheit ist, beherrscht auch den schönen Schein der inneren Phantasie-Welt. Die höhere Wahrheit, die Vollkommenheit dieser Zustände im Gegensatz zu der lückenhaft verständlichen Tageswirklichkeit, sodann das tiefe Bewusstsein von der in Schlaf und Traum heilenden und helfenden Natur ist zugleich das symbolische Analogon der wahrsagenden Fähigkeit und überhaupt der Künste, durch die das Leben möglich und lebenswerth gemacht wird. Aber auch jene zarte Linie, die das Traumbild nicht überschreiten darf, um nicht pathologisch zu wirken, widrigenfalls der Schein als plumpe Wirklichkeit uns betrügen würde—darf nicht im Bilde des Apollo fehlen: jene maassvolle Begrenzung, jene Freiheit von den wilderen Regungen, jene weisheitsvolle Ruhe des Bildnergottes. Sein Auge muss „sonnenhaft“, gemäss seinem Ursprunge, sein; auch wenn es zürnt und unmuthig blickt, liegt die Weihe des schönen Scheines auf ihm. Und so möchte von Apollo in einem excentrischen Sinne das gelten, was Schopenhauer von dem im Schleier der Maja befangenen Menschen sagt. Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I S. 416: „Wie auf dem tobenden Meere, das, nach allen Seiten unbegränzt, heulend Wellenberge erhebt und senkt, auf einem Kahn ein Schiffer sitzt, dem schwachen Fahrzeug vertrauend; so sitzt, mitten in einer Welt von Qualen, ruhig der einzelne Mensch, gestützt und vertrauend auf das principium individuationis“. Ja es wäre von Apollo zu sagen, dass in ihm das unerschütterte Vertrauen auf jenes principium und das ruhige Dasitzen des in ihm Befangenen seinen erhabensten Ausdruck bekommen habe, und man möchte selbst Apollo als das herrliche Götterbild des principii individuationis bezeichnen, aus dessen Gebärden und Blicken die ganze Lust und Weisheit des „Scheines“, sammt seiner Schönheit, zu uns spräche.\n\nAn derselben Stelle hat uns Schopenhauer das ungeheure *Grausen* geschildert, welches den Menschen ergreift, wenn er plötzlich an den Erkenntnissformen der Erscheinung irre wird, indem der Satz vom Grunde, in irgend einer seiner Gestaltungen, eine Ausnahme zu erleiden scheint. Wenn wir zu diesem Grausen die wonnevolle Verzückung hinzunehmen, die bei demselben Zerbrechen des principii individuationis aus dem innersten Grunde des Menschen, ja der Natur emporsteigt, so thun wir einen Blick in das Wesen des *Dionysischen*, das uns am nächsten noch durch die Analogie des *Rausches* gebracht wird. Entweder durch den Einfluss des narkotischen Getränkes, von dem alle ursprünglichen Menschen und Völker in Hymnen sprechen, oder bei dem gewaltigen, die ganze Natur lustvoll durchdringenden Nahen des Frühlings erwachen jene dionysischen Regungen, in deren Steigerung das Subjective zu völliger Selbstvergessenheit hinschwindet. Auch im deutschen Mittelalter wälzten sich unter der gleichen dionysischen Gewalt immer wachsende Schaaren, singend und tanzend, von Ort zu Ort: in diesen Sanct-Johann- und Sanct-Veittänzern erkennen wir die bacchischen Chöre der Griechen wieder, mit ihrer Vorgeschichte in Kleinasien, bis hin zu Babylon und den orgiastischen Sakäen. Es giebt Menschen, die, aus Mangel an Erfahrung oder aus Stumpfsinn, sich von solchen Erscheinungen wie von „Volkskrankheiten“, spöttisch oder bedauernd im Gefühl der eigenen Gesundheit abwenden: die Armen ahnen freilich nicht, wie leichenfarbig und gespenstisch eben diese ihre „Gesundheit“ sich ausnimmt, wenn an ihnen das glühende Leben dionysischer Schwärmer vorüberbraust.\n\nUnter dem Zauber des Dionysischen schliesst sich nicht nur der Bund zwischen Mensch und Mensch wieder zusammen: auch die entfremdete, feindliche oder unterjochte Natur feiert wieder ihr Versöhnungsfest mit ihrem verlorenen Sohne, dem Menschen. Freiwillig beut die Erde ihre Gaben, und friedfertig nahen die Raubthiere der Felsen und der Wüste. Mit Blumen und Kränzen ist der Wagen des Dionysus überschüttet: unter seinem Joche schreiten Panther und Tiger. Man verwandele das Beethoven’sche Jubellied der „Freude“ in ein Gemälde und bleibe mit seiner Einbildungskraft nicht zurück, wenn die Millionen schauervoll in den Staub sinken: so kann man sich dem Dionysischen nähern. Jetzt ist der Sclave freier Mann, jetzt zerbrechen alle die starren, feindseligen Abgrenzungen, die Noth, Willkür oder „freche Mode“ zwischen den Menschen festgesetzt haben. Jetzt, bei dem Evangelium der Weltenharmonie, fühlt sich Jeder mit seinem Nächsten nicht nur vereinigt, versöhnt, verschmolzen, sondern eins, als ob der Schleier der Maja zerrissen wäre und nur noch in Fetzen vor dem geheimnissvollen Ur-Einen herumflattere. Singend und tanzend äussert sich der Mensch als Mitglied einer höheren Gemeinsamkeit: er hat das Gehen und das Sprechen verlernt und ist auf dem Wege, tanzend in die Lüfte emporzufliegen. Aus seinen Gebärden spricht die Verzauberung. Wie jetzt die Thiere reden, und die Erde Milch und Honig giebt, so tönt auch aus ihm etwas Uebernatürliches: als Gott fühlt er sich, er selbst wandelt jetzt so verzückt und erhoben, wie er die Götter im Traume wandeln sah. Der Mensch ist nicht mehr Künstler, er ist Kunstwerk geworden: die Kunstgewalt der ganzen Natur, zur höchsten Wonnebefriedigung des Ur-Einen, offenbart sich hier unter den Schauern des Rausches. Der edelste Thon, der kostbarste Marmor wird hier geknetet und behauen, der Mensch, und zu den Meisselschlägen des dionysischen Weltenkünstlers tönt der eleusinische Mysterienruf: „Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?“—\n\n### Section 2\n\nWir haben bis jetzt das Apollinische und seinen Gegensatz, das Dionysische, als künstlerische Mächte betrachtet, die aus der Natur selbst, *ohne Vermittelung des menschlichen Künstlers*, hervorbrechen, und in denen sich ihre Kunsttriebe zunächst und auf directem Wege befriedigen: einmal als die Bilderwelt des Traumes, deren Vollkommenheit ohne jeden Zusammenhang mit der intellectuellen Höhe oder künstlerischen Bildung des Einzelnen ist, andererseits als rauschvolle Wirklichkeit, die wiederum des Einzelnen nicht achtet, sondern sogar das Individuum zu vernichten und durch eine mystische Einheitsempfindung zu erlösen sucht. Diesen unmittelbaren Kunstzuständen der Natur gegenüber ist jeder Künstler „Nachahmer“, und zwar entweder apollinischer Traumkünstler oder dionysischer Rauschkünstler oder endlich—wie beispielweise in der griechischen Tragödie—zugleich Rausch- und Traumkünstler: als welchen wir uns etwa zu denken haben, wie er, in der dionysischen Trunkenheit und mystischen Selbstentäusserung, einsam und abseits von den schwärmenden Chören niedersinkt und wie sich ihm nun, durch apollinische Traumeinwirkung, sein eigener Zustand d. h. seine Einheit mit dem innersten Grunde der Welt *in einem gleichnissartigen Traumbilde* offenbart.\n\nNach diesen allgemeinen Voraussetzungen und Gegenüberstellungen nahen wir uns jetzt den *Griechen*, um zu erkennen, in welchem Grade und bis zu welcher Höhe jene *Kunsttriebe der Natur* in ihnen entwickelt gewesen sind: wodurch wir in den Stand gesetzt werden, das Verhältniss des griechischen Künstlers zu seinen Urbildern, oder, nach dem aristotelischen Ausdrucke, „die Nachahmung der Natur“ tiefer zu verstehn und zu würdigen. Von den *Träumen* der Griechen ist trotz aller Traumlitteratur derselben und zahlreichen Traumanecdoten nur vermuthungsweise, aber doch mit ziemlicher Sicherheit zu sprechen: bei der unglaublich bestimmten und sicheren plastischen Befähigung ihres Auges, sammt ihrer hellen und aufrichtigen Farbenlust, wird man sich nicht entbrechen können, zur Beschämung aller Spätergeborenen, auch für ihre Träume eine logische Causalität der Linien und Umrisse, Farben und Gruppen, eine ihren besten Reliefs ähnelnde Folge der Scenen vorauszusetzen, deren Vollkommenheit uns, wenn eine Vergleichung möglich wäre, gewiss berechtigen würde, die träumenden Griechen als Homere und Homer als einen träumenden Griechen zu bezeichnen: in einem tieferen Sinne als wenn der moderne Mensch sich hinsichtlich seines Traumes mit Shakespeare zu vergleichen wagt.\n\nDagegen brauchen wir nicht nur vermuthungsweise zu sprechen, wenn die ungeheure Kluft aufgedeckt werden soll, welche die *dionysischen Griechen* von den dionysischen Barbaren trennt. Aus allen Enden der alten Welt—um die neuere hier bei Seite zu lassen—von Rom bis Babylon können wir die Existenz dionysischer Feste nachweisen, deren Typus sich, besten Falls, zu dem Typus der griechischen verhält, wie der bärtige Satyr, dem der Bock Namen und Attribute verlieh, zu Dionysus selbst. Fast überall lag das Centrum dieser Feste in einer überschwänglichen geschlechtlichen Zuchtlosigkeit, deren Wellen über jedes Familienthum und dessen ehrwürdige Satzungen hinweg flutheten; gerade die wildesten Bestien der Natur wurden hier entfesselt, bis zu jener abscheulichen Mischung von Wollust und Grausamkeit, die mir immer als der eigentliche „Hexentrank“ erschienen ist. Gegen die fieberhaften Regungen jener Feste, deren Kenntniss auf allen Land- und Seewegen zu den Griechen drang, waren sie, scheint es, eine Zeit lang völlig gesichert und geschützt durch die hier in seinem ganzen Stolz sich aufrichtende Gestalt des Apollo, der das Medusenhaupt keiner gefährlicheren Macht entgegenhalten konnte als dieser fratzenhaft ungeschlachten dionysischen. Es ist die dorische Kunst, in der sich jene majestätisch-ablehnende Haltung des Apollo verewigt hat. Bedenklicher und sogar unmöglich wurde dieser Widerstand, als endlich aus der tiefsten Wurzel des Hellenischen heraus sich ähnliche Triebe Bahn brachen: jetzt beschränkte sich das Wirken des delphischen Gottes darauf, dem gewaltigen Gegner durch eine zur rechten Zeit abgeschlossene Versöhnung die vernichtenden Waffen aus der Hand zu nehmen. Diese Versöhnung ist der wichtigste Moment in der Geschichte des griechischen Cultus: wohin man blickt, sind die Umwälzungen dieses Ereignisses sichtbar. Es war die Versöhnung zweier Gegner, mit scharfer Bestimmung ihrer von jetzt ab einzuhaltenden Grenzlinien und mit periodischer Uebersendung von Ehrengeschenken; im Grunde war die Kluft nicht überbrückt. Sehen wir aber, wie sich unter dem Drucke jenes Friedensschlusses die dionysische Macht offenbarte, so erkennen wir jetzt, im Vergleiche mit jenen babylonischen Sakäen und ihrem Rückschritte des Menschen zum Tiger und Affen, in den dionysischen Orgien der Griechen die Bedeutung von Welterlösungsfesten und Verklärungstagen. Erst bei ihnen erreicht die Natur ihren künstlerischen Jubel, erst bei ihnen wird die Zerreissung des principii individuationis ein künstlerisches Phänomen. Jener scheussliche Hexentrank aus Wollust und Grausamkeit war hier ohne Kraft: nur die wundersame Mischung und Doppelheit in den Affecten der dionysischen Schwärmer erinnert an ihn—wie Heilmittel an tödtliche Gifte erinnern—, jene Erscheinung, dass Schmerzen Lust erwecken, dass der Jubel der Brust qualvolle Töne entreisst. Aus der höchsten Freude tönt der Schrei des Entsetzens oder der sehnende Klagelaut über einen unersetzlichen Verlust. In jenen griechischen Festen bricht gleichsam ein sentimentalischer Zug der Natur hervor, als ob sie über ihre Zerstückelung in Individuen zu seufzen habe. Der Gesang und die Gebärdensprache solcher zwiefach gestimmter Schwärmer war für die homerisch-griechische Welt etwas Neues und Unerhörtes: und insbesondere erregte ihr die dionysische *Musik* Schrecken und Grausen. Wenn die Musik scheinbar bereits als eine apollinische Kunst bekannt war, so war sie dies doch nur, genau genommen, als Wellenschlag des Rhythmus, dessen bildnerische Kraft zur Darstellung apollinischer Zustände entwickelt wurde. Die Musik des Apollo war dorische Architektonik in Tönen, aber in nur angedeuteten Tönen, wie sie der Kithara zu eigen sind. Behutsam ist gerade das Element, als unapollinisch, ferngehalten, das den Charakter der dionysischen Musik und damit der Musik überhaupt ausmacht, die erschütternde Gewalt des Tones, der einheitliche Strom des Melos und die durchaus unvergleichliche Welt der Harmonie. Im dionysischen Dithyrambus wird der Mensch zur höchsten Steigerung aller seiner symbolischen Fähigkeiten gereizt; etwas Nieempfundenes drängt sich zur Aeusserung, die Vernichtung des Schleiers der Maja, das Einssein als Genius der Gattung, ja der Natur. Jetzt soll sich das Wesen der Natur symbolisch ausdrücken; eine neue Welt der Symbole ist nöthig, einmal die ganze leibliche Symbolik, nicht nur die Symbolik des Mundes, des Gesichts, des Wortes, sondern die volle, alle Glieder rhythmisch bewegende Tanzgebärde. Sodann wachsen die anderen symbolischen Kräfte, die der Musik, in Rhythmik, Dynamik und Harmonie, plötzlich ungestüm. Um diese Gesammtentfesselung aller symbolischen Kräfte zu fassen, muss der Mensch bereits auf jener Höhe der Selbstentäusserung angelangt sein, die in jenen Kräften sich symbolisch aussprechen will: der dithyrambische Dionysusdiener wird somit nur von Seinesgleichen verstanden! Mit welchem Erstaunen musste der apollinische Grieche auf ihn blicken! Mit einem Erstaunen, das um so grösser war, als sich ihm das Grausen beimischte, dass ihm jenes Alles doch eigentlich so fremd nicht sei, ja dass sein apollinisches Bewusstsein nur wie ein Schleier diese dionysische Welt vor ihm verdecke.\n\n### Section 3\n\nUm dies zu begreifen, müssen wir jenes kunstvolle Gebäude der *apollinischen Cultur* gleichsam Stein um Stein abtragen, bis wir die Fundamente erblicken, auf die es begründet ist. Hier gewahren wir nun zuerst die herrlichen *olympischen* Göttergestalten, die auf den Giebeln dieses Gebäudes stehen, und deren Thaten in weithin leuchtenden Reliefs dargestellt seine Friese zieren. Wenn unter ihnen auch Apollo steht, als eine einzelne Gottheit neben anderen und ohne den Anspruch einer ersten Stellung, so dürfen wir uns dadurch nicht beirren lassen. Derselbe Trieb, der sich in Apollo versinnlichte, hat überhaupt jene ganze olympische Welt geboren, und in diesem Sinne darf uns Apollo als Vater derselben gelten. Welches war das ungeheure Bedürfniss, aus dem eine so leuchtende Gesellschaft olympischer Wesen entsprang?\n\nWer, mit einer anderen Religion im Herzen, an diese Olympier herantritt und nun nach sittlicher Höhe, ja Heiligkeit, nach unleiblicher Vergeistigung, nach erbarmungsvollen Liebesblicken bei ihnen sucht, der wird unmuthig und enttäuscht ihnen bald den Rücken kehren müssen. Hier erinnert nichts an Askese, Geistigkeit und Pflicht: hier redet nur ein üppiges, ja triumphirendes Dasein zu uns, in dem alles Vorhandene vergöttlicht ist, gleichviel ob es gut oder böse ist. Und so mag der Beschauer recht betroffen vor diesem phantastischen Ueberschwang des Lebens stehn, um sich zu fragen, mit welchem Zaubertrank im Leibe diese übermüthigen Menschen das Leben genossen haben mögen, dass, wohin sie sehen, Helena, das „in süsser Sinnlichkeit schwebende“ Idealbild ihrer eignen Existenz, ihnen entgegenlacht. Diesem bereits rückwärts gewandten Beschauer müssen wir aber zurufen: „Geh’ nicht von dannen, sondern höre erst, was die griechische Volksweisheit von diesem selben Leben aussagt, das sich hier mit so unerklärlicher Heiterkeit vor dir ausbreitet. Es geht die alte Sage, dass König Midas lange Zeit nach dem weisen *Silen*, dem Begleiter des Dionysus, im Walde gejagt habe, ohne ihn zu fangen. Als er ihm endlich in die Hände gefallen ist, fragt der König, was für den Menschen das Allerbeste und Allervorzüglichste sei. Starr und unbeweglich schweigt der Dämon; bis er, durch den König gezwungen, endlich unter gellem Lachen in diese Worte ausbricht: „Elendes Eintagsgeschlecht, des Zufalls Kinder und der Mühsal, was zwingst du mich dir zu sagen, was nicht zu hören für dich das Erspriesslichste ist? Das Allerbeste ist für dich gänzlich unerreichbar: nicht geboren zu sein, nicht zu *sein*, *nichts* zu sein. Das Zweitbeste aber ist für dich—bald zu sterben“.\n\nWie verhält sich zu dieser Volksweisheit die olympische Götterwelt? Wie die entzückungsreiche Vision des gefolterten Märtyrers zu seinen Peinigungen.\n\nJetzt öffnet sich uns gleichsam der olympische Zauberberg und zeigt uns seine Wurzeln. Der Grieche kannte und empfand die Schrecken und Entsetzlichkeiten des Daseins: um überhaupt leben zu können, musste er vor sie hin die glänzende Traumgeburt der Olympischen stellen. Jenes ungeheure Misstrauen gegen die titanischen Mächte der Natur, jene über allen Erkenntnissen erbarmungslos thronende Moira, jener Geier des grossen Menschenfreundes Prometheus, jenes Schreckensloos des weisen Oedipus, jener Geschlechtsfluch der Atriden, der Orest zum Muttermorde zwingt, kurz jene ganze Philosophie des Waldgottes, sammt ihren mythischen Exempeln, an der die schwermüthigen Etrurier zu Grunde gegangen sind—wurde von den Griechen durch jene künstlerische *Mittelwelt* der Olympier fortwährend von Neuem überwunden, jedenfalls verhüllt und dem Anblick entzogen. Um leben zu können, mussten die Griechen diese Götter, aus tiefster Nöthigung, schaffen: welchen Hergang wir uns wohl so vorzustellen haben, dass aus der ursprünglichen titanischen Götterordnung des Schreckens durch jenen apollinischen Schönheitstrieb in langsamen Uebergängen die olympische Götterordnung der Freude entwickelt wurde: wie Rosen aus dornigem Gebüsch hervorbrechen. Wie anders hätte jenes so reizbar empfindende, so ungestüm begehrende, zum *Leiden* so einzig befähigte Volk das Dasein ertragen können, wenn ihm nicht dasselbe, von einer höheren Glorie umflossen, in seinen Göttern gezeigt worden wäre. Derselbe Trieb, der die Kunst in’s Leben ruft, als die zum Weiterleben verführende Ergänzung und Vollendung des Daseins, liess auch die olympische Welt entstehn, in der sich der hellenische „Wille“ einen verklärenden Spiegel vorhielt. So rechtfertigen die Götter das Menschenleben, indem sie es selbst leben—die allein genügende Theodicee! Das Dasein unter dem hellen Sonnenscheine solcher Götter wird als das an sich Erstrebenswerthe empfunden, und der eigentliche *Schmerz* der homerischen Menschen bezieht sich auf das Abscheiden aus ihm, vor allem auf das baldige Abscheiden: so dass man jetzt von ihnen, mit Umkehrung der silenischen Weisheit, sagen könnte, „das Allerschlimmste sei für sie, bald zu sterben, das Zweitschlimmste, überhaupt einmal zu sterben“. Wenn die Klage einmal ertönt, so klingt sie wieder vom kurzlebenden Achilles, von dem blättergleichen Wechsel und Wandel des Menschengeschlechts, von dem Untergang der Heroenzeit. Es ist des grössten Helden nicht unwürdig, sich nach dem Weiterleben zu sehnen, sei es selbst als Tagelöhner. So ungestüm verlangt, auf der apollinischen Stufe, der „Wille“ nach diesem Dasein, so eins fühlt sich der homerische Mensch mit ihm, dass selbst die Klage zu seinem Preisliede wird.\n\nHier muss nun ausgesprochen werden, dass diese von den neueren Menschen so sehnsüchtig angeschaute Harmonie, ja Einheit des Menschen mit der Natur, für die Schiller das Kunstwort „naiv“ in Geltung gebracht hat, keinesfalls ein so einfacher, sich von selbst ergebender, gleichsam unvermeidlicher Zustand ist, dem wir an der Pforte jeder Cultur, als einem Paradies der Menschheit begegnen *müssten*: dies konnte nur eine Zeit glauben, die den Emil Rousseau’s sich auch als Künstler zu denken suchte und in Homer einen solchen am Herzen der Natur erzogenen Künstler Emil gefunden zu haben wähnte. Wo uns das „Naive“ in der Kunst begegnet, haben wir die höchste Wirkung der apollinischen Cultur zu erkennen: welche immer erst ein Titanenreich zu stürzen und Ungethüme zu tödten hat und durch kräftige Wahnvorspiegelungen und lustvolle Illusionen über eine schreckliche Tiefe der Weltbetrachtung und reizbarste Leidensfähigkeit Sieger geworden sein muss. Aber wie selten wird das Naive, jenes völlige Verschlungensein in der Schönheit des Scheines, erreicht! Wie unaussprechbar erhaben ist deshalb *Homer*, der sich, als Einzelner, zu jener apollinischen Volkscultur verhält, wie der einzelne Traumkünstler zur Traumbefähigung des Volks und der Natur überhaupt. Die homerische „Naivetät“ ist nur als der vollkommene Sieg der apollinischen Illusion zu begreifen: es ist dies eine solche Illusion, wie sie die Natur, zur Erreichung ihrer Absichten, so häufig verwendet. Das wahre Ziel wird durch ein Wahnbild verdeckt: nach diesem strecken wir die Hände aus, und jenes erreicht die Natur durch unsre Täuschung. In den Griechen wollte der „Wille“ sich selbst, in der Verklärung des Genius und der Kunstwelt, anschauen; um sich zu verherrlichen, mussten seine Geschöpfe sich selbst als verherrlichenswerth empfinden, sie mussten sich in einer höheren Sphäre wiedersehn, ohne dass diese vollendete Welt der Anschauung als Imperativ oder als Vorwurf wirkte. Dies ist die Sphäre der Schönheit, in der sie ihre Spiegelbilder, die Olympischen, sahen. Mit dieser Schönheitsspiegelung kämpfte der hellenische „Wille“ gegen das dem künstlerischen correlative Talent zum Leiden und zur Weisheit des Leidens: und als Denkmal seines Sieges steht Homer vor uns, der naive Künstler.\n\n### Section 4\n\nUeber diesen naiven Künstler giebt uns die Traumanalogie einige Belehrung. Wenn wir uns den Träumenden vergegenwärtigen, wie er, mitten in der Illusion der Traumwelt und ohne sie zu stören, sich zuruft: „es ist ein Traum, ich will ihn weiter träumen“, wenn wir hieraus auf eine tiefe innere Lust des Traumanschauens zu schliessen haben, wenn wir andererseits, um überhaupt mit dieser inneren Lust am Schauen träumen zu können, den Tag und seine schreckliche Zudringlichkeit völlig vergessen haben müssen: so dürfen wir uns alle diese Erscheinungen etwa in folgender Weise, unter der Leitung des traumdeutenden Apollo, interpretiren. So gewiss von den beiden Hälften des Lebens, der wachen und der träumenden Hälfte, uns die erstere als die ungleich bevorzugtere, wichtigere, würdigere, lebenswerthere, ja allein gelebte dünkt: so möchte ich doch, bei allem Anscheine einer Paradoxie, für jenen geheimnissvollen Grund unseres Wesens, dessen Erscheinung wir sind, gerade die entgegengesetzte Werthschätzung des Traumes behaupten. Je mehr ich nämlich in der Natur jene allgewaltigen Kunsttriebe und in ihnen eine inbrünstige Sehnsucht zum Schein, zum Erlöstwerden durch den Schein gewahr werde, um so mehr fühle ich mich zu der metaphysischen Annahme gedrängt, dass das Wahrhaft-Seiende und Ur-Eine, als das ewig Leidende und Widerspruchsvolle, zugleich die entzückende Vision, den lustvollen Schein, zu seiner steten Erlösung braucht: welchen Schein wir, völlig in ihm befangen und aus ihm bestehend, als das Wahrhaft-Nichtseiende d. h. als ein fortwährendes Werden in Zeit, Raum und Causalität, mit anderen Worten, als empirische Realität zu empfinden genöthigt sind. Sehen wir also einmal von unsrer eignen „Realität“ für einen Augenblick ab, fassen wir unser empirisches Dasein, wie das der Welt überhaupt, als eine in jedem Moment erzeugte Vorstellung des Ur-Einen, so muss uns jetzt der Traum als der *Schein des Scheins*, somit als eine noch höhere Befriedigung der Urbegierde nach dem Schein hin gelten. Aus diesem selben Grunde hat der innerste Kern der Natur jene unbeschreibliche Lust an dem naiven Künstler und dem naiven Kunstwerke, das gleichfalls nur „Schein des Scheins“ ist. *Rafael*, selbst einer jener unsterblichen „Naiven“, hat uns in einem gleichnissartigen Gemälde jenes Depotenziren des Scheins zum Schein, den Urprozess des naiven Künstlers und zugleich der apollinischen Cultur, dargestellt. In seiner *Transfiguration* zeigt uns die untere Hälfte, mit dem besessenen Knaben, den verzweifelnden Trägern, den rathlos geängstigten Jüngern, die Widerspiegelung des ewigen Urschmerzes, des einzigen Grundes der Welt: der „Schein“ ist hier Widerschein des ewigen Widerspruchs, des Vaters der Dinge. Aus diesem Schein steigt nun, wie ein ambrosischer Duft, eine visionsgleiche neue Scheinwelt empor, von der jene im ersten Schein Befangenen nichts sehen—ein leuchtendes Schweben in reinster Wonne und schmerzlosem, aus weiten Augen strahlenden Anschauen. Hier haben wir, in höchster Kunstsymbolik, jene apollinische Schönheitswelt und ihren Untergrund, die schreckliche Weisheit des Silen, vor unseren Blicken und begreifen, durch Intuition, ihre gegenseitige Nothwendigkeit. Apollo aber tritt uns wiederum als die Vergöttlichung des principii individuationis entgegen, in dem allein das ewig erreichte Ziel des Ur-Einen, seine Erlösung durch den Schein, sich vollzieht: er zeigt uns, mit erhabenen Gebärden, wie die ganze Welt der Qual nöthig ist, damit durch sie der Einzelne zur Erzeugung der erlösenden Vision gedrängt werde und dann, ins Anschauen derselben versunken, ruhig auf seinem schwankenden Kahne, inmitten des Meeres, sitze.\n\nDiese Vergöttlichung der Individuation kennt, wenn sie überhaupt imperativisch und Vorschriften gebend gedacht wird, nur Ein Gesetz, das Individuum d. h. die Einhaltung der Grenzen des Individuums, das *Maass* im hellenischen Sinne. Apollo, als ethische Gottheit, fordert von den Seinigen das Maass und, um es einhalten zu können, Selbsterkenntniss. Und so läuft neben der ästhetischen Nothwendigkeit der Schönheit die Forderung des „Erkenne dich selbst“ und des „Nicht zu viel!“ her, während Selbstüberhebung und Uebermaass als die eigentlich feindseligen Dämonen der nicht-apollinischen Sphäre, daher als Eigenschaften der vor-apollinischen Zeit, des Titanenzeitalters, und der ausser-apollinischen Welt d. h. der Barbarenwelt, erachtet wurden. Wegen seiner titanenhaften Liebe zu den Menschen musste Prometheus von den Geiern zerrissen werden, seiner übermässigen Weisheit halber, die das Räthsel der Sphinx löste, musste Oedipus in einen verwirrenden Strudel von Unthaten stürzen: so interpretirte der delphische Gott die griechische Vergangenheit.\n\n„Titanenhaft“ und „barbarisch“ dünkte dem apollinischen Griechen auch die Wirkung, die das *Dionysische* erregte: ohne dabei sich verhehlen zu können, dass er selbst doch zugleich auch innerlich mit jenen gestürzten Titanen und Heroen verwandt sei. Ja er musste noch mehr empfinden: sein ganzes Dasein mit aller Schönheit und Mässigung ruhte auf einem verhüllten Untergrunde des Leidens und der Erkenntniss, der ihm wieder durch jenes Dionysische aufgedeckt wurde. Und siehe! Apollo konnte nicht ohne Dionysus leben! Das „Titanische“ und das „Barbarische“ war zuletzt eine eben solche Nothwendigkeit wie das Apollinische! Und nun denken wir uns, wie in diese auf den Schein und die Mässigung gebaute und künstlich gedämmte Welt der ekstatische Ton der Dionysusfeier in immer lockenderen Zauberweisen hineinklang, wie in diesen das ganze *Uebermaass* der Natur in Lust, Leid und Erkenntniss, bis zum durchdringenden Schrei, laut wurde: denken wir uns, was diesem dämonischen Volksgesange gegenüber der psalmodirende Künstler des Apollo, mit dem gespensterhaften Harfenklange, bedeuten konnte! Die Musen der Künste des „Scheins“ verblassten vor einer Kunst, die in ihrem Rausche die Wahrheit sprach, die Weisheit des Silen rief Wehe! Wehe! aus gegen die heiteren Olympier. Das Individuum, mit allen seinen Grenzen und Maassen, ging hier in der Selbstvergessenheit der dionysischen Zustände unter und vergass die apollinischen Satzungen. Das *Uebermaass* enthüllte sich als Wahrheit, der Widerspruch, die aus Schmerzen geborene Wonne sprach von sich aus dem Herzen der Natur heraus. Und so war, überall dort, wo das Dionysische durchdrang, das Apollinische aufgehoben und vernichtet. Aber eben so gewiss ist, dass dort, wo der erste Ansturm ausgehalten wurde, das Ansehen und die Majestät des delphischen Gottes starrer und drohender als je sich äusserte. Ich vermag nämlich den *dorischen* Staat und die dorische Kunst mir nur als ein fortgesetztes Kriegslager des Apollinischen zu erklären: nur in einem unausgesetzten Widerstreben gegen das titanisch-barbarische Wesen des Dionysischen konnte eine so trotzig-spröde, mit Bollwerken umschlossene Kunst, eine so kriegsgemässe und herbe Erziehung, ein so grausames und rücksichtsloses Staatswesen von längerer Dauer sein.\n\nBis zu diesem Punkte ist des Weiteren ausgeführt worden, was ich am Eingange dieser Abhandlung bemerkte: wie das Dionysische und das Apollinische in immer neuen auf einander folgenden Geburten, und sich gegenseitig steigernd das hellenische Wesen beherrscht haben: wie aus dem „erzenen“ Zeitalter, mit seinen Titanenkämpfen und seiner herben Volksphilosophie, sich unter dem Walten des apollinischen Schönheitstriebes die homerische Welt entwickelt, wie diese „naive“ Herrlichkeit wieder von dem einbrechenden Strome des Dionysischen verschlungen wird, und wie dieser neuen Macht gegenüber sich das Apollinische zur starren Majestät der dorischen Kunst und Weltbetrachtung erhebt. Wenn auf diese Weise die ältere hellenische Geschichte, im Kampf jener zwei feindseligen Principien, in vier grosse Kunststufen zerfällt: so sind wir jetzt gedrängt, weiter nach dem letzten Plane dieses Werdens und Treibens zu fragen, falls uns nicht etwa die letzterreichte Periode, die der dorischen Kunst, als die Spitze und Absicht jener Kunsttriebe gelten sollte: und hier bietet sich unseren Blicken das erhabene und hochgepriesene Kunstwerk der *attischen Tragödie* und des dramatischen Dithyrambus, als das gemeinsame Ziel beider Triebe, deren geheimnissvolles Ehebündniss, nach langem vorhergehenden Kampfe, sich in einem solchen Kinde—das zugleich Antigone und Kassandra ist—verherrlicht hat.\n\n### Section 5\n\nWir nahen uns jetzt dem eigentlichen Ziele unsrer Untersuchung, die auf die Erkenntniss des dionysisch-apollinischen Genius und seines Kunstwerkes, wenigstens auf das ahnungsvolle Verständniss jenes Einheitsmysteriums gerichtet ist. Hier fragen wir nun zunächst, wo jener neue Keim sich zuerst in der hellenischen Welt bemerkbar macht, der sich nachher bis zur Tragödie und zum dramatischen Dithyrambus entwickelt. Hierüber giebt uns das Alterthum selbst bildlich Aufschluss, wenn es als die Urväter und Fackelträger der griechischen Dichtung *Homer und Archilochus* auf Bildwerken, Gemmen u.s.w. neben einander stellt, in der sicheren Empfindung, dass nur diese Beiden gleich völlig originalen Naturen, von denen aus ein Feuerstrom auf die gesammte griechische Nachwelt fortfliesse, zu erachten seien. Homer, der in sich versunkene greise Träumer, der Typus des apollinischen, naiven Künstlers, sieht nun staunend den leidenschaftlichen Kopf des wild durch's Dasein getriebenen kriegerischen Musendieners Archilochus: und die neuere Aesthetik wusste nur deutend hinzuzufügen, dass hier dem „objectiven“ Künstler der erste „subjective“ entgegen gestellt sei. Uns ist mit dieser Deutung wenig gedient, weil wir den subjectiven Künstler nur als schlechten Künstler kennen und in jeder Art und Höhe der Kunst vor allem und zuerst Besiegung des Subjectiven, Erlösung vom „Ich“ und Stillschweigen jedes individuellen Willens und Gelüstens fordern, ja ohne Objectivität, ohne reines interesseloses Anschauen nie an die geringste wahrhaft künstlerische Erzeugung glauben können. Darum muss unsre Aesthetik erst jenes Problem lösen, wie der „Lyriker“ als Künstler möglich ist: er, der, nach der Erfahrung aller Zeiten, immer „ich“ sagt und die ganze chromatische Tonleiter seiner Leidenschaften und Begehrungen vor uns absingt. Gerade dieser Archilochus erschreckt uns, neben Homer, durch den Schrei seines Hasses und Hohnes, durch die trunknen Ausbrüche seiner Begierde; ist er, der erste subjectiv genannte Künstler, nicht damit der eigentliche Nichtkünstler? Woher aber dann die Verehrung, die ihm, dem Dichter, gerade auch das delphische Orakel, der Herd der „objectiven“ Kunst, in sehr merkwürdigen Aussprüchen erwiesen hat?\n\nUeber den Prozess seines Dichtens hat uns *Schiller* durch eine ihm selbst unerklärliche, doch nicht bedenklich scheinende psychologische Beobachtung Licht gebracht; er gesteht nämlich als den vorbereitenden Zustand vor dem Actus des Dichtens nicht etwa eine Reihe von Bildern, mit geordneter Causalität der Gedanken, vor sich und in sich gehabt zu haben, sondern vielmehr eine *musikalische Stimmung* („Die Empfindung ist bei mir anfangs ohne bestimmten und klaren Gegenstand; dieser bildet sich erst später. Eine gewisse musikalische Gemüthsstimmung geht vorher, und auf diese folgt bei mir erst die poetische Idee“). Nehmen wir jetzt das wichtigste Phänomen der ganzen antiken Lyrik hinzu, die überall als natürlich geltende Vereinigung, ja Identität *des Lyrikers mit dem Musiker*—der gegenüber unsre neuere Lyrik wie ein Götterbild ohne Kopf erscheint—so können wir jetzt, auf Grund unsrer früher dargestellten aesthetischen Metaphysik, uns in folgender Weise den Lyriker erklären. Er ist zuerst, als dionysischer Künstler, gänzlich mit dem Ur-Einen, seinem Schmerz und Widerspruch, eins geworden und producirt das Abbild dieses Ur-Einen als Musik, wenn anders diese mit Recht eine Wiederholung der Welt und ein zweiter Abguss derselben genannt worden ist; jetzt aber wird diese Musik ihm wieder wie in einem *gleichnissartigen Traumbilde*, unter der apollinischen Traumeinwirkung sichtbar. Jener bild- und begrifflose Wiederschein des Urschmerzes in der Musik, mit seiner Erlösung im Scheine, erzeugt jetzt eine zweite Spiegelung, als einzelnes Gleichniss oder Exempel. Seine Subjectivität hat der Künstler bereits in dem dionysischen Prozess aufgegeben: das Bild, das ihm jetzt seine Einheit mit dem Herzen der Welt zeigt, ist eine Traumscene, die jenen Urwiderspruch und Urschmerz, sammt der Urlust des Scheines, versinnlicht. Das „Ich“ des Lyrikers tönt also aus dem Abgrunde des Seins: seine „Subjectivität“ im Sinne der neueren Aesthetiker ist eine Einbildung. Wenn Archilochus, der erste Lyriker der Griechen, seine rasende Liebe und zugleich seine Verachtung den Töchtern des Lykambes kundgiebt, so ist es nicht seine Leidenschaft, die vor uns in orgiastischem Taumel tanzt: wir sehen Dionysus und die Mänaden, wir sehen den berauschten Schwärmer Archilochus zum Schlafe niedergesunken—wie ihn uns Euripides in den Bacchen beschreibt, den Schlaf auf hoher Alpentrift, in der Mittagssonne—: und jetzt tritt Apollo an ihn heran und berührt ihn mit dem Lorbeer. Die dionysisch-musikalische Verzauberung des Schläfers sprüht jetzt gleichsam Bilderfunken um sich, lyrische Gedichte, die in ihrer höchsten Entfaltung Tragödien und dramatische Dithyramben heissen.\n\nDer Plastiker und zugleich der ihm verwandte Epiker ist in das reine Anschauen der Bilder versunken. Der dionysische Musiker ist ohne jedes Bild völlig nur selbst Urschmerz und Urwiederklang desselben. Der lyrische Genius fühlt aus dem mystischen Selbstentäusserungs- und Einheitszustande eine Bilder- und Gleichnisswelt hervorwachsen, die eine ganz andere Färbung, Causalität und Schnelligkeit hat als jene Welt des Plastikers und Epikers. Während der Letztgenannte in diesen Bildern und nur in ihnen mit freudigem Behagen lebt und nicht müde wird, sie bis auf die kleinsten Züge hin liebevoll anzuschauen, während selbst das Bild des zürnenden Achilles für ihn nur ein Bild ist, dessen zürnenden Ausdruck er mit jener Traumlust am Scheine geniesst—so dass er, durch diesen Spiegel des Scheines, gegen das Einswerden und Zusammenschmelzen mit seinen Gestalten geschützt ist—, so sind dagegen die Bilder des Lyrikers nichts als *er* selbst und gleichsam nur verschiedene Objectivationen von ihm, weshalb er als bewegender Mittelpunkt jener Welt „ich“ sagen darf: nur ist diese Ichheit nicht dieselbe, wie die des wachen, empirisch-realen Menschen, sondern die einzige überhaupt wahrhaft seiende und ewige, im Grunde der Dinge ruhende Ichheit, durch deren Abbilder der lyrische Genius bis auf jenen Grund der Dinge hindurchsieht. Nun denken wir uns einmal, wie er unter diesen Abbildern auch *sich selbst* als Nichtgenius erblickt d.h. sein „Subject“, das ganze Gewühl subjectiver, auf ein bestimmtes, ihm real dünkendes Ding gerichteter Leidenschaften und Willensregungen; wenn es jetzt scheint als ob der lyrische Genius und der mit ihm verbundene Nichtgenius eins wäre und als ob der Erstere von sich selbst jenes Wörtchen „ich“ spräche, so wird uns jetzt dieser Schein nicht mehr verführen können, wie er allerdings diejenigen verführt hat, die den Lyriker als den subjectiven Dichter bezeichnet haben. In Wahrheit ist Archilochus, der leidenschaftlich entbrannte liebende und hassende Mensch nur eine Vision des Genius, der bereits nicht mehr Archilochus, sondern Weltgenius ist und der seinen Urschmerz in jenem Gleichnisse vom Menschen Archilochus symbolisch ausspricht: während jener subjectiv wollende und begehrende Mensch Archilochus überhaupt nie und nimmer Dichter sein kann. Es ist aber gar nicht nöthig, dass der Lyriker gerade nur das Phänomen des Menschen Archilochus vor sich sieht als Wiederschein des ewigen Seins; und die Tragödie beweist, wie weit sich die Visionswelt des Lyrikers von jenem allerdings zunächst stehenden Phänomen entfernen kann.\n\n*Schopenhauer*, der sich die Schwierigkeit, die der Lyriker für die philosophische Kunstbetrachtung macht, nicht verhehlt hat, glaubt einen Ausweg gefunden zu haben, den ich nicht mit ihm gehen kann, während ihm allein, in seiner tiefsinnigen Metaphysik der Musik, das Mittel in die Hand gegeben war, mit dem jene Schwierigkeit entscheidend beseitigt werden konnte: wie ich dies, in seinem Geiste und zu seiner Ehre, hier gethan zu haben glaube. Dagegen bezeichnet er als das eigenthümliche Wesen des Liedes Folgendes (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, S. 295): „Es ist das Subject des Willens, d.h. das eigene Wollen, was das Bewusstsein des Singenden füllt, oft als ein entbundenes, befriedigtes Wollen (Freude), wohl noch öfter aber als ein gehemmtes (Trauer), immer als Affect, Leidenschaft, bewegter Gemüthszustand. Neben diesem jedoch und zugleich damit wird durch den Anblick der umgebenden Natur der Singende sich seiner bewusst als Subjects des reinen, willenlosen Erkennens, dessen unerschütterliche, selige Ruhe nunmehr in Contrast tritt mit dem Drange des immer beschränkten, immer noch dürftigen Wollens: die Empfindung dieses Contrastes, dieses Wechselspieles ist eigentlich, was sich im Ganzen des Liedes ausspricht und was überhaupt den lyrischen Zustand ausmacht. In diesem tritt gleichsam das reine Erkennen zu uns heran, um uns vom Wollen und seinem Drange zu erlösen: wir folgen; doch nur auf Augenblicke: immer von Neuem entreisst das Wollen, die Erinnerung an unsere persönlichen Zwecke, uns der ruhigen Beschauung; aber auch immer wieder entlockt uns dem Wollen die nächste schöne Umgebung, in welcher sich die reine willenlose Erkenntniss uns darbietet. Darum geht im Liede und der lyrischen Stimmung das Wollen (das persönliche Interesse des Zwecks) und das reine Anschauen der sich darbietenden Umgebung wundersam gemischt durch einander: es werden Beziehungen zwischen beiden gesucht und imaginirt; die subjective Stimmung, die Affection des Willens, theilt der angeschauten Umgebung und diese wiederum jener ihre Farbe im Reflex mit: von diesem ganzen so gemischten und getheilten Gemüthszustande ist das ächte Lied der Abdruck“.\n\nWer vermöchte in dieser Schilderung zu verkennen, dass hier die Lyrik als eine unvollkommen erreichte, gleichsam im Sprunge und selten zum Ziele kommende Kunst charakterisirt wird, ja als eine Halbkunst, deren *Wesen* darin bestehen solle, dass das Wollen und das reine Anschauen d.h. der unaesthetische und der aesthetische Zustand wundersam durch einander gemischt seien? Wir behaupten vielmehr, dass der ganze Gegensatz, nach dem wie nach einem Werthmesser auch noch Schopenhauer die Künste eintheilt, der des Subjectiven und des Objectiven, überhaupt in der Aesthetik ungehörig ist, da das Subject, das wollende und seine egoistischen Zwecke fördernde Individuum nur als Gegner, nicht als Ursprung der Kunst gedacht werden kann. Insofern aber das Subject Künstler ist, ist es bereits von seinem individuellen Willen erlöst und gleichsam Medium geworden, durch das hindurch das eine wahrhaft seiende Subject seine Erlösung im Scheine feiert. Denn dies muss uns vor allem, zu unserer Erniedrigung *und* Erhöhung, deutlich sein, dass die ganze Kunstkomödie durchaus nicht für uns, etwa unsrer Besserung und Bildung wegen, aufgeführt wird, ja dass wir ebensowenig die eigentlichen Schöpfer jener Kunstwelt sind: wohl aber dürfen wir von uns selbst annehmen, dass wir für den wahren Schöpfer derselben schon Bilder und künstlerische Projectionen sind und in der Bedeutung von Kunstwerken unsre höchste Würde haben—denn nur als *aesthetisches Phänomen* ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig *gerechtfertigt*:—während freilich unser Bewusstsein über diese unsre Bedeutung kaum ein andres ist als es die auf Leinwand gemalten Krieger von der auf ihr dargestellten Schlacht haben. Somit ist unser ganzes Kunstwissen im Grunde ein völlig illusorisches, weil wir als Wissende mit jenem Wesen nicht eins und identisch sind, das sich, als einziger Schöpfer und Zuschauer jener Kunstkomödie, einen ewigen Genuss bereitet. Nur soweit der Genius im Actus der künstlerischen Zeugung mit jenem Urkünstler der Welt verschmilzt, weiss er etwas über das ewige Wesen der Kunst; denn in jenem Zustande ist er, wunderbarer Weise, dem unheimlichen Bild des Mährchens gleich, das die Augen drehn und sich selber anschaun kann; jetzt ist er zugleich Subject und Object, zugleich Dichter, Schauspieler und Zuschauer.\n\n### Section 6\n\nIn Betreff des Archilochus hat die gelehrte Forschung entdeckt, dass er das *Volkslied* in die Litteratur eingeführt habe, und dass ihm, dieser That halber, jene einzige Stellung neben Homer, in der allgemeinen Schätzung der Griechen zukomme. Was aber ist das Volkslied im Gegensatz zu dem völlig apollinischen Epos? Was anders als das perpetuum vestigium einer Vereinigung des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen; seine ungeheure, über alle Völker sich erstreckende und in immer neuen Geburten sich steigernde Verbreitung ist uns ein Zeugniss dafür, wie stark jener künstlerische Doppeltrieb der Natur ist: der in analoger Weise seine Spuren im Volkslied hinterlässt, wie die orgiastischen Bewegungen eines Volkes sich in seiner Musik verewigen. Ja es müsste auch historisch nachweisbar sein, wie jede an Volksliedern reich productive Periode zugleich auf das Stärkste durch dionysische Strömungen erregt worden ist, welche wir immer als Untergrund und Voraussetzung des Volksliedes zu betrachten haben.\n\nDas Volkslied aber gilt uns zu allernächst als musikalischer Weltspiegel, als ursprüngliche Melodie, die sich jetzt eine parallele Traumerscheinung sucht und diese in der Dichtung ausspricht. *Die Melodie ist also das Erste und Allgemeine*, das deshalb auch mehrere Objectivationen, in mehreren Texten, an sich erleiden kann. Sie ist auch das bei weitem wichtigere und nothwendigere in der naiven Schätzung des Volkes. Die Melodie gebiert die Dichtung aus sich und zwar immer wieder von Neuem; nichts Anderes will uns *die Strophenform des Volksliedes* sagen: welches Phänomen ich immer mit Erstaunen betrachtet habe, bis ich endlich diese Erklärung fand. Wer eine Sammlung von Volksliedern z.B. des Knaben Wunderhorn auf diese Theorie hin ansieht, der wird unzählige Beispiele finden, wie die fortwährend gebärende Melodie Bilderfunken um sich aussprüht: die in ihrer Buntheit, ihrem jähen Wechsel, ja ihrem tollen Sichüberstürzen eine dem epischen Scheine und seinem ruhigen Fortströmen wildfremde Kraft offenbaren. Vom Standpunkte des Epos ist diese ungleiche und unregelmässige Bilderwelt der Lyrik einfach zu verurtheilen: und dies haben gewiss die feierlichen epischen Rhapsoden der apollinischen Feste im Zeitalter des Terpander gethan.\n\nIn der Dichtung des Volksliedes sehen wir also die Sprache auf das Stärkste angespannt, *die Musik nachzuahmen:* deshalb beginnt mit Archilochus eine neue Welt der Poesie, die der homerischen in ihrem tiefsten Grunde widerspricht. Hiermit haben wir das einzig mögliche Verhältniss zwischen Poesie und Musik, Wort und Ton bezeichnet: das Wort, das Bild, der Begriff sucht einen der Musik analogen Ausdruck und erleidet jetzt die Gewalt der Musik an sich. In diesem Sinne dürfen wir in der Sprachgeschichte des griechischen Volkes zwei Hauptströmungen unterscheiden, jenachdem die Sprache die Erscheinungs- und Bilderwelt oder die Musikwelt nachahmte. Man denke nur einmal tiefer über die sprachliche Differenz der Farbe, des syntaktischen Bau's, des Wortmaterial's bei Homer und Pindar nach, um die Bedeutung dieses Gegensatzes zu begreifen; ja es wird Einem dabei handgreiflich deutlich, dass zwischen Homer und Pindar die *orgiastischen Flötenweisen des Olympus* erklungen sein müssen, die noch im Zeitalter des Aristoteles, inmitten einer unendlich entwickelteren Musik, zu trunkner Begeisterung hinrissen und gewiss in ihrer ursprünglichen Wirkung alle dichterischen Ausdrucksmittel der gleichzeitigen Menschen zur Nachahmung aufgereizt haben. Ich erinnere hier an ein bekanntes, unserer Aesthetik nur anstössig dünkendes Phänomen unserer Tage. Wir erleben es immer wieder, wie eine Beethoven'sche Symphonie die einzelnen Zuhörer zu einer Bilderrede nöthigt, sei es auch dass eine Zusammenstellung der verschiedenen, durch ein Tonstück erzeugten Bilderwelten sich recht phantastisch bunt, ja widersprechend ausnimmt: an solchen Zusammenstellungen ihren armen Witz zu üben und das doch wahrlich erklärenswerthe Phänomen zu übersehen, ist recht in der Art jener Aesthetik. Ja selbst wenn der Tondichter in Bildern über eine Composition geredet hat, etwa wenn er eine Symphonie als pastorale und einen Satz als „Scene am Bach“, einen anderen als „lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute“ bezeichnet, so sind das ebenfalls nur gleichnissartige, aus der Musik geborne Vorstellungen—und nicht etwa die nachgeahmten Gegenstände der Musik—Vorstellungen, die über den *dionysischen* Inhalt der Musik uns nach keiner Seite hin belehren können, ja die keinen ausschliesslichen Werth neben anderen Bildern haben. Diesen Prozess einer Entladung der Musik in Bildern haben wir uns nun auf eine jugendfrische, sprachlich schöpferische Volksmenge zu übertragen, um zur Ahnung zu kommen, wie das strophische Volkslied entsteht, und wie das ganze Sprachvermögen durch das neue Princip der Nachahmung der Musik aufgeregt wird.\n\nDürfen wir also die lyrische Dichtung als die nachahmende Effulguration der Musik in Bildern und Begriffen betrachten, so können wir jetzt fragen: „als was *erscheint* die Musik im Spiegel der Bildlichkeit und der Begriffe?“ *Sie erscheint als Wille*, das Wort im Schopenhauerischen Sinne genommen, d.h. als Gegensatz der aesthetischen, rein beschaulichen willenlosen Stimmung. Hier unterscheide man nun so scharf als möglich den Begriff des Wesens von dem der Erscheinung: denn die Musik kann, ihrem Wesen nach, unmöglich Wille sein, weil sie als solcher gänzlich aus dem Bereich der Kunst zu bannen wäre—denn der Wille ist das an sich Unaesthetische—; aber sie erscheint als Wille. Denn um ihre Erscheinung in Bildern auszudrücken, braucht der Lyriker alle Regungen der Leidenschaft, vom Flüstern der Neigung bis zum Grollen des Wahnsinns; unter dem Triebe, in apollinischen Gleichnissen von der Musik zu reden, versteht er die ganze Natur und sich in ihr nur als das ewig Wollende, Begehrende, Sehnende. Insofern er aber die Musik in Bildern deutet, ruht er selbst in der stillen Meeresruhe der apollinischen Betrachtung, so sehr auch alles, was er durch das Medium der Musik anschaut, um ihn herum in drängender und treibender Bewegung ist. Ja wenn er sich selbst durch dasselbe Medium erblickt, so zeigt sich ihm sein eignes Bild im Zustande des unbefriedigten Gefühls: sein eignes Wollen, Sehnen, Stöhnen, Jauchzen ist ihm ein Gleichniss, mit dem er die Musik sich deutet. Dies ist das Phänomen des Lyrikers: als apollinischer Genius interpretirt er die Musik durch das Bild des Willens, während er selbst, völlig losgelöst von der Gier des Willens, reines ungetrübtes Sonnenauge ist.\n\nDiese ganze Erörterung hält daran fest, dass die Lyrik eben so abhängig ist vom Geiste der Musik als die Musik selbst, in ihrer völligen Unumschränktheit, das Bild und den Begriff nicht *braucht*, sondern ihn nur neben sich *erträgt*. Die Dichtung des Lyrikers kann nichts aussagen, was nicht in der ungeheuersten Allgemeinheit und Allgültigkeit bereits in der Musik lag, die ihn zur Bilderrede nöthigte. Der Weltsymbolik der Musik ist eben deshalb mit der Sprache auf keine Weise erschöpfend beizukommen, weil sie sich auf den Urwiderspruch und Urschmerz im Herzen des Ur-Einen symbolisch bezieht, somit eine Sphäre symbolisirt, die über alle Erscheinung und vor aller Erscheinung ist. Ihr gegenüber ist vielmehr jede Erscheinung nur Gleichniss: daher kann die *Sprache*, als Organ und Symbol der Erscheinungen, nie und nirgends das tiefste Innere der Musik nach Aussen kehren, sondern bleibt immer, sobald sie sich auf Nachahmung der Musik einlässt, nur in einer äusserlichen Berührung mit der Musik, während deren tiefster Sinn, durch alle lyrische Beredsamkeit, uns auch keinen Schritt näher gebracht werden kann.\n\n### Section 7\n\nAlle die bisher erörterten Kunstprincipien müssen wir jetzt zu Hülfe nehmen, um uns in dem Labyrinth zurecht zu finden, als welches wir *den Ursprung der griechischen Tragödie* bezeichnen müssen. Ich denke nichts Ungereimtes zu behaupten, wenn ich sage, dass das Problem dieses Ursprungs bis jetzt noch nicht einmal ernsthaft aufgestellt, geschweige denn gelöst ist, so oft auch die zerflatternden Fetzen der antiken Ueberlieferung schon combinatorisch an einander genäht und wieder aus einander gerissen sind. Diese Ueberlieferung sagt uns mit voller Entschiedenheit, *dass die Tragödie aus dem tragischen Chore entstanden ist* und ursprünglich nur Chor und nichts als Chor war: woher wir die Verpflichtung nehmen, diesem tragischen Chore als dem eigentlichen Urdrama in's Herz zu sehen, ohne uns an den geläufigen Kunstredensarten—dass er der idealische Zuschauer sei oder das Volk gegenüber der fürstlichen Region der Scene zu vertreten habe—irgendwie genügen zu lassen. Jener zuletzt erwähnte, für manchen Politiker erhaben klingende Erläuterungsgedanke—als ob das unwandelbare Sittengesetz von den demokratischen Athenern in dem Volkschore dargestellt sei, der über die leidenschaftlichen Ausschreitungen und Ausschweifungen der Könige hinaus immer Recht behalte—mag noch so sehr durch ein Wort des Aristoteles nahegelegt sein: auf die ursprüngliche Formation der Tragödie ist er ohne Einfluss, da von jenen rein religiösen Ursprüngen der ganze Gegensatz von Volk und Fürst, überhaupt jegliche politisch-sociale Sphäre ausgeschlossen ist; aber wir möchten es auch in Hinsicht auf die uns bekannte classische Form des Chors bei Aeschylus und Sophokles für Blasphemie erachten, hier von der Ahnung einer „constitutionellen Volksvertretung“ zu reden, vor welcher Blasphemie Andere nicht zurückgeschrocken sind. Eine constitutionelle Volksvertretung kennen die antiken Staatsverfassungen in praxi nicht und haben sie hoffentlich auch in ihrer Tragödie nicht einmal „geahnt“.\n\nViel berühmter als diese politische Erklärung des Chors ist der Gedanke A. W. Schlegel's, der uns den Chor gewissermaassen als den Inbegriff und Extract der Zuschauermenge, als den „idealischen Zuschauer“ zu betrachten anempfiehlt. Diese Ansicht, zusammengehalten mit jener historischen Ueberlieferung, dass ursprünglich die Tragödie nur Chor war, erweist sich als das was sie ist, als eine rohe, unwissenschaftliche, doch glänzende Behauptung, die ihren Glanz aber nur durch ihre concentrirte Form des Ausdrucks, durch die echt germanische Voreingenommenheit für Alles, was „idealisch“ genannt wird und durch unser momentanes Erstauntsein erhalten hat. Wir sind nämlich erstaunt, sobald wir das uns gut bekannte Theaterpublicum mit jenem Chore vergleichen und uns fragen, ob es wohl möglich sei, aus diesem Publicum je etwas dem tragischen Chore Analoges herauszuidealisiren. Wir leugnen dies im Stillen und wundern uns jetzt eben so über die Kühnheit der Schlegel'schen Behauptung wie über die total verschiedene Natur des griechischen Publicums. Wir hatten nämlich doch immer gemeint, dass der rechte Zuschauer, er sei wer er wolle, sich immer bewusst bleiben müsse, ein Kunstwerk vor sich zu haben, nicht eine empirische Realität: während der tragische Chor der Griechen in den Gestalten der Bühne leibhafte Existenzen zu erkennen genöthigt ist. Der Okeanidenchor glaubt wirklich den Titan Prometheus vor sich zu sehen und hält sich selbst für eben so real wie den Gott der Scene. Und das sollte die höchste und reinste Art des Zuschauers sein, gleich den Okeaniden den Prometheus für leiblich vorhanden und real zu halten? Und es wäre das Zeichen des idealischen Zuschauers, auf die Bühne zu laufen und den Gott von seinen Martern zu befreien? Wir hatten an ein aesthetisches Publicum geglaubt und den einzelnen Zuschauer für um so befähigter gehalten, je mehr er im Stande war, das Kunstwerk als Kunst d.h. aesthetisch zu nehmen; und jetzt deutete uns der Schlegel'sche Ausdruck an, dass der vollkommne idealische Zuschauer die Welt der Scene gar nicht aesthetisch, sondern leibhaft empirisch auf sich wirken lasse. O über diese Griechen! seufzen wir; sie werfen uns unsre Aesthetik um! Daran aber gewöhnt, wiederholten wir den Schlegel'schen Spruch, so oft der Chor zur Sprache kam.\n\nAber jene so ausdrückliche Ueberlieferung redet hier gegen Schlegel: der Chor an sich, ohne Bühne, also die primitive Gestalt der Tragödie und jener Chor idealischer Zuschauer vertragen sich nicht mit einander. Was wäre das für eine Kunstgattung, die aus dem Begriff des Zuschauers herausgezogen wäre, als deren eigentliche Form der „Zuschauer an sich“ zu gelten hätte. Der Zuschauer ohne Schauspiel ist ein widersinniger Begriff. Wir fürchten, dass die Geburt der Tragödie weder aus der Hochachtung vor der sittlichen Intelligenz der Masse, noch aus dem Begriff des schauspiellosen Zuschauers zu erklären sei und halten dies Problem für zu tief, um von so flachen Betrachtungsarten auch nur berührt zu werden.\n\nEine unendlich werthvollere Einsicht über die Bedeutung des Chors hatte bereits Schiller in der berühmten Vorrede zur Braut von Messina verrathen, der den Chor als eine lebendige Mauer betrachtete, die die Tragödie um sich herum zieht, um sich von der wirklichen Welt rein abzuschliessen und sich ihren idealen Boden und ihre poetische Freiheit zu bewahren.\n\nSchiller kämpft mit dieser seiner Hauptwaffe gegen den gemeinen Begriff des Natürlichen, gegen die bei der dramatischen Poesie gemeinhin geheischte Illusion. Während der Tag selbst auf dem Theater nur ein künstlicher, die Architektur nur eine symbolische sei und die metrische Sprache einen idealen Charakter trage, herrsche immer noch der Irrthum im Ganzen: es sei nicht genug, dass man das nur als eine poetische Freiheit dulde, was doch das Wesen aller Poesie sei. Die Einführung des Chores sei der entscheidende Schritt, mit dem jedem Naturalismus in der Kunst offen und ehrlich der Krieg erklärt werde.—Eine solche Betrachtungsart ist es, scheint mir, für die unser sich überlegen wähnendes Zeitalter das wegwerfende Schlagwort „Pseudoidealismus“ gebraucht. Ich fürchte, wir sind dagegen mit unserer jetzigen Verehrung des Natürlichen und Wirklichen am Gegenpol alles Idealismus angelangt, nämlich in der Region der Wachsfigurencabinette. Auch in ihnen giebt es eine Kunst, wie bei gewissen beliebten Romanen der Gegenwart: nur quäle man uns nicht mit dem Anspruch, dass mit dieser Kunst der Schiller-Goethesche „Pseudoidealismus“ überwunden sei.\n\nFreilich ist es ein „idealer“ Boden, auf dem, nach der richtigen Einsicht Schillers, der griechische Satyrchor, der Chor der ursprünglichen Tragödie, zu wandeln pflegt, ein Boden hoch emporgehoben über die wirkliche Wandelbahn der Sterblichen. Der Grieche hat sich für diesen Chor die Schwebegerüste eines fingirten *Naturzustandes* gezimmert und auf sie hin fingirte *Naturwesen* gestellt. Die Tragödie ist auf diesem Fundamente emporgewachsen und freilich schon deshalb von Anbeginn an einem peinlichen Abkonterfeien der Wirklichkeit enthoben gewesen. Dabei ist es doch keine willkürlich zwischen Himmel und Erde hineinphantasirte Welt; vielmehr eine Welt von gleicher Realität und Glaubwürdigkeit wie sie der Olymp sammt seinen Insassen für den gläubigen Hellenen besass. Der Satyr als der dionysische Choreut lebt in einer religiös zugestandenen Wirklichkeit unter der Sanction des Mythus und des Cultus. Dass mit ihm die Tragödie beginnt, dass aus ihm die dionysische Weisheit der Tragödie spricht, ist ein hier uns eben so befremdendes Phänomen wie überhaupt die Entstehung der Tragödie aus dem Chore. Vielleicht gewinnen wir einen Ausgangspunkt der Betrachtung, wenn ich die Behauptung hinstelle, dass sich der Satyr, das fingirte Naturwesen, zu dem Culturmenschen in gleicher Weise verhält, wie die dionysische Musik zur Civilisation. Von letzterer sagt Richard Wagner, dass sie von der Musik aufgehoben werde wie der Lampenschein vom Tageslicht. In gleicher Weise, glaube ich, fühlte sich der griechische Culturmensch im Angesicht des Satyrchors aufgehoben: und dies ist die nächste Wirkung der dionysischen Tragödie, dass der Staat und die Gesellschaft, überhaupt die Klüfte zwischen Mensch und Mensch einem übermächtigen Einheitsgefühle weichen, welches an das Herz der Natur zurückführt. Der metaphysische Trost,—mit welchem, wie ich schon hier andeute, uns jede wahre Tragödie entlässt—dass das Leben im Grunde der Dinge, trotz allem Wechsel der Erscheinungen unzerstörbar mächtig und lustvoll sei, dieser Trost erscheint in leibhafter Deutlichkeit als Satyrchor, als Chor von Naturwesen, die gleichsam hinter aller Civilisation unvertilgbar leben und trotz allem Wechsel der Generationen und der Völkergeschichte ewig dieselben bleiben.\n\nMit diesem Chore tröstet sich der tiefsinnige und zum zartesten und schwersten Leiden einzig befähigte Hellene, der mit schneidigem Blicke mitten in das furchtbare Vernichtungstreiben der sogenannten Weltgeschichte, eben so wie in die Grausamkeit der Natur geschaut hat und in Gefahr ist, sich nach einer buddhaistischen Verneinung des Willens zu sehnen. Ihn rettet die Kunst, und durch die Kunst rettet ihn sich—das Leben.\n\nDie Verzückung des dionysischen Zustandes mit seiner Vernichtung der gewöhnlichen Schranken und Grenzen des Daseins enthält nämlich während seiner Dauer ein *lethargisches* Element, in das sich alles persönlich in der Vergangenheit Erlebte eintaucht. So scheidet sich durch diese Kluft der Vergessenheit die Welt der alltäglichen und der dionysischen Wirklichkeit von einander ab. Sobald aber jene alltägliche Wirklichkeit wieder ins Bewusstsein tritt, wird sie mit Ekel als solche empfunden; eine asketische, willenverneinende Stimmung ist die Frucht jener Zustände. In diesem Sinne hat der dionysische Mensch Aehnlichkeit mit Hamlet: beide haben einmal einen wahren Blick in das Wesen der Dinge gethan, sie haben *erkannt*, und es ekelt sie zu handeln; denn ihre Handlung kann nichts am ewigen Wesen der Dinge ändern, sie empfinden es als lächerlich oder schmachvoll, dass ihnen zugemuthet wird, die Welt, die aus den Fugen ist, wieder einzurichten. Die Erkenntniss tödtet das Handeln, zum Handeln gehört das Umschleiertsein durch die Illusion—das ist die Hamletlehre, nicht jene wohlfeile Weisheit von Hans dem Träumer, der aus zu viel Reflexion, gleichsam aus einem Ueberschuss von Möglichkeiten nicht zum Handeln kommt; nicht das Reflectiren, nein!—die wahre Erkenntniss, der Einblick in die grauenhafte Wahrheit überwiegt jedes zum Handeln antreibende Motiv, bei Hamlet sowohl als bei dem dionysischen Menschen. Jetzt verfängt kein Trost mehr, die Sehnsucht geht über eine Welt nach dem Tode, über die Götter selbst hinaus, das Dasein wird, sammt seiner gleissenden Wiederspiegelung in den Göttern oder in einem unsterblichen Jenseits, verneint. In der Bewusstheit der einmal geschauten Wahrheit sieht jetzt der Mensch überall nur das Entsetzliche oder Absurde des Seins, jetzt versteht er das Symbolische im Schicksal der Ophelia, jetzt erkennt er die Weisheit des Waldgottes Silen: es ekelt ihn.\n\nHier, in dieser höchsten Gefahr des Willens, naht sich, als rettende, heilkundige Zauberin, die *Kunst*; sie allein vermag jene Ekelgedanken über das Entsetzliche oder Absurde des Daseins in Vorstellungen umzubiegen, mit denen sich leben lässt: diese sind das *Erhabene* als die künstlerische Bändigung des Entsetzlichen und das *Komische* als die künstlerische Entladung vom Ekel des Absurden. Der Satyrchor des Dithyrambus ist die rettende That der griechischen Kunst; an der Mittelwelt dieser dionysischen Begleiter erschöpften sich jene vorhin beschriebenen Anwandlungen.\n\n### Section 8\n\nDer Satyr wie der idyllische Schäfer unserer neueren Zeit sind Beide Ausgeburten einer auf das Ursprüngliche und Natürliche gerichteten Sehnsucht; aber mit welchem festen unerschrocknen Griffe fasste der Grieche nach seinem Waldmenschen, wie verschämt und weichlich tändelte der moderne Mensch mit dem Schmeichelbild eines zärtlichen flötenden weichgearteten Hirten! Die Natur, an der noch keine Erkenntniss gearbeitet, in der die Riegel der Cultur noch unerbrochen sind—das sah der Grieche in seinem Satyr, der ihm deshalb noch nicht mit dem Affen zusammenfiel. Im Gegentheil: es war das Urbild des Menschen, der Ausdruck seiner höchsten und stärksten Regungen, als begeisterter Schwärmer, den die Nähe des Gottes entzückt, als mitleidender Genosse, in dem sich das Leiden des Gottes wiederholt, als Weisheitsverkünder aus der tiefsten Brust der Natur heraus, als Sinnbild der geschlechtlichen Allgewalt der Natur, die der Grieche gewöhnt ist mit ehrfürchtigem Staunen zu betrachten. Der Satyr war etwas Erhabenes und Göttliches: so musste er besonders dem schmerzlich gebrochnen Blick des dionysischen Menschen dünken. Ihn hätte der geputzte, erlogene Schäfer beleidigt: auf den unverhüllten und unverkümmert grossartigen Schriftzügen der Natur weilte sein Auge in erhabener Befriedigung; hier war die Illusion der Cultur von dem Urbilde des Menschen weggewischt, hier enthüllte sich der wahre Mensch, der bärtige Satyr, der zu seinem Gotte aufjubelt. Vor ihm schrumpfte der Culturmensch zur lügenhaften Caricatur zusammen. Auch für diese Anfänge der tragischen Kunst hat Schiller Recht: der Chor ist eine lebendige Mauer gegen die anstürmende Wirklichkeit, weil er—der Satyrchor—das Dasein wahrhaftiger, wirklicher, vollständiger abbildet als der gemeinhin sich als einzige Realität achtende Culturmensch. Die Sphäre der Poesie liegt nicht ausserhalb der Welt, als eine phantastische Unmöglichkeit eines Dichterhirns: sie will das gerade Gegentheil sein, der ungeschminkte Ausdruck der Wahrheit und muss eben deshalb den lügenhaften Aufputz jener vermeinten Wirklichkeit des Culturmenschen von sich werfen. Der Contrast dieser eigentlichen Naturwahrheit und der sich als einzige Realität gebärdenden Culturlüge ist ein ähnlicher wie zwischen dem ewigen Kern der Dinge, dem Ding an sich, und der gesammten Erscheinungswelt: und wie die Tragödie mit ihrem metaphysischen Troste auf das ewige Leben jenes Daseinskernes, bei dem fortwährenden Untergange der Erscheinungen, hinweist, so spricht bereits die Symbolik des Satyrchors in einem Gleichniss jenes Urverhältniss zwischen Ding an sich und Erscheinung aus. Jener idyllische Schäfer des modernen Menschen ist nur ein Konterfei der ihm als Natur geltenden Summe von Bildungsillusionen; der dionysische Grieche will die Wahrheit und die Natur in ihrer höchsten Kraft—er sieht sich zum Satyr verzaubert.\n\nUnter solchen Stimmungen und Erkenntnissen jubelt die schwärmende Schaar der Dionysusdiener: deren Macht sie selbst vor ihren eignen Augen verwandelt, so dass sie sich als wiederhergestellte Naturgenien, als Satyrn, zu erblicken wähnen. Die spätere Constitution des Tragödienchors ist die künstlerische Nachahmung jenes natürlichen Phänomens; bei der nun allerdings eine Scheidung von dionysischen Zuschauern und dionysischen Verzauberten nöthig wurde. Nur muss man sich immer gegenwärtig halten, dass das Publicum der attischen Tragödie sich selbst in dem Chore der Orchestra wiederfand, dass es im Grunde keinen Gegensatz von Publicum und Chor gab: denn alles ist nur ein grosser erhabener Chor von tanzenden und singenden Satyrn oder von solchen, welche sich durch diese Satyrn repräsentiren lassen. Das Schlegel'sche Wort muss sich uns hier in einem tieferen Sinne erschliessen. Der Chor ist der „idealische Zuschauer“, insofern er der einzige *Schauer* ist, der Schauer der Visionswelt der Scene. Ein Publicum von Zuschauern, wie wir es kennen, war den Griechen unbekannt: in ihren Theatern war es Jedem, bei dem in concentrischen Bogen sich erhebenden Terrassenbau des Zuschauerraumes, möglich, die gesammte Culturwelt um sich herum ganz eigentlich zu *übersehen* und in gesättigtem Hinschauen selbst Choreut sich zu wähnen. Nach dieser Einsicht dürfen wir den Chor, auf seiner primitiven Stufe in der Urtragödie, eine Selbstspiegelung des dionysischen Menschen nennen: welches Phänomen am deutlichsten durch den Prozess des Schauspielers zu machen ist, der, bei wahrhafter Begabung, sein von ihm darzustellendes Rollenbild zum Greifen wahrnehmbar vor seinen Augen schweben sieht. Der Satyrchor ist zu allererst eine Vision der dionysischen Masse, wie wiederum die Welt der Bühne eine Vision dieses Satyrchors ist: die Kraft dieser Vision ist stark genug, um gegen den Eindruck der „Realität“, gegen die rings auf den Sitzreihen gelagerten Bildungsmenschen den Blick stumpf und unempfindlich zu machen. Die Form des griechischen Theaters erinnert an ein einsames Gebirgsthal: die Architektur der Scene erscheint wie ein leuchtendes Wolkenbild, welches die im Gebirge herumschwärmenden Bacchen von der Höhe aus erblicken, als die herrliche Umrahmung, in deren Mitte ihnen das Bild des Dionysus offenbar wird.\n\nJene künstlerische Urerscheinung, die wir hier zur Erklärung des Tragödienchors zur Sprache bringen, ist, bei unserer gelehrtenhaften Anschauung über die elementaren künstlerischen Prozesse, fast anstössig; während nichts ausgemachter sein kann, als dass der Dichter nur dadurch Dichter ist, dass er von Gestalten sich umringt sieht, die vor ihm leben und handeln und in deren innerstes Wesen er hineinblickt. Durch eine eigenthümliche Schwäche der modernen Begabung sind wir geneigt, uns das aesthetische Urphänomen zu complicirt und abstract vorzustellen. Die Metapher ist für den ächten Dichter nicht eine rhetorische Figur, sondern ein stellvertretendes Bild, das ihm wirklich, an Stelle eines Begriffes, vorschwebt. Der Character ist für ihn nicht etwas aus zusammengesuchten Einzelzügen componirtes Ganzes, sondern eine vor seinen Augen aufdringlich lebendige Person, die von der gleichen Vision des Malers sich nur durch das fortwährende Weiterleben und Weiterhandeln unterscheidet. Wodurch schildert Homer so viel anschaulicher als alle Dichter? Weil er um so viel mehr anschaut. Wir reden über Poesie so abstract, weil wir alle schlechte Dichter zu sein pflegen. Im Grunde ist das aesthetische Phänomen einfach; man habe nur die Fähigkeit, fortwährend ein lebendiges Spiel zu sehen und immerfort von Geisterschaaren umringt zu leben, so ist man Dichter; man fühle nur den Trieb, sich selbst zu verwandeln und aus anderen Leibern und Seelen herauszureden, so ist man Dramatiker.\n\nDie dionysische Erregung ist im Stande, einer ganzen Masse diese künstlerische Begabung mitzutheilen, sich von einer solchen Geisterschaar umringt zu sehen, mit der sie sich innerlich eins weiss. Dieser Prozess des Tragödienchors ist das *dramatische* Urphänomen: sich selbst vor sich verwandelt zu sehen und jetzt zu handeln, als ob man wirklich in einen andern Leib, in einen andern Charakter eingegangen wäre. Dieser Prozess steht an dem Anfang der Entwickelung des Dramas. Hier ist etwas Anderes als der Rhapsode, der mit seinen Bildern nicht verschmilzt, sondern sie, dem Maler ähnlich, mit betrachtendem Auge ausser sich sieht; hier ist bereits ein Aufgeben des Individuums durch Einkehr in eine fremde Natur. Und zwar tritt dieses Phänomen epidemisch auf: eine ganze Schaar fühlt sich in dieser Weise verzaubert. Der Dithyramb ist deshalb wesentlich von jedem anderen Chorgesange unterschieden. Die Jungfrauen, die, mit Lorbeerzweigen in der Hand, feierlich zum Tempel des Apollo ziehn und dabei ein Prozessionslied singen, bleiben, wer sie sind, und behalten ihren bürgerlichen Namen: der dithyrambische Chor ist ein Chor von Verwandelten, bei denen ihre bürgerliche Vergangenheit, ihre sociale Stellung völlig vergessen ist: sie sind die zeitlosen, ausserhalb aller Gesellschaftssphären lebenden Diener ihres Gottes geworden. Alle andere Chorlyrik der Hellenen ist nur eine ungeheure Steigerung des apollinischen Einzelsängers; während im Dithyramb eine Gemeinde von unbewussten Schauspielern vor uns steht, die sich selbst unter einander als verwandelt ansehen.\n\nDie Verzauberung ist die Voraussetzung aller dramatischen Kunst. In dieser Verzauberung sieht sich der dionysische Schwärmer als Satyr, *und als Satyr wiederum schaut er den Gott* d.h. er sieht in seiner Verwandlung eine neue Vision ausser sich, als apollinische Vollendung seines Zustandes. Mit dieser neuen Vision ist das Drama vollständig.\n\nNach dieser Erkenntniss haben wir die griechische Tragödie als den dionysischen Chor zu verstehen, der sich immer von neuem wieder in einer apollinischen Bilderwelt entladet. Jene Chorpartien, mit denen die Tragödie durchflochten ist, sind also gewissermaassen der Mutterschooss des ganzen sogenannten Dialogs d.h. der gesammten Bühnenwelt, des eigentlichen Dramas. In mehreren auf einander folgenden Entladungen strahlt dieser Urgrund der Tragödie jene Vision des Dramas aus: die durchaus Traumerscheinung und insofern epischer Natur ist, andrerseits aber, als Objectivation eines dionysischen Zustandes, nicht die apollinische Erlösung im Scheine, sondern im Gegentheil das Zerbrechen des Individuums und sein Einswerden mit dem Ursein darstellt. Somit ist das Drama die apollinische Versinnlichung dionysischer Erkenntnisse und Wirkungen und dadurch wie durch eine ungeheure Kluft vom Epos abgeschieden.\n\nDer *Chor* der griechischen Tragödie, das Symbol der gesammten dionysisch erregten Masse, findet an dieser unserer Auffassung seine volle Erklärung. Während wir, mit der Gewöhnung an die Stellung eines Chors auf der modernen Bühne, zumal eines Opernchors, gar nicht begreifen konnten, wie jener tragische Chor der Griechen älter, ursprünglicher, ja wichtiger sein sollte, als die eigentliche „Action“,—wie dies doch so deutlich überliefert war—während wir wiederum mit jener überlieferten hohen Wichtigkeit und Ursprünglichkeit nicht reimen konnten, warum er doch nur aus niedrigen dienenden Wesen, ja zuerst nur aus bocksartigen Satyrn zusammengesetzt worden sei, während uns die Orchestra vor der Scene immer ein Räthsel blieb, sind wir jetzt zu der Einsicht gekommen, dass die Scene sammt der Action im Grunde und ursprünglich nur als *Vision* gedacht wurde, dass die einzige „Realität“ eben der Chor ist, der die Vision aus sich erzeugt und von ihr mit der ganzen Symbolik des Tanzes, des Tones und des Wortes redet. Dieser Chor schaut in seiner Vision seinen Herrn und Meister Dionysus und ist darum ewig der *dienende* Chor: er sieht, wie dieser, der Gott, leidet und sich verherrlicht, und *handelt* deshalb selbst nicht. Bei dieser, dem Gotte gegenüber durchaus dienenden Stellung ist er doch der höchste, nämlich dionysische Ausdruck der *Natur* und redet darum, wie diese, in der Begeisterung Orakel- und Weisheitssprüche: als der *mitleidende* ist er zugleich der *weise*, aus dem Herzen der Welt die Wahrheit verkündende. So entsteht denn jene phantastische und so anstössig scheinende Figur des weisen und begeisterten Satyrs, der zugleich „der tumbe Mensch“ im Gegensatz zum Gotte ist: Abbild der Natur und ihrer stärksten Triebe, ja Symbol derselben und zugleich Verkünder ihrer Weisheit und Kunst: Musiker, Dichter, Tänzer, Geisterseher in einer Person.\n\n*Dionysus*, der eigentliche Bühnenheld und Mittelpunkt der Vision, ist gemäss dieser Erkenntniss und gemäss der Ueberlieferung, zuerst, in der allerältesten Periode der Tragödie, nicht wahrhaft vorhanden, sondern wird nur als vorhanden vorgestellt: d.h. ursprünglich ist die Tragödie nur „Chor“ und nicht „Drama“. Später wird nun der Versuch gemacht, den Gott als einen realen zu zeigen und die Visionsgestalt sammt der verklärenden Umrahmung als jedem Auge sichtbar darzustellen; damit beginnt das „Drama“ im engeren Sinne. Jetzt bekommt der dithyrambische Chor die Aufgabe, die Stimmung der Zuhörer bis zu dem Grade dionysisch anzuregen, dass sie, wenn der tragische Held auf der Bühne erscheint, nicht etwa den unförmlich maskirten Menschen sehen, sondern eine gleichsam aus ihrer eignen Verzückung geborene Visionsgestalt. Denken wir uns Admet mit tiefem Sinnen seiner jüngst abgeschiedenen Gattin Alcestis gedenkend und ganz im geistigen Anschauen derselben sich verzehrend—wie ihm nun plötzlich ein ähnlich gestaltetes, ähnlich schreitendes Frauenbild in Verhüllung entgegengeführt wird: denken wir uns seine plötzliche zitternde Unruhe, sein stürmisches Vergleichen, seine instinctive Ueberzeugung—so haben wir ein Analogon zu der Empfindung, mit der der dionysisch erregte Zuschauer den Gott auf der Bühne heranschreiten sah, mit dessen Leiden er bereits eins geworden ist. Unwillkürlich übertrug er das ganze magisch vor seiner Seele zitternde Bild des Gottes auf jene maskirte Gestalt und löste ihre Realität gleichsam in eine geisterhafte Unwirklichkeit auf. Dies ist der apollinische Traumeszustand, in dem die Welt des Tages sich verschleiert und eine neue Welt, deutlicher, verständlicher, ergreifender als jene und doch schattengleicher, in fortwährendem Wechsel sich unserem Auge neu gebiert. Demgemäss erkennen wir in der Tragödie einen durchgreifenden Stilgegensatz: Sprache, Farbe, Beweglichkeit, Dynamik der Rede treten in der dionysischen Lyrik des Chors und andrerseits in der apollinischen Traumwelt der Scene als völlig gesonderte Sphären des Ausdrucks aus einander. Die apollinischen Erscheinungen, in denen sich Dionysus objectivirt, sind nicht mehr „ein ewiges Meer, ein wechselnd Weben, ein glühend Leben“, wie es die Musik des Chors ist, nicht mehr jene nur empfundenen, nicht zum Bilde verdichteten Kräfte, in denen der begeisterte Dionysusdiener die Nähe des Gottes spürt: jetzt spricht, von der Scene aus, die Deutlichkeit und Festigkeit der epischen Gestaltung zu ihm, jetzt redet Dionysus nicht mehr durch Kräfte, sondern als epischer Held, fast mit der Sprache Homers.\n\n### Section 9\n\nAlles, was im apollinischen Theile der griechischen Tragödie, im Dialoge, auf die Oberfläche kommt, sieht einfach, durchsichtig, schön aus. In diesem Sinne ist der Dialog ein Abbild des Hellenen, dessen Natur sich im Tanze offenbart, weil im Tanze die grösste Kraft nur potenziell ist, aber sich in der Geschmeidigkeit und Ueppigkeit der Bewegung verräth. So überrascht uns die Sprache der sophokleischen Helden durch ihre apollinische Bestimmtheit und Helligkeit, so dass wir sofort bis in den innersten Grund ihres Wesens zu blicken wähnen, mit einigem Erstaunen, dass der Weg bis zu diesem Grunde so kurz ist. Sehen wir aber einmal von dem auf die Oberfläche kommenden und sichtbar werdenden Charakter des Helden ab — der im Grunde nichts mehr ist als das auf eine dunkle Wand geworfene Lichtbild d. h. Erscheinung durch und durch — dringen wir vielmehr in den Mythus ein, der in diesen hellen Spiegelungen sich projicirt, so erleben wir plötzlich ein Phänomen, das ein umgekehrtes Verhältniss zu einem bekannten optischen hat. Wenn wir bei einem kräftigen Versuch, die Sonne in's Auge zu fassen, uns geblendet abwenden, so haben wir dunkle farbige Flecken gleichsam als Heilmittel vor den Augen: umgekehrt sind jene Lichtbilderscheinungen des sophokleischen Helden, kurz das Apollinische der Maske, nothwendige Erzeugungen eines Blickes in's Innere und Schreckliche der Natur, gleichsam leuchtende Flecken zur Heilung des von grausiger Nacht versehrten Blickes. Nur in diesem Sinne dürfen wir glauben, den ernsthaften und bedeutenden Begriff der „griechischen Heiterkeit“ richtig zu fassen; während wir allerdings den falsch verstandenen Begriff dieser Heiterkeit im Zustande ungefährdeten Behagens auf allen Wegen und Stegen der Gegenwart antreffen.\n\nDie leidvollste Gestalt der griechischen Bühne, der unglückselige *Oedipus*, ist von Sophokles als der edle Mensch verstanden worden, der zum Irrthum und zum Elend trotz seiner Weisheit bestimmt ist, der aber am Ende durch sein ungeheures Leiden eine magische segensreiche Kraft um sich ausübt, die noch über sein Verscheiden hinaus wirksam ist. Der edle Mensch sündigt nicht, will uns der tiefsinnige Dichter sagen: durch sein Handeln mag jedes Gesetz, jede natürliche Ordnung, ja die sittliche Welt zu Grunde gehen, eben durch dieses Handeln wird ein höherer magischer Kreis von Wirkungen gezogen, die eine neue Welt auf den Ruinen der umgestürzten alten gründen. Das will uns der Dichter, insofern er zugleich religiöser Denker ist, sagen: als Dichter zeigt er uns zuerst einen wunderbar geschürzten Prozessknoten, den der Richter langsam, Glied für Glied, zu seinem eigenen Verderben löst; die echt hellenische Freude an dieser dialektischen Lösung ist so gross, dass hierdurch ein Zug von überlegener Heiterkeit über das ganze Werk kommt, der den schauderhaften Voraussetzungen jenes Prozesses überall die Spitze abbricht. Im „Oedipus auf Kolonos“ treffen wir diese selbe Heiterkeit, aber in eine unendliche Verklärung emporgehoben; dem vom Uebermaasse des Elends betroffenen Greise gegenüber, der allem, was ihn betrifft, rein als *Leidender* preisgegeben ist — steht die überirdische Heiterkeit, die aus göttlicher Sphäre herniederkommt und uns andeutet, dass der Held in seinem rein passiven Verhalten seine höchste Activität erlangt, die weit über sein Leben hinausgreift, während sein bewusstes Tichten und Trachten im früheren Leben ihn nur zur Passivität geführt hat. So wird der für das sterbliche Auge unauflöslich verschlungene Prozessknoten der Oedipusfabel langsam entwirrt — und die tiefste menschliche Freude überkommt uns bei diesem göttlichen Gegenstück der Dialektik. Wenn wir mit dieser Erklärung dem Dichter gerecht geworden sind, so kann doch immer noch gefragt werden, ob damit der Inhalt des Mythus erschöpft ist: und hier zeigt sich, dass die ganze Auffassung des Dichters nichts ist als eben jenes Lichtbild, welches uns, nach einem Blick in den Abgrund, die heilende Natur vorhält. Oedipus der Mörder seines Vaters, der Gatte seiner Mutter, Oedipus der Räthsellöser der Sphinx! Was sagt uns die geheimnissvolle Dreiheit dieser Schicksalsthaten? Es giebt einen uralten, besonders persischen Volksglauben, dass ein weiser Magier nur aus Incest geboren werden könne: was wir uns, im Hinblick auf den räthsellösenden und seine Mutter freienden Oedipus, sofort so zu interpretiren haben, dass dort, wo durch weissagende und magische Kräfte der Bann von Gegenwart und Zukunft, das starre Gesetz der Individuation, und überhaupt der eigentliche Zauber der Natur gebrochen ist, eine ungeheure Naturwidrigkeit — wie dort der Incest — als Ursache vorausgegangen sein muss; denn wie könnte man die Natur zum Preisgeben ihrer Geheimnisse zwingen, wenn nicht dadurch, dass man ihr siegreich widerstrebt, d. h. durch das Unnatürliche? Diese Erkenntniss sehe ich in jener entsetzlichen Dreiheit der Oedipusschicksale ausgeprägt: derselbe, der das Räthsel der Natur — jener doppeltgearteten Sphinx — löst, muss auch als Mörder des Vaters und Gatte der Mutter die heiligsten Naturordnungen zerbrechen. Ja, der Mythus scheint uns zuraunen zu wollen, dass die Weisheit und gerade die dionysische Weisheit ein naturwidriger Greuel sei, dass der, welcher durch sein Wissen die Natur in den Abgrund der Vernichtung stürzt, auch an sich selbst die Auflösung der Natur zu erfahren habe. „Die Spitze der Weisheit kehrt sich gegen den Weisen: Weisheit ist ein Verbrechen an der Natur“: solche schreckliche Sätze ruft uns der Mythus zu: der hellenische Dichter aber berührt wie ein Sonnenstrahl die erhabene und furchtbare Memnonssäule des Mythus, so dass er plötzlich zu tönen beginnt — in sophokleischen Melodieen!\n\nDer Glorie der Passivität stelle ich jetzt die Glorie der Activität gegenüber, welche den *Prometheus* des Aeschylus umleuchtet. Was uns hier der Denker Aeschylus zu sagen hatte, was er aber als Dichter durch sein gleichnissartiges Bild uns nur ahnen lässt, das hat uns der jugendliche Goethe in den verwegenen Worten seines Prometheus zu enthüllen gewusst:\n\n„Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen\nNach meinem Bilde,\nEin Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei,\nZu leiden, zu weinen,\nZu geniessen und zu freuen sich,\nUnd dein nicht zu achten,\nWie ich!“\n\nDer Mensch, in's Titanische sich steigernd, erkämpft sich selbst seine Cultur und zwingt die Götter sich mit ihm zu verbinden, weil er in seiner selbsteignen Weisheit die Existenz und die Schranken derselben in seiner Hand hat. Das Wunderbarste an jenem Prometheusgedicht, das seinem Grundgedanken nach der eigentliche Hymnus der Unfrömmigkeit ist, ist aber der tiefe aeschyleische Zug nach *Gerechtigkeit*: das unermessliche Leid des kühnen „Einzelnen“ auf der einen Seite, und die göttliche Noth, ja Ahnung einer Götterdämmerung auf der andern, die zur Versöhnung, zum metaphysischen Einssein zwingende Macht jener beiden Leidenswelten — dies alles erinnert auf das Stärkste an den Mittelpunkt und Hauptsatz der aeschyleischen Weltbetrachtung, die über Göttern und Menschen die Moira als ewige Gerechtigkeit thronen sieht. Bei der erstaunlichen Kühnheit, mit der Aeschylus die olympische Welt auf seine Gerechtigkeitswagschalen stellt, müssen wir uns vergegenwärtigen, dass der tiefsinnige Grieche einen unverrückbar festen Untergrund des metaphysischen Denkens in seinen Mysterien hatte, und dass sich an den Olympiern alle seine skeptischen Anwandelungen entladen konnten. Der griechische Künstler insbesondere empfand im Hinblick auf diese Gottheiten ein dunkles Gefühl wechselseitiger Abhängigkeit: und gerade im Prometheus des Aeschylus ist dieses Gefühl symbolisirt. Der titanische Künstler fand in sich den trotzigen Glauben, Menschen schaffen und olympische Götter wenigstens vernichten zu können: und dies durch seine höhere Weisheit, die er freilich durch ewiges Leiden zu büssen gezwungen war. Das herrliche „Können“ des grossen Genius, das selbst mit ewigem Leide zu gering bezahlt ist, der herbe Stolz des *Künstlers* — das ist Inhalt und Seele der aeschyleischen Dichtung, während Sophokles in seinem Oedipus das Siegeslied des *Heiligen* präludirend anstimmt. Aber auch mit jener Deutung, die Aeschylus dem Mythus gegeben hat, ist dessen erstaunliche Schreckenstiefe nicht ausgemessen: vielmehr ist die Werdelust des Künstlers, die jedem Unheil trotzende Heiterkeit des künstlerischen Schaffens nur ein lichtes Wolken- und Himmelsbild, das sich auf einem schwarzen See der Traurigkeit spiegelt. Die Prometheussage ist ein ursprüngliches Eigenthum der gesammten arischen Völkergemeinde und ein Document für deren Begabung zum Tiefsinnig-Tragischen, ja es möchte nicht ohne Wahrscheinlichkeit sein, dass diesem Mythus für das arische Wesen eben dieselbe charakteristische Bedeutung innewohnt, die der Sündenfallmythus für das semitische hat, und dass zwischen beiden Mythen ein Verwandtschaftsgrad existiert, wie zwischen Bruder und Schwester. Die Voraussetzung jenes Prometheusmythus ist der überschwängliche Werth, den eine naive Menschheit dem *Feuer* beilegt als dem wahren Palladium jeder aufsteigenden Cultur: dass aber der Mensch frei über das Feuer waltet und es nicht nur durch ein Geschenk vom Himmel, als zündenden Blitzstrahl oder wärmenden Sonnenbrand empfängt, erschien jenen beschaulichen Ur-Menschen als ein Frevel, als ein Raub an der göttlichen Natur. Und so stellt gleich das erste philosophische Problem einen peinlichen unlösbaren Widerspruch zwischen Mensch und Gott hin und rückt ihn wie einen Felsblock an die Pforte jeder Cultur. Das Beste und Höchste, dessen die Menschheit theilhaftig werden kann, erringt sie durch einen Frevel und muss nun wieder seine Folgen dahinnehmen, nämlich die ganze Fluth von Leiden und von Kümmernissen mit denen die beleidigten Himmlischen das edel emporstrebende Menschengeschlecht heimsuchen — müssen: ein herber Gedanke, der durch die *Würde*, die er dem Frevel ertheilt, seltsam gegen den semitischen Sündenfallmythus absticht, in welchem die Neugierde, die lügnerische Vorspiegelung, die Verführbarkeit, die Lüsternheit, kurz eine Reihe vornehmlich weiblicher Affectionen als der Ursprung des Uebels angesehen wurde. Das, was die arische Vorstellung auszeichnet, ist die erhabene Ansicht von der *activen Sünde* als der eigentlich prometheischen Tugend: womit zugleich der ethische Untergrund der pessimistischen Tragödie gefunden ist, als die *Rechtfertigung* des menschlichen Uebels, und zwar sowohl der menschlichen Schuld als des dadurch verwirkten Leidens. Das Unheil im Wesen der Dinge — das der beschauliche Arier nicht geneigt ist wegzudeuteln —, der Widerspruch im Herzen der Welt offenbart sich ihm als ein Durcheinander verschiedener Welten, z. B. einer göttlichen und einer menschlichen, von denen jede als Individuum im Recht ist, aber als einzelne neben einer andern für ihre Individuation zu leiden hat. Bei dem heroischen Drange des Einzelnen ins Allgemeine, bei dem Versuche über den Bann der Individuation hinauszuschreiten und das *eine* Weltwesen selbst sein zu wollen, erleidet er an sich den in den Dingen verborgenen Urwiderspruch d. h. er frevelt und leidet. So wird von den Ariern der Frevel als Mann, von den Semiten die Sünde als Weib verstanden, so wie auch der Urfrevel vom Manne, die Ursünde vom Weibe begangen wird. Uebrigens sagt der Hexenchor:\n\n„Wir nehmen das nicht so genau:\nMit tausend Schritten macht's die Frau;\nDoch wie sie auch sich eilen kann,\nMit einem Sprunge macht's der Mann“.\n\nWer jenen innersten Kern der Prometheussage versteht — nämlich die dem titanisch strebenden Individuum gebotene Nothwendigkeit des Frevels — der muss auch zugleich das Unapollinische dieser pessimistischen Vorstellung empfinden; denn Apollo will die Einzelwesen gerade dadurch zur Ruhe bringen, dass er Grenzlinien zwischen ihnen zieht und dass er immer wieder an diese als an die heiligsten Weltgesetze mit seinen Forderungen der Selbsterkenntniss und des Maasses erinnert. Damit aber bei dieser apollinischen Tendenz die Form nicht zu ägyptischer Steifigkeit und Kälte erstarre, damit nicht unter dem Bemühen, der einzelnen Welle ihre Bahn und ihr Bereich vorzuschreiben, die Bewegung des ganzen See's ersterbe, zerstörte von Zeit zu Zeit wieder die hohe Fluth des Dionysischen alle jene kleinen Zirkel, in die der einseitig apollinische „Wille“ das Hellenenthum zu bannen suchte. Jene plötzlich anschwellende Fluth des Dionysischen nimmt dann die einzelnen kleinen Wellenberge der Individuen auf ihren Rücken, wie der Bruder des Prometheus, der Titan Atlas, die Erde. Dieser titanische Drang, gleichsam der Atlas aller Einzelnen zu werden und sie mit breitem Rücken höher und höher, weiter und weiter zu tragen, ist das Gemeinsame zwischen dem Prometheischen und dem Dionysischen. Der aeschyleische Prometheus ist in diesem Betracht eine dionysische Maske, während in jenem vorhin erwähnten tiefen Zuge nach Gerechtigkeit Aeschylus seine väterliche Abstammung von Apollo, dem Gotte der Individuation und der Gerechtigkeitsgrenzen, dem Einsichtigen verräth. Und so möchte das Doppelwesen des aeschyleischen Prometheus, seine zugleich dionysische und apollinische Natur in begrifflicher Formel so ausgedrückt werden können: „Alles Vorhandene ist gerecht und ungerecht und in beidem gleich berechtigt.“\n\nDas ist deine Welt! Das heisst eine Welt! —\n\n### Section 10\n\nEs ist eine unanfechtbare Ueberlieferung, dass die griechische Tragödie in ihrer ältesten Gestalt nur die Leiden des Dionysus zum Gegenstand hatte und dass der längere Zeit hindurch einzig vorhandene Bühnenheld eben Dionysus war. Aber mit der gleichen Sicherheit darf behauptet werden, dass niemals bis auf Euripides Dionysus aufgehört hat, der tragische Held zu sein, sondern dass alle die berühmten Figuren der griechischen Bühne Prometheus, Oedipus u. s. w. nur Masken jenes ursprünglichen Helden Dionysus sind. Dass hinter allen diesen Masken eine Gottheit steckt, das ist der eine wesentliche Grund für die so oft angestaunte typische „Idealität“ jener berühmten Figuren. Es hat ich weiss nicht wer behauptet, dass alle Individuen als Individuen komisch und damit untragisch seien: woraus zu entnehmen wäre, dass die Griechen überhaupt Individuen auf der tragischen Bühne nicht ertragen *konnten*. In der That scheinen sie so empfunden zu haben: wie überhaupt jene platonische Unterscheidung und Werthabschätzung der „Idee“ im Gegensatze zum „Idol“ zum Abbild tief im hellenischen Wesen begründet liegt. Um uns aber der Terminologie Plato's zu bedienen, so wäre von den tragischen Gestalten der hellenischen Bühne etwa so zu reden: der eine wahrhaft reale Dionysus erscheint in einer Vielheit der Gestalten, in der Maske eines kämpfenden Helden und gleichsam in das Netz des Einzelwillens verstrickt. So wie jetzt der erscheinende Gott redet und handelt, ähnelt er einem irrenden strebenden leidenden Individuum: und dass er überhaupt mit dieser epischen Bestimmtheit und Deutlichkeit *erscheint*, ist die Wirkung des Traumdeuters Apollo, der dem Chore seinen dionysischen Zustand durch jene gleichnissartige Erscheinung deutet. In Wahrheit aber ist jener Held der leidende Dionysus der Mysterien, jener die Leiden der Individuation an sich erfahrende Gott, von dem wundervolle Mythen erzählen, wie er als Knabe von den Titanen zerstückelt worden sei und nun in diesem Zustande als Zagreus verehrt werde: wobei angedeutet wird, dass diese Zerstückelung, das eigentlich dionysische *Leiden*, gleich einer Umwandlung in Luft, Wasser, Erde und Feuer sei, dass wir also den Zustand der Individuation als den Quell und Urgrund alles Leidens, als etwas an sich Verwerfliches, zu betrachten hätten. Aus dem Lächeln dieses Dionysus sind die olympischen Götter, aus seinen Thränen die Menschen entstanden. In jener Existenz als zerstückelter Gott hat Dionysus die Doppelnatur eines grausamen verwilderten Dämons und eines milden sanftmüthigen Herrschers. Die Hoffnung der Epopten ging aber auf eine Wiedergeburt des Dionysus, die wir jetzt als das Ende der Individuation ahnungsvoll zu begreifen haben: diesem kommenden dritten Dionysus erscholl der brausende Jubelgesang der Epopten. Und nur in dieser Hoffnung giebt es einen Strahl von Freude auf dem Antlitze der zerrissenen, in Individuen zertrümmerten Welt: wie es der Mythus durch die in ewige Trauer versenkte Demeter verbildlicht, welche zum ersten Male wieder sich *freut*, als man ihr sagt, sie könne den Dionysus *noch einmal* gebären. In den angeführten Anschauungen haben wir bereits alle Bestandtheile einer tiefsinnigen und pessimistischen Weltbetrachtung und zugleich damit *die Mysterienlehre der Tragödie* zusammen: die Grunderkenntniss von der Einheit alles Vorhandenen, die Betrachtung der Individuation als des Urgrundes des Uebels, die Kunst als die freudige Hoffnung, dass der Bann der Individuation zu zerbrechen sei, als die Ahnung einer wiederhergestellten Einheit. —\n\nEs ist früher angedeutet worden, dass das homerische Epos die Dichtung der olympischen Cultur ist, mit der sie ihr eignes Siegeslied über die Schrecken des Titanenkampfes gesungen hat. Jetzt, unter dem übermächtigen Einflusse der tragischen Dichtung, werden die homerischen Mythen von Neuem umgeboren und zeigen in dieser Metempsychose, dass inzwischen auch die olympische Cultur von einer noch tieferen Weltbetrachtung besiegt worden ist. Der trotzige Titan Prometheus hat es seinem olympischen Peiniger angekündigt, dass einst seiner Herrschaft die höchste Gefahr drohe, falls er nicht zur rechten Zeit sich mit ihm verbinden werde. In Aeschylus erkennen wir das Bündniss des erschreckten, vor seinem Ende bangenden Zeus mit dem Titanen. So wird das frühere Titanenzeitalter nachträglich wieder aus dem Tartarus ans Licht geholt. Die Philosophie der wilden und nackten Natur schaut die vorübertanzenden Mythen der homerischen Welt mit der unverhüllten Miene der Wahrheit an: sie erbleichen, sie zittern vor dem blitzartigen Auge dieser Göttin — bis sie die mächtige Faust des dionysischen Künstlers in den Dienst der neuen Gottheit zwingt. Die dionysische Wahrheit übernimmt das gesammte Bereich des Mythus als Symbolik *ihrer* Erkenntnisse und spricht diese theils in dem öffentlichen Cultus der Tragödie, theils in den geheimen Begehungen dramatischer Mysterienfeste, aber immer unter der alten mythischen Hülle aus. Welche Kraft war dies, die den Prometheus von seinen Geiern befreite und den Mythus zum Vehikel dionysischer Weisheit umwandelte? Dies ist die heraklesmässige Kraft der Musik: als welche, in der Tragödie zu ihrer höchsten Erscheinung gekommen, den Mythus mit neuer tiefsinnigster Bedeutsamkeit zu interpretiren weiss; wie wir dies als das mächtigste Vermögen der Musik früher schon zu charakterisiren hatten. Denn es ist das Loos jedes Mythus, allmählich in die Enge einer angeblich historischen Wirklichkeit hineinzukriechen und von irgend einer späteren Zeit als einmaliges Factum mit historischen Ansprüchen behandelt zu werden: und die Griechen waren bereits völlig auf dem Wege, ihren ganzen mythischen Jugendtraum mit Scharfsinn und Willkür in eine historisch-pragmatische *Jugendgeschichte* umzustempeln. Denn dies ist die Art, wie Religionen abzusterben pflegen: wenn nämlich die mythischen Voraussetzungen einer Religion unter den strengen, verstandesmässigen Augen eines rechtgläubigen Dogmatismus als eine fertige Summe von historischen Ereignissen systematisirt werden und man anfängt, ängstlich die Glaubwürdigkeit der Mythen zu vertheidigen, aber gegen jedes natürliche Weiterleben und Weiterwuchern derselben sich zu sträuben, wenn also das Gefühl für den Mythus abstirbt und an seine Stelle der Anspruch der Religion auf historische Grundlagen tritt. Diesen absterbenden Mythus ergriff jetzt der neugeborne Genius der dionysischen Musik: und in seiner Hand blühte er noch einmal, mit Farben, wie er sie noch nie gezeigt, mit einem Duft, der eine sehnsüchtige Ahnung einer metaphysischen Welt erregte. Nach diesem letzten Aufglänzen fällt er zusammen, seine Blätter werden welk, und bald haschen die spöttischen Luciane des Alterthums nach den von allen Winden fortgetragnen, entfärbten und verwüsteten Blumen. Durch die Tragödie kommt der Mythus zu seinem tiefsten Inhalt, seiner ausdrucksvollsten Form; noch einmal erhebt er sich, wie ein verwundeter Held, und der ganze Ueberschuss von Kraft, sammt der weisheitsvollen Ruhe des Sterbenden, brennt in seinem Auge mit letztem, mächtigem Leuchten.\n\nWas wolltest du, frevelnder Euripides, als du diesen Sterbenden noch einmal zu deinem Frohndienste zu zwingen suchtest? Er starb unter deinen gewaltsamen Händen: und jetzt brauchtest du einen nachgemachten, maskirten Mythus, der sich wie der Affe des Herakles mit dem alten Prunke nur noch aufzuputzen wusste. Und wie dir der Mythus starb, so starb dir auch der Genius der Musik: mochtest du auch mit gierigem Zugreifen alle Gärten der Musik plündern, auch so brachtest du es nur zu einer nachgemachten maskirten Musik. Und weil du Dionysus verlassen, so verliess dich auch Apollo; jage alle Leidenschaften von ihrem Lager auf und banne sie in deinen Kreis, spitze und feile dir für die Reden deiner Helden eine sophistische Dialektik zurecht — auch deine Helden haben nur nachgeahmte maskirte Leidenschaften und sprechen nur nachgeahmte maskirte Reden.\n\n### Section 11\n\nDie griechische Tragödie ist anders zu Grunde gegangen als sämmtliche ältere schwesterliche Kunstgattungen: sie starb durch Selbstmord, in Folge eines unlösbaren Conflictes, also tragisch, während jene alle in hohem Alter des schönsten und ruhigsten Todes verblichen sind. Wenn es nämlich einem glücklichen Naturzustande gemäss ist, mit schöner Nachkommenschaft und ohne Krampf vom Leben zu scheiden, so zeigt uns das Ende jener älteren Kunstgattungen einen solchen glücklichen Naturzustand: sie tauchen langsam unter, und vor ihren ersterbenden Blicken steht schon ihr schönerer Nachwuchs und reckt mit muthiger Gebärde ungeduldig das Haupt. Mit dem Tode der griechischen Tragödie dagegen entstand eine ungeheure, überall tief empfundene Leere; wie einmal griechische Schiffer zu Zeiten des Tiberius an einem einsamen Eiland den erschütternden Schrei hörten „der grosse Pan ist todt“: so klang es jetzt wie ein schmerzlicher Klageton durch die hellenische Welt: „die Tragödie ist todt! Die Poesie selbst ist mit ihr verloren gegangen! Fort, fort mit euch verkümmerten, abgemagerten Epigonen! Fort in den Hades, damit ihr euch dort an den Brosamen der vormaligen Meister einmal satt essen könnt!“\n\nAls aber nun doch noch eine neue Kunstgattung aufblühte, die in der Tragödie ihre Vorgängerin und Meisterin verehrte, da war mit Schrecken wahrzunehmen, dass sie allerdings die Züge ihrer Mutter trage, aber dieselben, die jene in ihrem langen Todeskampfe gezeigt hatte. Diesen Todeskampf der Tragödie kämpfte *Euripides*; jene spätere Kunstgattung ist als *neuere attische Komödie* bekannt. In ihr lebte die entartete Gestalt der Tragödie fort, zum Denkmale ihres überaus mühseligen und gewaltsamen Hinscheidens.\n\nBei diesem Zusammenhange ist die leidenschaftliche Zuneigung begreiflich, welche die Dichter der neueren Komödie zu Euripides empfanden; so dass der Wunsch des Philemon nicht weiter befremdet, der sich sogleich aufhängen lassen mochte, nur um den Euripides in der Unterwelt aufsuchen zu können: wenn er nur überhaupt überzeugt sein dürfte, dass der Verstorbene auch jetzt noch bei Verstande sei. Will man aber in aller Kürze und ohne den Anspruch, damit etwas Erschöpfendes zu sagen, dasjenige bezeichnen, was Euripides mit Menander und Philemon gemein hat und was für jene so aufregend vorbildlich wirkte: so genügt es zu sagen, dass *der Zuschauer* von Euripides auf die Bühne gebracht worden ist. Wer erkannt hat, aus welchem Stoffe die prometheischen Tragiker vor Euripides ihre Helden formten und wie ferne ihnen die Absicht lag, die treue Maske der Wirklichkeit auf die Bühne zu bringen, der wird auch über die gänzlich abweichende Tendenz des Euripides im Klaren sein. Der Mensch des alltäglichen Lebens drang durch ihn aus den Zuschauerräumen auf die Scene, der Spiegel, in dem früher nur die grossen und kühnen Züge zum Ausdruck kamen, zeigte jetzt jene peinliche Treue, die auch die misslungenen Linien der Natur gewissenhaft wiedergiebt. Odysseus, der typische Hellene der älteren Kunst, sank jetzt unter den Händen der neueren Dichter zur Figur des Graeculus herab, der von jetzt ab als gutmüthig-verschmitzter Haussclave im Mittelpunkte des dramatischen Interesse's steht. Was Euripides sich in den aristophanischen „Fröschen“ zum Verdienst anrechnet, dass er die tragische Kunst durch seine Hausmittel von ihrer pomphaften Beleibtheit befreit habe, das ist vor allem an seinen tragischen Helden zu spüren. Im Wesentlichen sah und hörte jetzt der Zuschauer seinen Doppelgänger auf der euripideischen Bühne und freute sich, dass jener so gut zu reden verstehe. Bei dieser Freude blieb es aber nicht: man lernte selbst bei Euripides sprechen, und dessen rühmt er sich selbst im Wettkampfe mit Aeschylus: wie durch ihn jetzt das Volk kunstmässig und mit den schlausten Sophisticationen zu beobachten, zu verhandeln und Folgerungen zu ziehen gelernt habe. Durch diesen Umschwung der öffentlichen Sprache hat er überhaupt die neuere Komödie möglich gemacht. Denn von jetzt ab war es kein Geheimniss mehr, wie und mit welchen Sentenzen die Alltäglichkeit sich auf der Bühne vertreten könne. Die bürgerliche Mittelmässigkeit, auf die Euripides alle seine politischen Hoffnungen aufbaute, kam jetzt zu Wort, nachdem bis dahin in der Tragödie der Halbgott, in der Komödie der betrunkene Satyr oder der Halbmensch den Sprachcharakter bestimmt hatten. Und so hebt der aristophanische Euripides zu seinem Preise hervor, wie er das allgemeine, allbekannte, alltägliche Leben und Treiben dargestellt habe, über das ein Jeder zu urtheilen befähigt sei. Wenn jetzt die ganze Masse philosophiere, mit unerhörter Klugheit Land und Gut verwalte und ihre Prozesse führe, so sei dies sein Verdienst und der Erfolg der von ihm dem Volke eingeimpften Weisheit.\n\nAn eine derartig zubereitete und aufgeklärte Masse durfte sich jetzt die neuere Komödie wenden, für die Euripides gewissermaassen der Chorlehrer geworden ist; nur dass diesmal der Chor der Zuschauer eingeübt werden musste. Sobald dieser in der euripideischen Tonart zu singen geübt war, erhob sich jene schachspielartige Gattung des Schauspiels, die neuere Komödie mit ihrem fortwährenden Triumphe der Schlauheit und Verschlagenheit. Euripides aber — der Chorlehrer — wurde unaufhörlich gepriesen: ja man würde sich getödtet haben, um noch mehr von ihm zu lernen, wenn man nicht gewusst hätte, dass die tragischen Dichter eben so todt seien wie die Tragödie. Mit ihr aber hatte der Hellene den Glauben an seine Unsterblichkeit aufgegeben, nicht nur den Glauben an eine ideale Vergangenheit, sondern auch den Glauben an eine ideale Zukunft. Das Wort aus der bekannten Grabschrift „als Greis leichtsinnig und grillig“ gilt auch vom greisen Hellenenthume. Der Augenblick, der Witz, der Leichtsinn, die Laune sind seine höchsten Gottheiten; der fünfte Stand, der des Sclaven, kommt, wenigstens der Gesinnung nach, jetzt zur Herrschaft: und wenn jetzt überhaupt noch von „griechischer Heiterkeit“ die Rede sein darf, so ist es die Heiterkeit des Sclaven, der nichts Schweres zu verantworten, nichts Grosses zu erstreben, nichts Vergangenes oder Zukünftiges höher zu schätzen weiss als das Gegenwärtige. Dieser Schein der „griechischen Heiterkeit“ war es, der die tiefsinnigen und furchtbaren Naturen der vier ersten Jahrhunderte des Christenthums so empörte: ihnen erschien diese weibische Flucht vor dem Ernst und dem Schrecken, dieses feige Sichgenügenlassen am bequemen Genuss nicht nur verächtlich, sondern als die eigentlich antichristliche Gesinnung. Und ihrem Einfluss ist es zuzuschreiben, dass die durch Jahrhunderte fortlebende Anschauung des griechischen Alterthums mit fast unüberwindlicher Zähigkeit jene blassrothe Heiterkeitsfarbe festhielt — als ob es nie ein sechstes Jahrhundert mit seiner Geburt der Tragödie, seinen Mysterien, seinen Pythagoras und Heraklit gegeben hätte, ja als ob die Kunstwerke der grossen Zeit gar nicht vorhanden wären, die doch — jedes für sich — aus dem Boden einer solchen greisenhaften und sclavenmässigen Daseinslust und Heiterkeit gar nicht zu erklären sind und auf eine völlig andere Weltbetrachtung als ihren Existenzgrund hinweisen.\n\nWenn zuletzt behauptet wurde, dass Euripides den Zuschauer auf die Bühne gebracht habe, um zugleich damit den Zuschauer zum Urtheil über das Drama erst wahrhaft zu befähigen, so entsteht der Schein, als ob die ältere tragische Kunst aus einem Missverhältniss zum Zuschauer nicht herausgekommen sei: und man möchte versucht sein, die radicale Tendenz des Euripides, ein entsprechendes Verhältniss zwischen Kunstwerk und Publicum zu erzielen, als einen Fortschritt über Sophokles hinaus zu preisen. Nun aber ist „Publicum“ nur ein Wort und durchaus keine gleichartige und in sich verharrende Grösse. Woher soll dem Künstler die Verpflichtung kommen, sich einer Kraft zu accommodieren, die ihre Stärke nur in der Zahl hat? Und wenn er sich, seiner Begabung und seinen Absichten nach, über jeden einzelnen dieser Zuschauer erhaben fühlt, wie dürfte er vor dem gemeinsamen Ausdruck aller dieser ihm untergeordneten Capacitäten mehr Achtung empfinden als vor dem relativ am höchsten begabten einzelnen Zuschauer? In Wahrheit hat kein griechischer Künstler mit grösserer Verwegenheit und Selbstgenugsamkeit sein Publicum durch ein langes Leben hindurch behandelt als gerade Euripides: er, der selbst da noch, als die Masse sich ihm zu Füssen warf, in erhabenem Trotze seiner eigenen Tendenz öffentlich in's Gesicht schlug, derselben Tendenz, mit der er über die Masse gesiegt hatte. Wenn dieser Genius die geringste Ehrfurcht vor dem Pandämonium des Publicums gehabt hätte, so wäre er unter den Keulenschlägen seiner Misserfolge längst vor der Mitte seiner Laufbahn zusammengebrochen. Wir sehen bei dieser Erwägung, dass unser Ausdruck, Euripides habe den Zuschauer auf die Bühne gebracht, um den Zuschauer wahrhaft urtheilsfähig zu machen, nur ein provisorischer war, und dass wir nach einem tieferen Verständniss seiner Tendenz zu suchen haben. Umgekehrt ist es ja allerseits bekannt, wie Aeschylus und Sophokles Zeit ihres Lebens, ja weit über dasselbe hinaus, im Vollbesitze der Volksgunst standen, wie also bei diesen Vorgängern des Euripides keineswegs von einem Missverhältniss zwischen Kunstwerk und Publicum die Rede sein kann. Was trieb den reichbegabten und unablässig zum Schaffen gedrängten Künstler so gewaltsam von dem Wege ab, über dem die Sonne der grössten Dichternamen und der unbewölkte Himmel der Volksgunst leuchteten? Welche sonderbare Rücksicht auf den Zuschauer führte ihn dem Zuschauer entgegen? Wie konnte er aus zu hoher Achtung vor seinem Publicum — sein Publicum missachten?\n\nEuripides fühlte sich — das ist die Lösung des eben dargestellten Räthsels — als Dichter wohl über die Masse, nicht aber über zwei seiner Zuschauer erhaben: die Masse brachte er auf die Bühne, jene beiden Zuschauer verehrte er als die allein urtheilsfähigen Richter und Meister aller seiner Kunst: ihren Weisungen und Mahnungen folgend übertrug er die ganze Welt von Empfindungen, Leidenschaften und Erfahrungen, die bis jetzt auf den Zuschauerbänken als unsichtbarer Chor zu jeder Festvorstellung sich einstellten, in die Seelen seiner Bühnenhelden, ihren Forderungen gab er nach, als er für diese neuen Charaktere auch das neue Wort und den neuen Ton suchte, in ihren Stimmen allein hörte er die gültigen Richtersprüche seines Schaffens eben so wie die siegverheissende Ermuthigung, wenn er von der Justiz des Publicums sich wieder einmal verurtheilt sah.\n\nVon diesen beiden Zuschauern ist der eine — Euripides selbst, Euripides *als Denker*, nicht als Dichter. Von ihm könnte man sagen, dass die ausserordentliche Fülle seines kritischen Talentes, ähnlich wie bei Lessing, einen productiv künstlerischen Nebentrieb wenn nicht erzeugt, so doch fortwährend befruchtet habe. Mit dieser Begabung, mit aller Helligkeit und Behendigkeit seines kritischen Denkens hatte Euripides im Theater gesessen und sich angestrengt, an den Meisterwerken seiner grossen Vorgänger wie an dunkelgewordenen Gemälden Zug um Zug, Linie um Linie wiederzuerkennen. Und hier nun war ihm begegnet, was dem in die tieferen Geheimnisse der aeschyleischen Tragödie Eingeweihten nicht unerwartet sein darf: er gewahrte etwas Incommensurables in jedem Zug und in jeder Linie, eine gewisse täuschende Bestimmtheit und zugleich eine räthselhafte Tiefe, ja Unendlichkeit des Hintergrundes. Die klarste Figur hatte immer noch einen Kometenschweif an sich, der in's Ungewisse, Unaufhellbare zu deuten schien. Dasselbe Zwielicht lag über dem Bau des Drama's, zumal über der Bedeutung des Chors. Und wie zweifelhaft blieb ihm die Lösung der ethischen Probleme! Wie fragwürdig die Behandlung der Mythen! Wie ungleichmässig die Vertheilung von Glück und Unglück! Selbst in der Sprache der älteren Tragödie war ihm vieles anstössig, mindestens räthselhaft; besonders fand er zu viel Pomp für einfache Verhältnisse, zu viel Tropen und Ungeheuerlichkeiten für die Schlichtheit der Charaktere. So sass er, unruhig grübelnd, im Theater, und er, der Zuschauer, gestand sich, dass er seine grossen Vorgänger nicht verstehe. Galt ihm aber der Verstand als die eigentliche Wurzel alles Geniessens und Schaffens, so musste er fragen und um sich schauen, ob denn Niemand so denke wie er und sich gleichfalls jene Incommensurabilität eingestehe. Aber die Vielen und mit ihnen die besten Einzelnen hatten nur ein misstrauisches Lächeln für ihn; erklären aber konnte ihm Keiner, warum seinen Bedenken und Einwendungen gegenüber die grossen Meister doch im Rechte seien. Und in diesem qualvollen Zustande fand er *den anderen Zuschauer*, der die Tragödie nicht begriff und deshalb nicht achtete. Mit diesem im Bunde durfte er es wagen, aus seiner Vereinsamung heraus den ungeheuren Kampf gegen die Kunstwerke des Aeschylus und Sophokles zu beginnen — nicht mit Streitschriften, sondern als dramatischer Dichter, der *seine* Vorstellung von der Tragödie der überlieferten entgegenstellt. —\n\n### Section 12\n\nBevor wir diesen anderen Zuschauer bei Namen nennen, verharren wir hier einen Augenblick, um uns jenen früher geschilderten Eindruck des Zwiespältigen und Incommensurabeln im Wesen der aeschyleischen Tragödie selbst in's Gedächtniss zurückzurufen. Denken wir an unsere eigene Befremdung dem *Chore* und dem *tragischen Helden* jener Tragödie gegenüber, die wir beide mit unseren Gewohnheiten ebensowenig wie mit der Ueberlieferung zu reimen wussten — bis wir jene Doppelheit selbst als Ursprung und Wesen der griechischen Tragödie wiederfanden, als den Ausdruck zweier in einander gewobenen Kunsttriebe, *des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen*.\n\nJenes ursprüngliche und allmächtige dionysische Element aus der Tragödie auszuscheiden und sie rein und neu auf undionysischer Kunst, Sitte und Weltbetrachtung aufzubauen — dies ist die jetzt in heller Beleuchtung sich uns enthüllende Tendenz des Euripides.\n\nEuripides selbst hat am Abend seines Lebens die Frage nach dem Werth und der Bedeutung dieser Tendenz in einem Mythus seinen Zeitgenossen auf das Nachdrücklichste vorgelegt. Darf überhaupt das Dionysische bestehn? Ist es nicht mit Gewalt aus dem hellenischen Boden auszurotten? Gewiss, sagt uns der Dichter, wenn es nur möglich wäre: aber der Gott Dionysus ist zu mächtig; der verständigste Gegner — wie Pentheus in den „Bacchen“ — wird unvermuthet von ihm bezaubert und läuft nachher mit dieser Verzauberung in sein Verhängniss. Das Urtheil der beiden Greise Kadmus und Tiresias scheint auch das Urtheil des greisen Dichters zu sein: das Nachdenken der klügsten Einzelnen werfe jene alten Volkstraditionen, jene sich ewig fortpflanzende Verehrung des Dionysus nicht um, ja es gezieme sich, solchen wunderbaren Kräften gegenüber, mindestens eine diplomatisch vorsichtige Theilnahme zu zeigen: wobei es aber immer noch möglich sei, dass der Gott an einer so lauen Betheiligung Anstoss nehme und den Diplomaten — wie hier den Kadmus — schliesslich in einen Drachen verwandle. Dies sagt uns ein Dichter, der mit heroischer Kraft ein langes Leben hindurch dem Dionysus widerstanden hat — um am Ende desselben mit einer Glorification seines Gegners und einem Selbstmorde seine Laufbahn zu schliessen, einem Schwindelnden gleich, der, um nur dem entsetzlichen, nicht mehr erträglichen Wirbel zu entgehn, sich vom Thurme herunterstürzt. Jene Tragödie ist ein Protest gegen die Ausführbarkeit seiner Tendenz; ach, und sie war bereits ausgeführt! Das Wunderbare war geschehn: als der Dichter widerrief, hatte bereits seine Tendenz gesiegt. Dionysus war bereits von der tragischen Bühne verscheucht und zwar durch eine aus Euripides redende dämonische Macht. Auch Euripides war in gewissem Sinne nur Maske: die Gottheit, die aus ihm redete, war nicht Dionysus, auch nicht Apollo, sondern ein ganz neugeborner Dämon, genannt *Sokrates*. Dies ist der neue Gegensatz: das Dionysische und das Sokratische, und das Kunstwerk der griechischen Tragödie ging an ihm zu Grunde. Mag nun auch Euripides uns durch seinen Widerruf zu trösten suchen, es gelingt ihm nicht: der herrlichste Tempel liegt in Trümmern; was nützt uns die Wehklage des Zerstörers und sein Geständniss, dass es der schönste aller Tempel gewesen sei? Und selbst dass Euripides zur Strafe von den Kunstrichtern aller Zeiten in einen Drachen verwandelt worden ist — wen möchte diese erbärmliche Compensation befriedigen?\n\nNähern wir uns jetzt jener *sokratischen* Tendenz, mit der Euripides die aeschyleische Tragödie bekämpfte und besiegte.\n\nWelches Ziel — so müssen wir uns jetzt fragen — konnte die euripideische Absicht, das Drama allein auf das Undionysische zu gründen, in der höchsten Idealität ihrer Durchführung überhaupt haben? Welche Form des Drama's blieb noch übrig, wenn es nicht aus dem Geburtsschoosse der Musik, in jenem geheimnissvollen Zwielicht des Dionysischen geboren werden sollte? Allein *das dramatisirte Epos*: in welchem apollinischen Kunstgebiete nun freilich die *tragische* Wirkung unerreichbar ist. Es kommt hierbei nicht auf den Inhalt der dargestellten Ereignisse an; ja ich möchte behaupten, dass es Goethe in seiner projectirten „Nausikaa“ unmöglich gewesen sein würde, den Selbstmord jenes idyllischen Wesens — der den fünften Act ausfüllen sollte — tragisch ergreifend zu machen; so ungemein ist die Gewalt des Episch-Apollinischen, dass es die schreckensvollsten Dinge mit jener Lust am Scheine und der Erlösung durch den Schein vor unseren Augen verzaubert. Der Dichter des dramatisirten Epos kann eben so wenig wie der epische Rhapsode mit seinen Bildern völlig verschmelzen: er ist immer noch ruhig unbewegte, aus weiten Augen blickende Anschauung, die die Bilder *vor* sich sieht. Der Schauspieler in diesem dramatisirten Epos bleibt im tiefsten Grunde immer noch Rhapsode; die Weihe des inneren Träumens liegt auf allen seinen Actionen, so dass er niemals ganz Schauspieler ist.\n\nWie verhält sich nun diesem Ideal des apollinischen Drama's gegenüber das euripideische Stück? Wie zu dem feierlichen Rhapsoden der alten Zeit jener jüngere, der sein Wesen im platonischen „Jon“ also beschreibt: „Wenn ich etwas Trauriges sage, füllen sich meine Augen mit Thränen; ist aber das, was ich sage, schrecklich und entsetzlich, dann stehen die Haare meines Hauptes vor Schauder zu Berge, und mein Herz klopft.“ Hier merken wir nichts mehr von jenem epischen Verlorensein im Scheine, von der affectlosen Kühle des wahren Schauspielers, der gerade in seiner höchsten Thätigkeit, ganz Schein und Lust am Scheine ist. Euripides ist der Schauspieler mit dem klopfenden Herzen, mit den zu Berge stehenden Haaren; als sokratischer Denker entwirft er den Plan, als leidenschaftlicher Schauspieler führt er ihn aus. Reiner Künstler ist er weder im Entwerfen noch im Ausführen. So ist das euripideische Drama ein zugleich kühles und feuriges Ding, zum Erstarren und zum Verbrennen gleich befähigt; es ist ihm unmöglich, die apollinische Wirkung des Epos zu erreichen, während es andererseits sich von den dionysischen Elementen möglichst gelöst hat, und jetzt, um überhaupt zu wirken, neue Erregungsmittel braucht, die nun nicht mehr innerhalb der beiden einzigen Kunsttriebe, des apollinischen und des dionysischen, liegen können. Diese Erregungsmittel sind kühle paradoxe *Gedanken* — an Stelle der apollinischen Anschauungen — und feurige *Affecte* — an Stelle der dionysischen Entzückungen — und zwar höchst realistisch nachgemachte, keineswegs in den Aether der Kunst getauchte Gedanken und Affecte.\n\nHaben wir demnach so viel erkannt, dass es Euripides überhaupt nicht gelungen ist, das Drama allein auf das Apollinische zu gründen, dass sich vielmehr seine undionysische Tendenz in eine naturalistische und unkünstlerische verirrt hat, so werden wir jetzt dem Wesen des *aesthetischen Sokratismus* schon näher treten dürfen; dessen oberstes Gesetz ungefähr so lautet: „alles muss verständig sein, um schön zu sein“; als Parallelsatz zu dem sokratischen „nur der Wissende ist tugendhaft.“ Mit diesem Kanon in der Hand maass Euripides alles Einzelne und rectificirte es gemäss diesem Princip: die Sprache, die Charaktere, den dramaturgischen Aufbau, die Chormusik. Was wir im Vergleich mit der sophokleischen Tragödie so häufig dem Euripides als dichterischen Mangel und Rückschritt anzurechnen pflegen, das ist zumeist das Product jenes eindringenden kritischen Prozesses, jener verwegenen Verständigkeit. Der euripideische *Prolog* diene uns als Beispiel für die Productivität jener rationalistischen Methode. Nichts kann unserer Bühnentechnik widerstrebender sein als der Prolog im Drama des Euripides. Dass eine einzelne auftretende Person am Eingange des Stückes erzählt, wer sie sei, was der Handlung vorangehe, was bis jetzt geschehen, ja was im Verlaufe des Stückes geschehen werde, das würde ein moderner Theaterdichter als ein muthwilliges und nicht zu verzeihendes Verzichtleisten auf den Effect der Spannung bezeichnen. Man weiss ja alles, was geschehen wird; wer wird abwarten wollen, dass dies wirklich geschieht? — da ja hier keinesfalls das aufregende Verhältniss eines wahrsagenden Traumes zu einer später eintretenden Wirklichkeit stattfindet. Ganz anders reflectirte Euripides. Die Wirkung der Tragödie beruhte niemals auf der epischen Spannung, auf der anreizenden Ungewissheit, was sich jetzt und nachher ereignen werde: vielmehr auf jenen grossen rhetorisch-lyrischen Scenen, in denen die Leidenschaft und die Dialektik des Haupthelden zu einem breiten und mächtigen Strome anschwoll. Zum Pathos, nicht zur Handlung bereitete Alles vor: und was nicht zum Pathos vorbereitete, das galt als verwerflich. Das aber, was die genussvolle Hingabe an solche Scenen am stärksten erschwert, ist ein dem Zuhörer fehlendes Glied, eine Lücke im Gewebe der Vorgeschichte; so lange der Zuhörer noch ausrechnen muss, was diese und jene Person bedeute, was dieser und jener Conflict der Neigungen und Absichten für Voraussetzungen habe, ist seine volle Versenkung in das Leiden und Thun der Hauptpersonen, ist das athemlose Mitleiden und Mitfürchten noch nicht möglich. Die aeschyleisch-sophokleische Tragödie verwandte die geistreichsten Kunstmittel, um dem Zuschauer in den ersten Scenen gewissermaassen zufällig alle jene zum Verständniss nothwendigen Fäden in die Hand zu geben: ein Zug, in dem sich jene edle Künstlerschaft bewährt, die das *nothwendige* Formelle gleichsam maskirt und als Zufälliges erscheinen lässt. Immerhin aber glaubte Euripides zu bemerken, dass während jener ersten Scenen der Zuschauer in eigenthümlicher Unruhe sei, um das Rechenexempel der Vorgeschichte auszurechnen, so dass die dichterischen Schönheiten und das Pathos der Exposition für ihn verloren ginge. Deshalb stellte er den Prolog noch vor die Exposition und legte ihn einer Person in den Mund, der man Vertrauen schenken durfte: eine Gottheit musste häufig den Verlauf der Tragödie dem Publicum gewissermaassen garantieren und jeden Zweifel an der Realität des Mythus nehmen: in ähnlicher Weise, wie Descartes die Realität der empirischen Welt nur durch die Appellation an die Wahrhaftigkeit Gottes und seine Unfähigkeit zur Lüge zu beweisen vermochte. Dieselbe göttliche Wahrhaftigkeit braucht Euripides noch einmal am Schlusse seines Drama's, um die Zukunft seiner Helden dem Publicum sicher zu stellen; dies ist die Aufgabe des berüchtigten deus ex machina. Zwischen der epischen Vorschau und Hinausschau liegt die dramatisch-lyrische Gegenwart, das eigentliche „Drama.“\n\nSo ist Euripides vor allem als Dichter der Wiederhall seiner bewussten Erkenntnisse; und gerade dies verleiht ihm eine so denkwürdige Stellung in der Geschichte der griechischen Kunst. Ihm muss im Hinblick auf sein kritisch-productives Schaffen oft zu Muthe gewesen sein als sollte er den Anfang der Schrift des Anaxagoras für das Drama lebendig machen, deren erste Worte lauten: „im Anfang war alles beisammen: da kam der Verstand und schuf Ordnung.“ Und wenn Anaxagoras mit seinem „Nous“ unter den Philosophen wie der erste Nüchterne unter lauter Trunkenen erschien, so mag auch Euripides sein Verhältniss zu den anderen Dichtern der Tragödie unter einem ähnlichen Bilde begriffen haben. So lange der einzige Ordner und Walter des Alls, der Nous, noch vom künstlerischen Schaffen ausgeschlossen war, war noch alles in einem chaotischen Urbrei beisammen; so musste Euripides urtheilen, so musste er die „trunkenen“ Dichter als der erste „Nüchterne“ verurtheilen. Das, was Sophokles von Aeschylus gesagt hat, er thue das Rechte, obschon unbewusst, war gewiss nicht im Sinne des Euripides gesagt: der nur so viel hätte gelten lassen, dass Aeschylus, *weil* er unbewusst schaffe, das Unrechte schaffe. Auch der göttliche Plato redet vom schöpferischen Vermögen des Dichters, insofern dies nicht die bewusste Einsicht ist, zu allermeist nur ironisch und stellt es der Begabung des Wahrsagers und Traumdeuters gleich; sei doch der Dichter nicht eher fähig zu dichten als bis er bewusstlos geworden sei, und kein Verstand mehr in ihm wohne. Euripides unternahm es, wie es auch Plato unternommen hat, das Gegenstück des „unverständigen“ Dichters der Welt zu zeigen; sein aesthetischer Grundsatz „alles muss bewusst sein, um schön zu sein“, ist, wie ich sagte, der Parallelsatz zu dem sokratischen „alles muss bewusst sein, um gut zu sein“. Demgemäss darf uns Euripides als der Dichter des aesthetischen Sokratismus gelten. Sokrates aber war jener *zweite Zuschauer*, der die ältere Tragödie nicht begriff und deshalb nicht achtete; mit ihm im Bunde wagte Euripides, der Herold eines neuen Kunstschaffens zu sein. Wenn an diesem die ältere Tragödie zu Grunde ging, so ist also der aesthetische Sokratismus das mörderische Princip: insofern aber der Kampf gegen das Dionysische der älteren Kunst gerichtet war, erkennen wir in Sokrates den Gegner des Dionysus, den neuen Orpheus, der sich gegen Dionysus erhebt und, obschon bestimmt, von den Mänaden des athenischen Gerichtshofes zerrissen zu werden, doch den übermächtigen Gott selbst zur Flucht nöthigt: welcher, wie damals, als er vor dem Edonerkönig Lykurg floh, sich in die Tiefen des Meeres rettete, nämlich in die mystischen Fluthen eines die ganze Welt allmählich überziehenden Geheimcultus.\n\n### Section 13\n\nDass Sokrates eine enge Beziehung der Tendenz zu Euripides habe, entging dem gleichzeitigen Alterthume nicht; und der beredteste Ausdruck für diesen glücklichen Spürsinn ist jene in Athen umlaufende Sage, Sokrates pflege dem Euripides im Dichten zu helfen. Beide Namen wurden von den Anhängern der „guten alten Zeit“ in einem Athem genannt, wenn es galt, die Volksverführer der Gegenwart aufzuzählen: von deren Einflusse es herrühre, dass die alte marathonische vierschrötige Tüchtigkeit an Leib und Seele immer mehr einer zweifelhaften Aufklärung, bei fortschreitender Verkümmerung der leiblichen und seelischen Kräfte, zum Opfer falle. In dieser Tonart, halb mit Entrüstung, halb mit Verachtung, pflegt die aristophanische Komödie von jenen Männern zu reden, zum Schrecken der Neueren, welche zwar Euripides gerne preisgeben, aber sich nicht genug darüber wundern können, dass Sokrates als der erste und oberste *Sophist*, als der Spiegel und Inbegriff aller sophistischen Bestrebungen bei Aristophanes erscheine: wobei es einzig einen Trost gewährt, den Aristophanes selbst als einen lüderlich lügenhaften Alcibiades der Poesie an den Pranger zu stellen. Ohne an dieser Stelle die tiefen Instincte des Aristophanes gegen solche Angriffe in Schutz zu nehmen, fahre ich fort, die enge Zusammengehörigkeit des Sokrates und des Euripides aus der antiken Empfindung heraus zu erweisen; in welchem Sinne namentlich daran zu erinnern ist, dass Sokrates als Gegner der tragischen Kunst sich des Besuchs der Tragödie enthielt, und nur, wenn ein neues Stück des Euripides aufgeführt wurde, sich unter den Zuschauern einstellte. Am berühmtesten ist aber die nahe Zusammenstellung beider Namen in dem delphischen Orakelspruche, welcher Sokrates als den Weisesten unter den Menschen bezeichnet, zugleich aber das Urtheil abgab, dass dem Euripides der zweite Preis im Wettkampfe der Weisheit gebühre.\n\nAls der dritte in dieser Stufenleiter war Sophokles genannt; er, der sich gegen Aeschylus rühmen durfte, er thue das Rechte und zwar, weil er *wisse*, was das Rechte sei. Offenbar ist gerade der Grad der Helligkeit dieses *Wissens* dasjenige, was jene drei Männer gemeinsam als die drei „Wissenden“ ihrer Zeit auszeichnet.\n\nDas schärfste Wort aber für jene neue und unerhörte Hochschätzung des Wissens und der Einsicht sprach Sokrates, als er sich als den Einzigen vorfand, der sich eingestehe, *nichts zu wissen*; während er, auf seiner kritischen Wanderung durch Athen, bei den grössten Staatsmännern, Rednern, Dichtern und Künstlern vorsprechend, überall die Einbildung des Wissens antraf. Mit Staunen erkannte er, dass alle jene Berühmtheiten selbst über ihren Beruf ohne richtige und sichere Einsicht seien und denselben nur aus Instinct trieben. „Nur aus Instinct“: mit diesem Ausdruck berühren wir Herz und Mittelpunkt der sokratischen Tendenz. Mit ihm verurtheilt der Sokratismus eben so die bestehende Kunst wie die bestehende Ethik: wohin er seine prüfenden Blicke richtet, sieht er den Mangel der Einsicht und die Macht des Wahns und schliesst aus diesem Mangel auf die innerliche Verkehrtheit und Verwerflichkeit des Vorhandenen. Von diesem einen Punkte aus glaubte Sokrates das Dasein corrigieren zu müssen: er, der Einzelne, tritt mit der Miene der Nichtachtung und der Ueberlegenheit, als der Vorläufer einer ganz anders gearteten Cultur, Kunst und Moral, in eine Welt hinein, deren Zipfel mit Ehrfurcht zu erhaschen wir uns zum grössten Glücke rechnen würden.\n\nDies ist die ungeheuere Bedenklichkeit, die uns jedesmal, Angesichts des Sokrates, ergreift und die uns immer und immer wieder anreizt, Sinn und Absicht dieser fragwürdigsten Erscheinung des Alterthums zu erkennen. Wer ist das, der es wagen darf, als ein Einzelner das griechische Wesen zu verneinen, das als Homer, Pindar und Aeschylus, als Phidias, als Perikles, als Pythia und Dionysus, als der tiefste Abgrund und die höchste Höhe unserer staunenden Anbetung gewiss ist? Welche dämonische Kraft ist es, die diesen Zaubertrank in den Staub zu schütten sich erkühnen darf? Welcher Halbgott ist es, dem der Geisterchor der Edelsten der Menschheit zurufen muss: „Weh! Weh! Du hast sie zerstört, die schöne Welt, mit mächtiger Faust; sie stürzt, sie zerfällt!“\n\nEinen Schlüssel zu dem Wesen des Sokrates bietet uns jene wunderbare Erscheinung, die als „Dämonion des Sokrates“ bezeichnet wird. In besonderen Lagen, in denen sein ungeheurer Verstand in's Schwanken gerieth, gewann er einen festen Anhalt durch eine in solchen Momenten sich äussernde göttliche Stimme. Diese Stimme *mahnt*, wenn sie kommt, immer *ab*. Die instinctive Weisheit zeigt sich bei dieser gänzlich abnormen Natur nur, um dem bewussten Erkennen hier und da *hindernd* entgegenzutreten. Während doch bei allen productiven Menschen der Instinct gerade die schöpferisch-affirmative Kraft ist, und das Bewusstsein kritisch und abmahnend sich gebärdet: wird bei Sokrates der Instinct zum Kritiker, das Bewusstsein zum Schöpfer—eine wahre Monstrosität per defectum! Und zwar nehmen wir hier einen monstrosen defectus jeder mystischen Anlage wahr, so dass Sokrates als der specifische *Nicht-Mystiker* zu bezeichnen wäre, in dem die logische Natur durch eine Superfötation eben so excessiv entwickelt ist wie im Mystiker jene instinctive Weisheit. Andrerseits aber war es jenem in Sokrates erscheinenden logischen Triebe völlig versagt, sich gegen sich selbst zu kehren; in diesem fessellosen Dahinströmen zeigt er eine Naturgewalt, wie wir sie nur bei den allergrössten instinctiven Kräften zu unsrer schaudervollen Ueberraschung antreffen. Wer nur einen Hauch von jener göttlichen Naivetät und Sicherheit der sokratischen Lebensrichtung aus den platonischen Schriften gespürt hat, der fühlt auch, wie das ungeheure Triebrad des logischen Sokratismus gleichsam *hinter* Sokrates in Bewegung ist, und wie dies durch Sokrates wie durch einen Schatten hindurch angeschaut werden muss. Dass er aber selbst von diesem Verhältniss eine Ahnung hatte, das drückt sich in dem würdevollen Ernste aus, mit dem er seine göttliche Berufung überall und noch vor seinen Richtern geltend machte. Ihn darin zu widerlegen war im Grunde eben so unmöglich als seinen die Instincte auflösenden Einfluss gut zu heissen. Bei diesem unlösbaren Conflicte war, als er einmal vor das Forum des griechischen Staates gezogen war, nur eine einzige Form der Verurtheilung geboten, die Verbannung; als etwas durchaus Räthselhaftes, Unrubricirbares, Unaufklärbares hätte man ihn über die Grenze weisen dürfen, ohne dass irgend eine Nachwelt im Recht gewesen wäre, die Athener einer schmählichen That zu zeihen. Dass aber der Tod und nicht nur die Verbannung über ihn ausgesprochen wurde, das scheint Sokrates selbst, mit völliger Klarheit und ohne den natürlichen Schauder vor dem Tode, durchgesetzt zu haben: er ging in den Tod, mit jener Ruhe, mit der er nach Plato's Schilderung als der letzte der Zecher im frühen Tagesgrauen das Symposion verlässt, um einen neuen Tag zu beginnen; indess hinter ihm, auf den Bänken und auf der Erde, die verschlafenen Tischgenossen zurückbleiben, um von Sokrates, dem wahrhaften Erotiker, zu träumen. *Der sterbende Sokrates* wurde das neue, noch nie sonst geschaute Ideal der edlen griechischen Jugend: vor allen hat sich der typische hellenische Jüngling, Plato, mit aller inbrünstigen Hingebung seiner Schwärmerseele vor diesem Bilde niedergeworfen.\n\n### Section 14\n\nDenken wir uns jetzt das eine grosse Cyklopenauge des Sokrates auf die Tragödie gewandt, jenes Auge, in dem nie der holde Wahnsinn künstlerischer Begeisterung geglüht hat—denken wir uns, wie es jenem Auge versagt war, in die dionysischen Abgründe mit Wohlgefallen zu schauen—was eigentlich musste es in der „erhabenen und hochgepriesenen“ tragischen Kunst, wie sie Plato nennt, erblicken? Etwas recht Unvernünftiges, mit Ursachen, die ohne Wirkungen, und mit Wirkungen, die ohne Ursachen zu sein schienen, dazu das Ganze so bunt und mannichfaltig, dass es einer besonnenen Gemüthsart widerstreben müsse, für reizbare und empfindliche Seelen aber ein gefährlicher Zunder sei. Wir wissen, welche einzige Gattung der Dichtkunst von ihm begriffen wurde, die *aesopische Fabel:* und dies geschah gewiss mit jener lächelnden Anbequemung, mit welcher der ehrliche gute Gellert in der Fabel von der Biene und der Henne das Lob der Poesie singt:\n\n„Du siehst an mir, wozu sie nützt,\nDem, der nicht viel Verstand besitzt\nDie Wahrheit durch ein Bild zu sagen“.\n\nNun aber schien Sokrates die tragische Kunst nicht einmal „die Wahrheit zu sagen“: abgesehen davon, dass sie sich an den wendet, der „nicht viel Verstand besitzt“, also nicht an den Philosophen: ein zweifacher Grund, von ihr fern zu bleiben. Wie Plato, rechnete er sie zu den schmeichlerischen Künsten, die nur das Angenehme, nicht das Nützliche darstellen und verlangte deshalb bei seinen Jüngern Enthaltsamkeit und strenge Absonderung von solchen unphilosophischen Reizungen; mit solchem Erfolge, dass der jugendliche Tragödiendichter Plato zu allererst seine Dichtungen verbrannte, um Schüler des Sokrates werden zu können. Wo aber unbesiegbare Anlagen gegen die sokratischen Maximen ankämpften, war die Kraft derselben, sammt der Wucht jenes ungeheuren Charakters, immer noch gross genug, um die Poesie selbst in neue und bis dahin unbekannte Stellungen zu drängen.\n\nEin Beispiel dafür ist der eben genannte Plato: er, der in der Verurtheilung der Tragödie und der Kunst überhaupt gewiss nicht hinter dem naiven Cynismus seines Meisters zurückgeblieben ist, hat doch aus voller künstlerischer Nothwendigkeit eine Kunstform schaffen müssen, die gerade mit den vorhandenen und von ihm abgewiesenen Kunstformen innerlich verwandt ist. Der Hauptvorwurf, den Plato der älteren Kunst zu machen hatte,—dass sie Nachahmung eines Scheinbildes sei, also noch einer niedrigeren Sphäre als die empirische Welt ist, angehöre—durfte vor allem nicht gegen das neue Kunstwerk gerichtet werden: und so sehen wir denn Plato bestrebt über die Wirklichkeit hinaus zu gehn und die jener Pseudo-Wirklichkeit zu Grunde liegende Idee darzustellen. Damit aber war der Denker Plato auf einem Umwege ebendahin gelangt, wo er als Dichter stets heimisch gewesen war und von wo aus Sophokles und die ganze ältere Kunst feierlich gegen jenen Vorwurf protestirten. Wenn die Tragödie alle früheren Kunstgattungen in sich aufgesaugt hatte, so darf dasselbe wiederum in einem excentrischen Sinne vom platonischen Dialoge gelten, der, durch Mischung aller vorhandenen Stile und Formen erzeugt, zwischen Erzählung, Lyrik, Drama, zwischen Prosa und Poesie in der Mitte schwebt und damit auch das strenge ältere Gesetz der einheitlichen sprachlichen Form durchbrochen hat; auf welchem Wege die *cynischen* Schriftsteller noch weiter gegangen sind, die in der grössten Buntscheckigkeit des Stils, im Hin- und Herschwanken zwischen prosaischen und metrischen Formen auch das litterarische Bild des „rasenden Sokrates“, den sie im Leben darzustellen pflegten, erreicht haben. Der platonische Dialog war gleichsam der Kahn, auf dem sich die schiffbrüchige ältere Poesie sammt allen ihren Kindern rettete: auf einen engen Raum zusammengedrängt und dem einen Steuermann Sokrates ängstlich unterthänig fuhren sie jetzt in eine neue Welt hinein, die an dem phantastischen Bilde dieses Aufzugs sich nie satt sehen konnte. Wirklich hat für die ganze Nachwelt Plato das Vorbild einer neuen Kunstform gegeben, das Vorbild des *Roman's:* der als die unendlich gesteigerte aesopische Fabel zu bezeichnen ist, in der die Poesie in einer ähnlichen Rangordnung zur dialektischen Philosophie lebt, wie viele Jahrhunderte hindurch dieselbe Philosophie zur Theologie: nämlich als ancilla. Dies war die neue Stellung der Poesie, in die sie Plato unter dem Drucke des dämonischen Sokrates drängte.\n\nHier überwächst der *philosophische Gedanke* die Kunst und zwingt sie zu einem engen Sich-Anklammern an den Stamm der Dialektik. In dem logischen Schematismus hat sich die *apollinische* Tendenz verpuppt: wie wir bei Euripides etwas Entsprechendes und ausserdem eine Uebersetzung des *Dionysischen* in den naturalistischen Affect wahrzunehmen hatten. Sokrates, der dialektische Held im platonischen Drama, erinnert uns an die verwandte Natur des euripideischen Helden, der durch Grund und Gegengrund seine Handlungen vertheidigen muss und dadurch so oft in Gefahr geräth, unser tragisches Mitleiden einzubüssen: denn wer vermöchte das *optimistische* Element im Wesen der Dialektik zu verkennen, das in jedem Schlusse sein Jubelfest feiert und allein in kühler Helle und Bewusstheit athmen kann: das optimistische Element, das, einmal in die Tragödie eingedrungen, ihre dionysischen Regionen allmählich überwuchern und sie nothwendig zur Selbstvernichtung treiben muss—bis zum Todessprunge in's bürgerliche Schauspiel. Man vergegenwärtige sich nur die Consequenzen der sokratischen Sätze: „Tugend ist Wissen; es wird nur gesündigt aus Unwissenheit; der Tugendhafte ist der Glückliche“: in diesen drei Grundformen des Optimismus liegt der Tod der Tragödie. Denn jetzt muss der tugendhafte Held Dialektiker sein, jetzt muss zwischen Tugend und Wissen, Glaube und Moral ein nothwendiger sichtbarer Verband sein, jetzt ist die transscendentale Gerechtigkeitslösung des Aeschylus zu dem flachen und frechen Princip der „poetischen Gerechtigkeit“ mit seinem üblichen deus ex machina erniedrigt.\n\nWie erscheint dieser neuen sokratisch-optimistischen Bühnenwelt gegenüber jetzt der *Chor* und überhaupt der ganze musikalisch-dionysische Untergrund der Tragödie? Als etwas Zufälliges, als eine auch wohl zu missende Reminiscenz an den Ursprung der Tragödie; während wir doch eingesehen haben, dass der Chor nur als *Ursache* der Tragödie und des Tragischen überhaupt verstanden werden kann. Schon bei Sophokles zeigt sich jene Verlegenheit in Betreff des Chors—ein wichtiges Zeichen, dass schon bei ihm der dionysische Boden der Tragödie zu zerbröckeln beginnt. Er wagt es nicht mehr, dem Chor den Hauptantheil der Wirkung anzuvertrauen, sondern schränkt sein Bereich dermaassen ein, dass er jetzt fast den Schauspielern coordinirt erscheint, gleich als ob er aus der Orchestra in die Scene hineingehoben würde: womit freilich sein Wesen völlig zerstört ist, mag auch Aristoteles gerade dieser Auffassung des Chors seine Beistimmung geben. Jene Verrückung der Chorposition, welche Sophokles jedenfalls durch seine Praxis und, der Ueberlieferung nach, sogar durch eine Schrift anempfohlen hat, ist der erste Schritt zur *Vernichtung* des Chors, deren Phasen in Euripides, Agathon und der neueren Komödie mit erschreckender Schnelligkeit auf einander folgen. Die optimistische Dialektik treibt mit der Geissel ihrer Syllogismen die *Musik* aus der Tragödie: d.h. sie zerstört das Wesen der Tragödie, welches sich einzig als eine Manifestation und Verbildlichung dionysischer Zustände, als sichtbare Symbolisirung der Musik, als die Traumwelt eines dionysischen Rausches interpretiren lässt.\n\nHaben wir also sogar eine schon vor Sokrates wirkende antidionysische Tendenz anzunehmen, die nur in ihm einen unerhört grossartigen Ausdruck gewinnt: so müssen wir nicht vor der Frage zurückschrecken, wohin denn eine solche Erscheinung wie die des Sokrates deute: die wir doch nicht im Stande sind, Angesichts der platonischen Dialoge, als eine nur auflösende negative Macht zu begreifen. Und so gewiss die allernächste Wirkung des sokratischen Triebes auf eine Zersetzung der dionysischen Tragödie ausging, so zwingt uns eine tiefsinnige Lebenserfahrung des Sokrates selbst zu der Frage, ob denn zwischen dem Sokratismus und der Kunst *nothwendig* nur ein antipodisches Verhältniss bestehe und ob die Geburt eines „künstlerischen Sokrates“ überhaupt etwas in sich Widerspruchsvolles sei.\n\nJener despotische Logiker hatte nämlich hier und da der Kunst gegenüber das Gefühl einer Lücke, einer Leere, eines halben Vorwurfs, einer vielleicht versäumten Pflicht. Oefters kam ihm, wie er im Gefängniss seinen Freunden erzählt, ein und dieselbe Traumerscheinung, die immer dasselbe sagte: „Sokrates, treibe Musik!“ Er beruhigt sich bis zu seinen letzten Tagen mit der Meinung, sein Philosophieren sei die höchste Musenkunst, und glaubt nicht recht, dass eine Gottheit ihn an jene „gemeine, populäre Musik“ erinnern werde. Endlich im Gefängniss versteht er sich, um sein Gewissen gänzlich zu entlasten, auch dazu, jene von ihm gering geachtete Musik zu treiben. Und in dieser Gesinnung dichtet er ein Proömium auf Apollo und bringt einige aesopische Fabeln in Verse. Das war etwas der dämonischen warnenden Stimme Aehnliches, was ihn zu diesen Uebungen drängte, es war seine apollinische Einsicht, dass er wie ein Barbarenkönig ein edles Götterbild nicht verstehe und in der Gefahr sei, sich an einer Gottheit zu versündigen—durch sein Nichtsverstehn. Jenes Wort der sokratischen Traumerscheinung ist das einzige Zeichen einer Bedenklichkeit über die Grenzen der logischen Natur: vielleicht—so musste er sich fragen—ist das mir Nichtverständliche doch nicht auch sofort das Unverständige? Vielleicht giebt es ein Reich der Weisheit, aus dem der Logiker verbannt ist? Vielleicht ist die Kunst sogar ein nothwendiges Correlativum und Supplement der Wissenschaft?\n\n### Section 15\n\nIm Sinne dieser letzten ahnungsvollen Fragen muss nun ausgesprochen werden, wie der Einfluss des Sokrates, bis auf diesen Moment hin, ja in alle Zukunft hinaus, sich, gleich einem in der Abendsonne immer grösser werdenden Schatten, über die Nachwelt hin ausgebreitet hat, wie derselbe zur Neuschaffung der *Kunst*—und zwar der Kunst im bereits metaphysischen, weitesten und tiefsten Sinne—immer wieder nöthigt und, bei seiner eignen Unendlichkeit, auch deren Unendlichkeit verbürgt.\n\nBevor dies erkannt werden konnte, bevor die innerste Abhängigkeit jeder Kunst von den Griechen, den Griechen von Homer bis auf Sokrates, überzeugend dargethan war, musste es uns mit diesen Griechen ergehen wie den Athenern mit Sokrates. Fast jede Zeit und Bildungsstufe hat einmal sich mit tiefem Missmuthe von den Griechen zu befreien gesucht, weil Angesichts derselben alles Selbstgeleistete, scheinbar völlig Originelle, und recht aufrichtig Bewunderte plötzlich Farbe und Leben zu verlieren schien und zur misslungenen Copie, ja zur Caricatur zusammenschrumpfte. Und so bricht immer von Neuem einmal der herzliche Ingrimm gegen jenes anmaassliche Völkchen hervor das sich erkühnte, alles Nichteinheimische für alle Zeiten als „barbarisch“ zu bezeichnen: wer sind jene, fragt man sich, die, obschon sie nur einen ephemeren historischen Glanz, nur lächerlich engbegrenzte Institutionen, nur eine zweifelhafte Tüchtigkeit der Sitte aufzuweisen haben und sogar mit hässlichen Lastern gekennzeichnet sind, doch die Würde und Sonderstellung unter den Völkern in Anspruch nehmen, die dem Genius unter der Masse zukommt? Leider war man nicht so glücklich den Schierlingsbecher zu finden, mit dem ein solches Wesen einfach abgethan werden konnte: denn alles Gift, das Neid, Verläumdung und Ingrimm in sich erzeugten, reichte nicht hin, jene selbstgenugsame Herrlichkeit zu vernichten. Und so schämt und fürchtet man sich vor den Griechen; es sei denn, dass Einer die Wahrheit über alles achte und so sich auch diese Wahrheit einzugestehn wage, dass die Griechen unsere und jegliche Cultur als Wagenlenker in den Händen haben, dass aber fase immer Wagen und Pferde von zu geringem Stoffe und der Glorie ihrer Führer unangemessen sind, die dann es für einen Scherz erachten, ein solches Gespann in den Abgrund zu jagen: über den sie selbst, mit dem Sprunge des Achilles, hinwegsetzen.\n\nUm die Würde einer solchen Führerstellung auch für Sokrates zu erweisen, genügt es in ihm den Typus einer vor ihm unerhörten Daseinsform zu erkennen, den Typus des *theoretischen Menschen*, über dessen Bedeutung und Ziel zur Einsicht zu kommen, unsere nächste Aufgabe ist. Auch der theoretische Mensch hat ein unendliches Genügen am Vorhandenen, wie der Künstler, und ist wie jener vor der praktischen Ethik des Pessimismus und vor seinen nur im Finsteren leuchtenden Lynkeusaugen, durch jenes Genügen geschützt. Wenn nämlich der Künstler bei jeder Enthüllung der Wahrheit immer nur mit verzückten Blicken an dem hängen bleibt, was auch jetzt, nach der Enthüllung, noch Hülle bleibt, geniesst und befriedigt sich der theoretische Mensch an der abgeworfenen Hülle und hat sein höchstes Lustziel in dem Prozess einer immer glücklichen, durch eigene Kraft gelingenden Enthüllung. Es gäbe keine Wissenschaft, wenn ihr nur um jene *eine* nackte Göttin und um nichts Anderes zu thun wäre. Denn dann müsste es ihren Jüngern zu Muthe sein, wie Solchen, die ein Loch gerade durch die Erde graben wollten: von denen ein Jeder einsieht, dass er, bei grösster und lebenslänglicher Anstrengung, nur ein ganz kleines Stück der ungeheuren Tiefe zu durchgraben im Stande sei, welches vor seinen Augen durch die Arbeit des Nächsten wieder überschüttet wird, so dass ein Dritter wohl daran zu thun scheint, wenn er auf eigne Faust eine neue Stelle für seine Bohrversuche wählt. Wenn jetzt nun Einer zur Ueberzeugung beweist, dass auf diesem directen Wege das Antipodenziel nicht zu erreichen sei, wer wird noch in den alten Tiefen weiterarbeiten wollen, es sei denn, dass er sich nicht inzwischen genügen lasse, edles Gestein zu finden oder Naturgesetze zu entdecken. Darum hat Lessing, der ehrlichste theoretische Mensch, es auszusprechen gewagt, dass ihm mehr am Suchen der Wahrheit als an ihr selbst gelegen sei: womit das Grundgeheimniss der Wissenschaft, zum Erstaunen, ja Aerger der Wissenschaftlichen, aufgedeckt worden ist. Nun steht freilich neben dieser vereinzelten Erkenntniss, als einem Excess der Ehrlichkeit, wenn nicht des Uebermuthes, eine tiefsinnige *Wahnvorstellung*, welche zuerst in der Person des Sokrates zur Welt kam, jener unerschütterliche Glaube, dass das Denken, an dem Leitfaden der Causalität, bis in die tiefsten Abgründe des Seins reiche, und dass das Denken das Sein nicht nur zu erkennen, sondern sogar zu *corrigiren* im Stande sei. Dieser erhabene metaphysische Wahn ist als Instinct der Wissenschaft beigegeben und führt sie immer und immer wieder zu ihren Grenzen, an denen sie in *Kunst* umschlagen muss: *auf welche es eigentlich, bei diesem Mechanismus, abgesehn ist.*\n\nSchauen wir jetzt, mit der Fackel dieses Gedankens, auf Sokrates hin: so erscheint er uns als der Erste, der an der Hand jenes Instinctes der Wissenschaft nicht nur leben, sondern—was bei weitem mehr ist—auch sterben konnte: und deshalb ist das Bild des *sterbenden Sokrates* als des durch Wissen und Gründe der Todesfurcht enthobenen Menschen das Wappenschild, das über dem Eingangsthor der Wissenschaft einen Jeden an deren Bestimmung erinnert, nämlich das Dasein als begreiflich und damit als gerechtfertigt erscheinen zu machen: wozu freilich wenn die Gründe nicht reichen, schliesslich auch der *Mythus* dienen muss, den ich sogar als nothwendige Consequenz, ja als Absicht der Wissenschaft soeben bezeichnete.\n\nWer sich einmal anschaulich macht, wie nach Sokrates, dem Mystagogen der Wissenschaft, eine Philosophenschule nach der anderen, wie Welle auf Welle, sich ablöst, wie eine nie geahnte Universalität der Wissensgier in dem weitesten Bereich der gebildeten Welt und als eigentliche Aufgabe für jeden höher Befähigten die Wissenschaft auf die hohe See führte, von der sie niemals seitdem wieder völlig vertrieben werden konnte, wie durch diese Universalität erst ein gemeinsames Netz des Gedankens über den gesammten Erdball, ja mit Ausblicken auf die Gesetzlichkeit eines ganzen Sonnensystems, gespannt wurde; wer dies Alles, sammt der erstaunlich hohen Wissenspyramide der Gegenwart, sich vergegenwärtigt, der kann sich nicht entbrechen, in Sokrates den einen Wendepunkt und Wirbel der sogenannten Weltgeschichte zu sehen. Denn dächte man sich einmal diese ganze unbezifferbare Summe von Kraft, die für jene Welttendenz verbraucht worden ist, *nicht* im Dienste des Erkennens, sondern auf die praktischen d.h. egoistischen Ziele der Individuen und Völker verwendet, so wäre wahrscheinlich in allgemeinen Vernichtungskämpfen und fortdauernden Völkerwanderungen die instinctive Lust zum Leben so abgeschwächt, dass, bei der Gewohnheit des Selbstmordes, der Einzelne vielleicht den letzten Rest von Pflichtgefühl empfinden müsste, wenn er, wie der Bewohner der Fidschiinseln, als Sohn seine Eltern, als Freund seinen Freund erdrosselt: ein praktischer Pessimismus, der selbst eine grausenhafte Ethik des Völkermordes aus Mitleid erzeugen könnte—der übrigens überall in der Welt vorhanden ist und vorhanden war, wo nicht die Kunst in irgend welchen Formen, besonders als Religion und Wissenschaft, zum Heilmittel und zur Abwehr jenes Pesthauchs erschienen ist.\n\nAngesichts dieses praktischen Pessimismus ist Sokrates das Urbild des theoretischen Optimisten, der in dem bezeichneten Glauben an die Ergründlichkeit der Natur der Dinge dem Wissen und der Erkenntniss die Kraft einer Universalmedizin beilegt und im Irrthum das Uebel an sich begreift. In jene Gründe einzudringen und die wahre Erkenntniss vom Schein und vom Irrthum zu sondern, dünkte dem sokratischen Menschen der edelste, selbst der einzige wahrhaft menschliche Beruf zu sein: so wie jener Mechanismus der Begriffe, Urtheile und Schlüsse von Sokrates ab als höchste Bethätigung und bewunderungswürdigste Gabe der Natur über alle anderen Fähigkeiten geschätzt wurde. Selbst die erhabensten sittlichen Thaten, die Regungen des Mitleids, der Aufopferung, des Heroismus und jene schwer zu erringende Meeresstille der Seele, die der apollinische Grieche Sophrosyne nannte, wurden von Sokrates und seinen gleichgesinnten Nachfolgern bis auf die Gegenwart hin aus der Dialektik des Wissens abgeleitet und demgemäss als lehrbar bezeichnet. Wer die Lust einer sokratischen Erkenntniss an sich erfahren hat und spürt, wie diese, in immer weiteren Ringen, die ganze Welt der Erscheinungen zu umfassen sucht, der wird von da an keinen Stachel, der zum Dasein drängen könnte, heftiger empfinden als die Begierde, jene Eroberung zu vollenden und das Netz undurchdringbar fest zu spinnen. Einem so Gestimmten erscheint dann der platonische Sokrates als der Lehrer einer ganz neuen Form der „griechischen Heiterkeit“ und Daseinsseligkeit, welche sich in Handlungen zu entladen sucht und diese Entladung zumeist in maeeutischen und erziehenden Einwirkungen auf edle Jünglinge, zum Zweck der endlichen Erzeugung des Genius, finden wird.\n\nNun aber eilt die Wissenschaft, von ihrem kräftigen Wahne angespornt, unaufhaltsam bis zu ihren Grenzen, an denen ihr im Wesen der Logik verborgener Optimismus scheitert. Denn die Peripherie des Kreises der Wissenschaft hat unendlich viele Punkte, und während noch gar nicht abzusehen ist, wie jemals der Kreis völlig ausgemessen werden könnte, so trifft doch der edle und begabte Mensch, noch vor der Mitte seines Daseins und unvermeidlich, auf solche Grenzpunkte der Peripherie, wo er in das Unaufhellbare starrt. Wenn er hier zu seinem Schrecken sieht, wie die Logik sich an diesen Grenzen um sich selbst ringelt und endlich sich in den Schwanz beisst—da bricht die neue Form der Erkenntniss durch, *die tragische Erkenntniss*, die, um nur ertragen zu werden, als Schutz und Heilmittel die Kunst braucht.\n\nSchauen wir, mit gestärkten und an den Griechen erlabten Augen, auf die höchsten Sphären derjenigen Welt, die uns umfluthet, so gewahren wir die in Sokrates vorbildlich erscheinende Gier der unersättlichen optimistischen Erkenntniss in tragische Resignation und Kunstbedürftigkeit umgeschlagen: während allerdings dieselbe Gier, auf ihren niederen Stufen, sich kunstfeindlich äussern und vornehmlich die dionysisch-tragische Kunst innerlich verabscheuen muss, wie dies an der Bekämpfung der aeschyleischen Tragödie durch den Sokratismus beispielsweise dargestellt wurde.\n\nHier nun klopfen wir, bewegten Gemüthes, an die Pforten der Gegenwart und Zukunft: wird jenes „Umschlagen“ zu immer neuen Configurationen des Genius und gerade des *musiktreibenden Sokrates* führen? Wird das über das Dasein gebreitete Netz der Kunst, sei es auch unter dem Namen der Religion oder der Wissenschaft, immer fester und zarter geflochten werden oder ist ihm bestimmt, unter dem ruhelos barbarischen Treiben und Wirbeln, das sich jetzt „die Gegenwart“ nennt, in Fetzen zu reissen?—Besorgt, doch nicht trostlos stehen wir eine kleine Weile bei Seite, als die Beschaulichen, denen es erlaubt ist, Zeugen jener ungeheuren Kämpfe und Uebergänge zu sein. Ach! Es ist der Zauber dieser Kämpfe, dass, wer sie schaut, sie auch kämpfen muss!\n\n### Section 16\n\nAn diesem ausgeführten historischen Beispiel haben wir klar zu machen gesucht, wie die Tragödie an dem Entschwinden des Geistes der Musik eben so gewiss zu Grunde geht, wie sie aus diesem Geiste allein geboren werden kann. Das Ungewöhnliche dieser Behauptung zu mildern und andererseits den Ursprung dieser unserer Erkenntniss aufzuzeigen, müssen wir uns jetzt freien Blicks den analogen Erscheinungen der Gegenwart gegenüber stellen; wir müssen mitten hinein in jene Kämpfe treten, welche, wie ich eben sagte, zwischen der unersättlichen optimistischen Erkenntniss und der tragischen Kunstbedürftigkeit in den höchsten Sphären unserer jetzigen Welt gekämpft werden. Ich will hierbei von allen den anderen gegnerischen Trieben absehn, die zu jeder Zeit der Kunst und gerade der Tragödie entgegenarbeiten und die auch in der Gegenwart in dem Maasse siegesgewiss um sich greifen, dass von den theatralischen Künsten z.B. allein die Posse und das Ballet in einem einigermaassen üppigen Wuchern ihre vielleicht nicht für Jedermann wohlriechenden Blüthen treiben. Ich will nur von der *erlauchtesten Gegnerschaft* der tragischen Weltbetrachtung reden und meine damit die in ihrem tiefsten Wesen optimistische Wissenschaft, mit ihrem Ahnherrn Sokrates an der Spitze. Alsbald sollen auch die Mächte bei Namen genannt werden, welche mir *eine Wiedergeburt der Tragödie*—und welche andere selige Hoffnungen für das deutsche Wesen!—zu verbürgen scheinen.\n\nBevor wir uns mitten in jene Kämpfe hineinstürzen, hüllen wir uns in die Rüstung unsrer bisher eroberten Erkenntnisse. Im Gegensatz zu allen denen, welche beflissen sind, die Künste aus einem einzigen Princip, als dem nothwendigen Lebensquell jedes Kunstwerks abzuleiten, halte ich den Blick auf jene beiden künstlerischen Gottheiten der Griechen, Apollo und Dionysus, geheftet und erkenne in ihnen die lebendigen und anschaulichen Repräsentanten *zweier* in ihrem tiefsten Wesen und ihren höchsten Zielen verschiedenen Kunstwelten. Apollo steht vor mir, als der verklärende Genius des principii individuationis, durch den allein die Erlösung im Scheine wahrhaft zu erlangen ist: während unter dem mystischen Jubelruf des Dionysus der Bann der Individuation zersprengt wird und der Weg zu den Müttern des Sein's, zu dem innersten Kern der Dinge offen liegt. Dieser ungeheuere Gegensatz, der sich zwischen der plastischen Kunst als der apollinischen und der Musik als der dionysischen Kunst klaffend aufthut, ist einem Einzigen der grossen Denker in dem Maasse offenbar geworden, dass er, selbst ohne jene Anleitung der hellenischen Göttersymbolik, der Musik einen verschiedenen Charakter und Ursprung vor allen anderen Künsten zuerkannte, weil sie nicht, wie jene alle, Abbild der Erscheinung, sondern unmittelbar Abbild des Willens selbst sei und also *zu allem Physischen der Welt das Metaphysische*, zu aller Erscheinung das Ding an sich darstelle. (Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, p. 310). Auf diese wichtigste Erkenntniss aller Aesthetik, mit der, in einem ernstern Sinne genommen, die Aesthetik erst beginnt, hat Richard Wagner, zur Bekräftigung ihrer ewigen Wahrheit, seinen Stempel gedrückt, wenn er im „Beethoven“ feststellt, dass die Musik nach ganz anderen aesthetischen Principien als alle bildenden Künste und überhaupt nicht nach der Kategorie der Schönheit zu bemessen sei: obgleich eine irrige Aesthetik, an der Hand einer missleiteten und entarteten Kunst, von jenem in der bildnerischen Welt geltenden Begriff der Schönheit aus sich gewöhnt habe, von der Musik eine ähnliche Wirkung wie von den Werken der bildenden Kunst zu fordern, nämlich die Erregung *des Gefallens an schönen Formen*. Nach der Erkenntniss jenes ungeheuren Gegensatzes fühlte ich eine starke Nöthigung, mich dem Wesen der griechischen Tragödie und damit der tiefsten Offenbarung des hellenischen Genius zu nahen: denn erst jetzt glaubte ich des Zaubers mächtig zu sein, über die Phraseologie unserer üblichen Aesthetik hinaus, das Urproblem der Tragödie mir leibhaft vor die Seele stellen zu können: wodurch mir ein so befremdlich eigenthümlicher Blick in das Hellenische vergönnt war, dass es mir scheinen musste, als ob unsre so stolz sich gebärdende classisch-hellenische Wissenschaft in der Hauptsache bis jetzt nur an Schattenspielen und Aeusserlichkeiten sich zu weiden gewusst habe.\n\nJenes Urproblem möchten wir vielleicht mit dieser Frage berühren: welche aesthetische Wirkung entsteht, wenn jene an sich getrennten Kunstmächte des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen neben einander in Thätigkeit gerathen? Oder in kürzerer Form: wie verhält sich die Musik zu Bild und Begriff?—Schopenhauer, dem Richard Wagner gerade für diesen Punkt eine nicht zu überbietende Deutlichkeit und Durchsichtigkeit der Darstellung nachrühmt, äussert sich hierüber am ausführlichsten in der folgenden Stelle, die ich hier in ihrer ganzen Länge wiedergeben werde. Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, p. 309: „Diesem allen zufolge können wir die erscheinende Welt, oder die Natur, und die Musik als zwei verschiedene Ausdrücke derselben Sache ansehen, welche selbst daher das allein Vermittelnde der Analogie beider ist, dessen Erkenntniss erfordert wird, um jene Analogie einzusehen. Die Musik ist demnach, wenn als Ausdruck der Welt angesehen eine im höchsten Grad allgemeine Sprache, die sich sogar zur Allgemeinheit der Begriffe ungefähr verhält wie diese zu den einzelnen Dingen. Ihre Allgemeinheit ist aber keineswegs jene leere Allgemeinheit der Abstraction, sondern ganz anderer Art und ist verbunden mit durchgängiger deutlicher Bestimmtheit. Sie gleicht hierin den geometrischen Figuren und den Zahlen, welche als die allgemeinen Formen aller möglichen Objecte der Erfahrung und auf alle a priori anwendbar, doch nicht abstract, sondern anschaulich und durchgängig bestimmt sind. Alle möglichen Bestrebungen, Erregungen und Aeusserungen des Willens, alle jene Vorgänge im Innern des Menschen, welche die Vernunft in den weiten negativen Begriff Gefühl wirft, sind durch die unendlich vielen möglichen Melodien auszudrücken, aber immer in der Allgemeinheit blosser Form, ohne den Stoff, immer nur nach dem Ansich, nicht nach der Erscheinung, gleichsam die innerste Seele derselben, ohne Körper. Aus diesem innigen Verhältniss, welches die Musik zum wahren Wesen aller Dinge hat, ist auch dies zu erklären, dass, wenn zu irgend einer Scene, Handlung, Vorgang, Umgebung, eine passende Musik ertönt, diese uns den geheimsten Sinn derselben aufzuschliessen scheint und als der richtigste und deutlichste Commentar dazu auftritt; imgleichen, dass es Dem, der sich dem Eindruck einer Symphonie ganz hingiebt, ist, als sähe er alle möglichen Vorgänge des Lebens und der Welt an sich vorüberziehen: dennoch kann er, wenn er sich besinnt, keine Aehnlichkeit angeben zwischen jenem Tonspiel und den Dingen, die ihm vorschwebten. Denn die Musik ist, wie gesagt, darin von allen anderen Künsten verschieden, dass sie nicht Abbild der Erscheinung, oder richtiger, der adäquaten Objectität des Willens, sondern unmittelbar Abbild des Willens selbst ist und also zu allem Physischen der Welt das Metaphysische, zu aller Erscheinung das Ding an sich darstellt. Man könnte demnach die Welt ebensowohl verkörperte Musik, als verkörperten Willen nennen: daraus also ist es erklärlich, warum Musik jedes Gemälde, ja jede Scene des wirklichen Lebens und der Welt, sogleich in erhöhter Bedeutsamkeit hervortreten lässt; freilich um so mehr, je analoger ihre Melodie dem innern Geiste der gegebenen Erscheinung ist. Hierauf beruht es, dass man ein Gedicht als Gesang, oder eine anschauliche Darstellung als Pantomime, oder beides als Oper der Musik unterlegen kann. Solche einzelne Bilder des Menschenlebens, der allgemeinen Sprache der Musik untergelegt, sind nie mit durchgängiger Nothwendigkeit ihr verbunden oder entsprechend; sondern sie stehen zu ihr nur im Verhältniss eines beliebigen Beispiels zu einem allgemeinen Begriff: sie stellen in der Bestimmtheit der Wirklichkeit Dasjenige dar, was die Musik in der Allgemeinheit blosser Form aussagt. Denn die Melodien sind gewissermaassen, gleich den allgemeinen Begriffen, ein Abstractum der Wirklichkeit. Diese nämlich, also die Welt der einzelnen Dinge, liefert das Anschauliche, das Besondere und Individuelle, den einzelnen Fall, sowohl zur Allgemeinheit der Begriffe, als zur Allgemeinheit der Melodien, welche beide Allgemeinheiten einander aber in gewisser Hinsicht entgegengesetzt sind; indem die Begriffe nur die allererst aus der Anschauung abstrahirten Formen, gleichsam die abgezogene äussere Schale der Dinge enthalten, also ganz eigentlich Abstracta sind; die Musik hingegen den innersten aller Gestaltung vorhergängigen Kern, oder das Herz der Dinge giebt. Dies Verhältniss liesse sich recht gut in der Sprache der Scholastiker ausdrücken, indem man sagte: die Begriffe sind die universalia post rem, die Musik aber giebt die universalia ante rem, und die Wirklichkeit die universalia in re. Dass aber überhaupt eine Beziehung zwischen einer Composition und einer anschaulichen Darstellung möglich ist, beruht, wie gesagt, darauf, dass beide nur ganz verschiedene Ausdrücke desselben innern Wesens der Welt sind. Wann nun im einzelnen Fall eine solche Beziehung wirklich vorhanden ist, also der Componist die Willensregungen, welche den Kern einer Begebenheit ausmachen, in der allgemeinen Sprache der Musik auszusprechen gewusst hat: dann ist die Melodie des Liedes, die Musik der Oper ausdrucksvoll. Die vom Componisten aufgefundene Analogie zwischen jenen beiden muss aber aus der unmittelbaren Erkenntniss des Wesens der Welt, seiner Vernunft unbewusst, hervorgegangen und darf nicht, mit bewusster Absichtlichkeit, durch Begriffe vermittelte Nachahmung sein: sonst spricht die Musik nicht das innere Wesen, den Willen selbst aus; sondern ahmt nur seine Erscheinung ungenügend nach; wie dies alle eigentlich nachbildende Musik thut“.—\n\nWir verstehen also, nach der Lehre Schopenhauer's, die Musik als die Sprache des Willens unmittelbar und fühlen unsere Phantasie angeregt, jene zu uns redende, unsichtbare und doch so lebhaft bewegte Geisterwelt zu gestalten und sie in einem analogen Beispiel uns zu verkörpern. Andrerseits kommt Bild und Begriff, unter der Einwirkung einer wahrhaft entsprechenden Musik, zu einer erhöhten Bedeutsamkeit. Zweierlei Wirkungen pflegt also die dionysische Kunst auf das apollinische Kunstvermögen auszuüben: die Musik reizt zum *gleichnissartigen Anschauen* der dionysischen Allgemeinheit, die Musik lässt sodann das gleichnissartige Bild *in höchster Bedeutsamkeit* hervortreten. Aus diesen an sich verständlichen und keiner tieferen Beobachtung unzugänglichen Thatsachen erschliesse ich die Befähigung der Musik, *den Mythus* d.h. das bedeutsamste Exempel zu gebären und gerade den *tragischen* Mythus: den Mythus, der von der dionysischen Erkenntniss in Gleichnissen redet. An dem Phänomen des Lyrikers habe ich dargestellt, wie die Musik im Lyriker darnach ringt, in apollinischen Bildern über ihr Wesen sich kund zu geben: denken wir uns jetzt, dass die Musik in ihrer höchsten Steigerung auch zu einer höchsten Verbildlichung zu kommen suchen muss, so müssen wir für möglich halten, dass sie auch den symbolischen Ausdruck für ihre eigentliche dionysische Weisheit zu finden wisse; und wo anders werden wir diesen Ausdruck zu suchen haben, wenn nicht in der Tragödie und überhaupt im Begriff des *Tragischen*?\n\nAus dem Wesen der Kunst, wie sie gemeinhin nach der einzigen Kategorie des Scheines und der Schönheit begriffen wird, ist das Tragische in ehrlicher Weise gar nicht abzuleiten; erst aus dem Geiste der Musik heraus verstehen wir eine Freude an der Vernichtung des Individuums. Denn an den einzelnen Beispielen einer solchen Vernichtung wird uns nur das ewige Phänomen der dionysischen Kunst deutlich gemacht, die den Willen in seiner Allmacht gleichsam hinter dem principio individuationis, das ewige Leben jenseit aller Erscheinung und trotz aller Vernichtung zum Ausdruck bringt. Die metaphysische Freude am Tragischen ist eine Uebersetzung der instinctiv unbewussten dionysischen Weisheit in die Sprache des Bildes: der Held, die höchste Willenserscheinung, wird zu unserer Lust verneint, weil er doch nur Erscheinung ist, und das ewige Leben des Willens durch seine Vernichtung nicht berührt wird. „Wir glauben an das ewige Leben“, so ruft die Tragödie; während die Musik die unmittelbare Idee dieses Lebens ist. Ein ganz verschiednes Ziel hat die Kunst des Plastikers: hier überwindet Apollo das Leiden des Individuums durch die leuchtende Verherrlichung der *Ewigkeit der Erscheinung*, hier siegt die Schönheit über das dem Leben inhärirende Leiden, der Schmerz wird in einem gewissen Sinne aus den Zügen der Natur hinweggelogen. In der dionysischen Kunst und in deren tragischer Symbolik redet uns dieselbe Natur mit ihrer wahren, unverstellten Stimme an: „Seid wie ich bin! Unter dem unaufhörlichen Wechsel der Erscheinungen die ewig schöpferische, ewig zum Dasein zwingende, an diesem Erscheinungswechsel sich ewig befriedigende Urmutter!“\n\n### Section 17\n\nAuch die dionysische Kunst will uns von der ewigen Lust des Daseins überzeugen: nur sollen wir diese Lust nicht in den Erscheinungen, sondern hinter den Erscheinungen suchen. Wir sollen erkennen, wie alles, was entsteht, zum leidvollen Untergange bereit sein muss, wir werden gezwungen in die Schrecken der Individualexistenz hineinzublicken—und sollen doch nicht erstarren: ein metaphysischer Trost reisst uns momentan aus dem Getriebe der Wandelgestalten heraus. Wir sind wirklich in kurzen Augenblicken das Urwesen selbst und fühlen dessen unbändige Daseinsgier und Daseinslust; der Kampf, die Qual, die Vernichtung der Erscheinungen dünkt uns jetzt wie nothwendig, bei dem Uebermaass von unzähligen, sich in's Leben drängenden und stossenden Daseinsformen, bei der überschwänglichen Fruchtbarkeit des Weltwillens; wir werden von dem wüthenden Stachel dieser Qualen in demselben Augenblicke durchbohrt, wo wir gleichsam mit der unermesslichen Urlust am Dasein eins geworden sind und wo wir die Unzerstörbarkeit und Ewigkeit dieser Lust in dionysischer Entzückung ahnen. Trotz Furcht und Mitleid sind wir die glücklich-Lebendigen, nicht als Individuen, sondern als das *eine* Lebendige, mit dessen Zeugungslust wir verschmolzen sind.\n\nDie Entstehungsgeschichte der griechischen Tragödie sagt uns jetzt mit lichtvoller Bestimmtheit, wie das tragische Kunstwerk der Griechen wirklich aus dem Geiste der Musik herausgeboren ist: durch welchen Gedanken wir zum ersten Male dem ursprünglichen und so erstaunlichen Sinne des Chors gerecht geworden zu sein glauben. Zugleich aber müssen wir zugeben, dass die vorhin aufgestellte Bedeutung des tragischen Mythus den griechischen Dichtern, geschweige den griechischen Philosophen, niemals in begrifflicher Deutlichkeit durchsichtig geworden ist; ihre Helden sprechen gewissermaassen oberflächlicher als sie handeln, der Mythus findet in dem gesprochnen Wort durchaus nicht seine adäquate Objectivation. Das Gefüge der Scenen und die anschaulichen Bilder offenbaren eine tiefere Weisheit, als der Dichter selbst in Worte und Begriffe fassen kann: wie das Gleiche auch bei Shakespeare beobachtet wird, dessen Hamlet z.B. in einem ähnlichen Sinne oberflächlicher redet als er handelt, so dass nicht aus den Worten heraus, sondern aus dem vertieften Anschauen und Ueberschauen des Ganzen jene früher erwähnte Hamletlehre zu entnehmen ist. In Betreff der griechischen Tragödie, die uns freilich nur als Wortdrama entgegentritt, habe ich sogar angedeutet, dass jene Incongruenz zwischen Mythus und Wort uns leicht verführen könnte, sie für flacher und bedeutungsloser zu halten, als sie ist, und demnach auch eine oberflächlichere Wirkung für sie vorauszusetzen, als sie nach den Zeugnissen der Alten gehabt haben muss: denn wie leicht vergisst man, dass, was dem Wortdichter nicht gelungen war, die höchste Vergeistigung und Idealität des Mythus zu erreichen, ihm als schöpferischem Musiker in jedem Augenblick gelingen konnte! Wir freilich müssen uns die Uebermacht der musikalischen Wirkung fast auf gelehrtem Wege reconstruiren, um etwas von jenem unvergleichlichen Troste zu empfangen, der der wahren Tragödie zu eigen sein muss. Selbst diese musikalische Uebermacht aber würden wir nur, wenn wir Griechen wären, als solche empfunden haben: während wir in der ganzen Entfaltung der griechischen Musik—der uns bekannten und vertrauten, so unendlich reicheren gegenüber—nur das in schüchternem Kraftgefühle angestimmte Jünglingslied des musikalischen Genius zu hören glauben. Die Griechen sind, wie die ägyptischen Priester sagen, die ewigen Kinder, und auch in der tragischen Kunst nur die Kinder, welche nicht wissen, welches erhabene Spielzeug unter ihren Händen entstanden ist und—zertrümmert wird.\n\nJenes Ringen des Geistes der Musik nach bildlicher und mythischer Offenbarung, welches von den Anfängen der Lyrik bis zur attischen Tragödie sich steigert, bricht plötzlich, nach eben erst errungener üppiger Entfaltung, ab und verschwindet gleichsam von der Oberfläche der hellenischen Kunst: während die aus diesem Ringen geborne dionysische Weltbetrachtung in den Mysterien weiterlebt und in den wunderbarsten Metamorphosen und Entartungen nicht aufhört, ernstere Naturen an sich zu ziehen Ob sie nicht aus ihrer mystischen Tiefe einst wieder als Kunst emporsteigen wird?\n\nHier beschäftigt uns die Frage, ob die Macht, an deren Entgegenwirken die Tragödie sich brach, für alle Zeit genug Stärke hat, um das künstlerische Wiedererwachen der Tragödie und der tragischen Weltbetrachtung zu verhindern. Wenn die alte Tragödie durch den dialektischen Trieb zum Wissen und zum Optimismus der Wissenschaft aus ihrem Gleise gedrängt wurde, so wäre aus dieser Thatsache auf einen ewigen Kampf zwischen *der theoretischen* und *der tragischen Weltbetrachtung* zu schliessen; und erst nachdem der Geist der Wissenschaft bis an seine Grenze geführt ist, und sein Anspruch auf universale Gültigkeit durch den Nachweis jener Grenzen vernichtet ist dürfte auf eine Wiedergeburt der Tragödie zu hoffen sein: für welche Culturform wir das Symbol *des musiktreibenden Sokrates*, in dem früher erörterten Sinne, hinzustellen hätten. Bei dieser Gegenüberstellung verstehe ich unter dem Geiste der Wissenschaft jenen zuerst in der Person des Sokrates an's Licht gekommenen Glauben an die Ergründlichkeit der Natur und an die Universalheilkraft des Wissens.\n\nWer sich an die nächsten Folgen dieses rastlos vorwärtsdringenden Geistes der Wissenschaft erinnert, wird sich sofort vergegenwärtigen, wie durch ihn der *Mythus* vernichtet wurde und wie durch diese Vernichtung die Poesie aus ihrem natürlichen idealen Boden, als eine nunmehr heimathlose, verdrängt war. Haben wir mit Recht der Musik die Kraft zugesprochen, den Mythus wieder aus sich gebären zu können, so werden wir den Geist der Wissenschaft auch auf der Bahn zu suchen haben, wo er dieser mythenschaffenden Kraft der Musik feindlich entgegentritt. Dies geschieht in der Entfaltung des *neueren attischen Dithyrambus*, dessen Musik nicht mehr das innere Wesen, den Willen selbst aussprach, sondern nur die Erscheinung ungenügend, in einer durch Begriffe vermittelten Nachahmung wiedergab: von welcher innerlich entarteten Musik sich die wahrhaft musikalischen Naturen mit demselben Widerwillen abwandten, den sie vor der kunstmörderischen Tendenz des Sokrates hatten. Der sicher zugreifende Instinct des Aristophanes hat gewiss das Rechte erfasst, wenn er Sokrates selbst, die Tragödie des Euripides und die Musik der neueren Dithyrambiker in dem gleichen Gefühle des Hasses zusammenfasste und in allen drei Phänomenen die Merkmale einer degenerirten Cultur witterte. Durch jenen neueren Dithyrambus ist die Musik in frevelhafter Weise zum imitatorischen Conterfei der Erscheinung z.B. einer Schlacht, eines Seesturmes gemacht und damit allerdings ihrer mythenschaffenden Kraft gänzlich beraubt worden. Denn wenn sie unsere Ergetzung nur dadurch zu erregen sucht, dass sie uns zwingt, äusserliche Analogien zwischen einem Vorgange des Lebens und der Natur und gewissen rhythmischen Figuren und charakteristischen Klängen der Musik zu suchen, wenn sich unser Verstand an der Erkenntniss dieser Analogien befriedigen soll, so sind wir in eine Stimmung herabgezogen, in der eine Empfängniss des Mythischen unmöglich ist; denn der Mythus will als ein einziges Exempel einer in's Unendliche hinein starrenden Allgemeinheit und Wahrheit anschaulich empfunden werden. Die wahrhaft dionysische Musik tritt uns als ein solcher allgemeiner Spiegel des Weltwillens gegenüber: jenes anschauliche Ereigniss, das sich in diesem Spiegel bricht, erweitert sich sofort für unser Gefühl zum Abbilde einer ewigen Wahrheit. Umgekehrt wird ein solches anschauliches Ereigniss durch die Tonmalerei des neueren Dithyrambus sofort jedes mythischen Charakters entkleidet; jetzt ist die Musik zum dürftigen Abbilde der Erscheinung geworden und darum unendlich ärmer als die Erscheinung selbst: durch welche Armuth sie für unsere Empfindung die Erscheinung selbst noch herabzieht, so dass jetzt z.B. eine derartig musikalisch imitirte Schlacht sich in Marschlärm, Signalklängen u.s.w. erschöpft, und unsere Phantasie gerade bei diesen Oberflächlichkeiten festgehalten wird. Die Tonmalerei ist also in jeder Beziehung das Gegenstück zu der mythenschaffenden Kraft der wahren Musik: durch sie wird die Erscheinung noch ärmer als sie ist, während durch die dionysische Musik die einzelne Erscheinung sich zum Weltbilde bereichert und erweitert. Es war ein mächtiger Sieg des undionysischen Geistes, als er, in der Entfaltung des neueren Dithyrambus, die Musik sich selbst entfremdet und sie zur Sclavin der Erscheinung herabgedrückt hatte. Euripides, der in einem höhern Sinne eine durchaus unmusikalische Natur genannt werden muss, ist aus eben diesem Grunde leidenschaftlicher Anhänger der neueren dithyrambischen Musik und verwendet mit der Freigebigkeit eines Räubers alle ihre Effectstücke und Manieren.\n\nNach einer anderen Seite sehen wir die Kraft dieses undionysischen, gegen den Mythus gerichteten Geistes in Thätigkeit, wenn wir unsere Blicke auf das Ueberhandnehmen der *Charakterdarstellung* und des psychologischen Raffinements in der Tragödie von Sophokles ab richten. Der Charakter soll sich nicht mehr zum ewigen Typus erweitern lassen, sondern im Gegentheil so durch künstliche Nebenzüge und Schattirungen, durch feinste Bestimmtheit aller Linien individuell wirken, dass der Zuschauer überhaupt nicht mehr den Mythus, sondern die mächtige Naturwahrheit und die Imitationskraft des Künstlers empfindet. Auch hier gewahren wir den Sieg der Erscheinung über das Allgemeine und die Lust an dem einzelnen gleichsam anatomischen Präparat, wir athmen bereits die Luft einer theoretischen Welt, welcher die wissenschaftliche Erkenntniss höher gilt als die künstlerische Wiederspiegelung einer Weltregel. Die Bewegung auf der Linie des Charakteristischen geht schnell weiter: während noch Sophokles ganze Charactere malt und zu ihrer raffinirten Entfaltung den Mythus ins Joch spannt, malt Euripides bereits nur noch grosse einzelne Charakterzüge, die sich in heftigen Leidenschaften zu äussern wissen; in der neuern attischen Komödie giebt es nur noch Masken mit *einem* Ausdruck, leichtsinnige Alte, geprellte Kuppler, verschmitzte Sclaven in unermüdlicher Wiederholung. Wohin ist jetzt der mythenbildende Geist der Musik? Was jetzt noch von Musik übrig ist, das ist entweder Aufregungs- oder Erinnerungsmusik d.h. entweder ein Stimulanzmittel für stumpfe und verbrauchte Nerven oder Tonmalerei. Für die erstere kommt es auf den untergelegten Text kaum noch an: schon bei Euripides geht es, wenn seine Helden oder Chöre erst zu singen anfangen, recht lüderlich zu; wohin mag es bei seinen frechen Nachfolgern gekommen sein?\n\nAm allerdeutlichsten aber offenbart sich der neue undionysische Geist in den *Schlüssen* der neueren Dramen. In der alten Tragödie war der metaphysische Trost am Ende zu spüren gewesen, ohne den die Lust an der Tragödie überhaupt nicht zu erklären ist; am reinsten tönt vielleicht im Oedipus auf Kolonos der versöhnende Klang aus einer anderen Welt. Jetzt, als der Genius der Musik aus der Tragödie entflohen war, ist, im strengen Sinne, die Tragödie todt: denn woher sollte man jetzt jenen metaphysischen Trost schöpfen können? Man suchte daher nach einer irdischen Lösung der tragischen Dissonanz; der Held, nachdem er durch das Schicksal hinreichend gemartert war, erntete in einer stattlichen Heirat, in göttlichen Ehrenbezeugungen einen wohlverdienten Lohn. Der Held war zum Gladiator geworden, dem man, nachdem er tüchtig geschunden und mit Wunden überdeckt war, gelegentlich die Freiheit schenkte. Der deus ex machina ist an Stelle des metaphysischen Trostes getreten. Ich will nicht sagen, dass die tragische Weltbetrachtung überall und völlig durch den andrängenden Geist des Undionysischen zerstört wurde: wir wissen nur, dass sie sich aus der Kunst gleichsam in die Unterwelt, in einer Entartung zum Geheimcult, flüchten musste. Aber auf dem weitesten Gebiete der Oberfläche des hellenischen Wesens wüthete der verzehrende Hauch jenes Geistes, welcher sich in jener Form der „griechischen Heiterkeit“ kundgiebt, von der bereits früher, als von einer greisenhaft unproductiven Daseinslust, die Rede war; diese Heiterkeit ist ein Gegenstück zu der herrlichen „Naivetät“ der älteren Griechen, wie sie, nach der gegebenen Charakteristik, zu fassen ist als die aus einem düsteren Abgrunde hervorwachsende Blüthe der apollinischen Cultur, als der Sieg, den der hellenische Wille durch seine Schönheitsspiegelung über das Leiden und die Weisheit des Leidens davonträgt. Die edelste Form jener anderen Form der „griechischen Heiterkeit“, der alexandrinischen, ist die Heiterkeit *des theoretischen Menschen*: sie zeigt dieselben charakteristischen Merkmale, die ich soeben aus dem Geiste des Undionysischen ableitete—dass sie die dionysische Weisheit und Kunst bekämpft, dass sie den Mythus aufzulösen trachtet, dass sie an Stelle eines metaphysischen Trostes eine irdische Consonanz, ja einen eigenen deus ex machina setzt, nämlich den Gott der Maschinen und Schmelztiegel, d.h. die im Dienste des höheren Egoismus erkannten und verwendeten Kräfte der Naturgeister, dass sie an eine Correctur der Welt durch das Wissen, an ein durch die Wissenschaft geleitetes Leben glaubt und auch wirklich im Stande ist, den einzelnen Menschen in einen allerengsten Kreis von lösbaren Aufgaben zu bannen, innerhalb dessen er heiter zum Leben sagt: „Ich will dich: du bist werth erkannt zu werden“.\n\n### Section 18\n\nEs ist ein ewiges Phänomen: immer findet der gierige Wille ein Mittel, durch eine über die Dinge gebreitete Illusion seine Geschöpfe im Leben festzuhalten und zum Weiterleben zu zwingen. Diesen fesselt die sokratische Lust des Erkennens und der Wahn, durch dasselbe die ewige Wunde des Daseins heilen zu können, jenen umstrickt der vor seinen Augen wehende verführerische Schönheitsschleier der Kunst, jenen wiederum der metaphysische Trost, dass unter dem Wirbel der Erscheinungen das ewige Leben unzerstörbar weiterfliesst: um von den gemeineren und fast noch kräftigeren Illusionen, die der Wille in jedem Augenblick bereithält, zu schweigen. Jene drei Illusionsstufen sind überhaupt nur für die edler ausgestatteten Naturen, von denen die Last und Schwere des Daseins überhaupt mit tieferer Unlust empfunden wird und die durch ausgesuchte Reizmittel über diese Unlust hinwegzutäuschen sind. Aus diesen Reizmitteln besteht alles, was wir Cultur nennen: je nach der Proportion der Mischungen haben wir eine vorzugsweise *sokratische* oder *künstlerische* oder *tragische* Cultur: oder wenn man historische Exemplificationen erlauben will: es giebt entweder eine alexandrinische oder eine hellenische oder eine buddhaistische Cultur.\n\nUnsere ganze moderne Welt ist in dem Netz der alexandrinischen Cultur befangen und kennt als Ideal den mit höchsten Erkenntnisskräften ausgerüsteten, im Dienste der Wissenschaft arbeitenden *theoretischen Menschen*, dessen Urbild und Stammvater Sokrates ist. Alle unsere Erziehungsmittel haben ursprünglich dieses Ideal im Auge: jede andere Existenz hat sich mühsam nebenbei emporzuringen, als erlaubte, nicht als beabsichtigte Existenz. In einem fast erschreckenden Sinne ist hier eine lange Zeit der Gebildete allein in der Form des Gelehrten gefunden worden; selbst unsere dichterischen Künste haben sich aus gelehrten Imitationen entwickeln müssen, und in dem Haupteffect des Reimes erkennen wir noch die Entstehung unserer poetischen Form aus künstlichen Experimenten mit einer nicht heimischen, recht eigentlich gelehrten Sprache. Wie unverständlich müsste einem ächten Griechen der an sich verständliche moderne Culturmensch *Faust* erscheinen, der durch alle Facultäten unbefriedigt stürmende, aus Wissenstrieb der Magie und dem Teufel ergebene Faust, den wir nur zur Vergleichung neben Sokrates zu stellen haben, um zu erkennen, dass der moderne Mensch die Grenzen jener sokratischen Erkenntnisslust zu ahnen beginnt und aus dem weiten wüsten Wissensmeere nach einer Küste verlangt. Wenn Goethe einmal zu Eckermann, mit Bezug auf Napoleon, äussert: „Ja mein Guter, es giebt auch eine Productivität der Thaten“, so hat er, in anmuthig naiver Weise, daran erinnert, dass der nicht theoretische Mensch für den modernen Menschen etwas Unglaubwürdiges und Staunenerregendes ist, so dass es wieder der Weisheit eines Goethe bedarf, um auch eine so befremdende Existenzform begreiflich, ja verzeihlich zu finden.\n\nUnd nun soll man sich nicht verbergen, was im Schoosse dieser sokratischen Cultur verborgen liegt! Der unumschränkt sich wähnende Optimismus! Nun soll man nicht erschrecken, wenn die Früchte dieses Optimismus reifen, wenn die von einer derartigen Cultur bis in die niedrigsten Schichten hinein durchsäuerte Gesellschaft allmählich unter üppigen Wallungen und Begehrungen erzittert, wenn der Glaube an das Erdenglück Aller, wenn der Glaube an die Möglichkeit einer solchen allgemeinen Wissenscultur allmählich in die drohende Forderung eines solchen alexandrinischen Erdenglückes, in die Beschwörung eines Euripideischen deus ex machina umschlägt! Man soll es merken: die alexandrinische Cultur braucht einen Sclavenstand, um auf die Dauer existieren zu können: aber sie leugnet, in ihrer optimistischen Betrachtung des Daseins, die Nothwendigkeit eines solchen Standes und geht deshalb, wenn der Effect ihrer schönen Verführungs und Beruhigungsworte von der „Würde des Menschen“ und der „Würde der Arbeit“ verbraucht ist, allmählich einer grauenvollen Vernichtung entgegen. Es giebt nichts Furchtbareres als einen barbarischen Sclavenstand, der seine Existenz als ein Unrecht zu betrachten gelernt hat und sich anschickt, nicht nur für sich, sondern für alle Generationen Rache zu nehmen. Wer wagt es, solchen drohenden Stürmen entgegen, sicheren Muthes an unsere blassen und ermüdeten Religionen zu appelliren, die selbst in ihren Fundamenten zu Gelehrtenreligionen entartet sind: so dass der Mythus, die nothwendige Voraussetzung jeder Religion, bereits überall gelähmt ist, und selbst auf diesem Bereich jener optimistische Geist zur Herrschaft gekommen ist, den wir als den Vernichtungskeim unserer Gesellschaft eben bezeichnet haben.\n\nWährend das im Schoosse der theoretischen Cultur schlummernde Unheil allmählich den modernen Menschen zu ängstigen beginnt, und er, unruhig, aus dem Schatze seiner Erfahrungen nach Mitteln greift, um die Gefahr abzuwenden, ohne selbst an diese Mittel recht zu glauben; während er also seine eigenen Consequenzen zu ahnen beginnt: haben grosse allgemein angelegte Naturen, mit einer unglaublichen Besonnenheit, das Rüstzeug der Wissenschaft selbst zu benützen gewusst, um die Grenzen und die Bedingtheit des Erkennens überhaupt darzulegen und damit den Anspruch der Wissenschaft auf universale Geltung und universale Zwecke entscheidend zu leugnen: bei welchem Nachweise zum ersten Male jene Wahnvorstellung als solche erkannt wurde, welche, an der Hand der Causalität, sich anmaasst, das innerste Wesen der Dinge ergründen zu können. Der ungeheuren Tapferkeit und Weisheit *Kant's* und *Schopenhauer's* ist der schwerste Sieg gelungen, der Sieg über den im Wesen der Logik verborgen liegenden Optimismus, der wiederum der Untergrund unserer Cultur ist. Wenn dieser an die Erkennbarkeit und Ergründlichkeit aller Welträthsel, gestützt auf die ihm unbedenklichen aeternae veritates, geglaubt und Raum, Zeit und Causalität als gänzlich unbedingte Gesetze von allgemeinster Gültigkeit behandelt hatte, offenbarte Kant, wie diese eigentlich nur dazu dienten, die blosse Erscheinung, das Werk der Maja, zur einzigen und höchsten Realität zu erheben und sie an die Stelle des innersten und wahren Wesens der Dinge zu setzen und die wirkliche Erkenntniss von diesem dadurch unmöglich zu machen, d.h., nach einem Schopenhauer'schen Ausspruche, den Träumer noch fester einzuschläfern (W. a. W. u. V. I, p. 498). Mit dieser Erkenntniss ist eine Cultur eingeleitet, welche ich als eine tragische zu bezeichnen wage: deren wichtigstes Merkmal ist, dass an die Stelle der Wissenschaft als höchstes Ziel die Weisheit gerückt wird, die sich, ungetäuscht durch die verführerischen Ablenkungen der Wissenschaften, mit unbewegtem Blicke dem Gesammtbilde der Welt zuwendet und in diesem das ewige Leiden mit sympathischer Liebesempfindung als das eigne Leiden zu ergreifen sucht. Denken wir uns eine heranwachsende Generation mit dieser Unerschrockenheit des Blicks, mit diesem heroischen Zug ins Ungeheure, denken wir uns den kühnen Schritt dieser Drachentödter, die stolze Verwegenheit, mit der sie allen den Schwächlichkeitsdoctrinen jenes Optimismus den Rücken kehren, um im Ganzen und Vollen „resolut zu leben“: sollte es nicht nöthig sein, dass der tragische Mensch dieser Cultur, bei seiner Selbsterziehung zum Ernst und zum Schrecken, eine neue Kunst, die Kunst des metaphysischen Trostes, die Tragödie als die ihm zugehörige Helena begehren und mit Faust ausrufen muss:\n\nUnd sollt' ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,\nIn's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?\n\nNachdem aber die sokratische Cultur von zwei Seiten aus erschüttert ist und das Scepter ihrer Unfehlbarkeit nur noch mit zitternden Händen zu halten vermag, einmal aus Furcht vor ihren eigenen Consequenzen, die sie nachgerade zu ahnen beginnt, sodann weil sie selbst von der ewigen Gültigkeit ihres Fundamentes nicht mehr mit dem früheren naiven Zutrauen überzeugt ist: so ist es ein trauriges Schauspiel, wie sich der Tanz ihres Denkens sehnsüchtig immer auf neue Gestalten stürzt, um sie zu umarmen, und sie dann plötzlich wieder, wie Mephistopheles die verführerischen Lamien, schaudernd fahren lässt. Das ist ja das Merkmal jenes „Bruches“, von dem Jedermann als von dem Urleiden der modernen Cultur zu reden pflegt, dass der theoretische Mensch vor seinen Consequenzen erschrickt und unbefriedigt es nicht mehr wagt sich dem furchtbaren Eisstrome des Daseins anzuvertrauen: ängstlich läuft er am Ufer auf und ab. Er will nichts mehr ganz haben, ganz auch mit aller der natürlichen Grausamkeit der Dinge. Soweit hat ihn das optimistische Betrachten verzärtelt. Dazu fühlt er, wie eine Cultur, die auf dem Princip der Wissenschaft aufgebaut ist, zu Grunde gehen muss, wenn sie anfängt, *unlogisch* zu werden d.h. vor ihren Consequenzen zurück zu fliehen. Unsere Kunst offenbart diese allgemeine Noth: umsonst dass man sich an alle grossen productiven Perioden und Naturen imitatorisch anlehnt, umsonst dass man die ganze „Weltlitteratur“ zum Troste des modernen Menschen um ihn versammelt und ihn mitten unter die Kunststile und Künstler aller Zeiten hinstellt, damit er ihnen, wie Adam den Thieren, einen Namen gebe: er bleibt doch der ewig Hungernde, der „Kritiker“ ohne Lust und Kraft, der alexandrinische Mensch, der im Grunde Bibliothekar und Corrector ist und an Bücherstaub und Druckfehlern elend erblindet.\n\n### Section 19\n\nMan kann den innersten Gehalt dieser sokratischen Cultur nicht schärfer bezeichnen, als wenn man sie *die Cultur der Oper* nennt: denn auf diesem Gebiete hat sich diese Cultur mit eigener Naivetät über ihr Wollen und Erkennen ausgesprochen, zu unserer Verwunderung, wenn wir die Genesis der Oper und die Thatsachen der Opernentwicklung mit den ewigen Wahrheiten des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen zusammenhalten. Ich erinnere zunächst an die Entstehung des stilo rappresentativo und des Recitativs. Ist es glaublich, dass diese gänzlich veräusserlichte, der Andacht unfähige Musik der Oper von einer Zeit mit schwärmerischer Gunst, gleichsam als die Wiedergeburt aller wahren Musik, empfangen und gehegt werden konnte, aus der sich soeben die unaussprechbar erhabene und heilige Musik Palestrina's erhoben hatte? Und wer möchte andrerseits nur die zerstreuungssüchtige Ueppigkeit jener Florentiner Kreise und die Eitelkeit ihrer dramatischen Sänger für die so ungestüm sich verbreitende Lust an der Oper verantwortlich machen? Dass in derselben Zeit, ja in demselben Volke neben dem Gewölbebau Palestrinischer Harmonien, an dem das gesammte christliche Mittelalter gebaut hatte, jene Leidenschaft für eine halbmusikalisch Sprechart erwachte, vermag ich mir nur aus einer im Wesen des Recitativs mitwirkenden *ausserkünstlerischen Tendenz* zu erklären.\n\nDem Zuhörer, der das Wort unter dem Gesange deutlich vernehmen will, entspricht der Sänger dadurch, dass er mehr spricht als singt und dass er den pathetischen Wortausdruck in diesem Halbgesange verschärft: durch diese Verschärfung des Pathos erleichtert er das Verständniss des Wortes und überwindet jene übrig gebliebene Hälfte der Musik. Die eigentliche Gefahr, die ihm jetzt droht, ist die, dass er der Musik einmal zur Unzeit das Obergewicht ertheilt, wodurch sofort Pathos der Rede und Deutlichkeit des Wortes zu Grunde gehen müsste: während er andrerseits immer den Trieb zu musikalischer Entladung und zu virtuosenhafter Präsentation seiner Stimme fühlt. Hier kommt ihm der „Dichter“ zu Hülfe, der ihm genug Gelegenheiten zu lyrischen Interjectionen, Wort- und Sentenzenwiederholungen u.s.w. zu bieten weiss: an welchen Stellen der Sänger jetzt in dem rein musikalischen Elemente, ohne Rücksicht auf das Wort, ausruhen kann. Dieser Wechsel affectvoll eindringlicher, doch nur halb gesungener Rede und ganz gesungener Interjection, der im Wesen des stilo rappresentativo liegt, dies rasch wechselnde Bemühen, bald auf den Begriff und die Vorstellung, bald auf den musikalischen Grund des Zuhörers zu wirken, ist etwas so gänzlich Unnatürliches und den Kunsttrieben des Dionysischen und des Apollinischen in gleicher Weise so innerlich Widersprechendes, dass man auf einen Ursprung des Recitativs zu schliessen hat, der ausserhalb aller künstlerischen Instincte liegt. Das Recitativ ist nach dieser Schilderung zu definiren als die Vermischung des epischen und des lyrischen Vortrags und zwar keinesfalls die innerlich beständige Mischung, die bei so gänzlich disparaten Dingen nicht erreicht werden konnte, sondern die äusserlichste mosaikartige Conglutination, wie etwas Derartiges im Bereich der Natur und der Erfahrung gänzlich vorbildlos ist. *Dies war aber nicht die Meinung jener Erfinder des Recitativs:* vielmehr glauben sie selbst und mit ihnen ihr Zeitalter, dass durch jenen stilo rappresentativo das Geheimniss der antiken Musik gelöst sei, aus dem sich allein die ungeheure Wirkung eines Orpheus, Amphion, ja auch der griechischen Tragödie erklären lasse. Der neue Stil galt als die Wiedererweckung der wirkungsvollsten Musik, der altgriechischen: ja man durfte sich, bei der allgemeinen und ganz volksthümlichen Auffassung der homerischen Welt *als der Urwelt*, dem Traume überlassen, jetzt wieder in die paradiesischen Anfänge der Menschheit hinabgestiegen zu sein, in der nothwendig auch die Musik jene unübertroffne Reinheit, Macht und Unschuld gehabt haben müsste, von der die Dichter in ihren Schäferspielen so rührend zu erzählen wussten. Hier sehen wir in das innerlichste Werden dieser recht eigentlich modernen Kunstgattung, der Oper: ein mächtiges Bedürfniss erzwingt sich hier eine Kunst, aber ein Bedürfniss unaesthetischer Art: die Sehnsucht zum Idyll, der Glaube an eine urvorzeitliche Existenz des künstlerischen und guten Menschen. Das Recitativ galt als die wiederentdeckte Sprache jenes Urmenschen; die Oper als das wiederaufgefundene Land jenes idyllisch oder heroisch guten Wesens, das zugleich in allen seinen Handlungen einem natürlichen Kunsttriebe folgt, das bei allem, was es zu sagen hat, wenigstens etwas singt, um, bei der leisesten Gefühlserregung, sofort mit voller Stimme zu singen. Es ist für uns jetzt gleichgültig, dass mit diesem neugeschaffnen Bilde des paradiesischen Künstlers die damaligen Humanisten gegen die alte kirchliche Vorstellung vom an sich verderbten und verlornen Menschen ankämpften: so dass die Oper als das Oppositionsdogma vom guten Menschen zu verstehen ist, mit dem aber zugleich ein Trostmittel gegen jenen Pessimismus gefunden war, zu dem gerade die Ernstgesinnten jener Zeit, bei der grauenhaften Unsicherheit aller Zustände, am stärksten gereizt waren. Genug, wenn wir erkannt haben, wie der eigentliche Zauber und damit die Genesis dieser neuen Kunstform in der Befriedigung eines gänzlich unaesthetischen Bedürfnisses liegt, in der optimistischen Verherrlichung des Menschen an sich, in der Auffassung des Urmenschen als des von Natur guten und künstlerischen Menschen: welches Princip der Oper sich allmählich in eine drohende und entsetzliche *Forderung* umgewandelt hat, die wir, im Angesicht der socialistischen Bewegungen der Gegenwart, nicht mehr überhören können. Der „gute Urmensch“ will seine Rechte: welche paradiesischen Aussichten!\n\nIch stelle daneben noch eine eben so deutliche Bestätigung meiner Ansicht, dass die Oper auf den gleichen Principien mit unserer alexandrinischen Cultur aufgebaut ist. Die Oper ist die Geburt des theoretischen Menschen, des kritischen Laien, nicht des Künstlers: eine der befremdlichsten Thatsachen in der Geschichte aller Künste. Es war die Forderung recht eigentlich unmusikalischer Zuhörer, dass man vor allem das Wort verstehen müsse: so dass eine Wiedergeburt der Tonkunst nur zu erwarten sei, wenn man irgend eine Gesangesweise entdecken werde, bei welcher das Textwort über den Contrapunkt wie der Herr über den Diener herrsche. Denn die Worte seien um so viel edler als das begleitende harmonische System, um wie viel die Seele edler als der Körper sei. Mit der laienhaft unmusikalischen Rohheit dieser Ansichten wurde in den Anfängen der Oper die Verbindung von Musik, Bild und Wort behandelt; im Sinne dieser Aesthetik kam es auch in den vornehmen Laienkreisen von Florenz, durch hier patronisirte Dichter und Sänger, zu den ersten Experimenten. Der kunstohnmächtige Mensch erzeugt sich eine Art von Kunst, gerade dadurch, dass er der unkünstlerische Mensch an sich ist. Weil er die dionysische Tiefe der Musik nicht ahnt, verwandelt er sich den Musikgenuss zur verstandesmässigen Wort- und Tonrhetorik der Leidenschaft im stilo rappresentativo und zur Wohllust der Gesangeskünste; weil er keine Vision zu schauen vermag, zwingt er den Maschinisten und Decorationskünstler in seinen Dienst; weil er das wahre Wesen des Künstlers nicht zu erfassen weiss, zaubert er vor sich den „künstlerischen Urmenschen“ nach seinem Geschmack hin d.h. den Menschen, der in der Leidenschaft singt und Verse spricht. Er träumt sich in eine Zeit hinein, in der die Leidenschaft ausreicht, um Gesänge und Dichtungen zu erzeugen: als ob jeder Affect im Stande gewesen sei, etwas Künstlerisches zu schaffen. Die Voraussetzung der Oper ist ein falscher Glaube über den künstlerischen Prozess und zwar jener idyllische Glaube, dass eigentlich jeder empfindende Mensch Künstler sei. Im Sinne dieses Glaubens ist die Oper der Ausdruck des Laienthums in der Kunst, das seine Gesetze mit dem heitern Optimismus des theoretischen Menschen dictirt.\n\nSollten wir wünschen, die beiden eben geschilderten, bei der Entstehung der Oper wirksamen Vorstellungen unter einen Begriff zu vereinigen, so würde uns nur übrig bleiben, von einer *idyllischen Tendenz der Oper* zu sprechen: wobei wir uns allein der Ausdrucksweise und Erklärung Schillers zu bedienen hätten. Entweder, sagt dieser, ist die Natur und das Ideal ein Gegenstand der Trauer, wenn jene als verloren, dieses als unerreicht dargestellt wird. Oder beide sind ein Gegenstand der Freude, indem sie als wirklich vorgestellt werden. Das erste giebt die Elegie in engerer, das andere die Idylle in weitester Bedeutung. Hier ist nun sofort auf das gemeinsame Merkmal jener beiden Vorstellungen in der Operngenesis aufmerksam zu machen, dass in ihnen das Ideal nicht als unerreicht, die Natur nicht als verloren empfunden wird. Es gab nach dieser Empfindung eine Urzeit des Menschen, in der er am Herzen der Natur lag und bei dieser Natürlichkeit zugleich das Ideal der Menschheit, in einer paradiesischen Güte und Künstlerschaft, erreicht hatte: von welchem vollkommnen Urmenschen wir alle abstammen sollten, ja dessen getreues Ebenbild wir noch wären: nur müssten wir Einiges von uns werfen, um uns selbst wieder als diesen Urmenschen zu erkennen, vermöge einer freiwilligen Entäusserung von überflüssiger Gelehrsamkeit, von überreicher Cultur. Der Bildungsmensch der Renaissance liess sich durch seine opernhafte Imitation der griechischen Tragödie zu einem solchen Zusammenklang von Natur und Ideal, zu einer idyllischen Wirklichkeit zurückgeleiten, er benutzte diese Tragödie, wie Dante den Virgil benutzte, um bis an die Pforten des Paradieses geführt zu werden: während er von hier aus selbständig noch weiter schritt und von einer Imitation der höchsten griechischen Kunstform zu einer „Wiederbringung aller Dinge“, zu einer Nachbildung der ursprünglichen Kunstwelt des Menschen überging. Welche zuversichtliche Gutmüthigkeit dieser verwegenen Bestrebungen, mitten im Schoosse der theoretischen Cultur!—einzig nur aus dem tröstenden Glauben zu erklären, dass „der Mensch an sich“ der ewig tugendhafte Opernheld, der ewig flötende oder singende Schäfer sei, der sich endlich immer als solchen wiederfinden müsse, falls er sich selbst irgendwann einmal wirklich auf einige Zeit verloren habe, einzig die Frucht jenes Optimismus, der aus der Tiefe der sokratischen Weltbetrachtung hier wie eine süsslich verführerische Duftsäule emporsteigt.\n\nEs liegt also auf den Zügen der Oper keinesfalls jener elegische Schmerz eines ewigen Verlustes, vielmehr die Heiterkeit des ewigen Wiederfindens, die bequeme Lust an einer idyllischen Wirklichkeit, die man wenigstens sich als wirklich in jedem Augenblicke vorstellen kann: wobei man vielleicht einmal ahnt, dass diese vermeinte Wirklichkeit nichts als ein phantastisch läppisches Getändel ist, dem jeder, der es an dem furchtbaren Ernst der wahren Natur zu messen und mit den eigentlichen Urscenen der Menschheitsanfänge zu vergleichen vermöchte, mit Ekel zurufen müsste: Weg mit dem Phantom! Trotzdem würde man sich täuschen, wenn man glaubte, ein solches tändelndes Wesen, wie die Oper ist, einfach durch einen kräftigen Anruf, wie ein Gespenst, verscheuchen zu können. Wer die Oper vernichten will, muss den Kampf gegen jene alexandrinische Heiterkeit aufnehmen, die sich in ihr so naiv über ihre Lieblingsvorstellung ausspricht, ja deren eigentliche Kunstform sie ist. Was ist aber für die Kunst selbst von dem Wirken einer Kunstform zu erwarten, deren Ursprünge überhaupt nicht im aesthetischen Bereiche liegen, die sich vielmehr aus einer halb moralischen Sphäre auf das künstlerische Gebiet hinübergestohlen hat und über diese hybride Entstehung nur hier und da einmal hinwegzutäuschen vermochte? Von welchen Säften nährt sich dieses parasitische Opernwesen, wenn nicht von denen der wahren Kunst? Wird nicht zu muthmaassen sein, dass, unter seinen idyllischen Verführungen, unter seinen alexandrinischen Schmeichelkünsten, die höchste und wahrhaftig ernst zu nennende Aufgabe der Kunst—das Auge vom Blick in's Grauen der Nacht zu erlösen und das Subject durch den heilenden Balsam des Scheins aus dem Krampfe der Willensregungen zu retten—zu einer leeren und zerstreuenden Ergetzlichkeitstendenz entarten werde? Was wird aus den ewigen Wahrheiten des Dionysischen und des Apollinischen, bei einer solchen Stilvermischung, wie ich sie am Wesen des stilo rappresentativo dargelegt habe? wo die Musik als Diener, das Textwort als Herr betrachtet, die Musik mit dem Körper, das Textwort mit der Seele verglichen wird? wo das höchste Ziel bestenfalls auf eine umschreibende Tonmalerei gerichtet sein wird, ähnlich wie ehedem im neuen attischen Dithyrambus? wo der Musik ihre wahre Würde, dionysischer Weltspiegel zu sein, völlig entfremdet ist, so dass ihr nur übrig bleibt, als Sclavin der Erscheinung, das Formenwesen der Erscheinung nachzuahmen und in dem Spiele der Linien und Proportionen eine äusserliche Ergetzung zu erregen. Einer strengen Betrachtung fällt dieser verhängnissvolle Einfluss der Oper auf die Musik geradezu mit der gesammten modernen Musikentwicklung zusammen; dem in der Genesis der Oper und im Wesen der durch sie repräsentirten Cultur lauernden Optimismus ist es in beängstigender Schnelligkeit gelungen, die Musik ihrer dionysischen Weltbestimmung zu entkleiden und ihr einen formenspielerischen, vergnüglichen Charakter aufzuprägen: mit welcher Veränderung nur etwa die Metamorphose des aeschyleischen Menschen in den alexandrinischen Heiterkeitsmenschen verglichen werden dürfte.\n\nWenn wir aber mit Recht in der hiermit angedeuteten Exemplification das Entschwinden des dionysischen Geistes mit einer höchst auffälligen, aber bisher unerklärten Umwandlung und Degeneration des griechischen Menschen in Zusammenhang gebracht haben—welche Hoffnungen müssen in uns aufleben, wenn uns die allersichersten Auspicien *den umgekehrten Prozess, das allmähliche Erwachen des dionysischen Geistes* in unserer gegenwärtigen Welt, verbürgen! Es ist nicht möglich, dass die göttliche Kraft des Herakles ewig im üppigen Frohndienste der Omphale erschlafft. Aus dem dionysischen Grunde des deutschen Geistes ist eine Macht emporgestiegen, die mit den Urbedingungen der sokratischen Cultur nichts gemein hat und aus ihnen weder zu erklären noch zu entschuldigen ist, vielmehr von dieser Cultur als das Schrecklich Unerklärliche, als das Uebermächtig-Feindselige empfunden wird, *die deutsche Musik*, wie wir sie vornehmlich in ihrem mächtigen Sonnenlaufe von Bach zu Beethoven, von Beethoven zu Wagner zu verstehen haben. Was vermag die erkenntnisslüsterne Sokratik unserer Tage günstigsten Falls mit diesem aus unerschöpflichen Tiefen emporsteigenden Dämon zu beginnen? Weder von dem Zacken- und Arabeskenwerk der Opernmelodie aus, noch mit Hülfe des arithmetischen Rechenbretts der Fuge und der contrapunktischen Dialektik will sich die Formel finden lassen, in deren dreimal gewaltigem Licht man jenen Dämon sich unterwürfig zu machen und zum Reden zu zwingen vermöchte. Welches Schauspiel, wenn jetzt unsere Aesthetiker, mit dem Fangnetz einer ihnen eignen „Schönheit“, nach dem vor ihnen mit unbegreiflichem Leben sich tummelnden Musikgenius schlagen und haschen, unter Bewegungen, die nach der ewigen Schönheit ebensowenig als nach dem Erhabenen beurtheilt werden wollen. Man mag sich nur diese Musikgönner einmal leibhaft und in der Nähe besehen, wenn sie so unermüdlich Schönheit! Schönheit! rufen, ob sie sich dabei wie die im Schoosse des Schönen gebildeten und verwöhnten Lieblingskinder der Natur ausnehmen oder ob sie nicht vielmehr für die eigne Rohheit eine lügnerisch verhüllende Form, für die eigne empfindungsarme Nüchternheit einen aesthetischen Vorwand suchen: wobei ich z.B. an Otto Jahn denke. Vor der deutschen Musik aber mag sich der Lügner und Heuchler in Acht nehmen: denn gerade sie ist, inmitten aller unserer Cultur, der einzig reine, lautere und läuternde Feuergeist, von dem aus und zu dem hin, wie in der Lehre des grossen Heraklit von Ephesus, sich alle Dinge in doppelter Kreisbahn bewegen: alles, was wir jetzt Cultur, Bildung, Civilisation nennen, wird einmal vor dem untrüglichen Richter Dionysus erscheinen müssen.\n\nErinnern wir uns sodann, wie dem aus gleichen Quellen strömenden Geiste *der deutschen Philosophie*, durch Kant und Schopenhauer, es ermöglicht war, die zufriedne Daseinslust der wissenschaftlichen Sokratik, durch den Nachweis ihrer Grenzen, zu vernichten, wie durch diesen Nachweis eine unendlich tiefere und ernstere Betrachtung der ethischen Fragen und der Kunst eingeleitet wurde, die wir geradezu als die in Begriffe gefasste *dionysische Weisheit* bezeichnen können: wohin weist uns das Mysterium dieser Einheit zwischen der deutschen Musik und der deutschen Philosophie, wenn nicht auf eine neue Daseinsform, über deren Inhalt wir uns nur aus hellenischen Analogien ahnend unterrichten können? Denn diesen unausmessbaren Werth behält für uns, die wir an der Grenzscheide zweier verschiedener Daseinsformen stehen, das hellenische Vorbild, dass in ihm auch alle jene Uebergänge und Kämpfe zu einer classisch-belehrenden Form ausgeprägt sind: nur dass wir gleichsam in *umgekehrter* Ordnung die grossen Hauptepochen des hellenischen Wesens analogisch durcherleben und zum Beispiel jetzt aus dem alexandrinischen Zeitalter rückwärts zur Periode der Tragödie zu schreiten scheinen. Dabei lebt in uns die Empfindung, als ob die Geburt eines tragischen Zeitalters für den deutschen Geist nur eine Rückkehr zu sich selbst, ein seliges Sichwiederfinden zu bedeuten habe, nachdem für eine lange Zeit ungeheure von aussen her eindringende Mächte den in hülfloser Barbarei der Form dahinlebenden zu einer Knechtschaft unter ihrer Form gezwungen hatten. Jetzt endlich darf er, nach seiner Heimkehr zum Urquell seines Wesens, vor allen Völkern kühn und frei, ohne das Gängelband einer romanischen Civilisation, einherzuschreiten wagen: wenn er nur von einem Volke unentwegt zu lernen versteht, von dem überhaupt lernen zu können schon ein hoher Ruhm und eine auszeichnende Seltenheit ist, von den Griechen. Und wann brauchten wir diese allerhöchsten Lehrmeister mehr als jetzt, wo wir *die Wiedergeburt der Tragödie* erleben und in Gefahr sind, weder zu wissen, woher sie kommt, noch uns deuten zu können, wohin sie will?\n\n### Section 20\n\nEs möchte einmal, unter den Augen eines unbestochenen Richters, abgewogen werden, in welcher Zeit und in welchen Männern bisher der deutsche Geist von den Griechen zu lernen am kräftigsten gerungen hat; und wenn wir mit Zuversicht annehmen, dass dem edelsten Bildungskampfe Goethe's, Schiller's und Winckelmann's dieses einzige Lob zugesprochen werden müsste, so wäre jedenfalls hinzuzufügen, dass seit jener Zeit und den nächsten Einwirkungen jenes Kampfes, das Streben auf einer gleichen Bahn zur Bildung und zu den Griechen zu kommen, in unbegreiflicher Weise schwächer und schwächer geworden ist. Sollten wir, um nicht ganz an dem deutschen Geist verzweifeln zu müssen, nicht daraus den Schluss ziehen dürfen, dass in irgend welchem Hauptpunkte es auch jenen Kämpfern nicht gelungen sein möchte, in den Kern des hellenischen Wesens einzudringen und einen dauernden Liebesbund zwischen der deutschen und der griechischen Cultur herzustellen? So dass vielleicht ein unbewusstes Erkennen jenes Mangels auch in den ernsteren Naturen den verzagten Zweifel erregte, ob sie, nach solchen Vorgängern, auf diesem Bildungswege noch weiter wie jene und überhaupt zum Ziele kommen würden. Deshalb sehen wir seit jener Zeit das Urtheil über den Werth der Griechen für die Bildung in der bedenklichsten Weise entarten; der Ausdruck mitleidiger Ueberlegenheit ist in den verschiedensten Feldlagern des Geistes und des Ungeistes zu hören; anderwärts tändelt eine gänzlich wirkungslose Schönrednerei mit der „griechischen Harmonie“, der „griechischen Schönheit“, der „griechischen Heiterkeit“. Und gerade in den Kreisen, deren Würde es sein könnte, aus dem griechischen Strombett unermüdet, zum Heile deutscher Bildung, zu schöpfen, in den Kreisen der Lehrer an den höheren Bildungsanstalten hat man am besten gelernt, sich mit den Griechen zeitig und in bequemer Weise abzufinden, nicht selten bis zu einem sceptischen Preisgeben des hellenischen Ideals und bis zu einer gänzlichen Verkehrung der wahren Absicht aller Alterthumsstudien. Wer überhaupt in jenen Kreisen sich nicht völlig in dem Bemühen, ein zuverlässiger Corrector von alten Texten oder ein naturhistorischer Sprachmikroskopiker zu sein, erschöpft hat, der sucht vielleicht auch das griechische Alterthum, neben anderen Alterthümern, sich „historisch“ anzueignen, aber jedenfalls nach der Methode und mit den überlegenen Mienen unserer jetzigen gebildeten Geschichtsschreibung. Wenn demnach die eigentliche Bildungskraft der höheren Lehranstalten wohl noch niemals niedriger und schwächlicher gewesen ist, wie in der Gegenwart, wenn der „Journalist“, der papierne Sclave des Tages, in jeder Rücksicht auf Bildung den Sieg über den höheren Lehrer davongetragen hat, und Letzterem nur noch die bereits oft erlebte Metamorphose übrig bleibt, sich jetzt nun auch in der Sprechweise des Journalisten, mit der „leichten Eleganz“ dieser Sphäre, als heiterer gebildeter Schmetterling zu bewegen—in welcher peinlichen Verwirrung müssen die derartig Gebildeten einer solchen Gegenwart jenes Phänomen anstarren, das nur etwa aus dem tiefsten Grunde des bisher unbegriffnen hellenischen Genius analogisch zu begreifen wäre, das Wiedererwachen des dionysischen Geistes und die Wiedergeburt der Tragödie? Es giebt keine andere Kunstperiode, in der sich die sogenannte Bildung und die eigentliche Kunst so befremdet und abgeneigt gegenübergestanden hätten, als wir das in der Gegenwart mit Augen sehn. Wir verstehen es, warum eine so schwächliche Bildung die wahre Kunst hasst; denn sie fürchtet durch sie ihren Untergang. Aber sollte nicht eine ganze Art der Cultur, nämlich jene sokratisch-alexandrinische, sich ausgelebt haben, nachdem sie in eine so zierlich-schmächtige Spitze, wie die gegenwärtige Bildung ist, auslaufen konnte! Wenn es solchen Helden, wie Schiller und Goethe, nicht gelingen durfte, jene verzauberte Pforte zu erbrechen, die in den hellenischen Zauberberg führt, wenn es bei ihrem muthigsten Ringen nicht weiter gekommen ist als bis zu jenem sehnsüchtigen Blick, den die Goethische Iphigenie vom barbarischen Tauris aus nach der Heimat über das Meer hin sendet, was bliebe den Epigonen solcher Helden zu hoffen, wenn sich ihnen nicht plötzlich, an einer ganz anderen, von allen Bemühungen der bisherigen Cultur unberührten Seite die Pforte von selbst aufthäte—unter dem mystischen Klange der wiedererweckten Tragödienmusik.\n\nMöge uns Niemand unsern Glauben an eine noch bevorstehende Wiedergeburt des hellenischen Alterthums zu verkümmern suchen; denn in ihm finden wir allein unsre Hoffnung für eine Erneuerung und Läuterung des deutschen Geistes durch den Feuerzauber der Musik. Was wüssten wir sonst zu nennen, was in der Verödung und Ermattung der jetzigen Cultur irgend welche tröstliche Erwartung für die Zukunft erwecken könnte? Vergebens spähen wir nach einer einzigen kräftig geästeten Wurzel, nach einem Fleck fruchtbaren und gesunden Erdbodens: überall Staub, Sand, Erstarrung, Verschmachten. Da möchte sich ein trostlos Vereinsamter kein besseres Symbol wählen können, als den Ritter mit Tod und Teufel, wie ihn uns Dürer gezeichnet hat, den geharnischten Ritter mit dem erzenen, harten Blicke, der seinen Schreckensweg, unbeirrt durch seine grausen Gefährten, und doch hoffnungslos, allein mit Ross und Hund zu nehmen weiss. Ein solcher Dürerscher Ritter war unser Schopenhauer: ihm fehlte jede Hoffnung, aber er wollte die Wahrheit. Es giebt nicht Seinesgleichen.—\n\nAber wie verändert sich plötzlich jene eben so düster geschilderte Wildniss unserer ermüdeten Cultur, wenn sie der dionysische Zauber berührt! Ein Sturmwind packt alles Abgelebte, Morsche, Zerbrochne, Verkümmerte, hüllt es wirbelnd in eine rothe Staubwolke und trägt es wie ein Geier in die Lüfte. Verwirrt suchen unsere Blicke nach dem Entschwundenen: denn was sie sehen, ist wie aus einer Versenkung an's goldne Licht gestiegen, so voll und grün, so üppig lebendig, so sehnsuchtsvoll unermesslich. Die Tragödie sitzt inmitten dieses Ueberflusses an Leben, Leid und Lust, in erhabener Entzückung, sie horcht einem fernen schwermüthigen Gesange—er erzählt von den Müttern des Seins, deren Namen lauten: Wahn, Wille, Wehe.—Ja, meine Freunde, glaubt mit mir an das dionysische Leben und an die Wiedergeburt der Tragödie. Die Zeit des sokratischen Menschen ist vorüber: kränzt euch mit Epheu, nehmt den Thyrsusstab zur Hand und wundert euch nicht, wenn Tiger und Panther sich schmeichelnd zu euren Knien niederlegen. Jetzt wagt es nur, tragische Menschen zu sein: denn ihr sollt erlöst werden. Ihr sollt den dionysischen Festzug von Indien nach Griechenland geleiten! Rüstet euch zu hartem Streite, aber glaubt an die Wunder eures Gottes!\n\n### Section 21\n\nVon diesen exhortativen Tönen in die Stimmung zurückgleitend, die dem Beschaulichen geziemt, wiederhole ich, dass nur von den Griechen gelernt werden kann, was ein solches wundergleiches plötzliches Aufwachen der Tragödie für den innersten Lebensgrund eines Volkes zu bedeuten hat. Es ist das Volk der tragischen Mysterien, das die Perserschlachten schlägt: und wiederum braucht das Volk, das jene Kriege geführt hat, die Tragödie als nothwendigen Genesungstrank. Wer würde gerade bei diesem Volke, nachdem es durch mehrere Generationen von den stärksten Zuckungen des dionysischen Dämon bis in's Innerste erregt wurde, noch einen so gleichmässig kräftigen Erguss des einfachsten politischen Gefühls, der natürlichsten Heimatsinstincte, der ursprünglichen männlichen Kampflust vermuthen? Ist es doch bei jedem bedeutenden Umsichgreifen dionysischer Erregungen immer zu spüren, wie die dionysische Lösung von den Fesseln des Individuums sich am allerersten in einer bis zur Gleichgültigkeit, ja Feindseligkeit gesteigerten Beeinträchtigung der politischen Instincte fühlbar macht, so gewiss andererseits der staatenbildende Apollo auch der Genius des principii individuationis ist und Staat und Heimatssinn nicht ohne Bejahung der individuellen Persönlichkeit leben können.\n\nVon dem Orgiasmus aus führt für ein Volk nur ein Weg, der Weg zum indischen Buddhaismus, der, um überhaupt mit seiner Sehnsucht in's Nichts ertragen zu werden, jener seltnen ekstatischen Zustände mit ihrer Erhebung über Raum, Zeit und Individuum bedarf: wie diese wiederum eine Philosophie fordern, die es lehrt, die unbeschreibliche Unlust der Zwischenzustände durch eine Vorstellung zu überwinden. Eben so nothwendig geräth ein Volk, von der unbedingten Geltung der politischen Triebe aus, in eine Bahn äusserster Verweltlichung, deren grossartigster, aber auch erschrecklichster Ausdruck das römische imperium ist.\n\nZwischen Indien und Rom hingestellt und zu verführerischer Wahl gedrängt, ist es den Griechen gelungen, in classischer Reinheit eine dritte Form hinzuzuerfinden, freilich nicht zu langem eigenen Gebrauche, aber eben darum für die Unsterblichkeit. Denn dass die Lieblinge der Götter früh sterben, gilt in allen Dingen, aber eben so gewiss, dass sie mit den Göttern dann ewig leben. Man verlange doch von dem Alleredelsten nicht, dass es die haltbare Zähigkeit des Leders habe; die derbe Dauerhaftigkeit, wie sie z.B. dem römischen Nationaltriebe zu eigen war, gehört wahrscheinlich nicht zu den nothwendigen Prädicaten der Vollkommenheit. Wenn wir aber fragen, mit welchem Heilmittel es den Griechen ermöglicht war, in ihrer grossen Zeit, bei der ausserordentlichen Stärke ihrer dionysischen und politischen Triebe, weder durch ein ekstatisches Brüten, noch durch ein verzehrendes Haschen nach Weltmacht und Weltehre sich zu erschöpfen, sondern jene herrliche Mischung zu erreichen, wie sie ein edler, zugleich befeuernder und beschaulich stimmender Wein hat, so müssen wir der ungeheuren, das ganze Volksleben erregenden, reinigenden und entladenden Gewalt der *Tragödie* eingedenk sein; deren höchsten Werth wir erst ahnen werden, wenn sie uns, wie bei den Griechen, als Inbegriff aller prophylaktischen Heilkräfte, als die zwischen den stärksten und an sich verhängnissvollsten Eigenschaften des Volkes waltende Mittlerin entgegentritt.\n\nDie Tragödie saugt den höchsten Musikorgiasmus in sich hinein, so dass sie geradezu die Musik, bei den Griechen, wie bei uns, zur Vollendung bringt, stellt dann aber den tragischen Mythus und den tragischen Helden daneben, der dann, einem mächtigen Titanen gleich, die ganze dionysische Welt auf seinen Rücken nimmt und uns davon entlastet: während sie andrerseits durch denselben tragischen Mythus, in der Person des tragischen Helden, von dem gierigen Drange nach diesem Dasein zu erlösen weiss, und mit mahnender Hand an ein anderes Sein und an eine höhere Lust erinnert, zu welcher der kämpfende Held durch seinen Untergang, nicht durch seine Siege sich ahnungsvoll vorbereitet. Die Tragödie stellt zwischen die universale Geltung ihrer Musik und den dionysisch empfänglichen Zuhörer ein erhabenes Gleichniss, den Mythus, und erweckt bei jenem den Schein, als ob die Musik nur ein höchstes Darstellungsmittel zur Belebung der plastischen Welt des Mythus sei. Dieser edlen Täuschung vertrauend darf sie jetzt ihre Glieder zum dithyrambischen Tanze bewegen und sich unbedenklich einem orgiastischen Gefühle der Freiheit hingeben, in welchem sie als Musik an sich, ohne jene Täuschung, nicht zu schwelgen wagen dürfte. Der Mythus schützt uns vor der Musik, wie er ihr andrerseits erst die höchste Freiheit giebt. Dafür verleiht die Musik, als Gegengeschenk, dem tragischen Mythus eine so eindringliche und überzeugende metaphysische Bedeutsamkeit, wie sie Wort und Bild, ohne jene einzige Hülfe, nie zu erreichen vermögen; und insbesondere überkommt durch sie den tragischen Zuschauer gerade jenes sichere Vorgefühl einer höchsten Lust, zu der der Weg durch Untergang und Verneinung führt, so dass er zu hören meint, als ob der innerste Abgrund der Dinge zu ihm vernehmlich spräche.\n\nHabe ich dieser schwierigen Vorstellung mit den letzten Sätzen vielleicht nur einen vorläufigen, für Wenige sofort verständlichen Ausdruck zu geben vermocht, so darf ich gerade an dieser Stelle nicht ablassen, meine Freunde zu einem nochmaligen Versuche anzureizen und sie zu bitten, an einem einzelnen Beispiele unsrer gemeinsamen Erfahrung sich für die Erkenntniss des allgemeinen Satzes vorzubereiten. Bei diesem Beispiele darf ich mich nicht auf jene beziehn, welche die Bilder der scenischen Vorgänge, die Worte und Affecte der handelnden Personen benutzen, um sich mit dieser Hülfe der Musikempfindung anzunähern; denn diese alle reden nicht Musik als Muttersprache und kommen auch, trotz jener Hülfe, nicht weiter als in die Vorhallen der Musikperception, ohne je deren innerste Heiligthümer berühren zu dürfen; manche von diesen, wie Gervinus, gelangen auf diesem Wege nicht einmal in die Vorhallen. Sondern nur an diejenigen habe ich mich zu wenden, die, unmittelbar verwandt mit der Musik, in ihr gleichsam ihren Mutterschooss haben und mit den Dingen fast nur durch unbewusste Musikrelationen in Verbindung stehen. An diese ächten Musiker richte ich die Frage, ob sie sich einen Menschen denken können, der den dritten Act von „Tristan und Isolde“ ohne alle Beihülfe von Wort und Bild rein als ungeheuren symphonischen Satz zu percipiren im Stande wäre, ohne unter einem krampfartigen Ausspannen aller Seelenflügel zu verathmen? Ein Mensch, der wie hier das Ohr gleichsam an die Herzkammer des Weltwillens gelegt hat, der das rasende Begehren zum Dasein als donnernden Strom oder als zartesten zerstäubten Bach von hier aus in alle Adern der Welt sich ergiessen fühlt, er sollte nicht jählings zerbrechen? Er sollte es ertragen, in der elenden gläsernen Hülle des menschlichen Individuums, den Wiederklang zahlloser Lust- und Weherufe aus dem „weiten Raum der Weltennacht“ zu vernehmen, ohne bei diesem Hirtenreigen der Metaphysik sich seiner Urheimat unaufhaltsam zuzuflüchten? Wenn aber doch ein solches Werk als Ganzes percipirt werden kann, ohne Verneinung der Individualexistenz, wenn eine solche Schöpfung geschaffen werden konnte, ohne ihren Schöpfer zu zerschmettern—woher nehmen wir die Lösung eines solchen Widerspruches?\n\nHier drängt sich zwischen unsre höchste Musikerregung und jene Musik der tragische Mythus und der tragische Held, im Grunde nur als Gleichniss der alleruniversalsten Thatsachen, von denen allein die Musik auf directem Wege reden kann. Als Gleichniss würde nun aber der Mythus, wenn wir als rein dionysische Wesen empfänden, gänzlich wirkungslos und unbeachtet neben uns stehen bleiben, und uns keinen Augenblick abwendig davon machen, unser Ohr dem Wiederklang der universalia ante rem zu bieten. Hier bricht jedoch die *apollinische* Kraft, auf Wiederherstellung des fast zersprengten Individuums gerichtet, mit dem Heilbalsam einer wonnevollen Täuschung hervor: plötzlich glauben wir nur noch Tristan zu sehen, wie er bewegungslos und dumpf sich fragt: „die alte Weise; was weckt sie mich?“ Und was uns früher wie ein hohles Seufzen aus dem Mittelpunkte des Seins anmuthete, das will uns jetzt nur sagen, wie „öd und leer das Meer.“ Und wo wir athemlos zu erlöschen wähnten, im krampfartigen Sichausrecken aller Gefühle, und nur ein Weniges uns mit dieser Existenz zusammenknüpfte, hören und sehen wir jetzt nur den zum Tode verwundeten und doch nicht sterbenden Helden, mit seinem verzweiflungsvollen Rufe: „Sehnen! Sehnen! Im Sterben mich zu sehnen, vor Sehnsucht nicht zu sterben!“ Und wenn früher der Jubel des Horns nach solchem Uebermaass und solcher Ueberzahl verzehrender Qualen fast wie der Qualen höchste uns das Herz zerschnitt, so steht jetzt zwischen uns und diesem „Jubel an sich“ der jauchzende Kurwenal, dem Schiffe, das Isolden trägt, zugewandt. So gewaltig auch das Mitleiden in uns hineingreift, in einem gewissen Sinne rettet uns doch das Mitleiden vor dem Urleiden der Welt, wie das Gleichnissbild des Mythus uns vor dem unmittelbaren Anschauen der höchsten Weltidee, wie der Gedanke und das Wort uns vor dem ungedämmten Ergusse des unbewussten Willens rettet. Durch jene herrliche apollinische Täuschung dünkt es uns, als ob uns selbst das Tonreich wie eine plastische Welt gegenüber träte, als ob auch in ihr nur Tristan's und Isoldens Schicksal, wie in einem allerzartesten und ausdrucksfähigsten Stoffe, geformt und bildnerisch ausgeprägt worden sei.\n\nSo entreisst uns das Apollinische der dionysischen Allgemeinheit und entzückt uns für die Individuen; an diese fesselt es unsre Mitleidserregung, durch diese befriedigt es den nach grossen und erhabenen Formen lechzenden Schönheitssinn; es führt an uns Lebensbilder vorbei und reizt uns zu gedankenhaftem Erfassen des in ihnen enthaltenen Lebenskernes. Mit der ungeheuren Wucht des Bildes, des Begriffs, der ethischen Lehre, der sympathischen Erregung reisst das Apollinische den Menschen aus seiner orgiastischen Selbstvernichtung empor und täuscht ihn über die Allgemeinheit des dionysischen Vorganges hinweg zu dem Wahne, dass er ein einzelnes Weltbild, z.B. Tristan und Isolde, sehe und es, *durch die Musik*, nur noch besser und innerlicher *sehen* solle. Was vermag nicht der heilkundige Zauber des Apollo, wenn er selbst in uns die Täuschung aufregen kann, als ob wirklich das Dionysische, im Dienste des Apollinischen, dessen Wirkungen zu steigern vermöchte, ja als ob die Musik sogar wesentlich Darstellungskunst für einen apollinischen Inhalt sei?\n\nBei jener prästabilirten Harmonie, die zwischen dem vollendeten Drama und seiner Musik waltet, erreicht das Drama einen höchsten, für das Wortdrama sonst unzugänglichen Grad von Schaubarkeit. Wie alle lebendigen Gestalten der Scene in den selbständig bewegten Melodienlinien sich zur Deutlichkeit der geschwungenen Linie vor uns vereinfachen, ertönt uns das Nebeneinander dieser Linien in dem mit dem bewegten Vorgange auf zarteste Weise sympathisirenden Harmonienwechsel: durch welchen uns die Relationen der Dinge in sinnlich wahrnehmbarer, keinesfalls abstracter Weise, unmittelbar vernehmbar werden, wie wir gleichfalls durch ihn erkennen, dass erst in diesen Relationen das Wesen eines Charakters und einer Melodienlinie sich rein offenbare. Und während uns so die Musik zwingt, mehr und innerlicher als sonst zu sehen, und den Vorgang der Scene wie ein zartes Gespinnst vor uns auszubreiten, ist für unser vergeistigtes, in's Innere blickendes Auge die Welt der Bühne eben so unendlich erweitert als von innen heraus erleuchtet. Was vermöchte der Wortdichter Analoges zu bieten, der mit einem viel unvollkommneren Mechanismus, auf indirectem Wege, vom Wort und vom Begriff aus, jene innerliche Erweiterung der schaubaren Bühnenwelt und ihre innere Erleuchtung zu erreichen sich abmüht? Nimmt nun zwar auch die musikalische Tragödie das Wort hinzu, so kann sie doch zugleich den Untergrund und die Geburtsstätte des Wortes danebenstellen und uns das Werden des Wortes, von innen heraus, verdeutlichen.\n\nAber von diesem geschilderten Vorgang wäre doch eben so bestimmt zu sagen, dass er nur ein herrlicher Schein, nämlich jene vorhin erwähnte apollinische *Täuschung* sei, durch deren Wirkung wir von dem dionysischen Andrange und Uebermaasse entlastet werden sollen. Im Grunde ist ja das Verhältniss der Musik zum Drama gerade das umgekehrte: die Musik ist die eigentliche Idee der Welt, das Drama nur ein Abglanz dieser Idee, ein vereinzeltes Schattenbild derselben. Jene Identität zwischen der Melodienlinie und der lebendigen Gestalt, zwischen der Harmonie und den Charakterrelationen jener Gestalt ist in einem entgegengesetzten Sinne wahr, als es uns, beim Anschauen der musikalischen Tragödie, dünken möchte. Wir mögen die Gestalt uns auf das Sichtbarste bewegen, beleben und von innen heraus beleuchten, sie bleibt immer nur die Erscheinung, von der es keine Brücke giebt, die in die wahre Realität, in's Herz der Welt führte. Aus diesem Herzen heraus aber redet die Musik; und zahllose Erscheinungen jener Art dürften an der gleichen Musik vorüberziehn, sie würden nie das Wesen derselben erschöpfen, sondern immer nur ihre veräusserlichten Abbilder sein. Mit dem populären und gänzlich falschen Gegensatz von Seele und Körper ist freilich für das schwierige Verhältniss von Musik und Drama nichts zu erklären und alles zu verwirren; aber die unphilosophische Rohheit jenes Gegensatzes scheint gerade bei unseren Aesthetikern, wer weiss aus welchen Gründen, zu einem gern bekannten Glaubensartikel geworden zu sein, während sie über einen Gegensatz der Erscheinung und des Dinges an sich nichts gelernt haben oder, aus ebenfalls unbekannten Gründen, nichts lernen mochten.\n\nSollte es sich bei unserer Analysis ergeben haben, dass das Apollinische in der Tragödie durch seine Täuschung völlig den Sieg über das dionysische Urelement der Musik davongetragen und sich diese zu ihren Absichten, nämlich zu einer höchsten Verdeutlichung des Drama's, nutzbar gemacht habe, so wäre freilich eine sehr wichtige Einschränkung hinzuzufügen: in dem allerwesentlichsten Punkte ist jene apollinische Täuschung durchbrochen und vernichtet. Das Drama, das in so innerlich erleuchteter Deutlichkeit aller Bewegungen und Gestalten, mit Hülfe der Musik, sich vor uns ausbreitet, als ob wir das Gewebe am Webstuhl im Auf- und Niederzucken entstehen sehen—erreicht als Ganzes eine Wirkung, die *jenseits aller apollinischen Kunstwirkungen* liegt. In der Gesammtwirkung der Tragödie erlangt das Dionysische wieder das Uebergewicht; sie schliesst mit einem Klange, der niemals von dem Reiche der apollinischen Kunst her tönen könnte. Und damit erweist sich die apollinische Täuschung als das, was sie ist, als die während der Dauer der Tragödie anhaltende Umschleierung der eigentlichen dionysischen Wirkung: die doch so mächtig ist, am Schluss das apollinische Drama selbst in eine Sphäre zu drängen, wo es mit dionysischer Weisheit zu reden beginnt und wo es sich selbst und seine apollinische Sichtbarkeit verneint. So wäre wirklich das schwierige Verhältniss des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen in der Tragödie durch einen Bruderbund beider Gottheiten zu symbolisiren: Dionysus redet die Sprache des Apollo, Apollo aber schliesslich die Sprache des Dionysus: womit das höchste Ziel der Tragödie und der Kunst überhaupt erreicht ist.\n\n### Section 22\n\nMag der aufmerksame Freund sich die Wirkung einer wahren musikalischen Tragödie rein und unvermischt, nach seinen Erfahrungen vergegenwärtigen. Ich denke das Phänomen dieser Wirkung nach beiden Seiten hin so beschrieben zu haben, dass er sich seine eignen Erfahrungen jetzt zu deuten wissen wird. Er wird sich nämlich erinnern, wie er, im Hinblick auf den vor ihm sich bewegenden Mythus, zu einer Art von Allwissenheit sich gesteigert fühlte, als ob jetzt die Sehkraft seiner Augen nicht nur eine Flächenkraft sei, sondern in's Innere zu dringen vermöge, und als ob er die Wallungen des Willens, den Kampf der Motive, den anschwellenden Strom der Leidenschaften, jetzt, mit Hülfe der Musik, gleichsam sinnlich sichtbar, wie eine Fülle lebendig bewegter Linien und Figuren vor sich sehe und damit bis in die zartesten Geheimnisse unbewusster Regungen hinabtauchen könne. Während er so einer höchsten Steigerung seiner auf Sichtbarkeit und Verklärung gerichteten Triebe bewusst wird, fühlt er doch eben so bestimmt, dass diese lange Reihe apollinischer Kunstwirkungen doch *nicht* jenes beglückte Verharren in willenlosem Anschauen erzeugt, das der Plastiker und der epische Dichter, also die eigentlich apollinischen Künstler, durch ihre Kunstwerke bei ihm hervorbringen: das heisst die in jenem Anschauen erreichte Rechtfertigung der Welt der individuatio, als welche die Spitze und der Inbegriff der apollinischen Kunst ist. Er schaut die verklärte Welt der Bühne und verneint sie doch. Er sieht den tragischen Helden vor sich in epischer Deutlichkeit und Schönheit und erfreut sich doch an seiner Vernichtung. Er begreift bis in's Innerste den Vorgang der Scene und flüchtet sich gern in's Unbegreifliche. Er fühlt die Handlungen des Helden als gerechtfertigt und ist doch noch mehr erhoben, wenn diese Handlungen den Urheber vernichten. Er schaudert vor den Leiden, die den Helden treffen werden und ahnt doch bei ihnen eine höhere, viel übermächtigere Lust. Er schaut mehr und tiefer als je und wünscht sich doch erblindet. Woher werden wir diese wunderbare Selbstentzweiung, dies Umbrechen der apollinischen Spitze, abzuleiten haben, wenn nicht aus dem *dionysischen* Zauber, der, zum Schein die apollinischen Regungen auf's Höchste reizend, doch noch diesen Ueberschwang der apollinischen Kraft in seinen Dienst zu zwingen vermag. *Der tragische Mythus* ist nur zu verstehen als eine Verbildlichung dionysischer Weisheit durch apollinische Kunstmittel; er führt die Welt der Erscheinung an die Grenzen, wo sie sich selbst verneint und wieder in den Schooss der wahren und einzigen Realität zurückzuflüchten sucht; wo sie dann, mit Isolden, ihren metaphysischen Schwanengesang also anzustimmen scheint:\n\nIn des Wonnemeeres\nwogendem Schwall,\nin der Duft-Wellen\ntönenden Schall,\nin des Weltathmens\nwehendem All—\nertrinken—versinken—\nunbewusst—höchste Lust!\n\nSo vergegenwärtigen wir uns, an den Erfahrungen des wahrhaft aesthetischen Zuhörers, den tragischen Künstler selbst, wie er, gleich einer üppigen Gottheit der individuatio, seine Gestalten schafft, in welchem Sinne sein Werk kaum als „Nachahmung der Natur“ zu begreifen wäre—wie dann aber sein ungeheurer dionysischer Trieb diese ganze Welt der Erscheinungen verschlingt, um hinter ihr und durch ihre Vernichtung eine höchste künstlerische Urfreude im Schoosse des Ur-Einen ahnen zu lassen. Freilich wissen von dieser Rückkehr zur Urheimat, von dem Bruderbunde der beiden Kunstgottheiten in der Tragödie und von der sowohl apollinischen als dionysischen Erregung des Zuhörers unsere Aesthetiker nichts zu berichten, während sie nicht müde werden, den Kampf des Helden mit dem Schicksal, den Sieg der sittlichen Weltordnung oder eine durch die Tragödie bewirkte Entladung von Affecten als das eigentlich Tragische zu charakterisiren: welche Unverdrossenheit mich auf den Gedanken bringt, sie möchten überhaupt keine aesthetisch erregbaren Menschen sein und beim Anhören der Tragödie vielleicht nur als moralische Wesen in Betracht kommen. Noch nie, seit Aristoteles, ist eine Erklärung der tragischen Wirkung gegeben worden, aus der auf künstlerische Zustände, auf eine aesthetische Thätigkeit der Zuhörer geschlossen werden dürfte. Bald soll Mitleid und Furchtsamkeit durch die ernsten Vorgänge zu einer erleichternden Entladung gedrängt werden, bald sollen wir uns bei dem Sieg guter und edler Principien, bei der Aufopferung des Helden im Sinne einer sittlichen Weltbetrachtung erhoben und begeistert fühlen; und so gewiss ich glaube, dass für zahlreiche Menschen gerade das und nur das die Wirkung der Tragödie ist, so deutlich ergiebt sich daraus, dass diese alle, sammt ihren interpretirenden Aesthetikern, von der Tragödie als einer höchsten *Kunst* nichts erfahren haben. Jene pathologische Entladung, die Katharsis des Aristoteles, von der die Philologen nicht recht wissen, ob sie unter die medicinischen oder die moralischen Phänomene zu rechnen sei, erinnert an eine merkwürdige Ahnung Goethe's. „Ohne ein lebhaftes pathologisches Interesse“, sagt er, „ist es auch mir niemals gelungen, irgend eine tragische Situation zu bearbeiten, und ich habe sie daher lieber vermieden als aufgesucht. Sollte es wohl auch einer von den Vorzügen der Alten gewesen sein, dass das höchste Pathetische auch nur aesthetisches Spiel bei ihnen gewesen wäre, da bei uns die Naturwahrheit mitwirken muss, um ein solches Werk hervorzubringen?“ Diese so tiefsinnige letzte Frage dürfen wir jetzt, nach unseren herrlichen Erfahrungen, bejahen, nachdem wir gerade an der musikalischen Tragödie mit Staunen erlebt haben, wie wirklich das höchste Pathetische doch nur ein aesthetisches Spiel sein kann: weshalb wir glauben dürfen, dass erst jetzt das Urphänomen des Tragischen mit einigem Erfolg zu beschreiben ist. Wer jetzt noch nur von jenen stellvertretenden Wirkungen aus ausseraesthetischen Sphären zu erzählen hat und über den pathologisch-moralischen Prozess sich nicht hinausgehoben fühlt, mag nur an seiner aesthetischen Natur verzweifeln: wogegen wir ihm die Interpretation Shakespeare's nach der Manier des Gervinus und das fleissige Aufspüren der „poetischen Gerechtigkeit“ als unschuldigen Ersatz anempfehlen.\n\nSo ist mit der Wiedergeburt der Tragödie auch der *aesthetische Zuhörer* wieder geboren, an dessen Stelle bisher in den Theaterräumen ein seltsames Quidproquo, mit halb moralischen und halb gelehrten Ansprüchen, zu sitzen pflegte, der „Kritiker“. In seiner bisherigen Sphäre war Alles künstlich und nur mit einem Scheine des Lebens übertüncht. Der darstellende Künstler wusste in der That nicht mehr, was er mit einem solchen, kritisch sich gebärdenden Zuhörer zu beginnen habe und spähte daher, sammt dem ihn inspirirenden Dramatiker oder Operncomponisten, unruhig nach den letzten Resten des Lebens in diesem anspruchsvoll öden und zum Geniessen unfähigen Wesen. Aus derartigen „Kritikern“ bestand aber bisher das Publicum; der Student, der Schulknabe, ja selbst das harmloseste weibliche Geschöpf war wider sein Wissen bereits durch Erziehung und Journale zu einer gleichen Perception eines Kunstwerks vorbereitet. Die edleren Naturen unter den Künstlern rechneten bei einem solchen Publicum auf die Erregung moralisch-religiöser Kräfte, und der Anruf der „sittlichen Weltordnung“ trat vikarirend ein, wo eigentlich ein gewaltiger Kunstzauber den ächten Zuhörer entzücken sollte. Oder es wurde vom Dramatiker eine grossartigere, mindestens aufregende Tendenz der politischen und socialen Gegenwart so deutlich vorgetragen, dass der Zuhörer seine kritische Erschöpfung vergessen und sich ähnlichen Affecten überlassen konnte, wie in patriotischen oder kriegerischen Momenten, oder vor der Rednerbühne des Parlaments oder bei der Verurtheilung des Verbrechens und des Lasters: welche Entfremdung der eigentlichen Kunstabsichten hier und da geradezu zu einem Cultus der Tendenz führen musste. Doch hier trat ein, was bei allen erkünstelten Künsten von jeher eingetreten ist, eine reissend schnelle Depravation jener Tendenzen, so dass zum Beispiel die Tendenz, das Theater als Veranstaltung zur moralischen Volksbildung zu verwenden, die zu Schiller's Zeit ernsthaft genommen wurde, bereits unter die unglaubwürdigen Antiquitäten einer überwundenen Bildung gerechnet wird. Während der Kritiker in Theater und Concert, der Journalist in der Schule, die Presse in der Gesellschaft zur Herrschaft gekommen war, entartete die Kunst zu einem Unterhaltungsobject der niedrigsten Art, und die aesthetische Kritik wurde als das Bindemittel einer eiteln, zerstreuten, selbstsüchtigen und überdies ärmlich-unoriginalen Geselligkeit benutzt, deren Sinn jene Schopenhauerische Parabel von den Stachelschweinen zu verstehen giebt; so dass zu keiner Zeit so viel über Kunst geschwatzt und so wenig von der Kunst gehalten worden ist. Kann man aber mit einem Menschen noch verkehren, der im Stande ist, sich über Beethoven und Shakespeare zu unterhalten? Mag Jeder nach seinem Gefühl diese Frage beantworten: er wird mit der Antwort jedenfalls beweisen, was er sich unter „Bildung“ vorstellt, vorausgesetzt dass er die Frage überhaupt zu beantworten sucht und nicht vor Ueberraschung bereits verstummt ist.\n\nDagegen dürfte mancher edler und zarter von der Natur Befähigte, ob er gleich in der geschilderten Weise allmählich zum kritischen Barbaren geworden war, von einer eben so unerwarteten als gänzlich unverständlichen Wirkung zu erzählen haben, die etwa eine glücklich gelungene Lohengrinaufführung auf ihn ausübte: nur dass ihm vielleicht jede Hand fehlte, die ihn mahnend und deutend anfasste, so dass auch jene unbegreiflich verschiedenartige und durchaus unvergleichliche Empfindung, die ihn damals erschütterte, vereinzelt blieb und wie ein räthselhaftes Gestirn nach kurzem Leuchten erlosch. Damals hatte er geahnt, was der aesthetische Zuhörer ist.\n\n### Section 23\n\nWer recht genau sich selber prüfen will, wie sehr er dem wahren aesthetischen Zuhörer verwandt ist oder zur Gemeinschaft der sokratisch-kritischen Menschen gehört, der mag sich nur aufrichtig nach der Empfindung fragen, mit der er das auf der Bühne dargestellte *Wunder* empfängt: ob er etwa dabei seinen historischen, auf strenge psychologische Causalität gerichteten Sinn beleidigt fühlt, ob er mit einer wohlwollenden Concession gleichsam das Wunder als ein der Kindheit verständliches, ihm entfremdetes Phänomen zulässt oder ob er irgend etwas Anderes dabei erleidet. Daran nämlich wird er messen können, wie weit er überhaupt befähigt ist, den *Mythus*, das zusammengezogene Weltbild, zu verstehen, der, als Abbreviatur der Erscheinung, das Wunder nicht entbehren kann. Das Wahrscheinliche ist aber, dass fast Jeder, bei strenger Prüfung, sich so durch den kritisch-historischen Geist unserer Bildung zersetzt fühlt, um nur etwa auf gelehrtem Wege, durch vermittelnde Abstractionen, sich die einstmalige Existenz des Mythus glaublich zu machen. Ohne Mythus aber geht jede Cultur ihrer gesunden schöpferischen Naturkraft verlustig: erst ein mit Mythen umstellter Horizont schliesst eine ganze Culturbewegung zur Einheit ab. Alle Kräfte der Phantasie und des apollinischen Traumes werden erst durch den Mythus aus ihrem wahllosen Herumschweifen gerettet. Die Bilder des Mythus müssen die unbemerkt allgegenwärtigen dämonischen Wächter sein, unter deren Hut die junge Seele heranwächst, an deren Zeichen der Mann sich sein Leben und seine Kämpfe deutet: und selbst der Staat kennt keine mächtigeren ungeschriebnen Gesetze als das mythische Fundament, das seinen Zusammenhang mit der Religion, sein Herauswachsen aus mythischen Vorstellungen verbürgt.\n\nMan stelle jetzt daneben den abstracten, ohne Mythen geleiteten Menschen, die abstracte Erziehung, die abstracte Sitte, das abstracte Recht, den abstracten Staat: man vergegenwärtige sich das regellose, von keinem heimischen Mythus gezügelte Schweifen der künstlerischen Phantasie: man denke sich eine Cultur, die keinen festen und heiligen Ursitz hat, sondern alle Möglichkeiten zu erschöpfen und von allen Culturen sich kümmerlich zu nähren verurtheilt ist—das ist die Gegenwart, als das Resultat jenes auf Vernichtung des Mythus gerichteten Sokratismus. Und nun steht der mythenlose Mensch, ewig hungernd, unter allen Vergangenheiten und sucht grabend und wühlend nach Wurzeln, sei es dass er auch in den entlegensten Alterthümern nach ihnen graben müsste. Worauf weist das ungeheure historische Bedürfniss der unbefriedigten modernen Cultur, das Umsichsammeln zahlloser anderer Culturen, das verzehrende Erkennenwollen, wenn nicht auf den Verlust des Mythus, auf den Verlust der mythischen Heimat, des mythischen Mutterschoosses? Man frage sich, ob das fieberhafte und so unheimliche Sichregen dieser Cultur etwas Anderes ist, als das gierige Zugreifen und Nach-Nahrung-Haschen des Hungernden—und wer möchte einer solchen Cultur noch etwas geben wollen, die durch alles, was sie verschlingt, nicht zu sättigen ist und bei deren Berührung sich die kräftigste, heilsamste Nahrung in „Historie und Kritik“ zu verwandeln pflegt?\n\nMan müsste auch an unserem deutschen Wesen schmerzlich verzweifeln, wenn es bereits in gleicher Weise mit seiner Cultur unlösbar verstrickt, ja eins geworden wäre, wie wir das an dem civilisirten Frankreich zu unserem Entsetzen beobachten können; und das, was lange Zeit der grosse Vorzug Frankreichs und die Ursache seines ungeheuren Uebergewichts war, eben jenes Einssein von Volk und Cultur, dürfte uns, bei diesem Anblick, nöthigen, darin das Glück zu preisen, dass diese unsere so fragwürdige Cultur bis jetzt mit dem edeln Kerne unseres Volkscharakters nichts gemein hat. Alle unsere Hoffnungen strecken sich vielmehr sehnsuchtsvoll nach jener Wahrnehmung aus, dass unter diesem unruhig auf und nieder zuckenden Culturleben und Bildungskrampfe eine herrliche, innerlich gesunde, uralte Kraft verborgen liegt, die freilich nur in ungeheuren Momenten sich gewaltig einmal bewegt und dann wieder einem zukünftigen Erwachen entgegenträumt. Aus diesem Abgrunde ist die deutsche Reformation hervorgewachsen: in deren Choral die Zukunftsweise der deutschen Musik zuerst erklang. So tief, muthig und seelenvoll, so überschwänglich gut und zart tönte dieser Choral Luther's, als der erste dionysische Lockruf, der aus dichtverwachsenem Gebüsch, im Nahen des Frühlings, hervordringt. Ihm antwortete in wetteiferndem Wiederhall jener weihevoll übermüthige Festzug dionysischer Schwärmer, denen wir die deutsche Musik danken—und denen wir *die Wiedergeburt des deutschen Mythus* danken werden!\n\nIch weiss, dass ich jetzt den theilnehmend folgenden Freund auf einen hochgelegenen Ort einsamer Betrachtung führen muss, wo er nur wenige Gefährten haben wird, und rufe ihm ermuthigend zu, dass wir uns an unseren leuchtenden Führern, den Griechen, festzuhalten haben. Von ihnen haben wir bis jetzt, zur Reinigung unserer aesthetischen Erkenntniss, jene beiden Götterbilder entlehnt, von denen jedes ein gesondertes Kunstreich für sich beherrscht und über deren gegenseitige Berührung und Steigerung wir durch die griechische Tragödie zu einer Ahnung kamen. Durch ein merkwürdiges Auseinanderreissen beider künstlerischen Urtriebe musste uns der Untergang der griechischen Tragödie herbeigeführt erscheinen: mit welchem Vorgange eine Degeneration und Umwandlung des griechischen Volkscharakters im Einklang war, uns zu ernstem Nachdenken auffordernd, wie nothwendig und eng die Kunst und das Volk, Mythus und Sitte, Tragödie und Staat, in ihren Fundamenten verwachsen sind. Jener Untergang der Tragödie war zugleich der Untergang des Mythus. Bis dahin waren die Griechen unwillkürlich genöthigt, alles Erlebte sofort an ihre Mythen anzuknüpfen, ja es nur durch diese Anknüpfung zu begreifen: wodurch auch die nächste Gegenwart ihnen sofort sub specie aeterni und in gewissem Sinne als zeitlos erscheinen musste. In diesen Strom des Zeitlosen aber tauchte sich eben so der Staat wie die Kunst, um in ihm vor der Last und der Gier des Augenblicks Ruhe zu finden. Und gerade nur so viel ist ein Volk—wie übrigens auch ein Mensch—werth, als es auf seine Erlebnisse den Stempel des Ewigen zu drücken vermag: denn damit ist es gleichsam entweltlicht und zeigt seine unbewusste innerliche Ueberzeugung von der Relativität der Zeit und von der wahren, d. h. der metaphysischen Bedeutung des Lebens. Das Gegentheil davon tritt ein, wenn ein Volk anfängt, sich historisch zu begreifen und die mythischen Bollwerke um sich herum zu zertrümmern: womit gewöhnlich eine entschiedene Verweltlichung, ein Bruch mit der unbewussten Metaphysik seines früheren Daseins, in allen ethischen Consequenzen, verbunden ist. Die griechische Kunst und vornehmlich die griechische Tragödie hielt vor Allem die Vernichtung des Mythus auf: man musste sie mit vernichten, um, losgelöst von dem heimischen Boden, ungezügelt in der Wildniss des Gedankens, der Sitte und der That leben zu können. Auch jetzt noch versucht jener metaphysische Trieb, sich eine, wenngleich abgeschwächte Form der Verklärung zu schaffen, in dem zum Leben drängenden Sokratismus der Wissenschaft: aber auf den niederen Stufen führte derselbe Trieb nur zu einem fieberhaften Suchen, das sich allmählich in ein Pandämonium überallher zusammengehäufter Mythen und Superstitionen verlor: in dessen Mitte der Hellene dennoch ungestillten Herzens sass, bis er es verstand, mit griechischer Heiterkeit und griechischem Leichtsinn, als Graeculus, jenes Fieber zu maskiren oder in irgend einem orientalisch dumpfen Aberglauben sich völlig zu betäuben.\n\nDiesem Zustande haben wir uns, seit der Wiedererweckung des alexandrinisch-römischen Alterthums im fünfzehnten Jahrhundert, nach einem langen schwer zu beschreibenden Zwischenacte, in der auffälligsten Weise angenähert. Auf den Höhen dieselbe überreiche Wissenslust, dasselbe ungesättigte Finderglück, dieselbe ungeheure Verweltlichung, daneben ein heimatloses Herumschweifen, ein gieriges Sichdrängen an fremde Tische, eine leichtsinnige Vergötterung der Gegenwart oder stumpf betäubte Abkehr, Alles sub specie saeculi, der „Jetztzeit“: welche gleichen Symptome auf einen gleichen Mangel im Herzen dieser Cultur zu rathen geben, auf die Vernichtung des Mythus. Es scheint kaum möglich zu sein, mit dauerndem Erfolge einen fremden Mythus überzupflanzen, ohne den Baum durch dieses Ueberpflanzen heillos zu beschädigen: welcher vielleicht einmal stark und gesund genug ist, jenes fremde Element mit furchtbarem Kampfe wieder auszuscheiden, für gewöhnlich aber siech und verkümmert oder in krankhaftem Wuchern sich verzehren muss. Wir halten so viel von dem reinen und kräftigen Kerne des deutschen Wesens, dass wir gerade von ihm jene Ausscheidung gewaltsam eingepflanzter fremder Elemente zu erwarten wagen und es für möglich erachten, dass der deutsche Geist sich auf sich selbst zurückbesinnt. Vielleicht wird Mancher meinen, jener Geist müsse seinen Kampf mit der Ausscheidung des Romanischen beginnen: wozu er eine äusserliche Vorbereitung und Ermuthigung in der siegreichen Tapferkeit und blutigen Glorie des letzten Krieges erkennen dürfte, die innerliche Nöthigung aber in dem Wetteifer suchen muss, der erhabenen Vorkämpfer auf dieser Bahn, Luther's ebensowohl als unserer grossen Künstler und Dichter, stets werth zu sein. Aber nie möge er glauben, ähnliche Kämpfe ohne seine Hausgötter, ohne seine mythische Heimat, ohne ein „Wiederbringen“ aller deutschen Dinge, kämpfen zu können! Und wenn der Deutsche zagend sich nach einem Führer umblicken sollte, der ihn wieder in die längst verlorne Heimat zurückbringe, deren Wege und Stege er kaum mehr kennt—so mag er nur dem wonnig lockenden Rufe des dionysischen Vogels lauschen, der über ihm sich wiegt und ihm den Weg dahin deuten will.\n\n### Section 24\n\nWir hatten unter den eigenthümlichen Kunstwirkungen der musikalischen Tragödie eine apollinische *Täuschung* hervorzuheben, durch die wir vor dem unmittelbaren Einssein mit der dionysischen Musik gerettet werden sollen, während unsre musikalische Erregung sich auf einem apollinischen Gebiete und an einer dazwischengeschobenen sichtbaren Mittelwelt entladen kann. Dabei glaubten wir beobachtet zu haben, wie eben durch diese Entladung jene Mittelwelt des scenischen Vorgangs, überhaupt das Drama, in einem Grade von innen heraus sichtbar und verständlich wurde, der in aller sonstigen, apollinischen Kunst unerreichbar ist: so dass wir hier, wo diese gleichsam durch den Geist der Musik beschwingt und emporgetragen war, die höchste Steigerung ihrer Kräfte und somit in jenem Bruderbunde des Apollo und des Dionysus die Spitze ebensowohl der apollinischen als der dionysischen Kunstabsichten anerkennen mussten.\n\nFreilich erreichte das apollinische Lichtbild gerade bei der inneren Beleuchtung durch die Musik nicht die eigenthümliche Wirkung der schwächeren Grade apollinischer Kunst; was das Epos oder der beseelte Stein vermögen, das anschauende Auge zu jenem ruhigen Entzücken an der Welt der individuatio zu zwingen, das wollte sich hier, trotz einer höheren Beseeltheit und Deutlichkeit, nicht erreichen lassen. Wir schauten das Drama an und drangen mit bohrendem Blick in seine innere bewegte Welt der Motive—und doch war uns, als ob nur ein Gleichnissbild an uns vorüberzöge, dessen tiefsten Sinn wir fast zu errathen glaubten und das wir, wie einen Vorhang, fortzuziehen wünschten, um hinter ihm das Urbild zu erblicken. Die hellste Deutlichkeit des Bildes genügte uns nicht: denn dieses schien eben sowohl Etwas zu offenbaren als zu verhüllen; und während es mit seiner gleichnissartigen Offenbarung zum Zerreissen des Schleiers, zur Enthüllung des geheimnissvollen Hintergrundes aufzufordern schien, hielt wiederum gerade jene durchleuchtete Allsichtbarkeit das Auge gebannt und wehrte ihm, tiefer zu dringen.\n\nWer dies nicht erlebt hat, zugleich schauen zu müssen und zugleich über das Schauen hinaus sich zu sehnen, wird sich schwerlich vorstellen, wie bestimmt und klar diese beiden Prozesse bei der Betrachtung des tragischen Mythus nebeneinander bestehen und nebeneinander empfunden werden: während die wahrhaft aesthetischen Zuschauer mir bestätigen werden, dass unter den eigenthümlichen Wirkungen der Tragödie jenes Nebeneinander die merkwürdigste sei. Man übertrage sich nun dieses Phänomen des aesthetischen Zuschauers in einen analogen Process im tragischen Künstler, und man wird die Genesis des *tragischen Mythus* verstanden haben. Er theilt mit der apollinischen Kunstsphäre die volle Lust am Schein und am Schauen und zugleich verneint er diese Lust und hat eine noch höhere Befriedigung an der Vernichtung der sichtbaren Scheinwelt. Der Inhalt des tragischen Mythus ist zunächst ein episches Ereigniss mit der Verherrlichung des kämpfenden Helden: woher stammt aber jener an sich räthselhafte Zug, dass das Leiden im Schicksale des Helden, die schmerzlichsten Ueberwindungen, die qualvollsten Gegensätze der Motive, kurz die Exemplification jener Weisheit des Silen, oder, aesthetisch ausgedrückt, das Hässliche und Disharmonische, in so zahllosen Formen, mit solcher Vorliebe immer von Neuem dargestellt wird und gerade in dem üppigsten und jugendlichsten Alter eines Volkes, wenn nicht gerade an diesem Allen eine höhere Lust percipirt wird?\n\nDenn dass es im Leben wirklich so tragisch zugeht, würde am wenigsten die Entstehung einer Kunstform erklären; wenn anders die Kunst nicht nur Nachahmung der Naturwirklichkeit, sondern gerade ein metaphysisches Supplement der Naturwirklichkeit ist, zu deren Ueberwindung neben sie gestellt. Der tragische Mythus, sofern er überhaupt zur Kunst gehört, nimmt auch vollen Antheil an dieser metaphysischen Verklärungsabsicht der Kunst überhaupt: was verklärt er aber, wenn er die Erscheinungswelt unter dem Bilde des leidenden Helden vorführt; die „Realität“ dieser Erscheinungswelt am wenigsten, denn er sagt uns gerade: „Seht hin! Seht genau hin! Dies ist euer Leben! Dies ist der Stundenzeiger an eurer Daseinsuhr!“\n\nUnd dieses Leben zeigte der Mythus, um es vor uns damit zu verklären? Wenn aber nicht, worin liegt dann die aesthetische Lust, mit der wir auch jene Bilder an uns vorüberziehen lassen? Ich frage nach der aesthetischen Lust und weiss recht wohl, dass viele dieser Bilder ausserdem mitunter noch eine moralische Ergetzung, etwa unter der Form des Mitleides oder eines sittlichen Triumphes, erzeugen können. Wer die Wirkung des Tragischen aber allein aus diesen moralischen Quellen ableiten wollte, wie es freilich in der Aesthetik nur allzu lange üblich war, der mag nur nicht glauben, etwas für die Kunst damit gethan zu haben: die vor Allem Reinheit in ihrem Bereiche verlangen muss. Für die Erklärung des tragischen Mythus ist es gerade die erste Forderung, die ihm eigenthümliche Lust in der rein aesthetischen Sphäre zu suchen, ohne in das Gebiet des Mitleids, der Furcht, des Sittlich-Erhabenen überzugreifen. Wie kann das Hässliche und das Disharmonische, der Inhalt des tragischen Mythus, eine aesthetische Lust erregen?\n\nHier nun wird es nöthig, uns mit einem kühnen Anlauf in eine Metaphysik der Kunst hinein zu schwingen, indem ich den früheren Satz wiederhole, dass nur als ein aesthetisches Phänomen das Dasein und die Welt gerechtfertigt erscheint: in welchem Sinne uns gerade der tragische Mythus zu überzeugen hat, dass selbst das Hässliche und Disharmonische ein künstlerisches Spiel ist, welches der Wille, in der ewigen Fülle seiner Lust, mit sich selbst spielt. Dieses schwer zu fassende Urphänomen der dionysischen Kunst wird aber auf directem Wege einzig verständlich und unmittelbar erfasst in der wunderbaren Bedeutung der *musikalischen Dissonanz*: wie überhaupt die Musik, neben die Welt hingestellt, allein einen Begriff davon geben kann, was unter der Rechtfertigung der Welt als eines aesthetischen Phänomens zu verstehen ist. Die Lust, die der tragische Mythus erzeugt, hat eine gleiche Heimat, wie die lustvolle Empfindung der Dissonanz in der Musik. Das Dionysische, mit seiner selbst am Schmerz percipirten Urlust, ist der gemeinsame Geburtsschooss der Musik und des tragischen Mythus.\n\nSollte sich nicht inzwischen dadurch, dass wir die Musikrelation der Dissonanz zu Hülfe nahmen, jenes schwierige Problem der tragischen Wirkung wesentlich erleichtert haben? Verstehen wir doch jetzt, was es heissen will, in der Tragödie zugleich schauen zu wollen und sich über das Schauen hinaus zu sehnen: welchen Zustand wir in Betreff der künstlerisch verwendeten Dissonanz eben so zu charakterisiren hätten, dass wir hören wollen und über das Hören uns zugleich hinaussehnen. Jenes Streben in's Unendliche, der Flügelschlag der Sehnsucht, bei der höchsten Lust an der deutlich percipirten Wirklichkeit, erinnern daran, dass wir in beiden Zuständen ein dionysisches Phänomen zu erkennen haben, das uns immer von Neuem wieder das spielende Aufbauen und Zertrümmern der Individualwelt als den Ausfluss einer Urlust offenbart, in einer ähnlichen Weise, wie wenn von Heraklit dem Dunklen die weltbildende Kraft einem Kinde verglichen wird, das spielend Steine hin und her setzt und Sandhaufen aufbaut und wieder einwirft.\n\nUm also die dionysische Befähigung eines Volkes richtig abzuschätzen, dürften wir nicht nur an die Musik des Volkes, sondern eben so nothwendig an den tragischen Mythus dieses Volkes als den zweiten Zeugen jener Befähigung zu denken haben. Es ist nun, bei dieser engsten Verwandtschaft zwischen Musik und Mythus, in gleicher Weise zu vermuthen, dass mit einer Entartung und Depravation des Einen eine Verkümmerung der Anderen verbunden sein wird: wenn anders in der Schwächung des Mythus überhaupt eine Abschwächung des dionysischen Vermögens zum Ausdruck kommt. Ueber Beides dürfte uns aber ein Blick auf die Entwicklung des deutschen Wesens nicht in Zweifel lassen: in der Oper wie in dem abstracten Charakter unseres mythenlosen Daseins, in einer zur Ergetzlichkeit herabgesunkenen Kunst, wie in einem vom Begriff geleiteten Leben, hatte sich uns jene gleich unkünstlerische, als am Leben zehrende Natur des sokratischen Optimismus enthüllt. Zu unserem Troste aber gab es Anzeichen dafür, dass trotzdem der deutsche Geist in herrlicher Gesundheit, Tiefe und dionysischer Kraft unzerstört, gleich einem zum Schlummer niedergesunknen Ritter, in einem unzugänglichen Abgrunde ruhe und träume: aus welchem Abgrunde zu uns das dionysische Lied emporsteigt, um uns zu verstehen zu geben, dass dieser deutsche Ritter auch jetzt noch seinen uralten dionysischen Mythus in selig-ernsten Visionen träumt. Glaube Niemand, dass der deutsche Geist seine mythische Heimat auf ewig verloren habe, wenn er so deutlich noch die Vogelstimmen versteht, die von jener Heimat erzählen. Eines Tages wird er sich wach finden, in aller Morgenfrische eines ungeheuren Schlafes: dann wird er Drachen tödten, die tückischen Zwerge vernichten und Brünnhilde erwecken—und Wotan's Speer selbst wird seinen Weg nicht hemmen können!\n\nMeine Freunde, ihr, die ihr an die dionysische Musik glaubt, ihr wisst auch, was für uns die Tragödie bedeutet. In ihr haben wir, wiedergeboren aus der Musik, den tragischen Mythus—und in ihm dürft ihr Alles hoffen und das Schmerzlichste vergessen! Das Schmerzlichste aber ist für uns alle—die lange Entwürdigung, unter der der deutsche Genius, entfremdet von Haus und Heimat, im Dienst tückischer Zwerge lebte. Ihr versteht das Wort—wie ihr auch, zum Schluss, meine Hoffnungen verstehen werdet.\n\n### Section 25\n\nMusik und tragischer Mythus sind in gleicher Weise Ausdruck der dionysischen Befähigung eines Volkes und von einander untrennbar. Beide entstammen einem Kunstbereiche, das jenseits des Apollinischen liegt; beide verklären eine Region, in deren Lustaccorden die Dissonanz eben so wie das schreckliche Weltbild reizvoll verklingt; beide spielen mit dem Stachel der Unlust, ihren überaus mächtigen Zauberkünsten vertrauend; beide rechtfertigen durch dieses Spiel die Existenz selbst der „schlechtesten Welt.“ Hier zeigt sich das Dionysische, an dem Apollinischen gemessen, als die ewige und ursprüngliche Kunstgewalt, die überhaupt die ganze Welt der Erscheinung in's Dasein ruft: in deren Mitte ein neuer Verklärungsschein nöthig wird, um die belebte Welt der Individuation im Leben festzuhalten. Könnten wir uns eine Menschwerdung der Dissonanz denken—und was ist sonst der Mensch?—so würde diese Dissonanz, um leben zu können, eine herrliche Illusion brauchen, die ihr einen Schönheitsschleier über ihr eignes Wesen decke. Dies ist die wahre Kunstabsicht des Apollo: in dessen Namen wir alle jene zahllosen Illusionen des schönen Scheins zusammenfassen, die in jedem Augenblick das Dasein überhaupt lebenswerth machen und zum Erleben des nächsten Augenblicks drängen.\n\nDabei darf von jenem Fundamente aller Existenz, von dem dionysischen Untergrunde der Welt, genau nur soviel dem menschlichen Individuum in's Bewusstsein treten, als von jener apollinischen Verklärungskraft wieder überwunden werden kann, so dass diese beiden Kunsttriebe ihre Kräfte in strenger wechselseitiger Proportion, nach dem Gesetze ewiger Gerechtigkeit, zu entfalten genöthigt sind. Wo sich die dionysischen Mächte so ungestüm erheben, wie wir dies erleben, da muss auch bereits Apollo, in eine Wolke gehüllt, zu uns herniedergestiegen sein; dessen üppigste Schönheitswirkungen wohl eine nächste Generation schauen wird.\n\nDass diese Wirkung aber nöthig sei, dies würde Jeder am sichersten, durch Intuition, nachempfinden, wenn er einmal, sei es auch im Traume, in eine althellenische Existenz sich zurückversetzt fühlte: im Wandeln unter hohen ionischen Säulengängen, aufwärtsblickend zu einem Horizont, der durch reine und edle Linien abgeschnitten ist, neben sich Wiederspiegelungen seiner verklärten Gestalt in leuchtendem Marmor, rings um sich feierlich schreitende oder zart bewegte Menschen, mit harmonisch tönenden Lauten und rhythmischer Gebärdensprache—würde er nicht, bei diesem fortwährenden Einströmen der Schönheit, zu Apollo die Hand erhebend ausrufen müssen: „Seliges Volk der Hellenen! Wie gross muss unter euch Dionysus sein, wenn der delische Gott solche Zauber für nöthig hält, um euren dithyrambischen Wahnsinn zu heilen“!—Einem so Gestimmten dürfte aber ein greiser Athener, mit dem erhabenen Auge des Aeschylus zu ihm aufblickend, entgegnen: „Sage aber auch dies, du wunderlicher Fremdling: wie viel musste dies Volk leiden, um so schön werden zu können! Jetzt aber folge mir zur Tragödie und opfere mit mir im Tempel beider Gottheiten“!","download_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/birth-of-tragedy/original.txt"},"translations":[{"id":"trn_birth_of_tragedy_mouseia","translator":"Mouseia","kind":"curated","note":"Complete machine-assisted Musean translation of the 1886 issue, with the Attempt at Self-Criticism and the Preface to Richard Wagner, made directly from the German of the Fritzsch Neue Ausgabe and read against its page images; reviewed against the German before publication.","text":"### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 1\n\nWhatever may underlie this questionable book, it must have been a question of the first importance and fascination, and a deeply personal question at that—the time in which it arose, *despite* which it arose, bears witness to this: the turbulent time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. While the thunder of the battle of Wörth rolled across Europe, the brooder and lover of riddles to whom this book owes its paternity sat somewhere in a corner of the Alps, deep in brooding and riddles, and consequently deeply troubled and untroubled at once, setting down his thoughts about the *Greeks*—the core of the strange, hard-to-get-at book to which this late foreword (or afterword) is meant to be devoted. A few weeks later, he himself was beneath the walls of Metz, still unable to shake off the question marks he had placed beside the supposed “cheerfulness” of the Greeks and Greek art; until at last, in that month of utmost tension when peace was being negotiated at Versailles, he too made peace with himself and, slowly recovering from an illness brought home from the battlefield, definitively settled within himself “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.”—Out of music? Music and tragedy? Greeks and the music of tragedy? Greeks and the artwork of pessimism? The best-turned-out, most beautiful, most envied kind of human being so far, the kind that most seduces one into living, the Greeks—what? Did they, of all people, *need* tragedy? More than that—art? What for—Greek art?…\n\nOne can guess where the great question mark over the value of existence had thus been placed. Is pessimism *necessarily* a sign of decline, of decay, of having turned out badly, of weary and weakened instincts?—as it was among the Indians, as it is, to all appearances, among us “modern” human beings and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of *strength*? An intellectual inclination toward the harsh, horrifying, evil, problematic aspects of existence, born of well-being, of overflowing health, of the *fullness* of existence? Is there perhaps a suffering from overfullness itself? A courage of the keenest vision that tempts and tests, that *craves* the terrible as its enemy, the worthy enemy against which it can prove its strength? From which it wants to learn what “being afraid” means? What does the *tragic* myth mean, precisely among the Greeks in their best, strongest, bravest age? And the tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian? What of tragedy, born from it?—And again: what killed tragedy—the Socratism of morality, the dialectic, contentedness, and cheerfulness of the theoretical human being—what? Might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, sickness, of instincts dissolving into anarchy? And the “Greek cheerfulness” of the later Greek world merely an evening glow? The Epicurean will *against* pessimism merely a sufferer’s precaution? And science itself, our science—indeed, what does all science mean when viewed as a symptom of life? To what end, worse still, *from where*—all science? What? Is the scientific spirit perhaps only a fear of pessimism and a flight from it? A subtle act of self-defense against—the *truth*? And, morally speaking, something like cowardice and dishonesty? Immorally speaking, a piece of cunning? Oh Socrates, Socrates, was this perhaps *your* secret? Oh mysterious ironist, was this perhaps your—irony?— —\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 2\n\nWhat I got hold of then, something terrible and dangerous, a problem with horns, not necessarily a bull, but in any case a *new* problem: today I would say that it was the *problem of science* itself—science grasped for the first time as problematic, as questionable. But the book in which my youthful courage and suspicion then found an outlet—what an *impossible* book had to grow out of a task so hostile to youth! Built entirely from premature, far-too-green personal experiences, all of them on the very threshold of what could be communicated; placed on the ground of *art*—for the problem of science cannot be recognized on the ground of science—a book perhaps for artists with an additional bent for analysis and retrospection (that is, for an exceptional kind of artist, whom one must seek out and would not even care to seek out…); full of psychological innovations and artists’ secrets, with an artists’ metaphysics in the background; a youthful work full of youthful courage and youthful melancholy, independent, defiantly self-reliant even where it seems to bow before an authority and its own reverence; in short, a first work in every bad sense of the word as well, despite its old man’s problem, burdened with every fault of youth, above all its “far too long,” its “Storm and Stress”: on the other hand, in view of its success (especially with the great artist to whom it addressed itself as if in a dialogue, Richard Wagner), a *proven* book—by which I mean one that at least satisfied “the best of its time.” On that account alone it should be treated with a measure of consideration and reserve; nevertheless, I do not want to suppress entirely how disagreeable it now seems to me, how alien it stands before me now, after sixteen years—before an eye that is older, a hundred times more exacting, but by no means colder, an eye that has grown no more estranged from the task itself that this audacious book ventured to approach for the first time—*to see science through the artist’s eyes, but art through those of life*….\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 3\n\nTo say it once more: today it is an impossible book to me—I call it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-muddled, sentimental, here and there sweetened to the point of femininity, uneven in tempo, without any will to logical precision, thoroughly convinced and therefore above offering proof, distrustful even of the *propriety* of offering proof: a book for the initiated, “music” for those baptized in music, those bound together from the beginning of things by shared and rare experiences of art, a sign of recognition for blood relations in the arts—a haughty and rapturous book that shuts itself off from the outset even more against the profane rabble of the “educated” than against “the people,” yet must also, as its effect proved and proves, know well enough how to find fellow enthusiasts and lure them onto new secret paths and dancing grounds. Here, in any case—people admitted this to themselves with as much curiosity as aversion—a *strange* voice was speaking, the disciple of a still “unknown god,” who had temporarily hidden himself beneath the scholar’s hood, beneath the heaviness and dialectical dreariness of the German, even beneath the bad manners of the Wagnerian; here was a spirit with strange, still nameless needs, a memory brimming with questions, experiences, hidden things, with the name Dionysus inscribed beside them like one more question mark; here there spoke—so people told themselves suspiciously—something like a mystical and almost maenadic soul, stammering, as if in a foreign tongue, laboriously and capriciously, almost undecided whether to communicate or conceal itself. This “new soul” should have *sung*—not spoken! What a pity that I did not dare to say as a poet what I had to say then: perhaps I could have done it! Or at least as a philologist—for even today, in this field, almost everything remains for the philologist to discover and unearth! Above all, the problem *that* there is a problem here—and that until we have an answer to the question “what is Dionysian?” the Greeks remain, as before, utterly unknown and beyond imagining…\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 4\n\nYes, what is Dionysian?—This book contains an answer—a “knower” speaks here, the initiate and disciple of his god. Perhaps I would now speak more cautiously and less eloquently about so difficult a psychological question as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. One fundamental question is the Greek’s relationship to pain, his degree of sensitivity—did this relationship remain the same? Or did it reverse itself?—the question whether his ever stronger *desire for beauty*, for festivals, amusements, new cults, really grew out of lack, out of deprivation, out of melancholy, out of pain? For suppose this very thing were true—and Pericles (or Thucydides) gives us to understand as much in the great funeral oration—where, then, must the opposite desire, which appeared earlier in time, have come from: the *desire for the ugly*, the older Hellene’s good, stern will to pessimism, to tragic myth, to the image of everything terrible, evil, enigmatic, destructive, fateful at the foundation of existence—where, then, must tragedy have come from? Perhaps from *pleasure*, from strength, from overflowing health, from an excess of fullness? And then, to ask physiologically, what is the meaning of that madness out of which tragic as well as comic art grew—Dionysian madness? What? Is madness perhaps not necessarily a symptom of degeneration, decline, a culture grown overripe? Are there perhaps—a question for psychiatrists—neuroses of *health*? Of a people’s youth and youthfulness? What does that synthesis of god and goat in the satyr point to? From what experience of himself, in response to what urge, did the Greek have to imagine the Dionysian enthusiast and primordial human as a satyr? And as for the origin of the tragic chorus: in those centuries when the Greek body flourished and the Greek soul brimmed over with life, were there perhaps endemic raptures? Visions and hallucinations that spread through entire communities, entire assemblies of worshipers? What? What if the Greeks, precisely in the abundance of their youth, had a will to the tragic and were pessimists? What if it was precisely madness, to borrow a phrase from Plato, that brought the *greatest* blessings upon Hellas? And what if, on the other hand and conversely, it was precisely in the times of their disintegration and weakness that the Greeks grew ever more optimistic, superficial, theatrical, and also more lustful for logic and for the logicizing of the world—thus at once more “cheerful” and more “scientific”? What? Might the victory of *optimism*, the ascendancy of *rationality*, practical and theoretical *utilitarianism*, like democracy itself, with which it is contemporary—despite all “modern ideas” and the prejudices of democratic taste—be a symptom of declining strength, approaching age, physiological exhaustion? And precisely *not*—pessimism? Was Epicurus an optimist—precisely as a *sufferer*?— —One sees that it is a whole bundle of heavy questions with which this book has burdened itself—let us add its heaviest question as well! What, seen through the eyes of *life*, is the meaning of—morality?…\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 5\n\nAlready in the preface to Richard Wagner, art—and *not* morality—is presented as the truly *metaphysical* activity of humanity; in the book itself, the provocative proposition recurs several times that the existence of the world is *justified* only as an aesthetic phenomenon. In fact, the whole book recognizes only an artist’s meaning and hidden meaning behind all that happens—a “god,” if you will, but certainly only an entirely unscrupulous and immoral artist-god who wants to become conscious of his equal pleasure and sovereignty in building as in destroying, in good as in bad, who, by creating worlds, releases himself from the *distress* of fullness and *overfullness*, from the *suffering* of the opposites crowded within him. The world, at every moment the *achieved* redemption of God, as the eternally changing, eternally new vision of the one who suffers most, who is most full of opposites, most rich in contradiction, and who knows how to redeem himself only in *semblance*: one may call this entire artists’ metaphysics arbitrary, idle, fantastic—the essential thing is that it already betrays a spirit that will one day, at any risk, defend itself against the *moral* interpretation and significance of existence. Here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism “beyond good and evil” announces itself; here that “perversity of disposition” finds words and a formula against which Schopenhauer never tired of hurling his fiercest curses and thunderbolts in advance—a philosophy that dares to place morality itself in the world of appearance, to demote it, and not merely to the rank of “appearances” (in the sense of the idealist technical term), but to that of “deceptions,” as semblance, delusion, error, interpretation, contrivance, art. Perhaps the depth of this *antimoral* tendency can best be measured by the cautious and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the book—Christianity as the most extravagant figuration of the moral theme that humanity has yet been made to hear. In truth, there is no greater opposite to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world taught in this book than Christian doctrine, which is and wants to be *only* moral, and which, with its absolute standards—for example, with the truthfulness of its God alone—relegates art, *all* art, to the realm of lies—that is, denies, damns, condemns it. Behind such a way of thinking and valuing, which must be hostile to art so long as it is at all genuine, I have always also sensed its *hostility to life*, its furious, vengeful aversion to life itself: for all life rests on semblance, art, deception, a way of seeing, the necessity of perspective and error. From the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, Christianity was life’s disgust and weariness with life, which merely disguised itself, merely hid itself, merely decked itself out under the belief in an “other” or “better” life. Hatred of the “world,” the curse upon the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented to slander this world all the better, at bottom a craving for nothingness, for the end, for rest, for the “Sabbath of Sabbaths”—all this, like Christianity’s unconditional will to recognize *only* moral values, always struck me as the most dangerous and sinister of all possible forms of a “will to downfall,” at the very least a sign of the deepest sickness, weariness, discontent, exhaustion, impoverishment of life—for before morality (especially Christian, that is, unconditional morality), life *must* continually and inevitably be found in the wrong, because life *is* something essentially immoral—life, crushed beneath the weight of contempt and the eternal No, *must* finally come to be felt as undeserving of desire, as worthless in itself. Morality itself—what? Might morality not be a “will to the denial of life,” a secret instinct of annihilation, a principle of decay, diminishment, slander, a beginning of the end? And consequently the danger of dangers?… It was *against* morality, then, that my instinct turned at the time, with this questionable book, as an instinct speaking on behalf of life, and invented for itself a fundamental counter-doctrine and counter-valuation of life, a purely artistic, an *anti-Christian* one. What should it be called? As a philologist and a man of words, I baptized it, not without some freedom—for who could know the right name of the Antichrist?—with the name of a Greek god: I called it the *Dionysian*.—\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 6\n\nIs it understood what task I was already daring to touch on with this book?… How deeply I regret now that I did not yet have the courage (or the immodesty?) to allow myself, in every respect, a *language of my own* for visions and ventures so much my own—that I laboriously sought to express in Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new valuations that ran fundamentally counter to the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as to their taste! What did Schopenhauer think of tragedy? “What gives everything tragic its distinctive upward sweep toward exaltation,” he says, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 495, “is the dawning recognition that the world, life, cannot offer true satisfaction and is therefore *not worth* our attachment: in this consists the tragic spirit—it thus leads to *resignation*.” Oh, how differently Dionysus spoke to me! Oh, how remote from me then was precisely this whole doctrine of resignation!—But there is something much worse about the book, something I now regret still more than having obscured and spoiled Dionysian intimations with Schopenhauerian formulas: namely, that I *spoiled* the magnificent *Greek problem* as it had dawned on me by mixing in the very latest concerns! That I attached hopes where there was nothing to hope for, where everything pointed all too clearly toward an end! That, on the basis of the latest German music, I began spinning fables about the “German essence,” as though it were on the point of discovering itself and finding itself again—and this at a time when the German spirit, which not long before had possessed the will to rule Europe, the strength to lead Europe, was just then *abdicating*, by last will and testament and for good, and, under the pompous pretext of founding an empire, making its transition to mediocrity, to democracy and “modern ideas”! In fact, in the meantime I have learned to think hopelessly and unsparingly enough about this “German essence,” and likewise about present-day *German music*, which is romanticism through and through and the most un-Greek of all possible art forms; moreover, a corrupter of the nerves of the first order, doubly dangerous among a people that loves drink and honors obscurity as a virtue—namely, in its double capacity as an intoxicating and at the same time *befogging* narcotic.—Apart, however, from all the rash hopes and mistaken applications to the most immediate present with which I spoiled my first book for myself at the time, the great Dionysian question mark as it is placed there remains standing, on and on, with regard to music as well: what would a music have to be like that was no longer romantic in origin—as German music is—but *Dionysian*?…\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 7\n\n—But, my dear sir, what in the world is romanticism if *your* book is not romanticism? Can the deep hatred of the “present day,” of “reality” and “modern ideas,” be carried any further than it has been in your artists’ metaphysics—which would sooner believe in nothingness, sooner even in the devil, than in the “now”? Does a ground bass of wrath and lust for destruction not rumble on beneath all your contrapuntal artistry of voices and seduction of the ear, a raging determination against everything that is “now,” a will not very far from practical nihilism, which seems to say, “Better that nothing should be true than that *you* should be right, than that *your* truth should prevail!” Listen for yourself, Mr. Pessimist and Deifier of Art, with a more open ear to a single chosen passage from your book, that not ineloquent dragon-slayer passage, which may sound dangerously like a pied piper to young ears and hearts: what? Is this not the genuine, authentic romantic’s confession of 1830 beneath the mask of the pessimism of 1850? And behind it the usual romantic finale is already sounding its prelude—break, breakdown, return, and prostration before an old faith, before the old God… What? Is your pessimist’s book not itself a piece of anti-Hellenism and romanticism, itself something “as intoxicating as it is befogging,” a narcotic at any rate, even a piece of music, of *German* music? But listen:\n\n“Let us imagine a rising generation with this fearlessness of vision, this heroic urge toward the tremendous; let us imagine the bold stride of these dragon-slayers, the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all the feeble doctrines of optimism in order to ‘live resolutely,’ wholly and fully: *should it not be necessary* that the tragic human being of this culture, in educating himself for seriousness and terror, should desire a new art, the *art of metaphysical consolation*, tragedy as the Helen who belongs to him, and cry out with Faust:\n\n“And should I not, with longing’s utmost force,\nDraw into life that one and only form?”\n\n“Should it not be *necessary*?”… No, three times no! You young romantics: it should *not* be necessary! But it is very likely to *end* that way, that *you* will end that way, namely “consoled,” as it is written, despite all your self-education for seriousness and terror, “metaphysically consoled,” in short, as romantics end, *Christian*… No! First you should learn the art of *this-worldly* consolation—you should learn to *laugh*, my young friends, if you are determined to remain pessimists; perhaps then, as laughing people, you will one day send all metaphysical consolation-mongering to the devil—and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of that Dionysian monster called *Zarathustra*:\n\n“Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs either! Lift up your legs too, you good dancers, and better yet: stand on your heads as well!\n\n“This crown of the laughing one, this crown of rose garlands: I myself placed this crown upon my head, I myself pronounced my laughter holy. I found no one else strong enough for it today.\n\n“Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light-footed, who beckons with his wings, poised for flight, beckoning to all birds, ready and prepared, a blissful lighthearted one:—\n\n“Zarathustra the truth-sayer, Zarathustra the truth-laugher, no impatient man, no man of absolutes, one who loves leaps and sidesteps: I myself placed this crown upon my head!\n\n“This crown of the laughing one, this crown of rose garlands: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown! I pronounced laughter holy: you higher human beings, *learn*—to laugh!”\n\n*Also sprach Zarathustra*, vierter Theil S. 87.\n\n### Preface to Richard Wagner\n\nTo keep at a distance all the possible misgivings, agitation, and misunderstandings that the thoughts gathered in this work will provoke, given the peculiar character of our aesthetic public, and to be able to write these introductory words with the same contemplative delight whose imprint the work itself bears on every page, as the fossil of happy and uplifting hours, I picture the moment when you, my deeply revered friend, will receive this work: how, perhaps after an evening walk through the winter snow, you look at the unbound Prometheus on the title page, read my name, and are immediately convinced that, whatever this work may contain, its author has something serious and urgent to say, and likewise that, in everything he conceived, he conversed with you as though you were present and could write down only what befitted that presence. You will recall that I gathered myself into these thoughts at the same time as your splendid commemorative essay on Beethoven was taking shape—that is, amid the terrors and sublimities of the war that had just broken out. Yet anyone who, in connection with this gathering of thoughts, should think of the contrast between patriotic excitement and aesthetic indulgence, between courageous seriousness and cheerful play, would be mistaken: rather, on truly reading this work, such readers might discover to their astonishment what a seriously German problem we are dealing with, one that we place at the very center of German hopes, as their vortex and turning point. But perhaps these same readers will find it altogether offensive to see an aesthetic problem taken so seriously, if they can recognize in art no more than an amusing sideline, a jingling of bells that could easily be dispensed with beside the “seriousness of existence”: as though no one knew what such a “seriousness of existence” amounts to in this contrast. Let these serious people be informed that I am convinced that art is the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life, in the sense of the man to whom I wish to dedicate this work here, as my sublime pioneer on this path.\n\n*Basel*, at the end of the year 1871.\n\n### Section 1\n\nWe will have gained much for the science of aesthetics when we have reached not merely a logical understanding but the immediate certainty of intuition that the continuing development of art is bound to the duality of the *Apollonian* and the *Dionysian*, much as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, with their continuous struggle and only periodic reconciliation. We borrow these names from the Greeks, who make the profound secret teachings of their view of art intelligible to the discerning not in concepts, but in the vividly clear figures of their world of gods. With their two deities of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we associate our recognition that in the Greek world an immense opposition of origins and aims exists between the image-maker’s art, the Apollonian, and the imageless art of music, the art of Dionysus: these two very different drives run side by side, usually in open conflict, continually provoking one another to new and more powerful births, in which to perpetuate the struggle of that opposition which the shared word “art” only seemingly bridges; until at last, through a miraculous metaphysical act of the Hellenic “will,” they appear paired, and in this pairing finally produce the equally Dionysian and Apollonian artwork of Attic tragedy.\n\nTo bring these two drives closer to us, let us first imagine them as the separate art-worlds of *dream* and *intoxication*, two physiological phenomena between which an opposition corresponding to that between the Apollonian and the Dionysian can be observed. It was in dreams, according to Lucretius’s conception, that the glorious figures of the gods first appeared before human souls; in dreams the great sculptor saw the enchanting bodily forms of superhuman beings; and the Hellenic poet, if asked about the secrets of poetic procreation, would likewise have pointed to dreams and offered instruction like that given by Hans Sachs in The Mastersingers:\n\nMy friend, this is the poet’s task:\nTo mark his dreams and read their meaning.\nBelieve me, our truest illusion\nIs opened up to us in dreams:\nAll verse and poetry\nIs nothing but the reading of true dreams.\n\nThe beautiful semblance of dream-worlds, in whose creation every human being is a complete artist, is the precondition of all visual art, and indeed, as we shall see, of an important half of poetry as well. We delight in an immediate understanding of form; all shapes speak to us; nothing is indifferent or unnecessary. Yet even amid the most intense life of this dream-reality we retain a glimmering sense of its *semblance*: at least this is my experience, and I could offer much testimony and many sayings of poets to show how common, indeed how normal, it is. The philosophical person even has a presentiment that beneath this reality in which we live and exist there lies hidden a second, quite different reality, so that this one too is a semblance; and Schopenhauer expressly describes the gift of sometimes seeing human beings and all things as mere phantoms or dream-images as the mark of a capacity for philosophy. As the philosopher relates to the reality of existence, so the artistically sensitive person relates to the reality of dreams; he looks closely and gladly, for from these images he interprets life, through these events he prepares himself for life. It is by no means only pleasant and friendly images that he experiences within himself with this all-embracing understanding: the serious, the gloomy, the sorrowful, the dark, sudden obstacles, the teasing tricks of chance, anxious expectations—in short, the whole “divine comedy” of life, including the Inferno—passes before him, not merely like a play of shadows—for he lives and suffers along with these scenes—and yet not without that fleeting sense of semblance. And perhaps some, like me, will remember sometimes calling out to themselves amid the dangers and terrors of a dream, encouragingly and with success: “It is a dream! I want to keep dreaming it!” I have also been told of people able to continue the causal sequence of one and the same dream over three or more successive nights: facts that clearly testify that our innermost being, the common foundation of us all, experiences the dream within itself with deep pleasure and joyful necessity.\n\nThis joyful necessity of the dream experience was likewise expressed by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, as the god of all image-making powers, is also the god of prophecy. He who is, in the root meaning of his name, the “shining one,” the deity of light, also rules over the beautiful semblance of the inner world of fantasy. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast to the only fragmentarily intelligible reality of waking life, and then the deep awareness of nature’s healing and helping power in sleep and dreams, are at the same time the symbolic analogue of the prophetic faculty and of the arts in general, through which life is made possible and worth living. But that delicate line which the dream-image must not cross if it is not to have a pathological effect—otherwise semblance would deceive us as crude reality—must also be present in the image of Apollo: that measured restraint, that freedom from the wilder impulses, that wise repose of the image-making god. His eye must be “sunlike,” in keeping with his origin; even when it looks angry and displeased, the consecration of beautiful semblance rests upon it. And so, in an eccentric sense, what Schopenhauer says of the human being caught in the veil of Maya might apply to Apollo. Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I S. 416: “Just as on the raging sea, which, boundless on every side, howling lifts and lowers mountains of waves, a boatman sits in a small boat, trusting the frail vessel; so, amid a world of torments, the individual human being sits calmly, supported by and trusting in the principle of individuation.” Indeed, one might say of Apollo that in him the unshaken trust in that principle and the calm repose of the person caught within it have found their most sublime expression; one might even describe Apollo as the glorious divine image of the principle of individuation, from whose gestures and glances the whole pleasure and wisdom of “semblance,” together with its beauty, would speak to us.\n\nIn the same passage Schopenhauer described for us the tremendous *horror* that seizes a person when he suddenly loses confidence in the cognitive forms of appearance, because the principle of sufficient reason, in one of its forms, seems to admit an exception. If to this horror we add the blissful rapture that rises from the innermost ground of the human being, indeed of nature, at this same shattering of the principle of individuation, we gain a glimpse into the essence of the *Dionysian*, brought closest to us by the analogy of *intoxication*. Either under the influence of the narcotic drink of which all primitive human beings and peoples speak in hymns, or at the mighty approach of spring, which pervades all nature with pleasure, those Dionysian stirrings awaken, and as they intensify, the subjective fades away into complete self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages too, ever-growing throngs rolled from place to place under this same Dionysian power, singing and dancing: in these dancers of St. John and St. Vitus we recognize the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their prehistory in Asia Minor, reaching back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. There are people who, from lack of experience or dullness of mind, turn away from such phenomena as from “epidemic diseases,” mockingly or pityingly, conscious of their own health: the poor creatures have no inkling how corpse-pale and ghostly this very “health” of theirs looks when the glowing life of Dionysian enthusiasts rushes past them.\n\nUnder the spell of the Dionysian, not only is the bond between human being and human being renewed: alienated, hostile, or subjugated nature too once more celebrates her festival of reconciliation with her lost son, humanity. The earth offers her gifts freely, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and the desert approach in peace. The chariot of Dionysus is heaped with flowers and garlands; beneath his yoke stride panthers and tigers. Transform Beethoven’s jubilant hymn to “Joy” into a painting, and do not let your imagination fall short when the millions sink shuddering into the dust: then you can approach the Dionysian. Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile boundaries that need, arbitrary power, or “insolent fashion” have established between human beings break apart. Now, at the gospel of universal harmony, everyone feels himself not merely united, reconciled, fused with his neighbor, but one with him, as though the veil of Maya had been torn and fluttered only in tatters before the mysterious primordial One. In song and dance the human being expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is about to fly up, dancing, into the air. Enchantment speaks from his gestures. Just as the animals now speak and the earth yields milk and honey, so something supernatural also sounds forth from him: he feels himself a god, he himself now moves in the same rapture and exaltation in which he saw the gods move in his dreams. The human being is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art: the artistic power of all nature reveals itself here, amid the shudders of intoxication, for the supreme, blissful satisfaction of the primordial One. The noblest clay, the most precious marble, is kneaded and hewn here—the human being—and to the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist sounds the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries: “Do you fall down, you millions? Do you sense the Creator, world?”—\n\n### Section 2\n\nSo far we have considered the Apollonian and its opposite, the Dionysian, as artistic powers that burst forth from nature itself, *without the mediation of the human artist*, and in which nature’s artistic drives find their first and direct satisfaction: on the one hand as the image-world of dreams, whose perfection has no connection whatever with the individual’s intellectual level or artistic education; on the other as an intoxicated reality that likewise pays no heed to the individual, but even seeks to annihilate him and redeem him through a mystical feeling of unity. In relation to these immediate artistic states of nature, every artist is an “imitator”: either an Apollonian dream-artist or a Dionysian artist of intoxication, or finally—as, for example, in Greek tragedy—an artist of both intoxication and dream. Such an artist we might imagine sinking down in Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-abandonment, alone and apart from the rapturous choruses, whereupon, through the influence of Apollonian dreaming, his own state—that is, his unity with the innermost ground of the world—is revealed to him *in a symbolic dream-image*.\n\nAfter these general premises and contrasts, let us now approach the *Greeks* to discover to what degree and to what height those *artistic drives of nature* were developed in them. This will enable us to understand and appreciate more deeply the Greek artist’s relation to his archetypes, or, in Aristotle’s phrase, “the imitation of nature.” Despite all their literature on dreams and their numerous dream anecdotes, we can speak of the Greeks’ *dreams* only conjecturally, though with considerable confidence: given their eye’s incredibly precise and sure grasp of sculptural form, together with their bright and candid delight in color, we cannot help assuming, to the shame of all later generations, that their dreams too possessed a logical causality of lines and contours, colors and groups, a succession of scenes resembling their finest reliefs, whose perfection, if a comparison were possible, would surely entitle us to call the dreaming Greeks Homers and Homer a dreaming Greek—in a deeper sense than when a modern person ventures to compare himself, as regards his dreaming, with Shakespeare.\n\nBy contrast, we need not speak merely in conjectures when uncovering the enormous gulf that separates the *Dionysian Greeks* from the Dionysian barbarians. From every corner of the ancient world—leaving the modern world aside here—from Rome to Babylon, we can demonstrate the existence of Dionysian festivals whose type stands, at best, in the same relation to that of the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, to whom the goat gave its name and attributes, stands to Dionysus himself. Almost everywhere the center of these festivals lay in an extravagant sexual license whose waves swept over every form of family life and its venerable laws; it was precisely nature’s wildest beasts that were unleashed here, reaching that abominable mixture of sensuality and cruelty that has always seemed to me the true “witches’ brew.” Against the feverish stirrings of these festivals, knowledge of which reached the Greeks by every land and sea route, they seem for a time to have been completely secured and protected by the figure of Apollo, rising here in all his pride, who could hold up the head of Medusa against no more dangerous power than this grotesquely uncouth Dionysian one. It is in Doric art that this majestically rejecting stance of Apollo has been immortalized. This resistance became more precarious and even impossible when similar drives at last broke through from the deepest root of the Hellenic itself: now the activity of the Delphic god was confined to taking the destructive weapons from his mighty opponent’s hands through a timely reconciliation. This reconciliation is the most important moment in the history of Greek worship: wherever one looks, the upheavals caused by this event are visible. It was the reconciliation of two opponents, with a strict definition of the boundaries they were henceforth to observe and with the periodic sending of gifts of honor; at bottom, the gulf had not been bridged. But if we look at how Dionysian power revealed itself under the pressure of that peace agreement, we now recognize in the Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, in comparison with those Babylonian Sacaea and their reversion of the human being to tiger and ape, the significance of festivals of world-redemption and days of transfiguration. Only with them does nature attain her artistic jubilation; only with them does the rending of the principle of individuation become an artistic phenomenon. That hideous witches’ brew of sensuality and cruelty was powerless here: only the wondrous mixture and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian enthusiasts recalls it—as medicines recall deadly poisons—that phenomenon in which pain awakens pleasure and jubilation wrests agonized sounds from the breast. Out of the highest joy sounds a cry of horror or a yearning lament for an irreplaceable loss. In those Greek festivals a sentimental strain in nature breaks forth, as it were, as though she had to sigh over her dismemberment into individuals. The song and gesture-language of such doubly attuned enthusiasts was something new and unheard-of to the Homeric Greek world; and Dionysian *music* in particular aroused terror and horror in it. If music was apparently already known as an Apollonian art, it was so, strictly speaking, only as the wave-beat of rhythm, whose shaping power was developed to represent Apollonian states. Apollo’s music was Doric architecture in sound, but in merely suggested sounds, such as belong to the kithara. Precisely the element that constitutes the character of Dionysian music, and thus of music altogether, is carefully kept away as un-Apollonian: the shattering power of sound, the unified stream of melody, and the utterly incomparable world of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb the human being is stimulated to the highest intensification of all his symbolic capacities; something never before felt presses for expression—the destruction of the veil of Maya, oneness as the genius of the species, indeed of nature. Now the essence of nature is to express itself symbolically; a new world of symbols is needed: first the whole symbolism of the body, not merely the symbolism of the mouth, the face, the word, but the full gesture of dance, moving every limb in rhythm. Then the other symbolic powers, those of music, suddenly grow impetuously in rhythm, dynamics, and harmony. To comprehend this total unleashing of all symbolic powers, a human being must already have reached that height of self-abandonment which seeks to express itself symbolically in these powers: thus the dithyrambic servant of Dionysus is understood only by his own kind! With what astonishment the Apollonian Greek must have looked at him! An astonishment all the greater because it was mingled with the horror that all this was not really so alien to him after all, indeed that his Apollonian consciousness concealed this Dionysian world from him only like a veil.\n\n### Section 3\n\nTo understand this, we must dismantle that artful edifice of *Apollonian culture*, stone by stone, as it were, until we see the foundations on which it rests. Here we first perceive the glorious figures of the *Olympian* gods standing on the pediments of this building, their deeds adorning its friezes in reliefs that shine far and wide. If Apollo too stands among them, as one deity beside others and without claiming first place, we must not let this mislead us. The same drive that took visible form in Apollo gave birth to that entire Olympian world, and in this sense we may regard Apollo as its father. What was the tremendous need from which so radiant a company of Olympian beings arose?\n\nAnyone who approaches these Olympians with another religion in his heart and now searches among them for moral elevation, indeed holiness, for disembodied spiritualization, for loving looks full of compassion, will soon have to turn his back on them, displeased and disappointed. Nothing here recalls asceticism, spirituality, and duty: here only a luxuriant, indeed triumphant existence speaks to us, in which everything that exists is deified, whether good or evil. And so the onlooker may stand quite bewildered before this fantastic exuberance of life and ask himself with what magic potion in their veins these high-spirited people can have enjoyed life, that, wherever they look, Helen, the ideal image of their own existence, “hovering in sweet sensuality,” meets them with laughter. But to this onlooker, already turning away, we must call out: “Do not leave, but first hear what Greek folk wisdom says of this same life that spreads before you here with such inexplicable cheerfulness. The old legend tells how King Midas hunted the wise *Silenus*, companion of Dionysus, in the forest for a long time without catching him. When he finally fell into his hands, the king asked what was the very best and most excellent thing for human beings. Stiff and motionless, the spirit remained silent, until, compelled by the king, he at last broke out with shrill laughter into these words: ‘Miserable race of a day, children of chance and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be most beneficial for you not to hear? The very best is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to *be*, to be *nothing*. But the second best for you is—to die soon.’”\n\nHow does the Olympian world of gods relate to this folk wisdom? As the tortured martyr’s rapturous vision relates to his torments.\n\nNow the Olympian magic mountain opens before us, as it were, and shows us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence: to be able to live at all, he had to set before them the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians. That immense distrust of the Titanic powers of nature, that Moira enthroned mercilessly above all knowledge, that vulture of the great friend of humanity, Prometheus, that fearful fate of wise Oedipus, that ancestral curse of the house of Atreus which forces Orestes to murder his mother—in short, that whole philosophy of the forest god, together with its mythical examples, which brought the melancholy Etruscans to ruin—was continually overcome anew by the Greeks through that artistic *intermediate world* of the Olympians, or at least veiled and hidden from view. To be able to live, the Greeks had to create these gods out of the deepest necessity: a process we may probably imagine as the gradual development, through that Apollonian drive for beauty, of the Olympian divine order of joy from the original Titanic divine order of terror, as roses burst forth from thorny bushes. How else could this people, so acutely sensitive, so impetuous in desire, so uniquely capable of *suffering*, have endured existence if it had not been shown to them in their gods, suffused with a higher glory? The same drive that calls art into life, as the complement and completion of existence that seduces us into living on, also brought the Olympian world into being, in which the Hellenic “will” held up a transfiguring mirror to itself. Thus the gods justify human life by living it themselves—the only sufficient theodicy! Existence beneath the bright sunshine of such gods is felt to be desirable in itself, and the true *pain* of Homeric humanity concerns departure from it, above all an early departure, so that one might now say of them, reversing the wisdom of Silenus, “The very worst thing for them is to die soon, the second worst to die at all.” When lament does sound, it tells once more of short-lived Achilles, of the human race changing and passing like leaves, of the downfall of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest hero to long to go on living, even as a day laborer. So impetuously does the “will,” at the Apollonian stage, crave this existence, so completely at one with it does the Homeric human being feel, that even lament becomes its hymn of praise.\n\nHere it must now be said that this harmony, indeed unity, of humanity with nature, gazed upon so longingly by modern people, for which Schiller established the technical term “naive,” is by no means so simple, self-evident, almost inevitable a condition that we *must* encounter it at the gateway of every culture as a paradise of humanity: only an age that tried to imagine Rousseau’s Emile as an artist too, and fancied it had found in Homer just such an artist-Emile, brought up at nature’s heart, could believe this. Wherever we encounter the “naive” in art, we must recognize the highest effect of Apollonian culture, which must always first overthrow a realm of Titans and slay monsters, and must have triumphed, through powerful delusive visions and pleasurable illusions, over a terrifying depth of insight into the world and the most acute capacity for suffering. But how rarely is the naive, that complete absorption in the beauty of semblance, attained! How inexpressibly sublime, then, is *Homer*, who, as an individual, stands in the same relation to that Apollonian popular culture as the individual dream-artist to the capacity for dreaming of the people and of nature in general. Homeric “naivety” can be understood only as the complete victory of Apollonian illusion: an illusion of the kind nature so often uses to attain her purposes. The true goal is concealed by a delusive image: we reach out our hands for the latter, and nature attains the former through our deception. In the Greeks the “will” wanted to behold itself in the transfiguration of genius and the world of art; to glorify itself, its creatures had to feel themselves worthy of glorification; they had to see themselves again in a higher sphere, without this perfected world of vision acting as an imperative or a reproach. This is the sphere of beauty in which they saw their mirror images, the Olympians. With this mirroring of beauty, the Hellenic “will” fought against the talent for suffering and for the wisdom of suffering that corresponded to the artistic talent: and as a monument to its victory, Homer stands before us, the naive artist.\n\n### Section 4\n\nThe analogy of dreams teaches us something about this naive artist. If we picture the dreamer calling out to himself, in the midst of the illusion of the dream-world and without disturbing it, “It is a dream; I want to keep dreaming it”; if from this we must infer a deep inner pleasure in beholding dreams; if, on the other hand, to be able to dream at all with this inner pleasure in seeing, we must have completely forgotten the day and its dreadful intrusiveness—then, under the guidance of Apollo the interpreter of dreams, we may interpret all these phenomena somewhat as follows. Certain as it is that, of the two halves of life, the waking and the dreaming half, the former seems to us incomparably preferable, more important, more worthy, more worth living, indeed the only half actually lived, I would nevertheless, despite every appearance of paradox, maintain precisely the opposite valuation of dreams for that mysterious ground of our being whose appearance we are. For the more I perceive in nature those all-powerful artistic drives, and in them an ardent longing for semblance, for redemption through semblance, the more I feel compelled toward the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent and primordial One, as the eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the enchanting vision, the pleasurable semblance, for its continual redemption: a semblance that we, wholly caught within it and consisting of it, are compelled to experience as the truly nonexistent—that is, as a continual becoming in time, space, and causality, in other words, as empirical reality. If, then, we set aside our own “reality” for a moment and understand our empirical existence, like that of the world in general, as a representation of the primordial One generated at every moment, then the dream must now count for us as the *semblance of semblance*, and thus as a still higher satisfaction of the primordial desire for semblance. For this same reason, the innermost core of nature takes that indescribable pleasure in the naive artist and the naive artwork, which is likewise only “semblance of semblance.” *Raphael*, himself one of those immortal “naive” artists, has portrayed for us in a symbolic painting that reduction of semblance to semblance, the primordial process of the naive artist and of Apollonian culture alike. In his *Transfiguration*, the lower half, with the possessed boy, his despairing bearers, the helplessly frightened disciples, shows us the reflection of eternal primordial pain, the sole ground of the world: “semblance” here is the reflected glow of eternal contradiction, the father of things. From this semblance there now rises, like an ambrosial fragrance, a visionary new world of semblance, invisible to those caught in the first semblance—a radiant hovering in purest bliss and painless contemplation shining from wide-open eyes. Here, in the highest symbolism of art, we have before our eyes that Apollonian world of beauty and its foundation, the terrible wisdom of Silenus, and through intuition we grasp their mutual necessity. Apollo, however, confronts us once again as the deification of the principle of individuation, in which alone the eternally attained goal of the primordial One, its redemption through semblance, is accomplished: with sublime gestures he shows us how the whole world of torment is necessary so that through it the individual may be driven to produce the redeeming vision and then, absorbed in contemplating it, sit calmly in his rocking boat in the middle of the sea.\n\nThis deification of individuation, if it is conceived at all as imperative and prescriptive, knows only one law: the individual—that is, observance of the individual’s boundaries, *measure* in the Hellenic sense. Apollo, as an ethical deity, demands measure from his followers and, so that they may observe it, self-knowledge. Thus alongside the aesthetic necessity of beauty run the demands “Know yourself” and “Not too much!” while self-exaltation and excess were regarded as the truly hostile demons of the non-Apollonian sphere, and hence as qualities of the pre-Apollonian time, the age of Titans, and of the world outside the Apollonian, that is, the barbarian world. Because of his Titanic love for humanity, Prometheus had to be torn apart by vultures; because of his excessive wisdom, which solved the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus had to plunge into a bewildering whirlpool of atrocities: thus the Delphic god interpreted the Greek past.\n\nThe effect aroused by the *Dionysian* also seemed “Titanic” and “barbaric” to the Apollonian Greek, though he could not conceal from himself that he was at the same time inwardly akin to those overthrown Titans and heroes. Indeed, he had to feel still more: his entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a veiled foundation of suffering and knowledge, which that Dionysian power laid bare to him again. And look! Apollo could not live without Dionysus! The “Titanic” and the “barbaric” were ultimately just as necessary as the Apollonian! And now let us imagine how the ecstatic sound of the Dionysian festival rang into this world built on semblance and moderation and artificially dammed up, in ever more enticing, magical strains; how in these strains the whole *excess* of nature in pleasure, suffering, and knowledge grew audible, rising to a piercing scream: let us imagine what the psalm-chanting artist of Apollo, with the ghostly sound of his harp, could amount to beside this demonic popular song! The Muses of the arts of “semblance” grew pale before an art that spoke the truth in its intoxication; the wisdom of Silenus cried “Woe! Woe!” against the cheerful Olympians. The individual, with all his boundaries and measures, perished here in the self-forgetfulness of Dionysian states and forgot the Apollonian laws. *Excess* revealed itself as truth; contradiction, bliss born from pain, spoke of itself from the heart of nature. And so, wherever the Dionysian broke through, the Apollonian was suspended and annihilated. Yet it is just as certain that wherever the first assault was withstood, the prestige and majesty of the Delphic god expressed themselves more rigidly and menacingly than ever. For I can explain the *Doric* state and Doric art to myself only as a permanent military encampment of the Apollonian: only in unremitting resistance to the Titanic-barbaric essence of the Dionysian could so defiantly austere an art, enclosed by ramparts, so martial and harsh an education, so cruel and ruthless a state endure for long.\n\nUp to this point we have developed further what I observed at the opening of this essay: how the Dionysian and the Apollonian ruled the Hellenic character in ever-new, successive births, each intensifying the other; how out of the “bronze” age, with its battles of Titans and its harsh folk philosophy, the Homeric world developed under the sway of the Apollonian drive for beauty; how this “naive” splendor was swallowed up again by the invading flood of the Dionysian; and how, confronting this new power, the Apollonian rose to the rigid majesty of Doric art and its view of the world. If in this way the earlier history of the Hellenes, in the struggle of those two hostile principles, falls into four great stages of art, we are now compelled to ask further about the ultimate design of this becoming and striving, unless we are to regard the last period attained, that of Doric art, as the summit and purpose of those artistic drives. And here the sublime and highly praised artwork of *Attic tragedy* and the dramatic dithyramb presents itself to our eyes as the shared goal of both drives, whose mysterious marriage, after a long preceding struggle, has glorified itself in such a child—who is at once Antigone and Cassandra.\n\n### Section 5\n\nWe now approach the true aim of our inquiry, which seeks knowledge of the Dionysian-Apollonian genius and his artwork, or at least an intuitive understanding of that mystery of union. Here we first ask where that new germ, which later developed into tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb, first became perceptible in the Hellenic world. Antiquity itself gives us a pictorial answer when, on sculptures, engraved gems, and the like, it places *Homer and Archilochus* side by side as the forefathers and torchbearers of Greek poetry, in the sure feeling that these two alone were to be regarded as equally and wholly original natures, from whom a stream of fire continued to flow through all subsequent Greek generations. Homer, the aged dreamer absorbed in himself, the type of the Apollonian, naive artist, now looks in astonishment at the passionate head of Archilochus, the warlike servant of the Muses driven wildly through existence; and modern aesthetics could add by way of interpretation only that here the “objective” artist was set against the first “subjective” one. This interpretation does little for us, because we know the subjective artist only as a bad artist, and in every kind and degree of art demand first and foremost the conquest of the subjective, redemption from the “I,” and the silencing of every individual will and desire; indeed, without objectivity, without pure, disinterested contemplation, we can never believe in even the slightest truly artistic creation. Therefore our aesthetics must first solve the problem of how the “lyric poet” is possible as an artist: he who, according to the experience of every age, always says “I” and sings before us the whole chromatic scale of his passions and desires. Beside Homer, this very Archilochus terrifies us with the cry of his hatred and scorn, with the drunken outbursts of his desire; does this not make him, the first artist called subjective, the true nonartist? But why, then, the reverence shown to him as a poet, precisely by the Delphic oracle too, the hearth of “objective” art, in some very remarkable pronouncements?\n\n*Schiller* has shed light on the process of his poetic creation through a psychological observation that he himself could not explain, yet that does not seem dubious. He confesses that, in the preparatory state before the act of composing poetry, he did not have before him and within him a series of images with an ordered causality of thoughts, but rather a *musical mood* (“At first, feeling in me has no definite and clear object; this takes shape only later. A certain musical state of mind comes first, and only after this does the poetic idea follow in me”). If we now add the most important phenomenon of all ancient lyric poetry, the union, indeed identity, *of the lyric poet with the musician*, everywhere regarded as natural—beside which our modern lyric poetry looks like a divine statue without a head—we can now, on the basis of our previously expounded aesthetic metaphysics, explain the lyric poet to ourselves as follows. First, as a Dionysian artist, he has become entirely one with the primordial One, its pain and contradiction, and produces the image of this primordial One as music, if music has indeed rightly been called a repetition of the world and a second cast of it; but now this music becomes visible to him again, as in a *symbolic dream-image*, under the influence of Apollonian dreaming. That imageless and conceptless reflection of primordial pain in music, with its redemption in semblance, now produces a second mirroring, as an individual symbol or example. The artist has already surrendered his subjectivity in the Dionysian process: the image that now shows him his unity with the heart of the world is a dream-scene that gives visible form to that primordial contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial pleasure of semblance. The lyric poet’s “I” thus sounds from the abyss of being; his “subjectivity,” in the sense of modern aestheticians, is a fiction. When Archilochus, the first lyric poet of the Greeks, declares his raging love and at the same time his contempt to the daughters of Lycambes, it is not his passion that dances before us in an orgiastic frenzy: we see Dionysus and the maenads, we see the intoxicated enthusiast Archilochus sunk in sleep—as Euripides describes it to us in The Bacchae, sleep on a high mountain pasture in the midday sun—and now Apollo approaches him and touches him with the laurel. The sleeper’s Dionysian-musical enchantment now sprays, as it were, sparks of images around him: lyric poems, which in their highest development are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.\n\nThe sculptor, and likewise the epic poet akin to him, is absorbed in the pure contemplation of images. Without any image at all, the Dionysian musician is himself entirely primordial pain and its primordial echo. Out of the mystical state of self-abandonment and unity, the lyrical genius feels a world of images and symbols growing forth, with an entirely different coloring, causality, and speed from the world of the sculptor and epic poet. While the latter lives in these images, and only in them, with joyful contentment, and never tires of lovingly contemplating them down to their smallest details; while even the image of the wrathful Achilles is for him only an image, whose wrathful expression he enjoys with that dreamlike pleasure in semblance—so that, through this mirror of semblance, he is protected against becoming one and fusing with his figures—the lyric poet’s images, by contrast, are nothing but *himself*, and, as it were, only different objectifications of him, which is why he, as the animating center of that world, may say “I.” Only this selfhood is not the same as that of the waking, empirically real human being, but the only truly existent and eternal selfhood, resting at the foundation of things, through whose images the lyrical genius sees right through to that foundation. Now let us imagine how, among these images, he also sees *himself* as a nongenius—that is, his “subject,” the whole tumult of subjective passions and impulses of will directed toward a particular thing that seems real to him. If it now appears as though the lyrical genius and the nongenius bound to him were one, and as though the former spoke that little word “I” of himself, this semblance will no longer be able to mislead us, as it certainly has misled those who called the lyric poet the subjective poet. In truth, Archilochus, the passionately inflamed human being who loves and hates, is only a vision of the genius who is already no longer Archilochus but the genius of the world, and who symbolically expresses his primordial pain in that image of the human being Archilochus; whereas that subjectively willing and desiring human being Archilochus can never, ever be a poet. But it is by no means necessary for the lyric poet to see before him only the phenomenon of the human being Archilochus as a reflection of eternal being; and tragedy shows how far the lyric poet’s visionary world can move away from that phenomenon, which admittedly lies nearest to hand.\n\n*Schopenhauer*, who did not conceal from himself the difficulty the lyric poet presents for a philosophical consideration of art, believes he has found a way out that I cannot follow, although in his profound metaphysics of music he alone had been given the means by which that difficulty could be decisively removed—as I believe I have done here, in his spirit and in his honor. He, by contrast, describes the distinctive essence of song as follows (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, S. 295): “It is the subject of the will, that is, one’s own willing, that fills the singer’s consciousness, often as a released, satisfied willing (joy), but probably still more often as a thwarted willing (sorrow), always as emotion, passion, an agitated state of mind. Beside this, however, and at the same time, the sight of surrounding nature makes the singer conscious of himself as the subject of pure, will-less knowing, whose unshakable, blissful calm now stands in contrast to the urge of willing, always restricted, always still in want: the feeling of this contrast, of this interplay, is really what expresses itself in the song as a whole and what constitutes the lyrical state at all. In this state, pure knowing approaches us, as it were, to redeem us from willing and its urge: we follow, but only for moments; again and again willing, the memory of our personal aims, tears us away from calm contemplation; but again and again, too, the nearest beautiful surroundings, in which pure, will-less knowledge presents itself to us, lure us away from willing. Thus in song and in the lyrical mood, willing (the personal interest in an aim) and pure contemplation of the surroundings that present themselves are wondrously intermingled: relations between the two are sought and imagined; the subjective mood, the affection of the will, imparts its color by reflection to the contemplated surroundings, and these in turn to that mood: the authentic song is the imprint of this entire, so mingled and divided state of mind.”\n\nWho could fail to recognize in this account that lyric poetry is characterized here as an art imperfectly attained, one that reaches its goal only by leaps, as it were, and seldom—indeed, as a half-art whose *essence* is supposed to consist in the wondrous intermingling of willing and pure contemplation, that is, of the unaesthetic and the aesthetic state? We maintain, rather, that the whole opposition by which even Schopenhauer still classifies the arts as if by a standard of value, the opposition of subjective and objective, has no place at all in aesthetics, since the subject, the individual who wills and advances his egoistic aims, can be conceived only as the opponent, not the origin, of art. But insofar as the subject is an artist, he is already redeemed from his individual will and has become, as it were, a medium through which the one truly existent subject celebrates its redemption in semblance. For this above all must be clear to us, to our humiliation *and* exaltation: that the whole comedy of art is by no means performed for us, for our improvement and education, say, and that we are just as little the true creators of that world of art; but we may indeed assume of ourselves that, for its true creator, we are already images and artistic projections, and have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art—for only as an *aesthetic phenomenon* are existence and the world eternally *justified*—while, to be sure, our consciousness of this significance of ours is scarcely different from the consciousness that warriors painted on a canvas have of the battle depicted on it. Thus all our knowledge of art is at bottom entirely illusory, because as knowers we are not one and identical with that being who, as the sole creator and spectator of that comedy of art, provides eternal enjoyment for himself. Only insofar as the genius, in the act of artistic procreation, fuses with that primordial artist of the world does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in that state he is, wondrously, like the uncanny fairy-tale image that can turn its eyes and look at itself; now he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator.\n\n### Section 6\n\nRegarding Archilochus, scholarly research has discovered that he introduced the *folk song* into literature, and that on account of this deed he holds that unique place beside Homer in the general esteem of the Greeks. But what is the folk song, as opposed to the wholly Apollonian epic? What else but the perpetual trace of a union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Its immense diffusion, spread over all peoples and swelling in ever new births, is for us a testimony to how strong that twofold artistic drive of nature is—a drive that leaves its traces in the folk song in the same way that the orgiastic movements of a people immortalize themselves in its music. Indeed, it would also have to be demonstrable historically that every period rich in productive folk songs was at the same time stirred most powerfully by Dionysian currents, which we must always regard as the ground and presupposition of the folk song.\n\nThe folk song, however, counts for us first and foremost as a musical mirror of the world, as primal melody, which now seeks out a parallel dream appearance for itself and speaks it forth in poetry. *Melody is therefore the first and universal thing*, which for that very reason can undergo several objectifications, in several texts. In the naive estimation of the people it is also by far the more important and the more necessary element. Melody gives birth to poetry out of itself, and does so again and again, ever anew; nothing else is what *the strophic form of the folk song* wants to tell us—a phenomenon I always regarded with astonishment until I finally found this explanation. Anyone who looks through a collection of folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn for instance, with this theory in mind will find countless examples of how the ceaselessly birthing melody sprays sparks of images around itself, which in their motley colors, their abrupt changes, even their mad tumbling over one another reveal a force utterly alien to epic semblance and its calm onward flow. From the standpoint of the epic, this uneven and irregular world of images in lyric is simply to be condemned; and this is surely what the solemn epic rhapsodes at the Apollonian festivals in the age of Terpander did.\n\nIn the poetry of the folk song, then, we see language strained to the utmost to *imitate music*; and so with Archilochus a new world of poetry begins, one that contradicts the Homeric at its deepest root. With this we have named the only possible relation between poetry and music, word and tone: the word, the image, the concept seeks an expression analogous to music and now suffers the power of music upon itself. In this sense we may distinguish two main currents in the linguistic history of the Greek people, according to whether language imitated the world of appearances and images or the world of music. One need only reflect more deeply on the linguistic differences of color, of syntactic structure, of vocabulary between Homer and Pindar to grasp the significance of this opposition; indeed, it becomes palpably clear that between Homer and Pindar the *orgiastic flute melodies of Olympus* must have sounded—melodies that even in the age of Aristotle, amid a vastly more developed music, still swept people away into drunken rapture and surely, in their original effect, provoked every poetic means of expression of the people of that time to imitation. I recall here a familiar phenomenon of our own day, one that our aesthetics finds merely offensive. Again and again we experience how a Beethoven symphony compels individual listeners to speak in images, even if an assemblage of the various worlds of images produced by a single piece of music looks quite fantastically motley, even contradictory. To exercise one’s poor wit on such assemblages while overlooking a phenomenon that is surely worth explaining is exactly in the manner of that aesthetics. Indeed, even when the tone-poet himself has spoken about a composition in images—when, say, he calls a symphony pastoral, and one movement “Scene by the Brook,” another “Merry Gathering of Country Folk”—these too are merely figurative representations born out of the music, and not at all the imitated objects of music—representations that can teach us nothing whatever about the *Dionysian* content of music, and that have no exclusive worth beside other images. We must now transfer this process of music discharging itself in images to a youthfully fresh, linguistically creative multitude, in order to get an inkling of how the strophic folk song arises, and how the whole faculty of language is stirred up by the new principle of imitating music.\n\nIf we may therefore regard lyric poetry as the imitative effulguration of music in images and concepts, we can now ask: “As what does music *appear* in the mirror of imagery and concepts?” *It appears as will*, the word taken in Schopenhauer’s sense, that is, as the opposite of the aesthetic, purely contemplative, will-less state of mind. Here one must now distinguish as sharply as possible the concept of essence from that of appearance: for music, in its essence, cannot possibly be will, because as such it would have to be banished entirely from the realm of art—for the will is that which is in itself unaesthetic—; but it appears as will. For in order to express its appearance in images, the lyric poet needs every stirring of passion, from the whisper of fondness to the rumble of madness; driven by the urge to speak of music in Apollonian similes, he understands all of nature, and himself within it, only as the eternally willing, desiring, yearning. But insofar as he interprets music in images, he himself rests in the still sea-calm of Apollonian contemplation, however much everything he beholds through the medium of music may be in urgent, driving motion around him. Indeed, when he catches sight of himself through that same medium, his own image shows itself to him in a state of unsatisfied feeling: his own willing, yearning, groaning, exulting is a simile by which he interprets music to himself. This is the phenomenon of the lyric poet: as an Apollonian genius he interprets music through the image of the will, while he himself, wholly released from the greed of the will, is a pure, untroubled sun-eye.\n\nThis whole discussion holds fast to the claim that lyric is just as dependent on the spirit of music as music itself, in its complete unrestrictedness, does not *need* image and concept but merely *tolerates* them beside itself. The poetry of the lyric poet can say nothing that did not already lie, in the most immense generality and universal validity, in the music that compelled him to speak in images. The world-symbolism of music can by no means be exhaustively grasped through language, precisely because it refers symbolically to the primal contradiction and primal pain in the heart of the primordial One, and thus symbolizes a sphere that lies above all appearance and before all appearance. Measured against it, every appearance is rather only a simile: and so *language*, as the organ and symbol of appearances, can never and nowhere turn the innermost depth of music outward, but remains, as soon as it engages in imitating music, only in an external contact with it, while music’s deepest meaning cannot be brought one step nearer to us by all lyrical eloquence.\n\n### Section 7\n\nWe must now call to our aid all the artistic principles discussed so far, in order to find our way in the labyrinth that we have to call *the origin of Greek tragedy*. I do not think I assert anything absurd when I say that the problem of this origin has not even been seriously posed so far, let alone solved, however often the fluttering shreds of ancient tradition have already been sewn together by conjecture and torn apart again. This tradition tells us with complete decisiveness *that tragedy arose out of the tragic chorus*, and that originally it was only chorus and nothing but chorus; which obliges us to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as the true primal drama, without letting ourselves be satisfied in any way by the current art-phrases—that the chorus is the ideal spectator, or that it is meant to represent the people over against the princely region of the stage. That last-mentioned explanatory idea, which sounds sublime to many a politician—as if the immutable moral law had been represented by the democratic Athenians in the people’s chorus, which beyond the passionate excesses and extravagances of kings always remains in the right—may be suggested ever so strongly by a remark of Aristotle’s: it has no influence on the original formation of tragedy, since from those purely religious origins the whole opposition of people and prince, indeed every political and social sphere, is excluded. But even with regard to the classical form of the chorus in Aeschylus and Sophocles that we know, we would consider it blasphemy to speak here of an intimation of a “constitutional popular representation”—a blasphemy from which others have not shrunk. The ancient constitutions of state knew no constitutional popular representation in practice, and in their tragedy, one hopes, they never even “intimated” it.\n\nFar more famous than this political explanation of the chorus is the idea of A. W. Schlegel, who recommends that we regard the chorus in a certain sense as the epitome and extract of the mass of spectators, as the “ideal spectator.” This view, set beside the historical tradition that tragedy was originally only chorus, proves to be what it is: a crude, unscientific, yet brilliant assertion, which has gained its brilliance only from its concentrated form of expression, from the genuinely Germanic bias in favor of everything called “ideal,” and from our momentary astonishment. For we are astonished as soon as we compare the theater public so well known to us with that chorus and ask ourselves whether it could ever be possible to idealize out of this public something analogous to the tragic chorus. We deny it silently, and now marvel as much at the boldness of Schlegel’s assertion as at the wholly different nature of the Greek public. For we had always supposed that the true spectator, whoever that may be, must always remain aware that a work of art is before them and not an empirical reality, whereas the tragic chorus of the Greeks is compelled to recognize embodied existences in the figures on the stage. The chorus of Oceanids truly believes it sees the Titan Prometheus before it, and takes itself to be just as real as the god of the scene. And that is supposed to be the highest and purest kind of spectator, to hold Prometheus, like the Oceanids, to be bodily present and real? And it would be the mark of the ideal spectator to run onto the stage and free the god from his torments? We had believed in an aesthetic public, and had held the individual spectator all the more capable the more that spectator was able to take the work of art as art, that is, aesthetically; and now Schlegel’s expression suggested to us that the perfect ideal spectator lets the world of the stage have its effect not aesthetically at all, but bodily and empirically. Oh, those Greeks! we sigh; they overturn our aesthetics! But grown accustomed to this, we repeated Schlegel’s dictum whenever the chorus came up.\n\nBut that tradition, so explicit, speaks against Schlegel here: the chorus in itself, without a stage—that is, the primitive form of tragedy—and that chorus of ideal spectators cannot be reconciled with each other. What kind of art would it be that was drawn out of the concept of the spectator, whose proper form would have to be the “spectator in itself”? The spectator without a spectacle is an absurd concept. We fear that the birth of tragedy can be explained neither from high regard for the moral intelligence of the masses nor from the concept of the spectator without a play, and we consider this problem too deep to be even touched by such shallow ways of looking at it.\n\nAn infinitely more valuable insight into the significance of the chorus had already been revealed by Schiller in the famous preface to Die Braut von Messina, where he regarded the chorus as a living wall that tragedy draws around itself in order to shut itself off completely from the real world and to preserve its ideal ground and its poetic freedom.\n\nWith this, his chief weapon, Schiller fights against the common concept of the natural, against the illusion commonly demanded in dramatic poetry. Although the day itself on the stage is only an artificial one, the architecture only symbolic, and the metrical language bears an ideal character, Schiller argues, error still reigns in the whole: it is not enough that one tolerates merely as a poetic license what is nonetheless the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus is the decisive step by which war is openly and honestly declared on every naturalism in art.—It is a way of thinking such as this, it seems to me, for which our age, imagining itself superior, uses the dismissive catchword “pseudo-idealism.” I fear that we, with our present veneration of the natural and the real, have by contrast arrived at the opposite pole of all idealism, namely in the region of the wax museums. There, too, there is an art, as in certain popular novels of the present day; only let no one torment us with the claim that this art has overcome the Schiller-Goethean “pseudo-idealism.”\n\nTo be sure, it is an “ideal” ground on which, according to Schiller’s correct insight, the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of original tragedy, is accustomed to walk, a ground raised high above the real path of mortals. For this chorus the Greek built the suspended scaffolding of a fictitious *state of nature*, and set fictitious *natural beings* upon it. Tragedy grew up on this foundation and, for that reason alone, of course, has been relieved from the very beginning of any painstaking portrayal of reality. Yet it is no world fantasized arbitrarily into the space between heaven and earth; rather it is a world of the same reality and credibility that Olympus, together with its inhabitants, possessed for the believing Hellene. The satyr, as the Dionysian chorist, lives in a reality religiously acknowledged, under the sanction of myth and cult. That tragedy begins with him, that the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy speaks out of him, is a phenomenon just as strange to us here as the origin of tragedy from the chorus altogether. Perhaps we gain a starting point for our reflection if I put forward the claim that the satyr, the fictitious natural being, stands to the human being of culture in the same relation as Dionysian music to civilization. Of the latter Richard Wagner says that it is superseded by music as lamplight is by daylight. In the same way, I believe, the Greek human being of culture felt superseded in the face of the satyr chorus: and this is the most immediate effect of Dionysian tragedy, that state and society, indeed the chasms between one human being and another, give way to an overpowering feeling of unity that leads back to the heart of nature. The metaphysical consolation—with which, as I already hint here, every true tragedy sends us away—that life at the ground of things is, despite all change of appearances, indestructibly powerful and full of joy: this consolation appears in bodily distinctness as the satyr chorus, as a chorus of natural beings who live on indestructibly, as it were, behind all civilization, and who, despite all change of generations and of the history of peoples, remain eternally the same.\n\nWith this chorus the profound Hellene, uniquely capable of the most delicate and the heaviest suffering, finds consolation: the Hellene who has looked with a keen, cutting gaze into the midst of the terrible destructive turmoil of so-called world history, and likewise into the cruelty of nature, and who is in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will. Art saves him, and through art—life saves him for itself.\n\nThe rapture of the Dionysian state, with its annihilation of the ordinary barriers and limits of existence, contains, for as long as it lasts, a *lethargic* element, into which everything personally experienced in the past is submerged. Thus, through this chasm of oblivion, the world of everyday reality and the world of Dionysian reality are sundered from each other. But as soon as that everyday reality enters consciousness again, it is felt as such with disgust; an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of those states. In this sense the Dionysian human being resembles Hamlet: both have once taken a true look into the essence of things, they have *come to know*, and it disgusts them to act; for their action can change nothing in the eternal essence of things, and they feel it to be ridiculous or shameful that they should be expected to set right again the world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires being veiled in illusion—that is the lesson of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Hans the Dreamer, who from too much reflection, as it were from a surplus of possibilities, never gets around to acting; not reflection, no!—true knowledge, insight into the horrifying truth, outweighs every motive that drives toward action, in Hamlet as in the Dionysian human being. Now no consolation avails any longer; longing reaches out beyond a world after death, beyond the gods themselves; existence, together with its gleaming reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond, is negated. In the awareness of the truth once beheld, the human being now sees everywhere only the dreadful or absurd in being, now understands what is symbolic in Ophelia’s fate, now recognizes the wisdom of the forest god Silenus: it sickens them.\n\nHere, in this supreme danger to the will, *art* approaches as a saving, healing sorceress; she alone is able to bend those thoughts of disgust at the dreadful or absurd nature of existence into representations with which one can live: these are the *sublime*, as the artistic taming of the dreadful, and the *comic*, as the artistic discharge of the disgust at the absurd. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; on the intermediate world of these Dionysian attendants those fits just described spent themselves.\n\n### Section 8\n\nThe satyr and the idyllic shepherd of our more recent age are both offspring of a longing directed toward the primal and the natural; but with what a firm, undaunted grasp the Greek reached for his forest man, and how bashfully and limply the modern human being dallied with the flattering image of a tender, fluting, soft-natured herdsman! Nature on which no knowledge has yet labored, in which the bolts of culture are still unbroken—that is what the Greek saw in his satyr, which for that reason was not yet equated with the ape. On the contrary: it was the archetype of the human being, the expression of the human being’s highest and strongest stirrings—as an inspired reveler whom the nearness of the god enraptures, as a compassionate companion in whom the god’s suffering is repeated, as a proclaimer of wisdom out of the deepest breast of nature, as an emblem of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek is accustomed to contemplate with reverent wonder. The satyr was something sublime and divine: so he had to appear, above all to the painfully shattered gaze of the Dionysian human being. The spruced-up, fabricated shepherd would have been an insult to that human being, whose eye rested in sublime satisfaction on the unveiled and undiminished grandeur of nature’s handwriting; here the illusion of culture was wiped away from the archetype of the human being, here the true human being was revealed, the bearded satyr who cries out in jubilation to his god. Before this figure the human being of culture shrank into a lying caricature. Schiller is right about these beginnings of tragic art too: the chorus is a living wall against the onrushing reality, because it—the satyr chorus—depicts existence more truthfully, more really, more completely than the human being of culture, who commonly esteems himself the only reality. The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world, as a fantastic impossibility of a poet’s brain: it wants to be precisely the opposite, the unvarnished expression of truth, and for that very reason it must cast off the lying finery of that supposed reality of the human being of culture. The contrast between this genuine truth of nature and the lie of culture, which poses as the sole reality, is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing in itself, and the whole world of appearances: and as tragedy, with its metaphysical consolation, points to the eternal life of that core of existence amid the ceaseless perishing of appearances, so the symbolism of the satyr chorus already expresses in a simile that primal relation between the thing in itself and appearance. That idyllic shepherd of the modern human being is only a likeness of the sum of illusions of cultivation that passes for nature in his eyes; the Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature at their highest power—he sees himself enchanted into a satyr.\n\nUnder such moods and insights the reveling throng of the servants of Dionysus exults: their power transforms them before their own eyes, so that they fancy they behold themselves as restored spirits of nature, as satyrs. The later constitution of the tragic chorus is the artistic imitation of that natural phenomenon; in which, to be sure, a separation of Dionysian spectators from the Dionysian enchanted then became necessary. Only one must always keep in mind that the audience of Attic tragedy found itself again in the chorus of the orchestra, that at bottom there was no opposition between audience and chorus: for everything is only one great, sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs, or of those who let themselves be represented by these satyrs. Schlegel’s phrase must disclose itself to us here in a deeper sense. The chorus is the “ideal spectator” insofar as it is the only *beholder*, the beholder of the visionary world of the stage. An audience of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks: in their theaters, thanks to the terraced structure of the auditorium rising in concentric arcs, it was possible for everyone quite literally to *look out over* the entire cultural world all around and, in sated gazing, to fancy themselves a chorist. By this insight we may call the chorus, at its primitive stage in primal tragedy, a self-mirroring of the Dionysian human being: a phenomenon that can be made clearest by the process of the actor, who, when truly gifted, sees the image of the role to be portrayed hovering before their eyes, so palpable it can almost be grasped. The satyr chorus is first of all a vision of the Dionysian mass, just as, in turn, the world of the stage is a vision of this satyr chorus: the power of this vision is strong enough to make the gaze dull and insensible to the impression of “reality,” to the people of cultivation arrayed on the tiers of seats all around. The form of the Greek theater recalls a lonely mountain valley: the architecture of the stage appears like a luminous cloud-image, which the Bacchantes roving through the mountains behold from the heights, as the glorious frame in whose midst the image of Dionysus is revealed to them.\n\nThat artistic primal phenomenon, which we bring up here in explanation of the tragic chorus, is, given our bookish view of the elementary artistic processes, almost offensive; whereas nothing can be more certain than that poets are poets only because they see themselves surrounded by figures who live and act before them and into whose innermost essence they look. Through a peculiar weakness of modern talent we are inclined to imagine the aesthetic primal phenomenon as too complicated and abstract. For the genuine poet the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a substitute image that truly hovers before him in place of a concept. A character is for the poet not a whole composed of collected individual traits, but an insistently living person before the poet’s eyes, who differs from the corresponding vision of the painter only by continuing to live and continuing to act. By what means does Homer depict so much more vividly than all other poets? Because he beholds so much more. We talk about poetry so abstractly because we all tend to be bad poets. At bottom the aesthetic phenomenon is simple; if one only has the capacity to see a living play continually and to live always surrounded by hosts of spirits, then one is a poet; if one only feels the drive to transform oneself and to speak out of other bodies and souls, then one is a dramatist.\n\nDionysian excitement is capable of communicating to an entire mass this artistic gift of seeing itself surrounded by such a host of spirits, with whom it knows itself inwardly to be one. This process of the tragic chorus is the *dramatic* primal phenomenon: to see oneself transformed before oneself and now to act as if one had really entered into another body, another character. This process stands at the beginning of the development of drama. Here is something other than the rhapsode, who does not fuse with his images but, like the painter, sees them outside himself with a contemplative eye; here there is already a giving up of the individual through entry into an alien nature. And indeed this phenomenon appears epidemically: a whole throng feels itself enchanted in this way. The dithyramb is therefore essentially different from every other choral song. The maidens who, with laurel branches in hand, process solemnly to the temple of Apollo and sing a processional song as they go remain who they are and keep their civic names: the dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of the transformed, in whom their civic past, their social standing, is utterly forgotten: they have become the timeless servants of their god, living outside all spheres of society. All other choral lyric of the Hellenes is merely an immense heightening of the Apollonian solo singer; whereas in the dithyramb there stands before us a community of unconscious actors who see themselves, among one another, as transformed.\n\nEnchantment is the presupposition of all dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr, *and as a satyr in turn beholds the god*, that is, in the transformation he sees a new vision outside himself, as the Apollonian consummation of his state. With this new vision the drama is complete.\n\nAccording to this insight, we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus, which again and again discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. Those choral parts with which tragedy is interwoven are therefore, in a certain sense, the womb of the whole so-called dialogue, that is, of the entire world of the stage, of the drama proper. In several successive discharges this primal ground of tragedy radiates forth that vision of the drama: which is thoroughly a dream appearance and in that respect epic in nature, but which, on the other hand, as the objectification of a Dionysian state, represents not the Apollonian redemption in semblance but, on the contrary, the shattering of the individual and its becoming one with primordial being. Thus the drama is the Apollonian embodiment of Dionysian insights and effects, and is thereby separated from the epic as by an immense chasm.\n\nThe *chorus* of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the entire mass in Dionysian excitement, finds its full explanation in this view of ours. While we, accustomed to the position of a chorus on the modern stage, above all an opera chorus, could not grasp at all how that tragic chorus of the Greeks should be older, more original, indeed more important than the “action” proper—as tradition had so clearly handed down—while we, again, could not reconcile with that handed-down high importance and originality the claim that the chorus was nevertheless composed only of lowly, serving beings, indeed at first only of goatish satyrs, while the orchestra in front of the stage always remained a riddle to us, we have now come to the insight that the stage together with the action was at bottom and originally conceived only as a *vision*, that the sole “reality” is precisely the chorus, which generates the vision out of itself and speaks of it with the whole symbolism of dance, tone, and word. In its vision this chorus beholds its lord and master Dionysus and is therefore eternally the *serving* chorus: it sees how he, the god, suffers and glorifies himself, and therefore does not itself *act*. In this position of utter service toward the god, it is nonetheless the highest, that is, the Dionysian, expression of *nature*, and therefore speaks, like nature, oracles and sayings of wisdom in its inspiration: as the *compassionate* one it is at the same time the *wise* one, proclaiming truth out of the heart of the world. Thus arises that fantastic and seemingly so offensive figure of the wise and inspired satyr, who is at the same time “the simple human being” in contrast to the god: image of nature and of its strongest drives, indeed symbol of them and at the same time herald of its wisdom and art: musician, poet, dancer, spirit-seer in one person.\n\n*Dionysus*, the true hero of the stage and center of the vision, is, according to this insight and according to tradition, at first, in the very oldest period of tragedy, not truly present, but is only imagined as present: that is, originally tragedy is only “chorus” and not “drama.” Later the attempt is made to show the god as a real one and to present the visionary figure, together with its transfiguring frame, as visible to every eye; with this the “drama” in the narrower sense begins. Now the dithyrambic chorus is given the task of stirring the mood of the listeners to such a Dionysian pitch that, when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they do not see the clumsily masked human being but rather a visionary figure born, as it were, of their own rapture. Let us imagine Admetus, in deep brooding, remembering his recently departed wife Alcestis and wholly consuming himself in the mental contemplation of her—how now suddenly a veiled female figure, similar in form, similar in gait, is led toward him: let us imagine his sudden trembling unrest, his stormy comparing, his instinctive conviction—then we have an analogue of the feeling with which the spectator in Dionysian excitement saw the god step forward on the stage, the god with whose suffering that spectator had already become one. Involuntarily the spectator transferred the whole image of the god, magically trembling before the soul, onto that masked figure and dissolved its reality, as it were, into a ghostly unreality. This is the Apollonian dream state, in which the world of day veils itself and a new world, clearer, more comprehensible, more moving than that one and yet more shadowlike, is born anew before our eyes in constant change. Accordingly we recognize in tragedy a thoroughgoing opposition of style: language, color, mobility, dynamics of speech diverge, in the Dionysian lyric of the chorus on the one hand and in the Apollonian dream world of the stage on the other, into wholly separate spheres of expression. The Apollonian appearances in which Dionysus objectifies himself are no longer “an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life,” as the music of the chorus is, no longer those merely felt forces, not condensed into an image, in which the inspired servant of Dionysus senses the nearness of the god: now the clarity and firmness of epic form speaks to the servant from the stage, now Dionysus speaks no longer through forces but as an epic hero, almost in the language of Homer.\n\n### Section 9\n\nEverything that comes to the surface in the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, in the dialogue, looks simple, transparent, beautiful. In this sense the dialogue is a likeness of the Hellene, whose nature reveals itself in dance, because in dance the greatest strength is only potential, yet betrays itself in the suppleness and lushness of movement. So the language of the Sophoclean heroes surprises us with its Apollonian definiteness and brightness, so that we think we are at once looking into the innermost ground of their being, with some astonishment that the way to this ground is so short. But suppose we look away for a moment from the hero’s character, which comes to the surface and becomes visible—and which at bottom is nothing more than a luminous image cast on a dark wall, that is, appearance through and through—and press on instead into the myth that projects itself in these bright reflections: then we suddenly experience a phenomenon that stands in the reverse relation to a familiar optical one. When, after a forceful attempt to look straight into the sun, we turn away blinded, we have dark colored spots before our eyes, as a kind of remedy: conversely, those luminous image-appearances of the Sophoclean hero, in short the Apollonian element of the mask, are necessary products of a glance into the inner and terrible side of nature, shining spots, as it were, to heal a gaze wounded by ghastly night. Only in this sense may we believe that we grasp rightly the serious and significant concept of “Greek cheerfulness”; whereas we do, of course, meet the misunderstood concept of this cheerfulness, as a condition of unthreatened comfort, on every road and footpath of the present day.\n\nThe most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the ill-fated *Oedipus*, was understood by Sophocles as the noble human being who, despite his wisdom, is destined for error and misery, but who in the end, through his monstrous suffering, exerts a magical, beneficent power around him that remains effective even beyond his death. The noble human being does not sin, the profound poet wants to tell us: through his action every law, every natural order, even the moral world may perish, yet precisely through this action a higher, magical circle of effects is drawn, effects that found a new world on the ruins of the old one overthrown. That is what the poet wants to tell us, insofar as he is also a religious thinker: as a poet he shows us first a legal case wondrously tied into a knot, which the judge slowly unravels, link by link, to his own ruin; the truly Hellenic delight in this dialectical solution is so great that it casts an air of superior cheerfulness over the whole work, one that everywhere blunts the point of the dreadful premises of that trial. In “Oedipus at Colonus” we meet this same cheerfulness, but lifted up into an infinite transfiguration: set against the old man, struck by an excess of misery and surrendered to everything that befalls him purely as a *sufferer*, there stands the unearthly cheerfulness that descends from the divine sphere and hints to us that the hero, in his purely passive conduct, attains his highest activity, which reaches far beyond his life, whereas his conscious thinking and striving in his earlier life led him only to passivity. Thus the knot of the Oedipus fable, which to mortal eyes is inextricably tangled, is slowly unraveled—and the deepest human joy comes over us at this divine counterpart of dialectic. If with this explanation we have done the poet justice, it can still be asked whether the content of the myth is thereby exhausted: and here it turns out that the poet’s whole conception is nothing but precisely that luminous image which healing nature holds up to us after a look into the abyss. Oedipus, the murderer of his father, the husband of his mother, Oedipus, the solver of the Sphinx’s riddle! What does the mysterious triad of these deeds of fate tell us? There is a very ancient popular belief, especially Persian, that a wise magus can be born only of incest: which, with regard to Oedipus, the riddle-solver who wed his mother, we must at once interpret to mean that where the spell of present and future, the rigid law of individuation, and in general the true enchantment of nature has been broken by prophetic and magical powers, a monstrous unnaturalness—as incest is in that case—must have preceded as the cause; for how could one force nature to give up her secrets, if not by victoriously resisting her, that is, by the unnatural? This insight I see stamped in that dreadful triad of Oedipus’s fates: the same man who solves the riddle of nature—that double-natured Sphinx—must also, as murderer of his father and husband of his mother, shatter the holiest orders of nature. Indeed, the myth seems to want to whisper to us that wisdom, and precisely Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural abomination, that whoever by his knowledge plunges nature into the abyss of annihilation must also undergo the dissolution of nature in himself. “The point of wisdom turns against the wise man: wisdom is a crime against nature”: such terrible sentences the myth calls out to us; but the Hellenic poet touches, like a ray of sunlight, the sublime and fearsome Memnon column of the myth, so that it suddenly begins to sound—in Sophoclean melodies!\n\nAgainst the glory of passivity I now set the glory of activity, which radiates around the *Prometheus* of Aeschylus. What the thinker Aeschylus had to tell us here, but what as a poet he lets us only sense through his parable-like image, the young Goethe knew how to unveil for us in the daring words of his Prometheus:\n\n“Here I sit, forming human beings\nIn my own image,\nA race to be like me,\nTo suffer, to weep,\nTo enjoy and to rejoice,\nAnd to pay you no heed,\nLike me!”\n\nMan, rising into the Titanic, wins his culture for himself by struggle and forces the gods to ally themselves with him, because in his own wisdom he holds their existence and their limits in his hand. The most wonderful thing about that Prometheus poem, however, which in its basic idea is the true hymn of impiety, is the deep Aeschylean drive toward *justice*: the immeasurable suffering of the bold “individual” on the one side, and on the other the divine distress, indeed the foreboding of a twilight of the gods, the compelling power of those two worlds of suffering, which drives toward reconciliation, toward metaphysical oneness—all this recalls with the greatest force the center and main tenet of the Aeschylean view of the world, which sees Moira enthroned as eternal justice above gods and men. Given the astonishing boldness with which Aeschylus places the Olympian world on his scales of justice, we must bear in mind that the profound Greek had an immovably firm foundation of metaphysical thought in his mysteries, and that all his skeptical fits could discharge themselves on the Olympians. The Greek artist in particular felt, in regard to these deities, a dim sense of mutual dependence: and precisely in the Prometheus of Aeschylus this feeling is symbolized. The Titanic artist found in himself the defiant belief that he could create human beings and at least destroy Olympian gods: and this by his higher wisdom, which he was admittedly forced to atone for with eternal suffering. The splendid “ability” of the great genius, which even eternal suffering pays for too cheaply, the austere pride of the *artist*—that is the content and soul of Aeschylean poetry, while Sophocles in his Oedipus strikes up, as a prelude, the victory song of the *saint*. But even with the interpretation that Aeschylus gave the myth, its astonishing depth of terror has not been fully measured: rather, the artist’s delight in becoming, the cheerfulness of artistic creation that defies every misfortune, is only a bright picture of cloud and sky mirrored on a black lake of sadness. The Prometheus legend is an original possession of the entire Aryan community of peoples and a document of their gift for the profoundly tragic; indeed, it might not be without probability that this myth holds for the Aryan character exactly the same characteristic significance that the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic, and that between the two myths there exists a degree of kinship like that between brother and sister. The presupposition of that Prometheus myth is the extravagant value that a naive humanity attaches to *fire* as the true palladium of every ascending culture: but that man should rule freely over fire, and not merely receive it as a gift from heaven, as igniting lightning bolt or warming blaze of the sun, seemed to those contemplative primeval humans a sacrilege, a robbery from divine nature. And so the very first philosophical problem poses a painful, insoluble contradiction between man and god and shoves it, like a boulder, up to the gateway of every culture. The best and highest that humanity can come to share in, it wins through a sacrilege, and must now in turn accept its consequences, namely the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended heavenly beings must afflict the nobly aspiring human race—must: a harsh thought, which by the *dignity* it bestows on sacrilege stands in strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall, in which curiosity, lying deception, susceptibility to seduction, lustfulness, in short a series of chiefly feminine passions, was regarded as the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is the sublime view of *active sin* as the properly Promethean virtue: with which the ethical foundation of pessimistic tragedy has been found at the same time, as the *justification* of human evil, and indeed of both human guilt and the suffering incurred by it. The calamity in the essence of things—which the contemplative Aryan is not inclined to explain away—the contradiction at the heart of the world, reveals itself to him as a jumble of different worlds, for example a divine and a human one, each of which is in the right as an individual, but which, as a single world beside another, has to suffer for its individuation. In the individual’s heroic urge toward the universal, in the attempt to step beyond the spell of individuation and to want to be the *one* world-being itself, he suffers in himself the primal contradiction hidden in things, that is, he commits sacrilege and suffers. Thus the Aryans understand sacrilege as a man, the Semites sin as a woman, just as the primal sacrilege is committed by the man, the primal sin by the woman. Incidentally, the chorus of witches says:\n\n“We don’t take this so exactly:\nA woman gets it done in a thousand steps;\nBut however she may hurry,\nA man does it in a single leap.”\n\nWhoever understands that innermost core of the Prometheus legend—namely the necessity of sacrilege imposed on the titanically striving individual—must at the same time feel the un-Apollonian quality of this pessimistic conception; for Apollo wants to bring individual beings to rest precisely by drawing boundary lines between them and by reminding them again and again, with his demands for self-knowledge and measure, of these lines as the holiest laws of the world. But lest in this Apollonian tendency form harden into Egyptian stiffness and coldness, lest the movement of the whole lake die away in the effort to prescribe to the single wave its path and its domain, the high flood of the Dionysian from time to time again destroyed all those small circles into which the one-sidedly Apollonian “will” sought to confine Hellenism. That suddenly swelling flood of the Dionysian then takes upon its back the single small wave-mountains of the individuals, as the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, carries the earth. This Titanic urge to become, as it were, the Atlas of all individuals and to carry them on a broad back higher and higher, farther and farther, is what the Promethean and the Dionysian have in common. In this respect the Aeschylean Prometheus is a Dionysian mask, while in that deep drive toward justice mentioned earlier Aeschylus betrays to the discerning his paternal descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and the boundaries of justice. And so the double nature of the Aeschylean Prometheus, his at once Dionysian and Apollonian nature, might be expressed in a conceptual formula thus: “All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both.”\n\nThat is your world! That’s what you call a world!—\n\n### Section 10\n\nIt is an unassailable tradition that Greek tragedy in its oldest form had only the sufferings of Dionysus for its subject, and that for a long time the only stage hero in existence was precisely Dionysus. But with the same certainty it may be asserted that right up to Euripides Dionysus never ceased to be the tragic hero, and that all the famous figures of the Greek stage—Prometheus, Oedipus, and so forth—are only masks of that original hero Dionysus. That a deity lurks behind all these masks is the one essential reason for the typical “ideality” of those famous figures, so often marveled at. Someone—I don’t know who—has claimed that all individuals as individuals are comic and therefore untragic: from which one would have to conclude that the Greeks were altogether *unable* to bear individuals on the tragic stage. In fact they seem to have felt that way: just as, in general, that Platonic distinction and valuation of the “idea” as opposed to the “idol,” the image, lies deeply grounded in the Hellenic nature. But to make use of Plato’s terminology, we might speak of the tragic figures of the Hellenic stage roughly like this: the one truly real Dionysus appears in a multiplicity of figures, in the mask of a struggling hero and, as it were, entangled in the net of the individual will. As the appearing god now speaks and acts, he resembles an erring, striving, suffering individual: and that he *appears* at all with this epic definiteness and clarity is the effect of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, who interprets to the chorus its Dionysian state through that parable-like appearance. In truth, however, that hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, that god who experiences in himself the sufferings of individuation, of whom wondrous myths tell how as a boy he was torn to pieces by the Titans and is now worshiped in this state as Zagreus: whereby it is intimated that this dismemberment, the properly Dionysian *suffering*, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, and that we should therefore regard the state of individuation as the source and primal ground of all suffering, as something reprehensible in itself. From the smile of this Dionysus the Olympian gods arose, from his tears human beings. In that existence as a dismembered god, Dionysus has the double nature of a cruel, savage demon and a mild, gentle ruler. The hope of the epopts, however, was directed toward a rebirth of Dionysus, which we must now grasp, with a premonition, as the end of individuation: to this coming third Dionysus the roaring jubilant song of the epopts resounded. And only in this hope is there a ray of joy on the face of the world, torn apart, shattered into individuals: as the myth depicts it through Demeter, sunk in eternal mourning, who for the first time *rejoices* again when she is told that she can give birth to Dionysus *once more*. In the views just cited we already have together all the components of a profound and pessimistic view of the world and, with it, *the mystery doctrine of tragedy*: the fundamental insight into the unity of everything that exists, the view of individuation as the primal ground of evil, art as the joyful hope that the spell of individuation can be broken, as the premonition of a restored unity.—\n\nIt was indicated earlier that the Homeric epic is the poetry of Olympian culture, with which that culture sang its own victory song over the terrors of the Titan struggle. Now, under the overpowering influence of tragic poetry, the Homeric myths are reborn once more and show in this metempsychosis that in the meantime the Olympian culture too has been conquered by a still deeper view of the world. The defiant Titan Prometheus announced to his Olympian tormentor that his rule would one day be threatened by the gravest danger unless he joined forces with Prometheus in time. In Aeschylus we recognize the alliance of the terrified Zeus, anxious about his end, with the Titan. Thus the earlier age of the Titans is afterward brought back from Tartarus into the light. The philosophy of wild and naked nature regards the myths of the Homeric world, dancing past, with the unveiled countenance of truth: they turn pale, they tremble before the lightning eye of this goddess—until the mighty fist of the Dionysian artist forces them into the service of the new deity. Dionysian truth takes over the entire domain of myth as the symbolism of *its own* insights and expresses these partly in the public cult of tragedy, partly in the secret celebrations of dramatic mystery festivals, but always under the old mythic cloak. What force was this that freed Prometheus from his vultures and transformed myth into a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom? It is the Heracles-like force of music: which, having reached its highest appearance in tragedy, knows how to interpret myth with a new and most profound significance; as we had already had to characterize this earlier as the mightiest capacity of music. For it is the lot of every myth gradually to creep into the narrowness of a supposedly historical reality and to be treated by some later age as a unique fact with historical claims: and the Greeks were already well on the way to restamping their entire mythic dream of youth, with ingenuity and caprice, as a historical-pragmatic *history of their youth*. For this is the way religions tend to die: namely, when the mythic presuppositions of a religion are systematized, under the stern, rationalistic eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a finished sum of historical events, and one begins anxiously to defend the credibility of the myths, while balking at any natural continued life and proliferation of them; when, that is, the feeling for myth dies and the claim of religion to historical foundations takes its place. This dying myth was now seized by the newborn genius of Dionysian music: and in the genius’s hand it bloomed once more, with colors such as it had never shown, with a fragrance that stirred a yearning intimation of a metaphysical world. After this last flaring up it collapses, its leaves wither, and soon the mocking Lucians of antiquity grab at the flowers, bleached and ravaged, carried off on every wind. Through tragedy myth arrives at its deepest content, its most expressive form; once more it rises, like a wounded hero, and the whole surplus of strength, together with the wisdom-filled calm of the dying, burns in its eye with a last, mighty gleam.\n\nWhat did you want, sacrilegious Euripides, when you tried to force this dying creature into your servitude once more? It died under your violent hands: and now you needed a counterfeit, masked myth, which, like Heracles’ ape, knew only how to deck itself out in the old finery. And as the myth died for you, so too the genius of music died for you: even though you plundered all the gardens of music with greedy seizing, you still arrived only at a counterfeit, masked music. And because you abandoned Dionysus, Apollo abandoned you as well; rouse all the passions from their lair and conjure them into your circle, sharpen and file a sophistic dialectic into shape for the speeches of your heroes—even your heroes have only imitated, masked passions and speak only imitated, masked speeches.\n\n### Section 11\n\nGreek tragedy perished differently from all the older sister art forms: it died by suicide, as the result of an insoluble conflict, that is, tragically, whereas all those others passed away at an advanced age in the most beautiful and peaceful death. For if it accords with a happy natural condition to depart from life with fair offspring and without convulsion, then the end of those older art forms shows us such a happy natural condition: they sink slowly, and before their dying eyes stands already their more beautiful progeny, impatiently raising its head with a bold gesture. With the death of Greek tragedy, by contrast, there arose an immense void, felt deeply everywhere; just as Greek sailors once, in the time of Tiberius, heard on a lonely island the shattering cry “the great Pan is dead,” so now a painful note of lamentation sounded through the Hellenic world: “Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself has been lost with it! Away, away with you, stunted, emaciated epigones! Away to Hades, so that you can for once eat your fill there on the crumbs of the former masters!”\n\nBut when yet another new art form did blossom, one that revered tragedy as its predecessor and mentor, it was perceived with horror that it did indeed bear its mother’s features, but the very ones she had shown in her long death agony. This death agony of tragedy was fought by *Euripides*; that later art form is known as *newer Attic comedy*. In it the degenerate form of tragedy lived on, as a monument to its exceedingly laborious and violent passing.\n\nGiven this connection, the passionate affection that the poets of the newer comedy felt for Euripides is understandable; so that the wish of Philemon, who was willing to be hanged on the spot just to be able to seek out Euripides in the underworld, no longer seems strange—if only he could be convinced that the deceased was still in his right mind even now. If one wants to designate, as briefly as possible and without claiming to say anything exhaustive, what Euripides has in common with Menander and Philemon and what acted as such an exciting model for them, it is enough to say that *the spectator* was brought onto the stage by Euripides. Whoever has recognized from what material the Promethean tragedians before Euripides shaped their heroes, and how far from them lay the intention of bringing the faithful mask of reality onto the stage, will also be clear about the entirely divergent tendency of Euripides. Through him the man of everyday life pushed from the auditorium onto the stage; the mirror in which formerly only the great and bold features found expression now showed that painful fidelity that conscientiously reproduces even nature’s botched lines. Odysseus, the typical Hellene of the older art, now sank under the hands of the newer poets to the figure of the Graeculus, who from now on stands at the center of dramatic interest as the good-natured, sly household slave. What Euripides credits himself with in the Aristophanic “Frogs”—that by his home remedies he freed tragic art of its pompous corpulence—is above all to be felt in his tragic heroes. In essence the spectator now saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage and was delighted that the double knew how to talk so well. But it did not stop at this delight: people themselves learned to speak from Euripides, and he himself boasts of this in his contest with Aeschylus: that through him the people had now learned to observe, to negotiate, and to draw conclusions artfully and with the shrewdest sophistications. Through this revolution in public speech he made the newer comedy possible at all. For from now on it was no secret any more how, and with what maxims, everyday life could represent itself on the stage. Bourgeois mediocrity, on which Euripides built all his political hopes, now came to speak, whereas until then the demigod in tragedy and the drunken satyr or half-man in comedy had set the character of the language. And so the Aristophanic Euripides stresses, in his own praise, how he portrayed the common, universally known, everyday life and bustle, about which anyone is capable of judging. If now the whole mass philosophized, managed land and property with unheard-of shrewdness, and conducted its lawsuits, that, he claims, was his merit and the result of the wisdom he had inoculated into the people.\n\nTo a mass prepared and enlightened in this way the newer comedy could now turn, for which Euripides had in a sense become the chorus master; only this time the chorus of spectators had to be trained. As soon as this chorus was practiced in singing in the Euripidean key, there arose that chess-game-like genre of drama, the newer comedy with its perpetual triumph of cleverness and cunning. But Euripides—the chorus master—was praised without end: indeed people would have killed themselves in order to learn still more from him, had they not known that the tragic poets were just as dead as tragedy. With tragedy, however, the Hellene had given up the belief in his own immortality, not only the belief in an ideal past but also the belief in an ideal future. The phrase from the well-known epitaph, “as an old man frivolous and whimsical,” applies also to aged Hellenism. The moment, wit, levity, whim are its highest deities; the fifth estate, that of the slave, now comes to power, at least in attitude: and if one may still speak at all of “Greek cheerfulness,” it is the cheerfulness of the slave, who has nothing heavy to answer for, nothing great to strive for, and knows how to value nothing of the past or the future more highly than the present. It was this semblance of “Greek cheerfulness” that so outraged the profound and formidable natures of the first four centuries of Christianity: to them this effeminate flight from seriousness and terror, this cowardly contentment with comfortable enjoyment, appeared not merely contemptible but as the truly anti-Christian disposition. And it is to their influence that we must ascribe the fact that the view of Greek antiquity, living on through centuries, held fast with almost insuperable tenacity to that pale pink hue of cheerfulness—as if there had never been a sixth century with its birth of tragedy, its mysteries, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus, indeed as if the works of art of the great age did not exist at all, which yet—each taken by itself—cannot be explained at all from the soil of such senile, slavish delight in existence and cheerfulness and point to an entirely different view of the world as their ground of existence.\n\nIf it was claimed just now that Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage in order thereby to enable the spectator truly, for the first time, to judge drama, then there arises the semblance that the older tragic art never got out of a mismatch between itself and the spectator: and one might be tempted to praise the radical tendency of Euripides to achieve a corresponding relation between work of art and public as progress beyond Sophocles. But now “public” is only a word and by no means a homogeneous quantity that stays constant within itself. Where is the artist supposed to get an obligation to accommodate himself to a force whose strength lies only in numbers? And if, by his gift and his aims, he feels himself superior to each single one of these spectators, how could he feel more respect for the collective expression of all these capacities subordinate to him than for the single spectator who is relatively the most gifted? In truth no Greek artist treated his public through a long life with greater audacity and self-sufficiency than Euripides did: he who, even when the mass threw itself at his feet, in sublime defiance publicly struck his own tendency in the face, that same tendency with which he had triumphed over the mass. If this genius had felt the slightest reverence for the pandemonium of the public, he would have collapsed under the club blows of his failures long before the middle of his career. We see from this consideration that our statement, that Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage in order to make the spectator truly capable of judgment, was only a provisional one, and that we have to seek a deeper understanding of his tendency. Conversely, it is of course universally known that Aeschylus and Sophocles throughout their lives, indeed far beyond them, stood in full possession of popular favor, so that in the case of these predecessors of Euripides there can by no means be talk of a mismatch between work of art and public. What drove the richly gifted artist, urged ceaselessly to create, so violently from the road over which the sun of the greatest poetic names and the cloudless sky of popular favor shone? What strange regard for the spectator set him against the spectator? How could he—out of too high a respect for his public—despise his public?\n\nEuripides felt himself—this is the solution to the riddle just presented—as a poet superior to the mass, to be sure, but not to two of his spectators: the mass he brought onto the stage, those two spectators he revered as the only competent judges and masters of all his art: following their directions and admonitions he transferred the whole world of feelings, passions, and experiences, which until now had joined every festival performance on the spectators’ benches as an invisible chorus, into the souls of his stage heroes; he yielded to their demands when he sought for these new characters also the new word and the new tone; in their voices alone he heard the valid verdicts on his creative work, just as he heard the victory-promising encouragement whenever he saw himself condemned once more by the justice of the public.\n\nOf these two spectators, one is Euripides himself, Euripides *as thinker*, not as poet. Of him one could say that the extraordinary abundance of his critical talent, similar to Lessing’s, if it did not generate, at least continually fertilized a productive artistic secondary drive. With this gift, with all the brightness and nimbleness of his critical thinking, Euripides had sat in the theater and strained to make out again, in the masterpieces of his great predecessors, as in paintings gone dark, feature by feature, line by line. And here now he encountered what must not be unexpected to anyone initiated into the deeper mysteries of Aeschylean tragedy: he perceived something incommensurable in every feature and every line, a certain deceptive definiteness and at the same time an enigmatic depth, indeed infinity, of background. The clearest figure still had a comet’s tail about it that seemed to point into the uncertain, the unilluminable. The same twilight lay over the structure of the drama, especially over the meaning of the chorus. And how doubtful the solution of the ethical problems remained to him! How questionable the treatment of the myths! How uneven the distribution of fortune and misfortune! Even in the language of the older tragedy much offended him, or at least puzzled him; in particular he found too much pomp for simple circumstances, too many tropes and monstrosities for the plainness of the characters. So he sat in the theater, restlessly brooding, and he, the spectator, admitted to himself that he did not understand his great predecessors. But if the intellect counted for him as the real root of all enjoying and creating, then he had to ask and look around whether no one at all thought as he did and likewise admitted that incommensurability. But the many, and with them the best individuals, had only a distrustful smile for him; yet no one could explain to him why, in the face of his misgivings and objections, the great masters were nonetheless in the right. And in this tormented condition he found *the other spectator*, who did not comprehend tragedy and therefore did not respect it. Allied with this one, he could dare, out of his isolation, to begin the immense struggle against the works of art of Aeschylus and Sophocles—not with polemics, but as a dramatic poet who sets *his* conception of tragedy against the traditional one.—\n\n### Section 12\n\nBefore we name this other spectator, let us pause here a moment to call back to mind the impression, described earlier, of the divided and incommensurable in the very nature of Aeschylean tragedy. Let us think of our own bewilderment before the *chorus* and the *tragic hero* of that tragedy, neither of which we knew how to reconcile with our habits any more than with tradition—until we rediscovered that very duality as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of two artistic drives woven into one another, *the Apollonian and the Dionysian*.\n\nTo eliminate that original and all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy and to rebuild it, pure and new, on un-Dionysian art, custom, and view of the world—this is the tendency of Euripides, now revealing itself to us in bright illumination.\n\nEuripides himself, in the evening of his life, put the question of the value and significance of this tendency to his contemporaries, in the most emphatic way, in a myth. Is the Dionysian to be allowed to exist at all? Is it not to be uprooted by force from Hellenic soil? Certainly, the poet tells us, if only it were possible: but the god Dionysus is too powerful; the most rational opponent—like Pentheus in the “Bacchae”—is unexpectedly bewitched by him and afterward runs with this enchantment into his doom. The judgment of the two old men Cadmus and Tiresias seems to be also the judgment of the aged poet: that the reflection of the cleverest individuals does not overthrow those old popular traditions, that veneration of Dionysus which propagates itself eternally, and that it is fitting, in the face of such wondrous powers, to show at least a diplomatically cautious participation: though it remains possible that the god may take offense at so lukewarm a participation and in the end turn the diplomat—as here Cadmus—into a dragon. This is what a poet tells us who with heroic strength resisted Dionysus throughout a long life—only to close his career at its end with a glorification of his adversary and a suicide, like someone seized by vertigo who, merely to escape the dreadful, no longer bearable whirl, hurls himself down from the tower. That tragedy is a protest against the feasibility of his tendency; alas, and it had already been carried out! The marvelous had happened: when the poet recanted, his tendency had already triumphed. Dionysus had already been driven from the tragic stage, and indeed by a demonic power speaking out of Euripides. Euripides too was in a certain sense only a mask: the deity that spoke out of him was not Dionysus, nor Apollo either, but an entirely newborn demon, called *Socrates*. This is the new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the work of art of Greek tragedy perished of it. Even if Euripides now seeks to console us by his recantation, he does not succeed: the most magnificent temple lies in ruins; what use to us is the lament of the destroyer and his confession that it was the most beautiful of all temples? And even that Euripides has been turned into a dragon, as punishment, by the art critics of all ages—whom would this wretched compensation satisfy?\n\nLet us now approach that *Socratic* tendency with which Euripides fought and conquered Aeschylean tragedy.\n\nWhat goal—so we must now ask—could the Euripidean intention to found drama solely on the un-Dionysian have at all, in the highest ideality of its execution? What form of drama remained, if it was not to be born from the womb of music, in that mysterious twilight of the Dionysian? Only *the dramatized epic*: in which Apollonian domain of art, of course, the *tragic* effect is unattainable. What matters here is not the content of the events portrayed; indeed I would claim that it would have been impossible for Goethe, in his projected “Nausicaa,” to make the suicide of that idyllic being—which was to fill the fifth act—tragically gripping; so uncommonly great is the power of the epic-Apollonian that it enchants the most horror-filled things before our eyes with that delight in semblance and redemption through semblance. The poet of the dramatized epic can no more fuse completely with his images than the epic rhapsode can: he remains still a calm, unmoved contemplative vision, gazing out of wide eyes, that sees the images *before* itself. The actor in this dramatized epic remains at bottom still a rhapsode; the consecration of inner dreaming lies upon all his actions, so that he is never wholly an actor.\n\nHow, then, does the Euripidean play stand in relation to this ideal of Apollonian drama? How does that younger rhapsode stand in relation to the solemn rhapsode of the old days, the one who describes his nature in Plato’s “Ion” thus: “When I say something sad, my eyes fill with tears; but if what I say is terrible and dreadful, then the hair of my head stands on end with shuddering, and my heart pounds.” Here we notice nothing any more of that epic state of being lost in semblance, of the passionless coolness of the true actor, who precisely in his highest activity is entirely semblance and delight in semblance. Euripides is the actor with the pounding heart, with hair standing on end; as a Socratic thinker he draws up the plan, as a passionate actor he carries it out. A pure artist he is neither in the drafting nor in the execution. Thus the Euripidean drama is a thing at once cool and fiery, equally capable of freezing and of burning; it is impossible for it to attain the Apollonian effect of epic, while on the other hand it has detached itself as far as possible from the Dionysian elements, and now, in order to have any effect at all, needs new means of excitation, which can no longer lie within the only two artistic drives, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These means of excitation are cool, paradoxical *thoughts*—in place of the Apollonian visions—and fiery *emotions*—in place of the Dionysian raptures—and indeed thoughts and emotions most realistically counterfeited, by no means dipped into the ether of art.\n\nIf we have recognized thus much, that Euripides never succeeded at all in founding drama solely on the Apollonian, that rather his un-Dionysian tendency strayed into a naturalistic and unartistic one, we may now approach more closely the nature of *aesthetic Socratism*; whose supreme law runs roughly thus: “everything must be rational in order to be beautiful”; as a parallel to the Socratic “only the one who knows is virtuous.” With this canon in hand Euripides measured every particular and rectified it according to this principle: the language, the characters, the dramaturgical structure, the choral music. What we are so often accustomed to charge to Euripides, in comparison with Sophoclean tragedy, as poetic deficiency and regression is mostly the product of that penetrating critical process, that daring rationality. Let the Euripidean *prologue* serve us as an example of the productivity of that rationalistic method. Nothing can be more repugnant to our stage technique than the prologue in the drama of Euripides. That a single character stepping forward at the entrance of the play tells who that person is, what precedes the action, what has happened so far, indeed what will happen in the course of the play—a modern playwright would call that a willful and unpardonable renunciation of the effect of suspense. One knows everything that will happen, after all; who will want to wait for it to really happen?—since here there is by no means the exciting relation of a prophetic dream to a reality that arrives later. Euripides reflected quite differently. The effect of tragedy never rested on epic suspense, on the tantalizing uncertainty of what would happen now and later: rather on those great rhetorical-lyrical scenes in which the passion and dialectic of the chief hero swelled into a broad and mighty stream. Everything prepared for pathos, not for action: and whatever did not prepare for pathos was deemed objectionable. But what most impedes the enjoyable surrender to such scenes is a missing link for the listener, a gap in the fabric of the backstory; as long as the listener still has to work out what this or that person means, what presuppositions this or that conflict of inclinations and intentions has, his full immersion in the suffering and action of the principal characters, his breathless suffering and fearing along with them, is not yet possible. Aeschylean-Sophoclean tragedy used the most ingenious artistic means to put into the spectator’s hand, in the first scenes and as if by chance, all those threads necessary for understanding: a trait in which that noble artistry proves itself that, as it were, masks the *necessary* formal element and lets it appear as something accidental. All the same, Euripides believed he noticed that during those first scenes the spectator is in a peculiar unrest, working out the arithmetic problem of the backstory, so that the poetic beauties and the pathos of the exposition would be lost to him. Therefore he placed the prologue even before the exposition and put it into the mouth of a person who could be trusted: a deity often had to guarantee the course of the tragedy to the public, in a manner of speaking, and remove every doubt about the reality of the myth: in much the same way that Descartes could prove the reality of the empirical world only by appealing to the truthfulness of God and his incapacity for lying. Euripides needs the same divine truthfulness once more at the end of his drama, to make the future of his heroes secure for the public; this is the task of the notorious deus ex machina. Between the epic looking forward and the epic looking beyond lies the dramatic-lyrical present, the actual “drama.”\n\nSo Euripides, above all as a poet, is the echo of his conscious insights; and precisely this gives him such a remarkable position in the history of Greek art. In regard to his critical-productive creating he must often have felt as if he were to bring to life for drama the beginning of the writing of Anaxagoras, whose first words read: “In the beginning all was together: then came intellect and created order.” And if Anaxagoras with his “Nous” appeared among the philosophers like the first sober man among nothing but drunks, Euripides too may have grasped his relation to the other tragic poets under a similar image. As long as the sole orderer and ruler of the universe, the Nous, was still excluded from artistic creation, everything was still together in a chaotic primal porridge; so Euripides had to judge, so he had to condemn the “drunken” poets as the first “sober one.” What Sophocles said of Aeschylus, that he does what is right, though unconsciously, was certainly not said in Euripides’ sense: he would have granted only so much, that Aeschylus, *because* he creates unconsciously, creates what is wrong. Even the divine Plato speaks of the poet’s creative faculty, insofar as it is not conscious insight, for the most part only ironically and puts it on a par with the gift of the soothsayer and dream-interpreter; the poet, he says, is after all not capable of composing until he has become unconscious and no intellect dwells in him any longer. Euripides undertook, as Plato also undertook, to show the world the counterpart of the “irrational” poet; his aesthetic principle “everything must be conscious in order to be beautiful” is, as I said, the parallel of the Socratic “everything must be conscious in order to be good.” Accordingly Euripides may count for us as the poet of aesthetic Socratism. Socrates, however, was that *second spectator* who did not comprehend the older tragedy and therefore did not respect it; allied with him, Euripides dared to be the herald of a new artistic creation. If the older tragedy perished of this, then aesthetic Socratism is the murderous principle: but insofar as the struggle was directed against the Dionysian element of the older art, we recognize in Socrates the adversary of Dionysus, the new Orpheus, who rises up against Dionysus and, though destined to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian court of justice, nonetheless forces the overpowering god himself to flee: who, as once when he fled from the Edonian king Lycurgus, saved himself in the depths of the sea, namely in the mystic waters of a secret cult gradually spreading over the whole world.\n\n### Section 13\n\nSocrates’ close affinity of purpose with Euripides did not escape their contemporaries in antiquity; the most eloquent expression of this fortunate instinct is the story circulating in Athens that Socrates regularly helped Euripides write his plays. The adherents of the “good old days” named both men in the same breath whenever they listed the corrupters of the people in their own time: it was their influence, they said, that was increasingly sacrificing the old, foursquare excellence of body and soul—the excellence of Marathon—to a dubious enlightenment, as physical and spiritual powers steadily withered. This is the tone, half indignation and half contempt, in which Aristophanic comedy habitually speaks of these men, to the horror of modern readers, who are quite willing to abandon Euripides but cannot cease wondering that Aristophanes should present Socrates as the first and foremost *Sophist*, the mirror and epitome of every sophistic endeavor. Their only consolation is to pillory Aristophanes himself as a dissolute, lying Alcibiades of poetry. Without defending Aristophanes’ profound instincts against such attacks here, I will continue to demonstrate the close kinship of Socrates and Euripides as antiquity felt it. In this connection we should recall in particular that Socrates, as an opponent of tragic art, refrained from attending tragedies and appeared among the spectators only when a new play by Euripides was being performed. Most famous of all, however, is the close conjunction of their names in the pronouncement of the Delphic oracle, which declared Socrates the wisest of human beings but also judged that Euripides deserved second prize in the contest of wisdom.\n\nSophocles was named third in this ranking: he could boast, in contrast to Aeschylus, that he did what was right, and did it because he *knew* what was right. Clearly it is precisely the degree of clarity in this *knowledge* that singles out the three men together as the three “knowing ones” of their time.\n\nBut Socrates gave the sharpest expression to this new, unprecedented esteem for knowledge and insight when he found himself the only person who admitted to *knowing nothing*, whereas on his critical wanderings through Athens, calling on the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, he everywhere encountered the conceit of knowledge. To his astonishment, he recognized that all these celebrated men lacked sound and certain insight even into their own professions and practiced them only by instinct. “Only by instinct”: with this expression we touch the heart and center of the Socratic tendency. With it, Socratism condemns existing art and existing ethics alike: wherever it turns its scrutinizing gaze, it sees a lack of insight and the power of delusion, and from this lack concludes that what exists is inwardly perverse and reprehensible. From this one point Socrates believed he must correct existence: he, a solitary individual, enters with an air of disdain and superiority, as the forerunner of an entirely different kind of culture, art, and morality, into a world whose merest fringe we would count it our greatest good fortune to grasp in reverence.\n\nThis is the immense misgiving that seizes us whenever we confront Socrates, urging us again and again to discover the meaning and intention of this most questionable figure of antiquity. Who is this who dares, as a single individual, to negate the Greek spirit, which in Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus, in Phidias, in Pericles, in the Pythia and Dionysus, is assured of our astonished adoration as both the deepest abyss and the loftiest height? What demonic power dares to pour this magic potion into the dust? What demigod is this to whom the spirit chorus of humanity’s noblest must cry: “Woe! Woe! You have destroyed it, the beautiful world, with a mighty fist; it falls, it crumbles!”\n\nA key to the nature of Socrates is offered by that marvelous phenomenon called the “daimonion of Socrates.” In particular situations, when his immense intellect began to waver, he found firm support in a divine voice that made itself heard at such moments. Whenever this voice comes, it always *warns* him *away*. In this wholly abnormal nature, instinctive wisdom appears only to *obstruct* conscious knowledge here and there. In all productive people, instinct is precisely the creative, affirmative force, while consciousness behaves critically and dissuasively; in Socrates, by contrast, instinct becomes the critic, consciousness the creator—a true monstrosity born of deficiency! What we perceive here is a monstrous absence of any mystical disposition, so that Socrates might be described as the specific *non-mystic*, in whom the logical nature has developed through a second conception as excessively as instinctive wisdom has in the mystic. On the other hand, the logical drive manifesting itself in Socrates was utterly incapable of turning against itself; in its unrestrained onward flow it displays an elemental force such as we encounter, to our shuddering astonishment, only in the very greatest instinctive powers. Anyone who has felt even a breath of the divine naivety and certainty of Socrates’ way of life in Plato’s writings also senses how the immense driving wheel of logical Socratism is moving, as it were, *behind* Socrates, and how we must look through Socrates as through a shadow to see it. That he himself had some inkling of this relation is expressed in the dignified gravity with which he asserted his divine calling everywhere, even before his judges. To refute him on this point was fundamentally as impossible as to approve his influence, which dissolved the instincts. Given this insoluble conflict, once he had been brought before the tribunal of the Greek state, only one form of condemnation was appropriate: exile. As something utterly enigmatic, unclassifiable, inexplicable, he might have been sent across the border without any posterity having the right to accuse the Athenians of a disgraceful deed. But that death rather than mere exile was pronounced upon him seems to have been brought about by Socrates himself, with complete lucidity and without the natural horror of death. He went to his death with the same calm with which, in Plato’s account, he leaves the symposium at the first light of dawn, the last of the drinkers, to begin a new day, while behind him his drowsy companions remain on the benches and the ground, dreaming of Socrates, the true lover. *The dying Socrates* became the new ideal, never before beheld, of noble Greek youth: above all, the quintessential Hellenic youth, Plato, cast himself before this image with all the fervent devotion of his rapturous soul.\n\n### Section 14\n\nLet us now imagine Socrates’ single great Cyclops eye turned upon tragedy, that eye in which the gracious madness of artistic inspiration never glowed—let us imagine how incapable that eye was of gazing with pleasure into the Dionysian abysses—what, after all, must it have seen in the “sublime and highly praised” art of tragedy, as Plato calls it? Something quite irrational, with causes that seemed to have no effects and effects that seemed to have no causes, the whole so colorful and manifold that it must repel a sober temperament, while providing dangerous tinder for excitable, sensitive souls. We know the only genre of poetry he understood: the *Aesopian fable*. And surely he understood it with that smiling condescension with which honest, good Gellert sings the praises of poetry in his fable of the bee and the hen:\n\n“You see in me what use it serves:\nTo tell someone of little sense\nThe truth by means of an image.”\n\nBut to Socrates tragic art did not seem even to “tell the truth,” quite apart from its addressing someone “of little sense,” and thus not the philosopher: a twofold reason to keep away from it. Like Plato, he counted it among the flattering arts, which present only what is pleasant, not what is useful, and therefore demanded of his disciples abstinence and strict separation from such unphilosophical enticements—with such success that the young tragic poet Plato first of all burned his poems so that he could become Socrates’ pupil. But where unconquerable gifts fought against the Socratic maxims, the force of those maxims, combined with the weight of that tremendous character, was still great enough to drive poetry itself into new and hitherto unknown positions.\n\nOne example is Plato himself, just mentioned. In condemning tragedy and art in general, he certainly did not lag behind his master’s naive cynicism; yet sheer artistic necessity compelled him to create an art form inwardly akin to the very existing forms he had rejected. Above all, the chief reproach Plato had to make against the older art—that it was the imitation of an illusory image and therefore belonged to a sphere still lower than the empirical world—must not be leveled at the new artwork. And so we see Plato striving to go beyond reality and represent the Idea underlying that pseudo-reality. Yet by this detour Plato the thinker had arrived at the very place where he had always been at home as a poet, and from which Sophocles and all the older art solemnly protested against that reproach. If tragedy had absorbed all earlier genres of art, the same may in turn be said, in an eccentric sense, of the Platonic dialogue: produced by mixing every existing style and form, it hovers midway between narrative, lyric, and drama, between prose and poetry, and thereby breaks through the older strict law of a unified linguistic form. The *Cynic* writers went still further along this path: with the utmost motley of styles, swaying back and forth between prose and metrical forms, they also achieved the literary image of the “raving Socrates” whom they habitually embodied in life. The Platonic dialogue was, as it were, the boat in which the shipwrecked older poetry saved itself along with all its children. Crowded into a narrow space and fearfully subject to the one helmsman, Socrates, they now sailed into a new world that could never tire of looking at the fantastic spectacle of this procession. Plato truly provided all posterity with the model of a new art form, the model of the *novel*: it may be described as the Aesopian fable raised to an infinite power, in which poetry stands in much the same subordinate relation to dialectical philosophy as that same philosophy stood to theology for many centuries—as its handmaid. This was the new position into which Plato forced poetry under the pressure of the demonic Socrates.\n\nHere *philosophical thought* overgrows art and forces it to cling tightly to the trunk of dialectic. The *Apollonian* tendency has enclosed itself in the chrysalis of logical schematism, just as we found something corresponding to this in Euripides, and in addition a translation of the *Dionysian* into naturalistic emotion. Socrates, the dialectical hero of the Platonic drama, recalls the kindred nature of the Euripidean hero, who must defend his actions with argument and counterargument, and thereby so often risks forfeiting our tragic pity. For who could fail to recognize the *optimistic* element in the nature of dialectic, which celebrates its triumph in every inference and can breathe only in cool clarity and consciousness? Once this optimistic element has penetrated tragedy, it must gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions and necessarily drive it to self-destruction—ending in the death leap into bourgeois drama. We need only consider the consequences of the Socratic propositions: “Virtue is knowledge; one sins only out of ignorance; the virtuous person is the happy person.” These three basic forms of optimism contain the death of tragedy. For now the virtuous hero must be a dialectician; now there must be a necessary, visible bond between virtue and knowledge, faith and morality; now Aeschylus’ transcendental resolution of justice has been debased into the shallow, impudent principle of “poetic justice,” with its customary god from the machine.\n\nAgainst this new Socratic-optimistic stage world, how does the *chorus* now appear, and with it the entire musical-Dionysian foundation of tragedy? As something incidental, a reminder of tragedy’s origin that might well be dispensed with, whereas we have understood that the chorus can be grasped only as the *cause* of tragedy and of the tragic in general. Even in Sophocles this embarrassment over the chorus becomes apparent—an important sign that the Dionysian ground of tragedy is already beginning to crumble in his work. He no longer dares entrust the principal share of the effect to the chorus, but so restricts its sphere that it now appears almost on the same level as the actors, as though it had been lifted out of the orchestra and onto the stage. This, of course, utterly destroys its nature, even if Aristotle endorses precisely this conception of the chorus. This displacement of the chorus, which Sophocles recommended at any rate through his practice and, according to tradition, even in a written treatise, is the first step toward its *annihilation*, whose successive phases follow one another with terrifying speed in Euripides, Agathon, and the newer comedy. With the scourge of its syllogisms, optimistic dialectic drives *music* out of tragedy: that is, it destroys the essence of tragedy, which can be interpreted only as a manifestation and embodiment in images of Dionysian states, as a visible symbolization of music, as the dream world of a Dionysian intoxication.\n\nIf we must therefore assume an anti-Dionysian tendency at work even before Socrates, one that merely gains an expression of unprecedented grandeur in him, we must not shrink from asking what a phenomenon such as Socrates points toward. For in the face of the Platonic dialogues we are unable to understand him as a merely dissolving, negative power. And however certain it is that the most immediate effect of the Socratic drive tended toward the disintegration of Dionysian tragedy, a profound experience in Socrates’ own life compels us to ask whether Socratism and art *necessarily* stand only at opposite poles, and whether the birth of an “artistic Socrates” is really something inherently contradictory.\n\nFor this despotic logician did occasionally feel, in relation to art, a gap, an emptiness, a half-reproach, a duty perhaps left unfulfilled. As he tells his friends in prison, the same dream apparition often came to him, always saying the same thing: “Socrates, practice music!” Until his last days he reassures himself with the belief that his philosophizing is the highest art of the Muses, and cannot quite believe that a divinity would be reminding him of that “common, popular music.” At last, in prison, to relieve his conscience entirely, he agrees to practice even the music he holds in such low esteem. In this spirit he composes a prelude to Apollo and puts some Aesopian fables into verse. What drove him to these exercises resembled the daimonion’s warning voice: it was his Apollonian insight that, like a barbarian king, he did not understand a noble image of a god and was in danger of offending a divinity—through his failure to understand. Those words of the Socratic dream apparition are the sole sign of a misgiving about the limits of the logical nature. Perhaps—so he must have asked himself—what is unintelligible to me is not, for that reason, unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative and supplement to science?\n\n### Section 15\n\nIn the spirit of these last questions, so full of presentiment, we must now say how the influence of Socrates has spread over posterity down to this very moment, indeed into all the future, like a shadow that grows ever longer in the evening sun; how it compels the creation of *art* anew, again and again—art, that is, in the already metaphysical, broadest and deepest sense—and, through its own infinity, guarantees the infinity of art as well.\n\nBefore this could be recognized, before the innermost dependence of all art on the Greeks—the Greeks from Homer to Socrates—had been convincingly demonstrated, we were bound to fare with these Greeks as the Athenians did with Socrates. Almost every age and stage of culture has at some point sought, in profound discontent, to free itself from the Greeks, because in their presence everything it had achieved for itself, everything seemingly wholly original and quite sincerely admired, suddenly seemed to lose color and life and shrink into a failed copy, even a caricature. And so heartfelt fury keeps breaking out afresh against that presumptuous little people who dared to brand everything not native to themselves as “barbaric” for all time. Who are they, we ask ourselves, who, although they have only an ephemeral historical splendor to show, only institutions of ludicrously narrow scope, only a dubious moral excellence, and are even marked by ugly vices, nonetheless claim the dignity and special standing among peoples that belong to genius amid the masses? Unfortunately, we have not been lucky enough to find the cup of hemlock that could simply dispose of such a being: all the poison generated by envy, slander, and fury was insufficient to annihilate that self-sufficient magnificence. And so we feel shame and fear before the Greeks—unless someone prizes truth above all else and therefore dares admit this truth as well: that the Greeks, as charioteers, hold our culture and every culture in their hands, but that almost always the chariots and horses are made of too inferior a substance, unworthy of the glory of their drivers, who then think it a joke to send such a team plunging into the abyss, while they themselves clear it with the leap of Achilles.\n\nTo establish the dignity of such leadership for Socrates too, it is enough to recognize in him the type of a form of existence unheard of before him: the type of the *theoretical human being*, whose meaning and aim it is our next task to understand. Like the artist, the theoretical person finds infinite satisfaction in what exists and, like the artist, is protected by that satisfaction against the practical ethics of pessimism and its Lynceus eyes, which shine only in the dark. For while the artist, whenever truth is unveiled, clings with rapturous gaze only to what remains a veil even now, after the unveiling, the theoretical person takes pleasure and satisfaction in the discarded veil, finding the highest object of delight in a process of unveiling that always succeeds happily through one’s own power. There would be no science if it cared for that *one* naked goddess and nothing else. For then its disciples would have to feel like people who wanted to dig a hole straight through the earth: each of them realizes that even with the greatest lifelong exertion he can dig through only a tiny stretch of that immense depth, which before his eyes is filled in again by his neighbor’s work, so that a third seems well advised to choose a new spot on his own for his attempts at boring. If someone now proves convincingly that this direct route cannot reach the goal at the antipodes, who would still want to keep working in the old depths, unless in the meantime he found satisfaction in discovering precious stones or laws of nature? That is why Lessing, the most honest theoretical person, dared to declare that he cared more for the search for truth than for truth itself: with this, the fundamental secret of science was laid bare, to the astonishment, indeed the annoyance, of its practitioners. Yet alongside this isolated insight, as an excess of honesty if not of high spirits, stands a profound *delusional idea*, which first came into the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakable faith that thought, following the guiding thread of causality, reaches into the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of *correcting* it. This sublime metaphysical delusion is given to science as an instinct and leads it again and again to its limits, where it must turn into *art*: *the real object toward which this mechanism is directed*.\n\nIf we now look at Socrates by the torchlight of this thought, he appears to us as the first who, guided by that instinct of science, could not only live but—what is far more—also die. Thus the image of the *dying Socrates*, the human being freed from fear of death by knowledge and reasons, is the heraldic shield above the entrance gate of science, reminding everyone of its vocation: to make existence appear intelligible and thereby justified. For this purpose, of course, when reasons fail, *myth* too must ultimately serve—the very thing I have just described as a necessary consequence, indeed as the aim, of science.\n\nAnyone who vividly imagines how, after Socrates, the initiator into the mysteries of science, one philosophical school succeeds another like wave upon wave; how an undreamed-of universality of the thirst for knowledge, across the broadest reaches of the cultivated world and as the true task of everyone with superior gifts, carried science onto the high seas, from which it has never since been wholly driven back; how only through this universality was a common web of thought stretched over the entire globe, indeed with vistas onto the lawful order of a whole solar system—anyone who brings all this before his mind, together with the astonishingly lofty pyramid of knowledge in the present, cannot help seeing in Socrates the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history. For if we imagined this entire incalculable sum of energy expended on that world tendency being used *not* in the service of knowledge but for the practical—that is, egoistic—aims of individuals and peoples, then general wars of annihilation and continual migrations of peoples would probably have so weakened the instinctive joy in living that, with suicide a habit, an individual might feel a final remnant of duty when, like an inhabitant of the Fiji Islands, he strangled his parents as their son, or his friend as a friend. This would be a practical pessimism that could even produce a horrifying ethics of genocide out of pity—a pessimism that, incidentally, exists and has existed everywhere in the world where art in some form, especially as religion and science, has not appeared as a remedy and defense against that pestilential breath.\n\nIn the face of this practical pessimism, Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist, who, through the faith already described in the fathomability of the nature of things, credits knowledge and insight with the power of a universal medicine and sees error as evil in itself. To penetrate those depths and distinguish true knowledge from semblance and error seemed to the Socratic person the noblest, indeed the only truly human vocation, just as, from Socrates onward, that mechanism of concepts, judgments, and inferences was valued above all other faculties as nature’s highest activity and most admirable gift. Even the most sublime moral deeds, the impulses of pity, self-sacrifice, and heroism, and that hard-won sea-calm of the soul which the Apollonian Greek called sophrosyne, were derived by Socrates and his like-minded successors down to the present from the dialectic of knowledge, and accordingly declared teachable. Anyone who has experienced the pleasure of a Socratic insight and feels how, in ever-widening circles, it seeks to embrace the entire world of appearances will from then on feel no more powerful spur toward existence than the desire to complete that conquest and weave the net so tightly that nothing can pass through it. To someone disposed in this way, the Platonic Socrates then appears as the teacher of an entirely new form of “Greek cheerfulness” and bliss in existence, which seeks to discharge itself in action and will chiefly find that discharge in maieutic and educative influence on noble youths, with the aim of finally begetting genius.\n\nBut now science, spurred by its powerful delusion, hastens irresistibly toward its limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence of logic founders. For the circumference of the circle of science has infinitely many points, and while it is still impossible to see how that circle could ever be completely measured out, the noble and gifted person inevitably encounters, even before the midpoint of life, such boundary points on the circumference, where he stares into what cannot be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees here how logic coils around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, a new form of knowledge breaks through, *tragic knowledge*, which needs art as protection and remedy merely to be endured.\n\nIf, with eyes strengthened and refreshed by the Greeks, we look upon the highest spheres of the world that washes around us, we perceive the insatiable thirst for optimistic knowledge, exemplified in Socrates, transformed into tragic resignation and a need for art. On its lower levels, however, that same thirst must express itself in hostility to art, and inwardly abhor Dionysian-tragic art above all, as was shown, for example, in the account of Socratism’s battle against Aeschylean tragedy.\n\nHere, then, with stirred hearts, we knock at the gates of the present and future: will that “transformation” lead to ever-new configurations of genius, and precisely of the *music-practicing Socrates*? Will the net of art spread over existence, even under the name of religion or science, be woven ever more firmly and delicately, or is it destined to be torn to shreds by the restlessly barbaric activity and turmoil that now calls itself “the present”?—Anxious but not without consolation, we stand aside for a little while as contemplative observers permitted to witness those tremendous struggles and transitions. Ah! The spell of these struggles is that whoever beholds them must also fight them!\n\n### Section 16\n\nThrough this historical example, developed in detail, we have tried to make clear that tragedy perishes with the fading of the spirit of music just as surely as it can be born from that spirit alone. To temper the strangeness of this claim and, on the other hand, to reveal the origin of this insight of ours, we must now confront the analogous phenomena of the present with an unclouded gaze. We must enter the midst of those struggles which, as I have just said, are being fought in the highest spheres of our present world between the insatiable desire for optimistic knowledge and the tragic need for art. Here I will disregard all the other hostile drives that work against art, and against tragedy in particular, in every age, and that are spreading through the present with such confidence of victory that, among the theatrical arts, for example, farce and ballet alone put forth their blossoms in a somewhat luxuriant growth—blossoms whose scent may not please everyone. I will speak only of the *most illustrious opposition* to the tragic view of the world, by which I mean science, optimistic in its deepest essence, with its ancestor Socrates at its head. Soon, too, the powers will be named that seem to me to guarantee *a rebirth of tragedy*—and what other blessed hopes for the German spirit!\n\nBefore we plunge into the midst of those struggles, let us clothe ourselves in the armor of the insights we have won so far. In contrast to all those intent on deriving the arts from a single principle as the necessary source of life for every artwork, I keep my gaze fixed on those two artistic divinities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognize in them the living, visible representatives of *two* worlds of art, different in their deepest essence and their highest aims. Apollo stands before me as the transfiguring genius of the principle of individuation, through whom alone redemption in semblance can truly be attained, while at the mystical, jubilant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is shattered and the way lies open to the Mothers of being, to the innermost core of things. This tremendous opposition, which gapes open between the plastic arts as the Apollonian art and music as the Dionysian art, became apparent to only one of the great thinkers with such clarity that, even without the guidance of this Hellenic symbolism of the gods, he recognized in music a character and origin different from those of all the other arts: it is not, like all of them, an image of appearance, but an immediate image of the will itself, and thus represents *the metaphysical in relation to everything physical in the world*, the thing in itself in relation to all appearance. (Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, p. 310). Richard Wagner has set his seal on this most important insight in all aesthetics—with which aesthetics, taken in a more serious sense, first begins—confirming its eternal truth when he establishes in “Beethoven” that music must be judged by aesthetic principles entirely different from those of all the visual arts, and not by the category of beauty at all, even though a mistaken aesthetics, guided by a misguided and degenerate art, had grown accustomed, starting from the concept of beauty valid in the world of visual form, to demand an effect from music similar to that of works of visual art: namely, the arousal of *pleasure in beautiful forms*. After recognizing that tremendous opposition, I felt a powerful necessity to approach the essence of Greek tragedy, and with it the deepest revelation of Hellenic genius. For only now did I believe I possessed the magic to go beyond the phraseology of our customary aesthetics and bring the primal problem of tragedy bodily before my soul. This granted me so strangely distinctive a glimpse into the Hellenic world that it could only seem to me as though our classical-Hellenic scholarship, for all its proud bearing, had so far in the main known only how to feast on shadow plays and externals.\n\nPerhaps we may touch on that primal problem with this question: what aesthetic effect arises when those inherently separate artistic powers, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, become active side by side? Or, more briefly: how does music relate to image and concept?—Schopenhauer, whom Richard Wagner praises for an unsurpassable clarity and transparency of exposition on precisely this point, discusses the matter most fully in the following passage, which I will reproduce here in its entirety. Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, p. 309: “In accordance with all this, we can regard the world of appearances, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing, which is therefore itself the sole mediator of the analogy between them and must be known if that analogy is to be understood. Accordingly, when regarded as an expression of the world, music is a language universal to the highest degree, whose relation even to the universality of concepts is roughly that of concepts to individual things. Its universality, however, is by no means the empty universality of abstraction, but of an entirely different kind, joined to clear definiteness throughout. In this it resembles geometrical figures and numbers, which, as the universal forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to all of them prior to experience, are nevertheless not abstract but directly apprehensible and thoroughly determinate. All possible strivings, excitations, and expressions of the will, all those processes within the human being that reason casts into the broad negative concept of feeling, can be expressed through the infinitely many possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere form, without the material, always only in terms of their in-itself, not their appearance—as it were their innermost soul, without a body. This intimate relation of music to the true essence of all things also explains why, when suitable music sounds during any scene, action, event, or setting, it seems to disclose its most secret meaning to us and to serve as its truest and clearest commentary; likewise, why someone who gives himself wholly to the impression of a symphony feels as though he were seeing all possible events of life and the world pass before him. Yet on reflection he can point to no resemblance between that play of sounds and the things that hovered before his mind. For music, as I have said, differs from all other arts in that it is not an image of appearance, or more precisely of the adequate objecthood of the will, but an immediate image of the will itself, and thus represents the metaphysical in relation to everything physical in the world, the thing in itself in relation to all appearance. Accordingly, the world could just as well be called embodied music as embodied will. This, then, explains why music immediately makes every painting, indeed every scene of actual life and the world, stand out with heightened significance—all the more so, of course, the closer the analogy between its melody and the inner spirit of the given appearance. On this rests the possibility of setting a poem to music as a song, or a visual representation as a pantomime, or both as an opera. Such individual images of human life, set to the universal language of music, are never connected or in correspondence with it through any thoroughgoing necessity; rather, they stand to it only as an arbitrarily chosen example stands to a universal concept. They present in the definiteness of reality what music expresses in the universality of mere form. For melodies, like universal concepts, are in a certain sense an abstraction from reality. Reality, that is, the world of individual things, supplies what is perceptible, particular, and individual—the individual case—both for the universality of concepts and for that of melodies. Yet these two universalities are in a certain respect opposed: concepts contain only the forms first abstracted from perception, as it were the outer husk stripped from things, and are thus abstractions in the strictest sense; music, by contrast, gives the innermost core that precedes all formation, or the heart of things. This relation could be expressed quite well in the language of the Scholastics by saying: concepts are universals after the thing, music gives universals before the thing, and reality gives universals in the thing. But the very possibility of a relation between a composition and a visual representation rests, as I have said, on their being merely quite different expressions of the same inner essence of the world. When such a relation is actually present in a particular case, when the composer has known how to express in the universal language of music the stirrings of the will that constitute the core of an event, then the melody of the song, the music of the opera, is expressive. But the analogy the composer discovers between the two must have arisen from an immediate knowledge of the essence of the world, without his reason being conscious of it; it must not be an imitation mediated by concepts and made with conscious intention. Otherwise the music does not express the inner essence, the will itself, but merely imitates its appearance inadequately, as all music that is properly imitative does.”—\n\nThus, following Schopenhauer’s teaching, we understand music as the immediate language of the will and feel our imagination stirred to give form to that invisible yet so vividly moving spirit world that speaks to us, and to embody it for ourselves in an analogous example. On the other hand, image and concept acquire a heightened significance under the influence of music that truly corresponds to them. Dionysian art therefore ordinarily exerts two effects on the Apollonian artistic faculty: music prompts a *vision in likenesses* of Dionysian universality; music then makes the likeness-image stand out *with the highest significance*. From these facts, intelligible in themselves and accessible to any deeper observation, I infer music’s capacity to give birth to *myth*, that is, the most significant example, and specifically to *tragic* myth: the myth that speaks in likenesses of Dionysian knowledge. In the phenomenon of the lyric poet I have shown how music struggles within him to make its essence known in Apollonian images. If we now imagine that music at its highest intensification must also seek the highest embodiment in images, we must consider it possible that it can find the symbolic expression of its own Dionysian wisdom. And where else should we seek this expression, if not in tragedy and in the very concept of *the tragic*?\n\nThe tragic cannot honestly be derived at all from the essence of art as commonly understood through the sole category of semblance and beauty; only through the spirit of music do we understand a joy in the annihilation of the individual. For individual examples of such annihilation merely make clear to us the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art, which expresses the will in its omnipotence, as it were behind the principle of individuation, eternal life beyond all appearance and despite all annihilation. Metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of instinctively unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images: the hero, the highest appearance of the will, is negated to our delight because he is, after all, only appearance, and his annihilation does not touch the eternal life of the will. “We believe in eternal life,” cries tragedy, while music is the immediate idea of this life. The sculptor’s art has an entirely different aim: here Apollo overcomes the suffering of the individual through the radiant glorification of the *eternity of appearance*; here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life, and in a certain sense pain is lied away from the features of nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism, that same nature addresses us in its true, undisguised voice: “Be as I am! Beneath the ceaseless change of appearances, the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally compelling into existence, eternally finding satisfaction in this change of appearances!”\n\n### Section 17\n\nDionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of the eternal joy of existence; only we are to seek this joy not in appearances but behind them. We are to recognize that everything that comes into being must be prepared for a painful downfall; we are compelled to look into the terrors of individual existence—and yet are not to freeze in horror: a metaphysical consolation tears us momentarily out of the machinery of changing forms. For brief moments we really are the primordial being itself and feel its unbridled thirst for existence and joy in existence. The struggle, the torment, the annihilation of appearances now seem necessary, as it were, given the excess of countless forms of existence pressing and jostling their way into life, given the exuberant fertility of the world-will. We are pierced by the raging sting of these torments at the very moment when we have, as it were, become one with the immeasurable primordial joy in existence, and when in Dionysian rapture we divine the indestructibility and eternity of this joy. Despite fear and pity, we are the happily living—not as individuals, but as the *one* living being, with whose joy in procreation we have merged.\n\nThe history of the origin of Greek tragedy now tells us with luminous certainty how the Greeks’ tragic artwork was truly born from the spirit of music. Through this thought we believe we have, for the first time, done justice to the original and so astonishing meaning of the chorus. At the same time, however, we must admit that the significance of tragic myth proposed above never became transparent in conceptual clarity to the Greek poets, let alone the Greek philosophers. Their heroes speak, in a sense, more superficially than they act; myth by no means finds its adequate objectification in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and the visible images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can grasp in words and concepts. The same can also be observed in Shakespeare, whose Hamlet, for example, in a similar sense speaks more superficially than he acts, so that the lesson of Hamlet mentioned earlier must be drawn not from the words but from a deepened contemplation and survey of the whole. As for Greek tragedy, which admittedly comes before us only as spoken drama, I have even suggested that this incongruity between myth and word could easily tempt us to consider it shallower and less significant than it is, and accordingly to assume that its effect was more superficial than, according to ancient testimony, it must have been. For how easily we forget that what the poet of words had failed to do—attain the highest spiritualization and ideality of myth—he could accomplish at any moment as a creative musician! We, of course, must reconstruct the overwhelming power of the musical effect almost by scholarly means in order to receive something of that incomparable consolation which must belong to true tragedy. Yet even this musical predominance could have been felt by us as such only if we were Greeks, whereas in the whole development of Greek music—set against the infinitely richer music we know and are familiar with—we believe we hear only the youthful song of musical genius, struck up in a shy sense of its own strength. The Greeks are, as the Egyptian priests say, the eternal children, and in tragic art too they are only children who do not know what sublime toy has come into being under their hands and—is being shattered.\n\nThat struggle of the spirit of music toward revelation in image and myth, intensifying from the beginnings of lyric poetry to Attic tragedy, suddenly breaks off just after achieving its luxuriant flowering, and vanishes, as it were, from the surface of Hellenic art. Meanwhile the Dionysian view of the world born of that struggle lives on in the mysteries and, through the most wondrous metamorphoses and degenerations, never ceases to attract more serious natures. Might it not one day rise again from its mystical depths as art?\n\nHere we are concerned with the question whether the power against whose resistance tragedy shattered is strong enough for all time to prevent the artistic reawakening of tragedy and the tragic view of the world. If ancient tragedy was driven from its course by the dialectical drive toward knowledge and the optimism of science, we would have to infer from this fact an eternal struggle between *the theoretical* and *the tragic view of the world*. Only after the spirit of science has been led to its limits, and its claim to universal validity destroyed by the demonstration of those limits, might we hope for a rebirth of tragedy. For this form of culture we would have to establish the symbol of *the music-practicing Socrates*, in the sense discussed earlier. In this contrast, by the spirit of science I mean that faith, first brought to light in the person of Socrates, in the fathomability of nature and the universal healing power of knowledge.\n\nAnyone who recalls the immediate consequences of this restlessly advancing spirit of science will at once bring to mind how it annihilated *myth*, and how this annihilation drove poetry from its natural, ideal soil, leaving it homeless. If we have rightly credited music with the power to give birth to myth anew from within itself, then we must also seek the spirit of science along the path where it confronts this myth-creating power of music as an enemy. This happens in the development of the *newer Attic dithyramb*, whose music no longer expressed the inner essence, the will itself, but merely reproduced appearance inadequately, in an imitation mediated by concepts. Truly musical natures turned away from this inwardly degenerate music with the same revulsion they felt toward Socrates’ art-murdering tendency. Aristophanes’ sure-seizing instinct certainly grasped the truth when it embraced Socrates himself, Euripides’ tragedy, and the music of the newer dithyrambic poets in the same feeling of hatred, scenting the marks of a degenerate culture in all three phenomena. Through that newer dithyramb, music was sacrilegiously made into an imitative portrait of appearance—of a battle, for example, or a storm at sea—and thereby wholly robbed of its myth-creating power. For if it seeks to arouse our delight only by compelling us to look for external analogies between an event in life or nature and certain rhythmic figures and characteristic sounds in music, if our understanding is to find satisfaction in recognizing these analogies, then we are dragged down into a mood in which receiving the mythical is impossible. For myth seeks to be felt in a vivid vision as a single example of a universality and truth gazing into infinity. Truly Dionysian music confronts us as just such a universal mirror of the world-will: the visible event refracted in this mirror immediately expands for our feeling into the image of an eternal truth. Conversely, the tone painting of the newer dithyramb immediately strips such a visible event of every mythical quality. Music has now become a meager image of appearance, and is therefore infinitely poorer than appearance itself; through this poverty it even diminishes appearance itself in our feeling, so that, for example, a battle musically imitated in this way is exhausted in the din of marching, signal calls, and the like, and our imagination is held fast precisely at these superficialities. Tone painting is thus in every respect the opposite of the myth-creating power of true music: through it appearance becomes poorer than it is, whereas through Dionysian music the individual appearance is enriched and expanded into an image of the world. It was a mighty victory for the non-Dionysian spirit when, in the development of the newer dithyramb, it estranged music from itself and degraded it into the slave of appearance. Euripides, who in a higher sense must be called an utterly unmusical nature, is for precisely this reason a passionate adherent of the newer dithyrambic music, and employs all its showpieces and mannerisms with a robber’s generosity.\n\nWe see the power of this non-Dionysian spirit, directed against myth, at work from another side when we turn our gaze to the growing predominance of *character portrayal* and psychological refinement in tragedy from Sophocles onward. Character is no longer to be allowed to expand into an eternal type; on the contrary, through artful secondary traits and shadings, through the most delicate definition of every line, it is to seem so individual that the spectator no longer feels myth at all, but rather the powerful fidelity to nature and the artist’s imitative power. Here too we perceive the victory of appearance over the universal and the pleasure in the individual specimen, as though it were an anatomical preparation; we are already breathing the air of a theoretical world that prizes scientific knowledge above the artistic reflection of a universal law. The movement along the line of characterization advances swiftly: while Sophocles still paints whole characters and harnesses myth to their refined development, Euripides already paints only great individual character traits that know how to express themselves in violent passions. In the newer Attic comedy there are only masks with *one* expression: frivolous old men, cheated pimps, cunning slaves, in tireless repetition. Where is the myth-forming spirit of music now? What remains of music is either music of excitation or music of recollection—that is, either a stimulant for dulled, worn-out nerves or tone painting. For the former, the accompanying text scarcely matters anymore: even in Euripides things become quite slovenly once his heroes or choruses begin to sing. What can they have come to in his brazen successors?\n\nBut the new non-Dionysian spirit reveals itself most clearly of all in the *endings* of the newer dramas. In ancient tragedy, the metaphysical consolation without which pleasure in tragedy cannot be explained at all could be felt at the end; perhaps the reconciling sound from another world rings out most purely in Oedipus at Colonus. Now that the genius of music has fled from tragedy, tragedy is, strictly speaking, dead: for where could that metaphysical consolation now be drawn from? So an earthly resolution of tragic dissonance was sought. After being sufficiently tortured by fate, the hero reaped his well-earned reward in a splendid marriage, in divine tributes of honor. The hero had become a gladiator who, after being thoroughly flayed and covered in wounds, was occasionally granted his freedom. The god from the machine has taken the place of metaphysical consolation. I do not mean to say that the tragic view of the world was everywhere and entirely destroyed by the advancing spirit of the non-Dionysian: we know only that it had to flee from art, as it were into the underworld, degenerating into a secret cult. But across the broadest expanse of the surface of the Hellenic spirit raged the consuming breath of that spirit which manifests itself in the form of “Greek cheerfulness” already discussed as a senile, unproductive joy in existence. This cheerfulness is the opposite of the magnificent “naivety” of the older Greeks, which, according to the characterization given, must be understood as the blossom of Apollonian culture growing from a dark abyss, as the victory the Hellenic will wins over suffering and the wisdom of suffering through its mirroring of beauty. The noblest expression of that other form of “Greek cheerfulness,” the Alexandrian form, is the cheerfulness of *the theoretical human being*. It displays the same characteristic features I have just derived from the spirit of the non-Dionysian: it fights Dionysian wisdom and art; it strives to dissolve myth; it replaces metaphysical consolation with an earthly consonance, indeed with a god from the machine of its own, namely the god of machines and crucibles—that is, the forces of the spirits of nature known and employed in the service of a higher egoism. It believes in a correction of the world through knowledge, in a life guided by science, and is actually capable of confining the individual within the very narrowest circle of solvable tasks, within which he cheerfully says to life: “I want you: you are worth knowing.”\n\n### Section 18\n\nIt is an eternal phenomenon: the greedy will always finds a means, through an illusion spread over things, to hold its creatures fast in life and compel them to go on living. One person is bound by the Socratic pleasure in knowledge and the delusion that through it the eternal wound of existence can be healed; another is ensnared by art’s seductive veil of beauty, fluttering before his eyes; another, in turn, by the metaphysical consolation that beneath the whirl of appearances eternal life flows on indestructibly—not to speak of the more commonplace and almost still more powerful illusions the will keeps ready at every moment. Those three stages of illusion are, in general, only for more nobly gifted natures, who feel the burden and weight of existence with a deeper displeasure and must be deceived out of that displeasure by choice stimulants. Everything we call culture consists of these stimulants: according to the proportions of their mixture, we have a predominantly *Socratic*, *artistic*, or *tragic* culture. Or, if historical examples may be permitted: there is either an Alexandrian, a Hellenic, or a Buddhist culture.\n\nOur entire modern world is caught in the net of Alexandrian culture and recognizes as its ideal the *theoretical human being*, equipped with the highest powers of knowledge and working in the service of science, whose archetype and forefather is Socrates. All our educational methods originally have this ideal in view: every other existence must struggle laboriously upward alongside it, as a permitted rather than an intended existence. In an almost frightening sense, for a long time the cultivated person was found here only in the form of the scholar; even our poetic arts had to develop from learned imitations, and in the principal effect of rhyme we still recognize the origin of our poetic form in artificial experiments with a language not native to us, a learned language in the strictest sense. How incomprehensible a genuine Greek would have to find *Faust*, the modern man of culture, in himself comprehensible—Faust, storming unsatisfied through all the faculties of learning, devoted to magic and the devil out of his drive for knowledge. We need only set him beside Socrates for comparison to recognize that modern humanity is beginning to divine the limits of that Socratic pleasure in knowledge and longs, from the vast, desolate sea of knowledge, for a shore. When Goethe once remarks to Eckermann, with reference to Napoleon, “Yes, my dear fellow, there is also a productivity of deeds,” he reminds us, with charming naivety, that the non-theoretical person is something incredible and astonishing to the modern person, so that it takes the wisdom of a Goethe once again to find even so strange a form of existence comprehensible, indeed pardonable.\n\nAnd now we must not conceal from ourselves what lies hidden in the womb of this Socratic culture! Optimism that imagines itself without limits! Now we must not be horrified when the fruits of this optimism ripen, when society, leavened by such a culture down to its lowest strata, gradually begins to tremble with exuberant stirrings and desires; when faith in earthly happiness for everyone, faith in the possibility of such a universal culture of knowledge, gradually turns into the threatening demand for such an Alexandrian happiness on earth, into the invocation of a Euripidean god from the machine! We must take note: Alexandrian culture needs a slave class if it is to endure, but in its optimistic view of existence it denies the necessity of such a class, and therefore, once the effect of its fair words of seduction and reassurance about the “dignity of humanity” and the “dignity of labor” is spent, it gradually moves toward a horrifying annihilation. There is nothing more terrible than a barbaric slave class that has learned to regard its existence as an injustice and prepares to take revenge not only for itself but for all generations. In the face of such threatening storms, who dares appeal with confident courage to our pale and weary religions, which have degenerated even in their foundations into scholars’ religions, so that myth, the necessary precondition of every religion, is already paralyzed everywhere, and even in this sphere that optimistic spirit has come to power which we have just identified as the seed of our society’s annihilation?\n\nWhile the disaster slumbering in the womb of theoretical culture gradually begins to frighten the modern person, and he reaches anxiously into the treasury of his experiences for means to avert the danger without quite believing in those means himself; while he thus begins to divine his own consequences, great natures of universal breadth have known how, with incredible deliberation, to use the instruments of science itself to demonstrate the limits and conditioned character of knowledge in general, and thereby decisively to deny science’s claim to universal validity and universal aims. In this demonstration, the delusional idea that presumes, guided by causality, to fathom the innermost essence of things was recognized as such for the first time. The tremendous courage and wisdom of *Kant* and *Schopenhauer* won the hardest victory, the victory over the optimism hidden in the essence of logic, which in turn forms the foundation of our culture. Supported by eternal truths that it took without question, this optimism had believed that all the riddles of the world could be known and fathomed, and had treated space, time, and causality as wholly unconditioned laws of the most universal validity. Kant revealed how these actually served only to elevate mere appearance, the work of Maya, into the sole and highest reality, putting it in the place of the innermost and true essence of things and thereby making genuine knowledge of that essence impossible—that is, in Schopenhauer’s phrase, lulling the dreamer into a still deeper sleep (W. a. W. u. V. I, p. 498). This insight has inaugurated a culture I dare to call tragic. Its most important feature is that wisdom replaces science as the highest goal: undeceived by the seductive distractions of the sciences, it turns an unwavering gaze upon the total image of the world and seeks, with loving sympathy, to embrace the eternal suffering within it as its own. Let us imagine a rising generation with this fearlessness of vision, this heroic impulse toward the tremendous; let us imagine the bold stride of these dragon slayers, the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all the doctrines of weakness belonging to that optimism, in order to “live resolutely,” wholly and fully. Must not the tragic person of this culture, in educating himself to seriousness and terror, necessarily desire a new art, the art of metaphysical consolation, tragedy as the Helen who belongs to him, and cry out with Faust:\n\nAnd should I not, with longing’s utmost force,\nDraw into life that one and only form?\n\nBut now that Socratic culture has been shaken from two sides and can hold the scepter of its infallibility only in trembling hands—first from fear of its own consequences, which it is at last beginning to divine, and then because it is no longer convinced of the eternal validity of its foundation with its former naive confidence—it is a sad spectacle to see how the dance of its thought keeps flinging itself longingly upon new forms to embrace them, only suddenly to release them again with a shudder, as Mephistopheles releases the seductive Lamias. This is precisely the sign of that “rupture” everyone speaks of as the primal affliction of modern culture: the theoretical person recoils before his consequences and, unsatisfied, no longer dares entrust himself to the terrible, icy torrent of existence. Anxiously he runs up and down the bank. He no longer wants anything whole, whole also with all the natural cruelty of things. So far has the optimistic way of looking at things pampered him. Moreover, he feels how a culture built upon the principle of science must perish when it begins to become *illogical*, that is, to flee from its consequences. Our art reveals this universal distress: in vain do we lean in imitation on all the great productive periods and natures; in vain do we gather the whole of “world literature” around the modern person for his consolation and place him amid the artistic styles and artists of every age, so that, like Adam with the animals, he may give them names. He remains nonetheless the eternally hungry one, the “critic” without pleasure or power, the Alexandrian person, who is at bottom a librarian and proofreader and goes miserably blind from book dust and printing errors.\n\n### Section 19\n\nThe innermost substance of this Socratic culture cannot be characterized more sharply than by calling it *the culture of opera*. For in this sphere that culture has spoken with a naivety all its own about what it wills and knows—to our astonishment, when we set the genesis of opera and the facts of its development beside the eternal truths of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Let me recall first the emergence of the representational style and recitative. Is it credible that this wholly externalized operatic music, incapable of devotion, could have been received and cherished with rapturous favor, almost as the rebirth of all true music, by an age from which Palestrina’s inexpressibly sublime and sacred music had only just arisen? And who, on the other hand, would hold only the distraction-seeking luxury of those Florentine circles and the vanity of their dramatic singers responsible for the delight in opera that spread so impetuously? That in the same age, indeed among the same people, beside the vaulted edifice of Palestrina’s harmonies, on which the entire Christian Middle Ages had labored, this passion for a half-musical manner of speaking should awaken—I can explain this to myself only through an *extra-artistic tendency* at work in the very nature of recitative.\n\nThe singer accommodates the listener who wants to hear the words distinctly beneath the singing by speaking more than singing, and by intensifying the impassioned expression of the words in this half-song. Through this intensification of pathos, he makes the words easier to understand and overcomes the remaining half of music. The real danger now threatening him is that he may at some point give music the upper hand at the wrong moment, which would immediately destroy the pathos of the speech and the clarity of the words. On the other hand, he always feels the drive toward musical release and a virtuoso display of his voice. Here the “poet” comes to his aid, knowing how to offer him enough opportunities for lyrical interjections, repetitions of words and maxims, and the like: at these points the singer can now rest in the purely musical element, without regard for the words. This alternation between emotionally insistent yet only half-sung speech and wholly sung interjection, inherent in the representational style—this rapidly shifting effort to affect now the listener’s concepts and ideas, now his musical depths—is something so completely unnatural, so inwardly at odds with the artistic drives of the Dionysian and the Apollonian alike, that we must infer an origin for recitative outside all artistic instincts. On this account, recitative must be defined as a mixture of epic and lyrical delivery: by no means an inwardly stable mixture, which could not be achieved with things so wholly disparate, but the most external, mosaic-like gluing together, something utterly without a model in nature or experience. *But this was not the opinion of those inventors of recitative*: rather, they themselves, and their age with them, believed that this representational style had solved the mystery of ancient music, which alone could explain the tremendous effect of an Orpheus, an Amphion, indeed of Greek tragedy itself. The new style was regarded as the reawakening of the most powerful music, that of ancient Greece. Indeed, given the general and thoroughly popular conception of the Homeric world *as the primordial world*, people could surrender to the dream that they had now descended once again into humanity’s paradisiacal beginnings, when music, too, must necessarily have possessed that unsurpassed purity, power, and innocence of which the poets could tell such moving tales in their pastoral plays. Here we look into the innermost becoming of this quintessentially modern art form, opera: a powerful need compels an art into existence, but a need of an unaesthetic kind—the longing for the idyll, the belief in an existence of the artistic and good human being in the primordial past. Recitative was regarded as the rediscovered language of that primordial human being; opera as the recovered land of that idyllically or heroically good creature who at the same time follows a natural artistic drive in all his actions, who sings at least a little in everything he has to say, only to begin singing at full voice at the slightest stirring of feeling. For our present purposes it is immaterial that, with this newly created image of the paradisiacal artist, the humanists of the time were fighting the old ecclesiastical conception of the human being as inherently corrupt and lost. Opera must thus be understood as the opposing dogma of the good human being, which at the same time supplied a consolation against the pessimism to which precisely the serious-minded people of that age were most strongly impelled by the horrifying uncertainty of all circumstances. It is enough if we have recognized that the real enchantment, and thus the genesis, of this new art form lies in satisfying a wholly unaesthetic need: in the optimistic glorification of humanity as such, in conceiving the primordial human being as naturally good and artistic. This principle of opera has gradually turned into a threatening and terrifying *demand*, which, in the face of the socialist movements of the present, we can no longer fail to hear. The “good primordial human being” wants his rights: what paradisiacal prospects!\n\nAlongside this I place another equally clear confirmation of my view that opera is built on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the offspring of the theoretical person, the critical layman, not the artist: one of the strangest facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of listeners unmusical in the strictest sense that the words must be understood above all else, so that a rebirth of the art of music could be expected only if some manner of singing were discovered in which the words of the text ruled over counterpoint as the master over the servant. For words, they said, were as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic system as the soul was nobler than the body. With the unmusical crudity of a layman inherent in these views, the union of music, image, and word was handled in the beginnings of opera. In the spirit of this aesthetics, the first experiments also took place in the aristocratic lay circles of Florence, through poets and singers patronized there. The person powerless to create art produces a kind of art for himself precisely because he is the unartistic person as such. Because he has no inkling of music’s Dionysian depths, he transforms the enjoyment of music into an intellectual rhetoric of passion in words and tones in the representational style, and into sensuous delight in the arts of singing. Because he cannot behold a vision, he forces the stage machinist and the scenery painter into his service; because he does not know how to grasp the artist’s true nature, he conjures before him the “artistic primordial human being” to his own taste—that is, the person who sings and speaks in verse when impassioned. He dreams himself into an age when passion is enough to produce songs and poetry, as though every emotion had been capable of creating something artistic. Opera presupposes a false belief about the artistic process, namely that idyllic belief that everyone who feels is really an artist. In the sense of this belief, opera is the expression of the lay mentality in art, dictating its laws with the cheerful optimism of the theoretical person.\n\nIf we wished to unite under one concept the two ideas just described as active in the birth of opera, we would have no choice but to speak of an *idyllic tendency in opera*, using only Schiller’s terminology and explanation. Either, he says, nature and the ideal are an object of sorrow, when nature is presented as lost and the ideal as unattained; or both are an object of joy, when they are represented as real. The first gives elegy in the narrower sense, the second idyll in the broadest. Here we must immediately draw attention to the common feature of those two ideas in the genesis of opera: in them the ideal is not felt to be unattained, nor nature to be lost. According to this feeling, there was a primordial age of humanity when the human being lay against nature’s heart and, in this naturalness, had at the same time attained the ideal of humanity in a paradisiacal goodness and artistry. We were all supposed to descend from this perfect primordial human being, indeed still to be his faithful likeness: we needed only to cast off a few things in order to recognize ourselves once again as this primordial human being, by voluntarily divesting ourselves of superfluous learning and overabundant culture. Through his operatic imitation of Greek tragedy, the cultivated person of the Renaissance allowed himself to be led back to such a harmony of nature and ideal, to an idyllic reality. He used this tragedy as Dante used Virgil, to be led to the gates of paradise; from there, however, he advanced further on his own, passing from an imitation of the highest Greek art form to a “restoration of all things,” to a re-creation of humanity’s original world of art. What confident good nature in these audacious endeavors, in the very womb of theoretical culture!—It can be explained only by the consoling belief that the “human being as such” is the eternally virtuous operatic hero, the eternally piping or singing shepherd, who must always finally rediscover himself as such if at some time he has really lost himself for a while. It is solely the fruit of that optimism which rises here from the depths of the Socratic view of the world like a cloyingly seductive column of fragrance.\n\nThus the features of opera bear by no means that elegiac pain of an eternal loss, but rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery, the easy pleasure in an idyllic reality that we can at least imagine as real at any moment. In doing so we may occasionally suspect that this supposed reality is nothing but a fantastically silly dalliance, at which anyone able to measure it against the terrible seriousness of true nature and compare it with the actual primal scenes of humanity’s beginnings would have to cry out in disgust: “Away with the phantom!” Yet we would be deceiving ourselves if we believed that such a trifling creature as opera could simply be banished like a ghost by a forceful shout. Whoever wants to annihilate opera must take up the struggle against that Alexandrian cheerfulness which speaks so naively in it about its favorite idea, and of which it is indeed the proper art form. But what is art itself to expect from the workings of an art form whose origins do not lie in the aesthetic sphere at all, which has instead stolen over into the artistic domain from a half-moral sphere and has managed only here and there to disguise this hybrid origin? On what juices does this parasitic operatic creature feed, if not those of true art? Must we not suppose that, under its idyllic seductions, under its Alexandrian flatteries, art’s highest and truly serious task—to redeem the eye from gazing into the horrors of night, and through the healing balm of semblance to rescue the subject from the convulsions of the will’s stirrings—will degenerate into an empty pursuit of distracting amusement? What becomes of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and the Apollonian in such a mixture of styles as I have demonstrated in the nature of the representational style? Where music is regarded as servant, the words of the text as master, music compared with the body, the words with the soul? Where the highest goal will at best be directed toward a paraphrasing tone painting, as formerly in the new Attic dithyramb? Where music has been wholly estranged from its true dignity as a Dionysian mirror of the world, so that nothing remains for it but, as the slave of appearance, to imitate the formal character of appearance and arouse an external delight in the play of lines and proportions? To a rigorous examination, this fatal influence of opera on music simply coincides with the entire development of modern music. The optimism lurking in the genesis of opera and in the nature of the culture it represents has succeeded with alarming speed in stripping music of its Dionysian vocation in the world and stamping it with a playful, entertaining character absorbed in forms. This change can perhaps be compared only with the metamorphosis of the Aeschylean human being into the cheerful Alexandrian human being.\n\nBut if, in the example just indicated, we have rightly connected the fading of the Dionysian spirit with a most striking yet hitherto unexplained transformation and degeneration of the Greek human being—what hopes must awaken within us when the surest of auspices guarantee *the reverse process, the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit* in our present world! It is not possible for the divine strength of Heracles to languish forever in voluptuous servitude to Omphale. From the Dionysian ground of the German spirit a power has arisen that has nothing in common with the primordial conditions of Socratic culture and can neither be explained nor excused in terms of them; rather, that culture feels it as something terrifyingly inexplicable, overwhelmingly hostile: *German music*, as we must understand it above all in its mighty solar course from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. What, in the most favorable case, can the knowledge-hungry Socratism of our day do with this demon rising from inexhaustible depths? Neither the jagged patterns and arabesques of operatic melody nor the help of the fugue’s arithmetical counting board and contrapuntal dialectic will yield the formula in whose thrice-mighty light that demon could be subdued and forced to speak. What a spectacle, when our aestheticians now swipe and snatch at the genius of music with the catching net of a “beauty” all their own, as it romps before them with incomprehensible life, in movements that will no more submit to judgment by eternal beauty than by the sublime. We need only take a close, bodily look at these patrons of music as they cry so tirelessly, “Beauty! Beauty!” Do they look like nature’s favorite children, nurtured and pampered in the lap of beauty, or are they not rather seeking a mendaciously concealing form for their own crudity, an aesthetic pretext for their own sober poverty of feeling? Here I am thinking, for example, of Otto Jahn. But let liars and hypocrites beware of German music: for amid our entire culture it alone is the pure, clear, and purifying spirit of fire, from which and toward which all things move in a double circular course, as in the teaching of the great Heraclitus of Ephesus. Everything we now call culture, cultivation, civilization must one day appear before the unerring judge Dionysus.\n\nLet us recall, furthermore, how the spirit of *German philosophy*, flowing from the same sources, was enabled through Kant and Schopenhauer to annihilate the contented joy in existence of scientific Socratism by demonstrating its limits; how this demonstration inaugurated an infinitely deeper and more serious consideration of ethical questions and art, which we may simply call *Dionysian wisdom* grasped in concepts. Where does the mystery of this unity between German music and German philosophy point us, if not toward a new form of existence, whose substance we can learn to divine only through Hellenic analogies? For us, standing at the boundary between two different forms of existence, the Hellenic model retains this immeasurable value: in it, all those transitions and struggles are also stamped into a classically instructive form. Only, we experience by analogy the great principal epochs of the Hellenic spirit in, as it were, *reverse* order, and now seem, for example, to be stepping backward from the Alexandrian age into the period of tragedy. In this we feel as though the birth of a tragic age could mean for the German spirit only a return to itself, a blissful rediscovery of itself, after tremendous powers pressing in from outside had for a long time forced it, living on in a helpless barbarism of form, into bondage to their form. Now at last, after returning home to the primal source of its being, it may dare stride boldly and freely before all peoples, without the leading strings of a Romance civilization—if only it knows how to learn unswervingly from one people from whom even to be able to learn at all is already a high honor and a distinguishing rarity: the Greeks. And when have we needed these supreme teachers more than now, as we experience *the rebirth of tragedy* and are in danger of neither knowing where it comes from nor being able to interpret for ourselves where it seeks to go?\n\n### Section 20\n\nLet it be weighed for once, before the eyes of an incorruptible judge, in what age and in which men the German spirit has so far struggled most vigorously to learn from the Greeks; and if we confidently assume that this singular praise must be awarded to the noblest struggle for culture undertaken by Goethe, Schiller, and Winckelmann, we must certainly add that, since that age and the immediate effects of that struggle, the effort to reach culture and the Greeks along the same path has, incomprehensibly, grown weaker and weaker. To keep from despairing altogether of the German spirit, may we not conclude from this that, on some essential point, even those champions may have failed to penetrate the heart of the Hellenic nature and establish an enduring bond of love between German and Greek culture? Perhaps, then, an unconscious recognition of that failure aroused, even in more serious natures, the dispiriting doubt whether, coming after such predecessors, they could advance along this path of cultivation any farther than those men had, or indeed reach the goal at all. Thus, ever since that age, we have seen judgments of the Greeks’ value for culture degenerate in the most disturbing way; expressions of pitying superiority can be heard in the most diverse camps of spirit and of spiritlessness; elsewhere, utterly ineffectual fine talk toys with “Greek harmony,” “Greek beauty,” and “Greek serenity.” And precisely in those circles whose honorable task might be to draw tirelessly from the Greek riverbed for the good of German culture, among the teachers at our higher educational institutions, people have learned better than anywhere else to settle their accounts with the Greeks early and comfortably—not infrequently to the point of skeptically abandoning the Hellenic ideal and completely reversing the true purpose of all classical studies. Anyone in those circles who has not entirely exhausted himself in the effort to be a reliable corrector of ancient texts or a natural historian peering at language through a microscope may also seek to make Greek antiquity his own “historically,” alongside other antiquities—but in any case by the method and with the superior airs of our present-day cultivated historiography. If, then, the actual power of our higher educational institutions to cultivate people has probably never been lower or feebler than it is today; if the “journalist,” the paper slave of the day, has triumphed over the teacher of higher learning in every aspect of culture, leaving the latter only the metamorphosis we have so often witnessed already, of now flitting about in his turn in the journalist’s idiom, with the “light elegance” of that sphere, as a cheerful, cultivated butterfly—in what painful bewilderment must those educated in this fashion by such an age stare at a phenomenon that could perhaps be grasped by analogy only from the deepest ground of the still-uncomprehended Hellenic genius: the reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the rebirth of tragedy? There is no other period in art when so-called culture and art itself have faced one another with such estrangement and aversion as we see before our eyes today. We understand why so feeble a culture hates true art: it fears that art will destroy it. But might not an entire kind of civilization, the Socratic-Alexandrian, have run its course, once it could taper to so dainty and slender a point as our present culture? If even heroes such as Schiller and Goethe were not permitted to break open the enchanted gate leading into the Hellenic magic mountain; if, in their boldest struggles, they advanced no farther than that longing gaze which Goethe’s Iphigenia sends across the sea toward her homeland from barbarian Tauris—what hope would remain for the later followers of such heroes, unless the gate suddenly opened to them of its own accord, on an entirely different side, untouched by all the efforts of culture up to now—to the mystical sound of the reawakened music of tragedy?\n\nLet no one try to diminish our faith in a rebirth of Hellenic antiquity still to come; for in that faith alone we find our hope for a renewal and purification of the German spirit through the fiery magic of music. What else could we name that, amid the desolation and exhaustion of present-day culture, might awaken any comforting expectation for the future? In vain we search for a single root branching vigorously, for a patch of fertile, healthy soil: everywhere dust, sand, rigidity, languishing. Someone left desolately alone could scarcely choose a better symbol than the knight with Death and the Devil as Dürer has drawn him for us: the armored knight with his hard, bronze-like gaze, who knows how to travel his terrifying road, undeterred by his dreadful companions and yet without hope, alone with his horse and dog. Our Schopenhauer was such a Dürer knight: he lacked all hope, but he wanted truth. There is no one like him.—\n\nBut how suddenly that wilderness of our exhausted culture, just painted in such gloomy colors, is transformed when Dionysian magic touches it! A storm wind seizes everything outworn, rotten, broken, stunted, wraps it in a whirling cloud of red dust, and carries it into the air like a vulture. Bewildered, our eyes search for what has vanished: for what they now see seems to have risen from a hidden depth into golden light, so full and green, so luxuriantly alive, so boundless in its longing. Tragedy sits amid this abundance of life, suffering, and delight, in sublime rapture, listening to a distant, sorrowful song—it tells of the Mothers of Being, whose names are Delusion, Will, Woe.—Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian life and the rebirth of tragedy. The age of the Socratic human being is over: crown yourselves with ivy, take the thyrsus in your hands, and do not be surprised when tigers and panthers lie down caressingly at your knees. Only dare, now, to be tragic human beings: for you are to be redeemed. You are to escort the Dionysian procession from India to Greece! Arm yourselves for a hard struggle, but believe in the miracles of your god!\n\n### Section 21\n\nSlipping back from these exhortations into the mood appropriate to contemplation, I repeat that only from the Greeks can we learn what such a miraculous, sudden awakening of tragedy means for the innermost ground of a people’s life. It is the people of the tragic mysteries that fights the battles against the Persians; and in turn, the people that has waged those wars needs tragedy as a necessary healing draught. Who would still expect, precisely in this people, after it had been stirred to its depths for several generations by the most violent convulsions of the Dionysian demon, so steadily vigorous an outpouring of the simplest political feeling, the most natural instincts of attachment to home, the primal masculine delight in battle? Whenever Dionysian excitements spread significantly, one can always sense how the Dionysian release from the fetters of the individual makes itself felt first of all in a weakening of political instincts that intensifies to indifference, even hostility; just as surely, on the other hand, the state-founding Apollo is also the genius of the principle of individuation, and neither the state nor attachment to home can live without an affirmation of individual personality.\n\nFrom orgiastic ecstasy only one path leads onward for a people: the path to Indian Buddhism, which, with its longing for nothingness, needs those rare ecstatic states that lift one above space, time, and the individual if it is to be bearable at all; just as those states in turn demand a philosophy that teaches one to overcome, through an idea, the indescribable distress of the intervening states. With equal necessity, a people that starts from the unconditional authority of political drives is driven onto a course of utter worldliness, whose grandest but also most terrifying expression is the Roman empire.\n\nPlaced between India and Rome and pressed toward a seductive choice, the Greeks succeeded in inventing a third form in classical purity—not, admittedly, for their own prolonged use, but for immortality for that very reason. For the saying that the gods’ favorites die young holds true in all things; but it is equally certain that they then live eternally with the gods. Let us not demand that what is noblest of all should have the lasting toughness of leather; the coarse durability characteristic, for example, of the Roman national drive is probably not among the necessary attributes of perfection. But if we ask what remedy enabled the Greeks in their great age, despite the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political drives, to avoid exhausting themselves either in ecstatic brooding or in a consuming pursuit of world power and world renown, and instead to achieve that magnificent blend found in a noble wine, at once kindling the spirit and disposing it to contemplation, we must remember the enormous power of *tragedy*, which stirs, purifies, and discharges the entire life of a people. We will only begin to divine its highest value when it confronts us, as it did the Greeks, as the sum of all preventive healing powers, as the mediator that holds sway between a people’s strongest and inherently most fatal qualities.\n\nTragedy absorbs the highest orgiastic ecstasy of music, so that, among the Greeks as among ourselves, it positively brings music to fulfillment; but it then places beside it the tragic myth and the tragic hero, who, like a mighty Titan, takes the whole Dionysian world upon his back and lifts its burden from us. At the same time, through that same tragic myth, in the person of the tragic hero, tragedy knows how to deliver us from the greedy urge for this existence, and with an admonishing hand reminds us of another being and a higher delight, for which the struggling hero, with a sense of foreboding, prepares himself through his downfall, not his victories. Between the universal validity of its music and the listener receptive to Dionysian experience, tragedy places a sublime likeness, the myth, and awakens in that listener the semblance that music is merely the supreme means of representation for bringing the sculptural world of myth to life. Trusting in this noble illusion, music may now move its limbs in dithyrambic dance and surrender without misgiving to an orgiastic feeling of freedom in which, as music in itself, without that illusion, it would not dare to revel. Myth shields us from music, while on the other hand it alone grants music its highest freedom. In return, as a countergift, music lends tragic myth a metaphysical significance so penetrating and convincing that word and image could never attain it without this unique assistance. Through music, in particular, the tragic spectator is seized by precisely that sure presentiment of a supreme delight to which the path leads through downfall and negation, so that he seems to hear the innermost abyss of things speaking audibly to him.\n\nIf in these last sentences I have perhaps managed to give this difficult conception only a provisional expression, immediately intelligible to few, then precisely here I must not cease urging my friends to make another attempt, and asking them to prepare themselves to grasp the general proposition through a single example from our shared experience. In this example I cannot appeal to those who use the images of events onstage, the words and emotions of the characters, to help them approach the experience of music; for none of them speaks music as a native language, and even with this help they get no farther than the antechambers of musical perception, never being allowed to touch its innermost sanctuaries; some of them, like Gervinus, do not even reach the antechambers by this route. Rather, I must address only those who are directly akin to music, who have in it, as it were, their mother’s womb, and are connected with things almost exclusively through unconscious musical relations. I ask these genuine musicians whether they can imagine a human being capable of perceiving the third act of “Tristan and Isolde,” without any assistance from word or image, purely as an immense symphonic movement, without breathing his last in a convulsive stretching of all the soul’s wings. A human being who, as here, has laid his ear, as it were, against the heart chamber of the world-will, who feels the raging desire for existence pour from here into all the world’s veins, as a thundering torrent or the most delicate brook dissolved into spray—would he not shatter suddenly? Could he bear, within the wretched glass shell of the human individual, to hear the echo of countless cries of delight and pain from the “vast expanse of the world’s night,” without fleeing irresistibly, at this shepherd’s song of metaphysics, to his primordial home? Yet if such a work can be perceived as a whole without negating individual existence, if such a creation could be created without crushing its creator—where do we find the solution to this contradiction?\n\nHere the tragic myth and the tragic hero thrust themselves between our highest musical excitement and that music—fundamentally only as a likeness of the most universal facts, of which music alone can speak directly. Yet as a likeness, if we felt as purely Dionysian beings, the myth would remain beside us utterly ineffectual and unnoticed, and would not for a moment turn us away from offering our ears to the echo of universals prior to things. Here, however, the *Apollonian* power breaks forth, intent on restoring the almost shattered individual, with the healing balm of a blissful illusion: suddenly we believe we see only Tristan, motionless and dazed, asking himself, “The old tune; why does it wake me?” And what earlier seemed to us like a hollow sigh from the center of being now wishes to tell us only how “desolate and empty the sea” is. And where we imagined we were being extinguished, breathless, in the convulsive stretching of all our feelings, and only a little still bound us to this existence, we now hear and see only the hero wounded to death and yet not dying, with his despairing cry: “Longing! Longing! In dying still to long, not to die of longing!” And where earlier, after such an excess and such a multitude of consuming torments, the horn’s jubilation cut through our hearts almost like the greatest torment of all, now the rejoicing Kurwenal stands between us and this “jubilation in itself,” turned toward the ship carrying Isolde. However powerfully compassion reaches into us, in a certain sense it nevertheless saves us from the primordial suffering of the world, just as the figurative image of myth saves us from the immediate vision of the supreme world-Idea, and thought and word save us from the undammed outpouring of the unconscious will. Through that magnificent Apollonian illusion, it seems to us that even the realm of sound confronts us as a sculptural world, as though in it, too, only the fate of Tristan and Isolde had been shaped and given visible form, as in the most delicate and expressive of materials.\n\nThus the Apollonian tears us away from Dionysian universality and enchants us with individuals; it binds our compassion to them, and through them satisfies the sense of beauty thirsting for great and sublime forms; it leads images of life past us and urges us to grasp in thought the living core they contain. With the enormous force of the image, the concept, the ethical teaching, the stirring of sympathy, the Apollonian snatches the human being up out of his orgiastic self-annihilation, and, by deceiving him about the universality of the Dionysian process, brings him to the delusion that he is seeing a single image of the world—Tristan and Isolde, for example—and is meant only to *see* it still better and more inwardly *through music*. What can the healing magic of Apollo not accomplish, if it can even arouse in us the illusion that the Dionysian really could serve the Apollonian by intensifying its effects—indeed, that music is even essentially an art of representation for an Apollonian content?\n\nThrough the preestablished harmony that reigns between the perfected drama and its music, drama attains a supreme degree of vivid visibility otherwise inaccessible to spoken drama. As all the living figures onstage simplify themselves before us in the independently moving melodic lines to the clarity of a sweeping line, we hear these lines side by side in the shifting harmonies that respond with the most delicate sympathy to the unfolding action. Through those harmonies, the relations between things become immediately perceptible to us in a sensuous, by no means abstract way; through them we likewise recognize that only in these relations does the essence of a character and of a melodic line reveal itself purely. And while music thus compels us to see more, and more inwardly, than usual, and to spread the action onstage before us like a delicate web, the world of the stage is both infinitely expanded and illuminated from within for our spiritualized eye, which looks into the interior. What could the poet of words offer that compares with this, as he struggles, with a far less perfect mechanism and by an indirect route, starting from word and concept, to achieve that inward expansion of the visible stage-world and its inner illumination? Although musical tragedy, too, brings in the word, it can at the same time place beside it the ground and birthplace of the word, and make clear to us, from within, how the word comes into being.\n\nBut we would have to say just as firmly of the process described here that it is only a magnificent semblance: that Apollonian *illusion* mentioned earlier, whose effect is meant to relieve us of the Dionysian onrush and excess. Fundamentally, the relation of music to drama is precisely the reverse: music is the actual Idea of the world, drama only a reflection of this Idea, an isolated shadow-image of it. That identity between the melodic line and the living figure, between the harmony and the relations of that figure’s character, is true in the opposite sense to what we might suppose while watching musical tragedy. We may make the figure move before us as vividly as possible, bring it to life, and illuminate it from within: it always remains only appearance, from which no bridge leads into true reality, into the heart of the world. Yet music speaks out of that heart; and countless appearances of that kind might pass before the same music without ever exhausting its essence, remaining always only its externalized images. The popular and utterly false opposition between soul and body can, of course, explain nothing about the difficult relation between music and drama, and can confuse everything; but the unphilosophical crudity of that opposition seems to have become a readily professed article of faith precisely among our aestheticians, for who knows what reasons, while they have learned nothing about an opposition between appearance and the thing in itself, or, for equally unknown reasons, have wished to learn nothing.\n\nIf our analysis should have shown that the Apollonian in tragedy, through its illusion, has triumphed completely over music’s primordial Dionysian element and harnessed music to its own purposes, namely the highest possible clarification of drama, then a very important qualification would certainly have to be added: at the most essential point of all, that Apollonian illusion is broken through and destroyed. The drama that unfolds before us with the help of music, in such inwardly illuminated clarity of every movement and figure, as though we were watching the fabric come into being on the loom with its darting up and down—achieves, as a whole, an effect that lies *beyond all Apollonian artistic effects*. In the total effect of tragedy, the Dionysian regains the upper hand; tragedy closes with a sound that could never come from the realm of Apollonian art. And so the Apollonian illusion proves to be what it is: a veiling of the actual Dionysian effect that lasts throughout the tragedy. Yet that effect is powerful enough, at the end, to drive the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom, and where it negates itself and its Apollonian visibility. Thus the difficult relation between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy could truly be symbolized by a fraternal alliance between the two divinities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo finally speaks the language of Dionysus. With this, the highest aim of tragedy, and of art in general, is attained.\n\n### Section 22\n\nLet the attentive friend call to mind, from his own experience, the effect of a true musical tragedy, pure and unmixed. I believe I have described both sides of this effect in such a way that he will now know how to interpret his own experiences. For he will remember how, as he watched the myth unfolding before him, he felt himself raised to a kind of omniscience, as though the power of his eyes were now not merely confined to surfaces but could penetrate within, and as though, with the help of music, he now saw the surges of the will, the struggle of motives, the swelling current of the passions before him, almost visibly embodied for the senses, as a wealth of lines and figures in living motion, and could thereby plunge down into the most delicate secrets of unconscious impulses. While he thus becomes conscious of the highest intensification of his drives toward visibility and transfiguration, he feels just as certainly that this long series of Apollonian artistic effects does *not*, after all, produce that blissful lingering in will-less contemplation which the sculptor and the epic poet, the properly Apollonian artists, bring about in him through their works: that is, the justification of the world of individuation attained in that contemplation, which is the summit and sum of Apollonian art. He beholds the transfigured world of the stage, and yet negates it. He sees the tragic hero before him in epic clarity and beauty, and yet delights in his annihilation. He understands the action onstage to its innermost depths, and gladly takes refuge in the incomprehensible. He feels the hero’s actions to be justified, and yet is still more uplifted when those actions destroy their author. He shudders at the sufferings that will befall the hero, and yet senses in them a higher, far more overpowering delight. He sees more, and more deeply, than ever, and yet wishes himself blind. From what are we to derive this marvelous self-division, this breaking off of the Apollonian summit, if not from *Dionysian* magic, which, while seeming to excite Apollonian impulses to the highest pitch, can nevertheless force even this overflowing of Apollonian power into its service? *Tragic myth* can be understood only as an embodiment of Dionysian wisdom in images through Apollonian artistic means; it leads the world of appearance to the limits where it negates itself and seeks to flee back into the womb of the true and only reality; where it then seems, with Isolde, to intone its metaphysical swan song in these words:\n\nIn the sea of rapture’s\nsurging swell,\nin the fragrant waves’\nresonant sound,\nin the world-breath’s\nbillowing universe—\nto drown—to sink—\nunconscious—highest delight!\n\nThus, through the experiences of the truly aesthetic listener, we picture the tragic artist himself: how, like a luxuriant deity of individuation, he creates his figures—in which sense his work could scarcely be understood as an “imitation of nature”—but how his enormous Dionysian drive then devours this entire world of appearances, so that behind it, and through its annihilation, we may sense a supreme primordial joy of art in the womb of the primordial One. Our aestheticians, of course, have nothing to tell us about this return to the primordial home, about the fraternal alliance of the two artistic divinities in tragedy, or about the listener’s simultaneously Apollonian and Dionysian excitement. Instead, they never tire of characterizing the hero’s struggle with fate, the victory of the moral world order, or a discharge of emotions brought about by tragedy as the truly tragic element. This tirelessness makes me suspect that they may not be people capable of aesthetic excitement at all, and that in listening to tragedy they may count only as moral beings. Never, since Aristotle, has an explanation of the tragic effect been given from which one could infer artistic states, an aesthetic activity on the listeners’ part. Sometimes the grave events are supposed to drive pity and fear toward a relieving discharge; sometimes we are supposed to feel uplifted and inspired by the victory of good and noble principles, by the hero’s sacrifice in the spirit of a moral view of the world. And as surely as I believe that for many people precisely this, and only this, is the effect of tragedy, it follows just as clearly that all of them, together with their interpreting aestheticians, have experienced nothing of tragedy as a supreme *art*. That pathological discharge, Aristotle’s catharsis, which philologists do not quite know whether to class among medical or moral phenomena, recalls a remarkable intuition of Goethe’s. “Without a lively interest in the passions,” he says, “I too have never succeeded in treating any tragic situation, and have therefore preferred to avoid rather than seek them out. Might it also have been one of the ancients’ advantages that even the highest pathos was only aesthetic play for them, whereas with us fidelity to nature must contribute to the production of such a work?” After our magnificent experiences, we may now answer this deeply searching final question in the affirmative, since precisely in musical tragedy we have experienced with amazement how even the highest pathos can really be only aesthetic play. We may therefore believe that only now can the primordial phenomenon of the tragic be described with some success. Anyone who still has nothing to report but those surrogate effects from nonaesthetic spheres, and does not feel himself raised above the pathological-moral process, may simply despair of his aesthetic nature; to him we recommend, as an innocent substitute, interpreting Shakespeare in the manner of Gervinus and diligently hunting down “poetic justice.”\n\nThus, with the rebirth of tragedy, the *aesthetic listener* too is reborn. Until now his seat in the theater had generally been occupied by a strange substitute, with half-moral, half-scholarly pretensions: the “critic.” Within the critic’s former sphere everything was artificial, merely whitewashed with a semblance of life. The performing artist truly no longer knew what to do with a listener who struck such critical poses, and therefore, together with the dramatist or opera composer who inspired him, searched anxiously for the last remnants of life in this pretentiously barren creature, incapable of enjoyment. Yet until now the audience consisted of such “critics”; the university student, the schoolboy, even the most harmless female creature had, without knowing it, already been prepared by education and newspapers to perceive a work of art in the same way. The nobler natures among artists counted on arousing moral and religious forces in such an audience, and the invocation of the “moral world order” served as a substitute where a mighty artistic enchantment should properly have enraptured the genuine listener. Or the dramatist presented some grander, or at least exciting, tendency of contemporary politics and society so clearly that the listener could forget his critical exhaustion and surrender to emotions like those felt in patriotic or warlike moments, or before the parliamentary speaker’s platform, or in the condemnation of crime and vice. This estrangement from the true purposes of art was bound, here and there, to lead outright to a cult of tendentiousness. Yet here there occurred what has always occurred with all contrived arts: those tendencies deteriorated with headlong speed, so that, for example, the aim of using the theater as an institution for the people’s moral education, taken seriously in Schiller’s time, is already counted among the discredited antiquities of an outgrown culture. While the critic had come to rule the theater and concert hall, the journalist the school, and the press society, art degenerated into an object of entertainment of the lowest kind, and aesthetic criticism was used as the binding agent of a vain, distracted, selfish, and moreover wretchedly unoriginal social life, whose meaning Schopenhauer’s parable of the porcupines helps us understand. Thus no age has chattered so much about art and thought so little of it. But can one still associate with a person capable of making conversation about Beethoven and Shakespeare? Let each answer this question as he feels: his answer will in any case reveal what he understands by “culture,” provided he attempts to answer the question at all and has not already fallen silent in astonishment.\n\nOn the other hand, many a person endowed by nature with nobler and more delicate gifts, even though he had gradually become a critical barbarian in the manner described, may have an effect to recount, as unexpected as it was utterly incomprehensible, which a felicitously successful performance of Lohengrin, for example, exerted upon him. Only perhaps there was no hand to take hold of him, admonishing and interpreting, so that even that sensation, incomprehensibly different and altogether beyond comparison, which shook him then, remained isolated, and went out like a mysterious star after a brief gleam. At that moment he had sensed what the aesthetic listener is.\n\n### Section 23\n\nAnyone wishing to examine himself very closely as to how far he is akin to the true aesthetic listener, or belongs to the community of Socratic-critical people, need only ask himself honestly what he feels when he encounters the *miracle* represented onstage: whether he perhaps feels that his historical sense, directed toward strict psychological causality, has been offended; whether, with a benevolent concession, he admits the miracle, as it were, as a phenomenon intelligible to childhood but alien to himself; or whether he undergoes something else entirely. For by this he will be able to measure how far he is capable of understanding *myth* at all—that concentrated image of the world which, as an abridgment of appearance, cannot dispense with the miracle. What is likely, however, is that on strict examination almost everyone will feel himself so disintegrated by the critical-historical spirit of our culture that only by scholarly means, through mediating abstractions, can he make the former existence of myth seem credible to himself. Yet without myth every culture forfeits its healthy, creative natural power: only a horizon ringed with myths rounds off an entire cultural movement into unity. Only through myth are all the powers of imagination and Apollonian dream rescued from their indiscriminate wandering. The images of myth must be the unnoticed, omnipresent demonic guardians under whose protection the young soul grows, whose signs the grown man uses to interpret his life and struggles; and even the state knows no more powerful unwritten laws than the mythical foundation that guarantees its connection with religion, its growth out of mythical ideas.\n\nNow set beside this the abstract human being, guided by no myths, abstract education, abstract custom, abstract law, the abstract state: picture the unregulated roaming of the artistic imagination, unbridled by any native myth; imagine a culture that has no fixed and sacred original dwelling, but is condemned to exhaust every possibility and eke out its nourishment from every culture—that is the present, as the result of that Socratism directed toward the annihilation of myth. And now the mythless human being stands eternally hungry amid all the pasts, digging and rummaging for roots, even if he must dig for them in the remotest antiquities. What does the enormous historical need of unsatisfied modern culture point to—its gathering of countless other cultures around itself, its consuming desire to know—if not the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical mother’s womb? Let us ask whether the feverish and so uncanny agitation of this culture is anything but the hungry person’s greedy grasping and snatching after food—and who would still wish to give anything to a culture that cannot be sated by everything it devours, and at whose touch the strongest, most wholesome nourishment habitually turns into “history and criticism”?\n\nWe would have to despair painfully of our German nature, too, if it had already become in the same way inextricably entangled with its culture, indeed one with it, as we can observe to our horror in civilized France. And what was for so long France’s great advantage and the cause of its immense predominance, precisely that oneness of people and culture, might at this sight compel us to count it good fortune that this highly questionable culture of ours has so far had nothing in common with the noble core of our national character. Rather, all our hopes reach out longingly toward the perception that beneath this cultural life restlessly twitching up and down, beneath these spasms of cultivation, there lies hidden a magnificent, inwardly healthy, age-old power, which admittedly stirs with violence only at tremendous moments, and then dreams again toward a future awakening. From this abyss the German Reformation grew: in its chorale the future melody of German music sounded for the first time. So deep, bold, and soulful, so overflowingly good and tender, was the sound of Luther’s chorale, as the first Dionysian call of enticement issuing from dense undergrowth as spring approaches. It was answered, in an echo of rivalry, by that consecrated and exuberant procession of Dionysian enthusiasts to whom we owe German music—and to whom we shall owe *the rebirth of German myth*!\n\nI know that I must now lead the friend who follows with sympathy to a high place of solitary contemplation, where he will have few companions, and I call to him in encouragement that we must hold fast to our radiant guides, the Greeks. Thus far, to purify our aesthetic knowledge, we have borrowed from them those two divine figures, each ruling a separate realm of art, and through Greek tragedy we gained an intimation of their mutual contact and intensification. The downfall of Greek tragedy had to appear to us as brought about by a remarkable tearing apart of the two primordial artistic drives; a degeneration and transformation of the Greek national character was in harmony with that event, urging us to reflect seriously on how necessarily and intimately art and people, myth and custom, tragedy and state, are intertwined at their foundations. That downfall of tragedy was at the same time the downfall of myth. Until then the Greeks had been involuntarily compelled to connect everything they experienced immediately with their myths, indeed to understand it only through this connection; thus even the most immediate present had to appear to them at once under the aspect of eternity, and in a certain sense as timeless. Into this current of the timeless the state as well as art immersed itself, to find in it rest from the burden and greed of the moment. And a people—like a human being, for that matter—is worth precisely as much as it is able to stamp its experiences with the seal of the eternal: for in doing so it is, as it were, lifted out of worldliness, and shows its unconscious inner conviction of the relativity of time and of life’s true, that is, metaphysical significance. The opposite occurs when a people begins to understand itself historically and to shatter the mythical bulwarks around it. This is usually accompanied by a decisive turn toward worldliness, a break, in all its ethical consequences, with the unconscious metaphysics of its earlier existence. Greek art, and Greek tragedy above all, held back the annihilation of myth more than anything else: it had to be annihilated too, so that people, severed from their native soil, could live unbridled in the wilderness of thought, custom, and deed. Even now that metaphysical drive attempts to create for itself a form of transfiguration, though a weakened one, in the Socratism of science pressing toward life; but at the lower levels the same drive led only to a feverish search that gradually lost itself in a pandemonium of myths and superstitions heaped together from everywhere. In its midst the Hellene nevertheless sat with his heart unsatisfied, until he learned to mask that fever with Greek serenity and Greek frivolity, as a petty Greek, or to numb himself completely in some dull Oriental superstition.\n\nSince the revival of Alexandrian-Roman antiquity in the fifteenth century, after a long interlude difficult to describe, we have approached this condition in the most striking way. On the heights, the same overflowing delight in knowledge, the same insatiable happiness in discovery, the same enormous turn toward worldliness; beside them, a homeless wandering, a greedy crowding around foreign tables, a frivolous deification of the present or a dully numbed turning away—all under the aspect of the age, the “present day.” These identical symptoms suggest an identical lack at the heart of this culture: the annihilation of myth. It seems scarcely possible to transplant a foreign myth with lasting success without doing irreparable damage to the tree through this transplanting. The tree may occasionally be strong and healthy enough to expel that foreign element again in a terrible struggle, but usually it must waste away, sickly and stunted or in pathological overgrowth. We think so highly of the pure and vigorous core of the German nature that we dare to expect precisely from it that expulsion of forcibly implanted foreign elements, and consider it possible that the German spirit will return to an awareness of itself. Perhaps many will think that this spirit must begin its struggle by expelling the Romance element: for this it may recognize an outward preparation and encouragement in the victorious valor and bloody glory of the last war, but it must seek the inward necessity in the emulation that strives always to be worthy of the sublime pioneers on this path, Luther as well as our great artists and poets. But let it never believe that it can fight such battles without its household gods, without its mythical home, without a “restoration” of all things German! And if the German should look about timidly for a guide to lead him back into the homeland long since lost, whose roads and paths he scarcely knows anymore—let him only listen to the blissfully enticing call of the Dionysian bird that sways above him and wishes to show him the way there.\n\n### Section 24\n\nAmong the distinctive artistic effects of musical tragedy, we had to single out an Apollonian *illusion* intended to save us from immediate oneness with Dionysian music, while allowing our musical excitement to discharge itself in an Apollonian realm, upon an intervening, visible intermediate world. In this we believed we had observed how, precisely through this discharge, that intermediate world of events onstage—the drama as a whole—became visible and intelligible from within to a degree unattainable in all other Apollonian art. Thus here, where this art was, as it were, given wings and borne aloft by the spirit of music, we had to recognize the highest intensification of its powers, and therefore, in that fraternal alliance of Apollo and Dionysus, the summit of both Apollonian and Dionysian artistic aims.\n\nYet precisely in being illuminated from within by music, the luminous Apollonian image did not attain the distinctive effect of the lesser degrees of Apollonian art. What the epic or the animated stone can accomplish—compelling the contemplating eye to that calm rapture in the world of individuation—could not be achieved here, despite a greater animation and clarity. We watched the drama and penetrated with a probing gaze into its inner, moving world of motives—and yet we felt as though only a figurative image were passing before us, whose deepest meaning we believed we could almost divine, and which we wished to draw aside like a curtain, to see the original image behind it. The brightest clarity of the image did not satisfy us, for it seemed to reveal something and conceal it in equal measure. And while its figurative revelation seemed to invite us to tear the veil apart and uncover the mysterious background, that very illuminated visibility of everything held the eye spellbound in turn and prevented it from penetrating deeper.\n\nAnyone who has not experienced this simultaneous necessity to behold and longing to go beyond beholding will scarcely imagine how distinctly and clearly these two processes coexist and are felt side by side in contemplating tragic myth; whereas truly aesthetic spectators will confirm for me that, among the distinctive effects of tragedy, this coexistence is the most remarkable. Now transpose this phenomenon of the aesthetic spectator into an analogous process in the tragic artist, and the genesis of *tragic myth* will be understood. It shares with the Apollonian artistic sphere the full delight in semblance and beholding, and at the same time negates this delight and finds a still higher satisfaction in annihilating the visible world of semblance. The content of tragic myth is, first of all, an epic event glorifying the hero in his struggle. But what is the source of that intrinsically puzzling trait: that the suffering in the hero’s fate, the most painful acts of overcoming, the most tormenting conflicts of motives—in short, the exemplification of that wisdom of Silenus, or, in aesthetic terms, the ugly and disharmonious—are represented in such countless forms, with such fondness, again and again, and precisely in a people’s most luxuriant and youthful age, unless a higher delight is perceived in all these very things?\n\nFor the fact that life really does proceed so tragically would be the least adequate explanation for the genesis of an art form—if art is not merely an imitation of natural reality, but precisely a metaphysical supplement to natural reality, set beside it for its overcoming. Insofar as tragic myth belongs to art at all, it also shares fully in this metaphysical aim of transfiguration that belongs to art as a whole. But what does it transfigure when it presents the world of appearance in the image of the suffering hero? Least of all the “reality” of this world of appearance, for it tells us precisely: “Look! Look closely! This is your life! This is the hour hand on the clock of your existence!”\n\nAnd did myth show us this life in order thereby to transfigure it before us? But if not, where does the aesthetic delight lie with which we let these images, too, pass before us? I am asking about aesthetic delight, and I know very well that many of these images can sometimes also produce a moral gratification, perhaps in the form of pity or a moral triumph. But anyone who would derive the effect of the tragic solely from these moral sources, as has indeed been customary in aesthetics for all too long, should not imagine that he has thereby done anything for art, which must demand purity in its domain above all. In explaining tragic myth, the very first requirement is to seek its distinctive delight in the purely aesthetic sphere, without encroaching on the territory of pity, fear, or the morally sublime. How can the ugly and the disharmonious, the content of tragic myth, arouse an aesthetic delight?\n\nHere it becomes necessary to take a bold running leap into a metaphysics of art, as I repeat the earlier proposition that only as an aesthetic phenomenon do existence and the world appear justified. In this sense, tragic myth in particular must convince us that even the ugly and disharmonious are an artistic game the will plays with itself in the eternal fullness of its delight. Yet this elusive primordial phenomenon of Dionysian art becomes intelligible by a direct route, and is immediately grasped, only in the wondrous significance of *musical dissonance*: just as music in general, set beside the world, alone can give a conception of what is meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. The delight produced by tragic myth has the same home as the pleasurable sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primordial delight perceived even in pain, is the common womb from which music and tragic myth are born.\n\nMight we not meanwhile have substantially eased that difficult problem of the tragic effect by enlisting the help of dissonance as a musical relation? For we now understand what it means, in tragedy, to wish at once to behold and to long to go beyond beholding. With regard to dissonance used artistically, we would have to characterize this same state by saying that we wish to hear and at the same time long to go beyond hearing. That striving into the infinite, the wingbeat of longing, amid the highest delight in clearly perceived reality, reminds us that in both states we must recognize a Dionysian phenomenon, which reveals to us again and again the playful building and shattering of the individual world as the outflow of a primordial delight—much as when Heraclitus the Obscure compares the world-forming power to a child who, at play, sets stones here and there and builds up heaps of sand only to knock them down again.\n\nTo assess a people’s Dionysian capacity correctly, then, we would have to consider not only its music but, just as necessarily, its tragic myth as the second witness to that capacity. Given this closest kinship between music and myth, we may likewise suppose that a degeneration and debasement of the one will be accompanied by a withering of the other—if indeed a weakening of myth expresses a weakening of Dionysian power at all. Yet a glance at the development of the German nature should leave us in no doubt about either: in opera as in the abstract character of our mythless existence, in an art sunk to mere amusement as in a life guided by concepts, that nature of Socratic optimism, as inartistic as it is corrosive of life, had revealed itself to us. To console us, however, there were signs that despite all this the German spirit rests and dreams in an inaccessible abyss, undestroyed in its magnificent health, depth, and Dionysian strength, like a knight who has sunk into slumber. From this abyss the Dionysian song rises to us, to let us understand that even now this German knight still dreams his age-old Dionysian myth in blissfully solemn visions. Let no one believe that the German spirit has lost its mythical home forever, when it still understands so clearly the birds’ voices that tell of that home. One day it will find itself awake, in all the morning freshness of an immense sleep: then it will kill dragons, annihilate the treacherous dwarfs, and awaken Brünnhilde—and even Wotan’s spear will be powerless to bar its way!\n\nMy friends, you who believe in Dionysian music, you also know what tragedy means for us. In it we have tragic myth, reborn from music—and in that myth you may hope for everything and forget what is most painful! But what is most painful for all of us is—the long degradation under which the German genius lived, estranged from house and home, in the service of treacherous dwarfs. You understand these words—as, in the end, you will also understand my hopes.\n\n### Section 25\n\nMusic and tragic myth are equally expressions of a people’s Dionysian capacity, and are inseparable from each other. Both spring from a realm of art that lies beyond the Apollonian; both transfigure a region in whose chords of delight dissonance, like the terrifying image of the world, dies away enchantingly; both play with the sting of distress, trusting in their overwhelmingly powerful magic arts; both, through this play, justify the existence of even the “worst world.” Here the Dionysian, measured against the Apollonian, reveals itself as the eternal and original artistic power that calls the entire world of appearance into existence. In its midst a new transfiguring semblance becomes necessary to hold the animated world of individuation fast in life. If we could imagine dissonance becoming human—and what else is the human being?—then, in order to live, this dissonance would need a magnificent illusion to spread a veil of beauty over its own nature. This is the true artistic aim of Apollo, under whose name we gather all those countless illusions of beautiful semblance that at every moment make existence itself worth living and urge us to experience the next moment.\n\nAt the same time, of that foundation of all existence, that Dionysian ground of the world, precisely only so much may enter the human individual’s consciousness as can in turn be overcome by that Apollonian power of transfiguration. Thus these two artistic drives are compelled to unfold their powers in strict mutual proportion, according to the law of eternal justice. Where the Dionysian powers rise as impetuously as we are experiencing them, Apollo too must already have descended to us, veiled in a cloud; his most luxuriant effects of beauty will probably be seen by a coming generation.\n\nBut anyone would most surely feel, through intuition, that this effect is necessary if he once felt himself transported back, even if only in a dream, into an ancient Hellenic existence: walking beneath tall Ionic colonnades, looking up toward a horizon bounded by pure and noble lines, beside him reflections of his transfigured form in gleaming marble, all around him people striding solemnly or moving delicately, with harmoniously sounding voices and a rhythmic language of gesture—amid this ceaseless influx of beauty, would he not have to raise his hand to Apollo and cry: “Blessed people of the Hellenes! How great Dionysus must be among you, if the Delian god considers such enchantments necessary to heal your dithyrambic madness!”—But an aged Athenian, looking up at him with the sublime eye of Aeschylus, might reply to someone in this mood: “But say this too, you curious stranger: how much this people must have suffered to be able to become so beautiful! Now, though, follow me to the tragedy, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both divinities!”","download_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/birth-of-tragedy/translations/trn_birth_of_tragedy_mouseia.txt"},{"id":"trn_birth_of_tragedy_plain","translator":"Mouseia","kind":"plain","note":"Complete machine-assisted Plain English edition, made independently and directly from the same German text, without reference to the Musean edition or to any English translation.","text":"### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 1\n\nWhatever lies behind this questionable book, it must have been a question of the first importance and fascination. It must also have been a deeply personal question. The time when the book came into being is evidence of that: the turbulent time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, *despite* which it came into being. As the thunder of the battle of Wörth rolled across Europe, the brooding lover of riddles who fathered this book sat somewhere in a corner of the Alps. Deep in his brooding and riddles, he was therefore both deeply troubled and untroubled. He wrote down his thoughts about the *Greeks*. These formed the core of the strange, hard-to-enter book to which this late preface, or afterword, is to be devoted. A few weeks later he himself was outside the walls of Metz. He still had not escaped the question marks he had placed against the supposed “cheerfulness” of the Greeks and Greek art. At last, in that month of extreme tension when peace was being discussed at Versailles, he also made peace with himself. Slowly recovering from an illness he had brought home from the battlefield, he settled “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music” for himself, once and for all.—Out of music? Music and tragedy? Greeks and the music of tragedy? Greeks and the artwork of pessimism? The Greeks, the best-turned-out, most beautiful, most envied kind of people so far, the people who most tempt us to live—what? They, of all people, *needed* tragedy? More than that—art? What was Greek art for?…\n\nYou can guess where the great question mark over the value of existence had now been placed. Is pessimism *necessarily* a sign of decline, of decay, of having turned out badly, of tired and weakened instincts? It was that among the Indians, and apparently it is that among us “modern” people and Europeans. Is there a pessimism of *strength*? An intellectual preference for what is hard, horrifying, evil, and problematic in existence, arising from well-being, overflowing health, a *fullness* of existence? Could there even be suffering from overfullness itself? A tempting courage of the sharpest eye that *wants* what is terrible, as it wants an enemy, a worthy enemy against whom to test its strength? From whom it wants to learn what “being afraid” means? What does *tragic* myth mean among the Greeks, precisely in their best, strongest, bravest age? And the tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian? What of tragedy, born from it?—Then again: what killed tragedy was the Socratic approach to morality, the dialectic, contentment, and cheerfulness of the theoretical person. What? Could this very Socratic approach be a sign of decline, exhaustion, sickness, of instincts falling apart in anarchy? And could the “Greek cheerfulness” of the later Greeks be only a sunset glow? Could the Epicurean will *against* pessimism be merely a sufferer’s precaution? And science itself, our science—yes, what does all science mean at all, seen as a symptom of life? What is all science for? Worse still, *where does it come from*? What? Is a scientific outlook perhaps only fear of pessimism and an escape from it? A subtle act of self-defense against—the *truth*? And, in moral terms, something like cowardice and dishonesty? In nonmoral terms, a piece of cunning? Oh Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps *your* secret? Oh mysterious ironist, was this perhaps your—irony?— —\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 2\n\nWhat I got hold of then was something terrible and dangerous: a problem with horns, not necessarily a bull, but certainly a *new* problem. Today I would say it was the *problem of science* itself. For the first time, science was understood as problematic, as something open to question. But the book in which my youthful courage and suspicion expressed themselves—what an *impossible* book had to grow out of a task so unsuited to youth! It was built entirely from premature, unripe personal experiences. All of them stood right at the edge of what could be communicated. It took its stand on the ground of *art*, since the problem of science cannot be recognized on the ground of science. Perhaps it was a book for artists with a secondary gift for analysis and looking back—that is, for an exceptional sort of artist whom one has to search for and would not even want to search for… It was full of psychological innovations and artists’ secrets, with an artist’s metaphysics in the background. A work of youth, full of youthful courage and youthful sadness, it was independent, defiantly self-reliant even where it seemed to bow to an authority and to its own admiration. In short, it was a first work in every bad sense of the word as well. Despite its aged problem, it had every fault of youth, above all youth’s “far too long” and its “storm and stress.” On the other hand, in view of its success—especially with the great artist it addressed as if in a conversation between two people, Richard Wagner—it was a *proven* book. I mean a book that at least satisfied “the best people of its time.” On that basis alone it should be treated with some consideration and restraint. Still, I do not want to suppress entirely how unpleasant it seems to me now, how foreign it stands before me after sixteen years. My eye is older and a hundred times harder to please, but it has by no means grown colder. Nor has it grown more distant from the task that daring book first ventured to approach: *to see science from the artist’s point of view, but art from the point of view of life*…\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 3\n\nTo say it again, today I find it an impossible book. I call it badly written, clumsy, embarrassing, wild about images and confused by them, emotional, here and there sugary to the point of femininity, uneven in pace, with no desire for clean logic. It is very sure of itself and therefore considers proof beneath it; it even distrusts the *propriety* of proving things. It is a book for the initiated, “music” for people baptized into music, people joined together from the beginning of things by shared and rare experiences of art. It is a badge of recognition for blood relatives in the arts. It is an arrogant, overenthusiastic book. From the start it shuts itself off from the uninitiated mass of the “educated” even more than from “the people.” Yet, as its effect proved and still proves, it must also know well enough how to seek out fellow enthusiasts and lure them onto new hidden paths and dancing grounds. In any case, a *foreign* voice was speaking here. People admitted that to themselves with both curiosity and dislike. It was the voice of a disciple of a still “unknown god,” who had temporarily hidden under a scholar’s hood, under German heaviness and humorless dialectic, even under a Wagnerian’s bad manners. Here was a mind with foreign needs that still had no name, a memory bursting with questions, experiences, and hidden things, beside which the name Dionysus had been written like one more question mark. Here, people suspiciously told themselves, something like a mystical, almost maenad-like soul was speaking. Painfully and arbitrarily, almost unable to decide whether it wanted to reveal or hide itself, it stammered as if in a foreign language. This “new soul” should have *sung*, not spoken! What a pity I did not dare to say as a poet what I had to say then. Perhaps I could have done it! Or at least as a scholar of ancient language and literature. Even today, almost everything in this field remains for such a scholar to discover and dig up! Above all, the problem *that* there is a problem here. And that, as long as we have no answer to the question “what is Dionysian?”, the Greeks remain completely unknown and impossible to imagine…\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 4\n\nYes, what is Dionysian?—This book contains an answer. Someone “who knows” speaks in it, an initiate and disciple of his god. Perhaps today I would speak more cautiously and less eloquently about so difficult a psychological question as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. One basic question is the Greek’s relationship to pain, his degree of sensitivity. Did that relationship stay the same, or did it reverse itself? Did his constantly growing *desire for beauty*, for festivals, entertainments, and new forms of worship really grow out of lack, deprivation, melancholy, and pain? Suppose this were true—and Pericles, or Thucydides, gives us to understand that it was, in the great funeral speech. Where, then, must the opposite desire, which appeared earlier, have come from? The *desire for the ugly*: the earlier Greek’s good, strict will toward pessimism, tragic myth, and the image of everything terrible, evil, mysterious, destructive, and fatal at the bottom of existence. Where, then, must tragedy have come from? Perhaps from *pleasure*, from strength, from overflowing health, from an excessive fullness? And what, in physiological terms, is the meaning of the madness from which both tragic and comic art grew, Dionysian madness? What? Perhaps madness is not necessarily a symptom of degeneration, decline, or an overripe culture? Could there be—here is a question for psychiatrists—neuroses of *health*? Of a people’s youth and youthfulness? What does the combination of god and goat in the satyr point to? What personal experience and what urge made the Greek imagine the Dionysian enthusiast and primal human being as a satyr? And as for the origin of the tragic chorus: in those centuries when the Greek body flourished and the Greek soul overflowed with life, could there have been widespread outbreaks of ecstasy? Visions and hallucinations that spread through whole communities, whole gatherings of worshipers? What if the Greeks, precisely in the richness of their youth, wanted the tragic and were pessimists? What if it was precisely madness, to use Plato’s words, that brought the *greatest* blessings to Greece? And what if, on the contrary, the Greeks became increasingly optimistic, superficial, and theatrical precisely in the times of their disintegration and weakness? What if they also grew more eager for logic and for making the world logical, and thus became both “more cheerful” and “more scientific”? What? Despite all “modern ideas” and the prejudices of democratic taste, could the victory of *optimism*, the dominance of *rationality*, and practical and theoretical *utilitarianism* be symptoms of declining strength, approaching age, and physiological exhaustion, just like democracy itself, which appears at the same time? And could pessimism be precisely what is *not* such a symptom? Was Epicurus an optimist precisely as a *sufferer*?— —You can see that this book has burdened itself with a whole bundle of difficult questions. Let us add its most difficult question! Seen from the point of view of *life*, what does morality mean?…\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 5\n\nAlready in the preface to Richard Wagner, art—and *not* morality—is presented as the truly *metaphysical* activity of human beings. In the book itself, the provocative statement returns several times: the existence of the world is *justified* only as an aesthetic phenomenon. In fact, the whole book recognizes only an artist’s meaning and hidden meaning behind everything that happens. A “god,” if you like, but certainly only a completely unscrupulous and nonmoral artist-god. In building as in destroying, in good things as in bad, he wants to experience the same pleasure and sovereign power of his own. By creating worlds, he frees himself from the *distress* of fullness and *overfullness*, from the *suffering* caused by the opposites crowded together inside him. At every moment the world is God’s *achieved* deliverance: the eternally changing, eternally new vision of the one who suffers most, who is most full of opposites and contradictions, and who can redeem himself only in *semblance*. You may call this whole artist’s metaphysics arbitrary, pointless, or fantastic. Its essential feature is that it already reveals a spirit that will one day resist the *moral* interpretation and significance of existence, whatever the danger. Here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism “beyond good and evil” announces itself. Here that “perversity of outlook” finds a voice and a formula—the perversity against which Schopenhauer never tired of hurling his angriest curses and thunderbolts in advance. It is a philosophy that dares to put morality itself into the world of appearance, to lower it into that world. It puts morality not only among “appearances,” in the technical sense used by idealist philosophy, but among “deceptions,” as semblance, delusion, error, interpretation, something contrived, art. Perhaps the depth of this *antimoral* tendency is best measured by the cautious, hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout the book. Christianity is the most extravagant working-out of the moral theme that humanity has yet had to listen to. In truth, nothing stands more completely opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world taught in this book than Christian teaching. It is and wants to be *only* moral. With its absolute standards—the truthfulness of its God, for example—it sends art, *all* art, into the realm of lies. That is, it denies, damns, and condemns it. Behind this way of thinking and valuing, which must be hostile to art as long as it is at all genuine, I have always also sensed *hostility to life*: a furious, vengeful disgust with life itself. For all life rests on semblance, art, deception, ways of seeing, the necessity of perspective and error. From the beginning, Christianity was essentially and thoroughly life’s disgust and weariness with life. It merely disguised, hid, and dressed up this disgust in the belief in an “other” or “better” life. Hatred of the “world,” curses on the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a world beyond invented to slander this world more effectively—at bottom, a longing for nothingness, for the end, for rest, for the “Sabbath of Sabbaths.” All this, like Christianity’s unconditional will to recognize *only* moral values, always seemed to me the most dangerous and sinister of all possible forms of a “will to destruction.” At the very least, it is a sign of the deepest sickness, fatigue, ill temper, exhaustion, and impoverishment of life. For, judged by morality—especially Christian, that is, unconditional morality—life *must* constantly and inevitably be found in the wrong, because life *is* something essentially nonmoral. Finally, crushed under the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life *must* be felt as unworthy of desire, worthless in itself. Morality itself—what? Could morality be a “will to deny life,” a hidden instinct of destruction, a principle of decay, belittlement, and slander, the beginning of the end? And therefore the danger of dangers?… So, with this questionable book, my instinct turned *against* morality. As an instinct speaking up for life, it invented a fundamentally opposed teaching and valuation of life: a purely artistic one, an *anti-Christian* one. What should I call it? As a scholar of ancient language and a man of words, I took some liberty in naming it—for who knows the true name of the Antichrist? I gave it the name of a Greek god: I called it *Dionysian*.—\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 6\n\nDo you understand what task I was already daring to touch on with this book?… How much I now regret that I did not yet have the courage—or the immodesty?—to allow myself, in every respect, a *language of my own* for such personal views and ventures. Instead I struggled to express unfamiliar, new valuations in formulas taken from Schopenhauer and Kant, valuations fundamentally opposed to both their spirit and their taste! What did Schopenhauer think about tragedy? “What gives everything tragic its distinctive upward sweep,” he says in Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 495, “is the dawning recognition that the world, life, can give no true satisfaction, and is therefore *not worth* our attachment. That is the tragic spirit: it therefore leads toward *resignation*.” Oh, how differently Dionysus spoke to me! How far from me, precisely then, was this whole doctrine of resignation!—But there is something much worse about the book, something I now regret even more than having darkened and spoiled Dionysian intuitions with Schopenhauer’s formulas. I *spoiled* the whole magnificent *Greek problem*, as it had dawned on me, by mixing in the most modern concerns! I attached hopes where there was nothing to hope for, where everything pointed all too clearly to an end! On the basis of the latest German music, I began to spin tales about the “German character,” as if it were just about to discover and rediscover itself. And this at a time when the German spirit, which not long before had still possessed the will to rule Europe and the strength to lead it, was making its last and final *abdication*. Under the pompous pretext of founding an empire, it was moving toward mediocrity, democracy, and “modern ideas”! In fact, since then I have learned to think hopelessly and unsparingly enough about this “German character,” and likewise about present-day *German music*. This music is romantic through and through, the most un-Greek of all possible art forms. It is also a destroyer of nerves of the first rank. It is doubly dangerous among a people who love drinking and honor lack of clarity as a virtue, because it is a drug that both intoxicates and *befogs*.—Of course, apart from all the hasty hopes and mistaken applications to the most recent events with which I spoiled my first book, the great Dionysian question mark placed in it remains. This also applies to music: what would music have to be like if, instead of having a romantic origin like German music, it had a *Dionysian* origin?…\n\n### An Attempt at Self-Criticism, Section 7\n\n—But sir, what in the world is romanticism if *your* book is not romantic? Could a deep hatred of the “present age,” “reality,” and “modern ideas” be taken any further than in your artist’s metaphysics? It would sooner believe in nothingness, sooner believe in the devil, than in the “now”! Beneath all your contrapuntal art of voices and seduction of the ears, isn’t there a rumbling bass of anger and a desire to destroy? A furious determination against everything that exists “now,” a will not very far from practical nihilism, which seems to say: “Better that nothing should be true than that *you* should be right, than that *your* truth should win out!” Listen for yourself, Mr. Pessimist and Worshiper of Art, with a more open ear, to just one selected passage from your book. That eloquent passage about dragon-slayers may sound dangerously like the Pied Piper to young ears and hearts. What? Isn’t it the genuine romantic creed of 1830 under the mask of the pessimism of 1850? And behind it the usual romantic finale is already being sounded: a break, a collapse, a return, and a headlong fall before an old faith, before the old God… What? Isn’t your pessimistic book itself a piece of hostility to the Greeks and a piece of romanticism? Isn’t it itself something “as intoxicating as it is befogging,” a drug in any case, even a piece of music, of *German* music? But listen:\n\n“Let us imagine a growing generation with this fearlessness of vision, this heroic drive toward the tremendous. Let us imagine the bold stride of these dragon-slayers, the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all the feeble doctrines of optimism, in order to ‘live resolutely,’ wholly and fully. *Wouldn’t it be necessary* for the tragic person of this culture, as he trains himself for seriousness and terror, to desire a new art, the *art of metaphysical comfort*, tragedy as the Helen who belongs to him, and to cry out with Faust:\n\n“And shouldn’t I, with all the force of longing,\nDraw that one and only figure into life?”\n\n“Wouldn’t it be *necessary*?”… No, three times no, you young romantics: it should *not* be necessary! But it is very likely that this is how it *ends*, how *you* end: “comforted,” as it is written, despite all your training for seriousness and terror, “metaphysically comforted.” In short, as romantics end, as *Christians*… No! First you should learn the art of comfort *in this world*. You should learn to *laugh*, my young friends, if you absolutely insist on remaining pessimists. Perhaps then, as people who laugh, you will one day send all metaphysical comforting to the devil—and metaphysics first of all! Or, to put it in the language of that Dionysian monster called *Zarathustra*:\n\n“Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs either! Lift up your legs too, you good dancers, and better still: stand on your heads as well!\n\n“This crown of the laughing man, this crown of roses: I put this crown on myself, I myself pronounced my laughter holy. I found no one else strong enough for that today.\n\n“Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one, who waves his wings, ready to fly, waving to all the birds, ready and prepared, blissfully lighthearted:—\n\n“Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the truth-laugher, not impatient, not someone who insists on absolutes, someone who loves leaps and leaps to the side: I put this crown on myself!\n\n“This crown of the laughing man, this crown of roses: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown! I pronounced laughter holy: you higher people, *learn*—to laugh!”\n\n*Also sprach Zarathustra*, vierter Theil S. 87.\n\n### Preface to Richard Wagner\n\nThe thoughts brought together in this book will give rise to every sort of concern, agitation, and misunderstanding, given the peculiar character of our public discussion of art. To keep all that at a distance, and to write these opening words with the same joy of contemplation whose mark they themselves bear on every page, as the petrified trace of good and uplifting hours, I picture the moment when you, my deeply respected friend, receive it. Perhaps after an evening walk through the winter snow, you look at the unbound Prometheus on the title page and read my name. You immediately feel sure that, whatever this book may contain, its author has something serious and urgent to say. You are equally sure that, in everything he thought out, he conversed with you as if you were present, and could write down only something that answered to that presence. You will remember that I gathered my thoughts on these matters at the same time that you were writing your magnificent commemorative essay on Beethoven. That is, amid the terrors and grandeurs of the war that had just broken out. But anyone who thinks this gathering of thoughts set patriotic excitement against aesthetic self-indulgence, or brave seriousness against cheerful play, would be mistaken. If such people actually read this book, they may instead discover to their surprise how seriously German the problem we are dealing with is. We place it right at the center of German hopes, as their vortex and turning point. Yet these same people may find it altogether offensive to see an aesthetic problem taken so seriously. That is, if they can see in art nothing more than an amusing sideline, a jingling of bells that one could easily do without, alongside the “seriousness of existence.” As if no one knew what such a “seriousness of existence” amounts to when this contrast is made! For the instruction of these serious people, let me say that I am convinced that art is the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life, in the sense of the man to whom I here dedicate this book as my lofty forerunner and champion on this path.\n\n*Basel*, end of the year 1871.\n\n### Section 1\n\nWe will have gained a great deal for the science of aesthetics once we reach not just a logical understanding but the direct certainty of seeing this: art’s continuing development depends on the duality of the *Apollonian* and the *Dionysian*. In much the same way, reproduction depends on the two sexes, with their constant struggle and reconciliation only at intervals. We take these names from the Greeks. The Greeks made the profound secret teachings of their understanding of art accessible to anyone with insight, not through concepts, but through the strikingly clear figures of their gods. Our recognition is tied to their two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus. In the Greek world, the image-maker’s art, the Apollonian, and the imageless art of music, the art of Dionysus, stand enormously opposed in origin and aims. These two very different drives move alongside each other, usually in open conflict. They provoke each other into ever new and more powerful creations, which carry on the struggle between these opposites. The shared word “art” only seems to bridge that struggle. At last, through a miraculous metaphysical act of the Greek “will,” they appear paired together. In that pairing they finally produce Attic tragedy, a work of art that is as Dionysian as it is Apollonian.\n\nTo bring these two drives closer to us, let us first imagine them as the separate art worlds of *dreaming* and *intoxication*. Between these physiological phenomena we can observe a contrast corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. According to Lucretius, it was in dreams that the splendid figures of the gods first appeared to human souls. In dreams the great sculptor saw the delightful bodily forms of superhuman beings. Asked about the secrets of poetic creation, the Greek poet would likewise have pointed to dreams. He would have given much the same instruction as Hans Sachs gives in The Mastersingers:\n\nMy friend, that is exactly the poet’s work:\nTo note and interpret his dreaming.\nBelieve me, a person’s truest illusion\nIs revealed to him in a dream:\nAll the art and craft of poetry\nIs nothing but interpreting true dreams.\n\nThe beautiful semblance of dream worlds, which every person creates as a complete artist, is the precondition of all visual art. It is also, as we will see, the precondition of an important half of poetry. We enjoy these forms through direct understanding. Every shape speaks to us; nothing is unimportant or unnecessary. Even when this dream reality is most alive, we still have a glimmering sense of its being *semblance*. At least that is my experience. I could offer much evidence, including statements by poets, that it is frequent, indeed normal. The philosophical person even suspects that beneath this reality in which we live and exist, a second, quite different reality is hidden, so that this reality too is a semblance. Schopenhauer actually identifies the gift of sometimes seeing people and all things as mere phantoms or dream images as the mark of philosophical ability. The person responsive to art relates to the reality of dreams as the philosopher relates to the reality of existence. He watches closely and gladly. From these images he interprets life for himself; through these events he practices for life. It is not just pleasant, friendly images that he experiences with this complete understanding. Serious, gloomy, sad, and dark things, sudden obstacles, the teasing tricks of chance, anxious expectations—in short, the whole “divine comedy” of life, including the Inferno—pass before him. And not just like a shadow play, since he lives and suffers along with these scenes. Yet that fleeting sense of semblance is still there. Perhaps some people, like me, remember that in the dangers and terrors of a dream they have sometimes called out to themselves, taking courage, and with success: “It is a dream! I want to keep dreaming it!” I have also been told of people able to continue the causal sequence of one and the same dream over three or more consecutive nights. These facts clearly show that our innermost being, the shared foundation of us all, experiences dreaming with deep pleasure and joyful necessity.\n\nThe Greeks also expressed this joyful necessity of dreaming in their Apollo. Apollo, as the god of all image-making powers, is also the god of prophecy. The root meaning of his name makes him the “shining one,” the god of light. He also rules over the beautiful semblance of the inner world of imagination. The higher truth and perfection of these states, compared with the only partly understandable reality of waking life, together with a deep awareness of nature’s healing and helpful power in sleep and dreams, are the symbolic counterpart of the gift of prophecy and of the arts in general, which make life possible and worth living. But the image of Apollo must also include that delicate line the dream image must not cross if it is not to become pathological. Otherwise its semblance would deceive us as crude reality. Apollo must have that measured restraint, that freedom from wilder impulses, that wise calm of the image-making god. His eye must be “sunlike,” in keeping with his origin. Even when it looks angry and displeased, the blessing of beautiful semblance rests on him. And so, in an unusual sense, what Schopenhauer says of the person caught in the veil of Maya might apply to Apollo. Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I S. 416: “Just as, on the raging sea, boundless in every direction, which howls as it raises and lowers mountains of waves, a sailor sits in a boat, trusting the frail vessel, so the individual person sits calmly amid a world of torments, supported by and trusting in the principle of individuation.” Indeed, we could say that Apollo gives the highest expression to unshakable trust in that principle of individuation and to the calm of a person caught in it, sitting at rest. We might even call Apollo the magnificent divine image of the principle of individuation. From his gestures and looks, all the pleasure and wisdom of “semblance,” together with its beauty, would speak to us.\n\nIn the same passage, Schopenhauer described the tremendous *horror* that grips a person who suddenly loses confidence in the forms through which we know appearances, when the principle of sufficient reason seems, in one of its forms, to admit an exception. Add to this horror the blissful ecstasy that rises from the deepest ground of human beings, indeed of nature, when the principle of individuation breaks down in the same way. Then we gain a glimpse into the nature of the *Dionysian*. The analogy of *intoxication* brings it closest to us. Under the influence of the intoxicating drink celebrated in hymns by all early humans and peoples, or with the mighty approach of spring, which fills all nature with pleasure, those Dionysian impulses awaken. As they grow stronger, the subjective element fades into complete self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages too, ever-growing crowds driven by the same Dionysian power surged from place to place, singing and dancing. In these dancers of Saint John and Saint Vitus we recognize the Greeks’ Bacchic choruses, whose earlier history leads back through Asia Minor to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea festivals. Some people, through lack of experience or dullness, turn away from such phenomena as if from “epidemic diseases.” Feeling healthy themselves, they respond with mockery or pity. The poor things have no idea how corpse-pale and ghostly this very “health” of theirs looks when the glowing life of Dionysian enthusiasts rushes past them.\n\nUnder the spell of the Dionysian, the bond between one human being and another is not simply renewed. Nature too, alienated, hostile, or subjugated, once again celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, humanity. The earth freely offers its gifts, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and deserts approach peacefully. The chariot of Dionysus is covered with flowers and garlands. Panthers and tigers walk beneath his yoke. Turn Beethoven’s jubilant song of “Joy” into a painting, and do not let your imagination fall short when the millions sink into the dust in awe: then you can approach the Dionysian. Now the slave is a free man. Now all the rigid, hostile boundaries that necessity, arbitrary power, or “impudent fashion” set up between people break apart. Now, with this gospel of universal harmony, everyone feels not merely united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but one with him. It is as if the veil of Maya had been torn apart and were fluttering in shreds before the mysterious primal unity. Through singing and dancing, people express their membership in a higher community. They have forgotten how to walk and speak and are on their way to dancing up into the air. Their gestures speak of enchantment. Just as animals now speak and the earth gives milk and honey, something supernatural also sounds out from them. Each person feels like a god, and now moves in the same ecstasy and elevation as the gods he saw moving in dreams. The human being is no longer an artist, but has become a work of art. Here, in the shudders of intoxication, the artistic power of all nature reveals itself, to the highest, most blissful satisfaction of the primal unity. The noblest clay and the most precious marble, the human being, is kneaded and carved here. The cry of the Eleusinian mysteries sounds out to the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist: “Do you fall to the ground, you millions? Do you sense the creator, world?”—\n\n### Section 2\n\nSo far we have considered the Apollonian and its opposite, the Dionysian, as artistic powers that break out of nature itself, *without the human artist acting as a go-between*. In them, nature’s artistic drives find their first, direct satisfaction. On the one hand there is the world of dream images, whose perfection has no connection with an individual’s intellectual level or artistic education. On the other there is the reality of intoxication, which likewise pays no attention to the individual. Indeed, it seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him through a mystical feeling of oneness. In relation to these immediate artistic states of nature, every artist is an “imitator.” He is either an Apollonian artist of dreams or a Dionysian artist of intoxication, or finally—as in Greek tragedy, for example—an artist of both intoxication and dreams. We might imagine this last artist sinking down alone, apart from the ecstatic choruses, in Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-abandonment. Then, through the influence of Apollonian dreaming, his own condition—his oneness with the innermost ground of the world—is revealed to him *in a symbolic dream image*.\n\nAfter these general assumptions and contrasts, we now approach the *Greeks*. We want to recognize to what degree and to what height these *artistic drives of nature* had developed in them. This will enable us to understand and appreciate more deeply the Greek artist’s relationship to his original models, or, in Aristotle’s expression, “the imitation of nature.” Despite all the Greeks’ literature about dreams and their many dream anecdotes, we can speak of their *dreams* only by conjecture, though still with considerable confidence. Their eye had an unbelievably precise and sure gift for visual form, along with a bright, straightforward pleasure in color. We cannot help assuming, to the shame of everyone born later, that their dreams too had a logical causal order of lines and outlines, colors and groups, and a sequence of scenes resembling their finest relief sculptures. If comparison were possible, the perfection of these dreams would certainly justify calling the dreaming Greeks Homers and Homer a dreaming Greek. This would be true in a deeper sense than when a modern person dares to compare himself with Shakespeare on the subject of his own dreams.\n\nBy contrast, we need not speak merely by conjecture when revealing the enormous gulf separating the *Dionysian Greeks* from the Dionysian barbarians. From every corner of the ancient world—leaving the modern world aside here—from Rome to Babylon, we can show that Dionysian festivals existed. At best, their character compares with that of the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, who received his name and attributes from the goat, compares with Dionysus himself. Almost everywhere, these festivals centered on extravagant sexual license, whose waves swept over all family life and its respected rules. The wildest beasts of nature were unleashed here, reaching that disgusting mixture of lust and cruelty that has always seemed to me the true “witches’ brew.” News of these festivals reached the Greeks by every land and sea route. For a time, it seems, they were entirely protected and secured against the festivals’ feverish impulses by the figure of Apollo, standing here in all his pride. There was no more dangerous power against which he could hold up the head of Medusa than this grotesque, uncouth Dionysian power. Doric art made this majestic, rejecting posture of Apollo permanent. Resistance became more doubtful, even impossible, when similar drives finally broke out from the deepest roots of Greek life itself. Now the Delphic god’s action was limited to taking the destructive weapons out of his mighty opponent’s hand through a timely reconciliation. This reconciliation is the most important moment in the history of Greek worship. Wherever we look, the changes brought about by this event are visible. It was a reconciliation between two opponents, with a sharp definition of the boundaries they must now observe, and with periodic exchanges of gifts of honor. At bottom, the gulf had not been bridged. But if we look at how Dionysian power revealed itself under the pressure of this peace settlement, we now recognize what the Greeks’ Dionysian orgies meant. Compared with the Babylonian Sacaea festivals and their regression of humanity to the tiger and the ape, they were festivals of the world’s deliverance and days of transfiguration. Only with the Greeks does nature reach its artistic jubilation; only with them does the tearing apart of the principle of individuation become an artistic phenomenon. That horrible witches’ brew of lust and cruelty had no power here. Only the strange mixture and doubleness in the emotions of Dionysian enthusiasts recall it—as medicines recall deadly poisons. This is the phenomenon in which pain awakens pleasure and jubilation tears sounds of agony from the chest. Out of the highest joy comes a scream of horror or a longing lament for an irreplaceable loss. In these Greek festivals, a sentimental side of nature seems to break out, as if nature had to sigh over being broken into individuals. The song and body language of these enthusiasts, with their twofold mood, were new and unheard-of to the Homeric Greek world. In particular, Dionysian *music* filled that world with terror and horror. Music may already have seemed familiar as an Apollonian art, but strictly speaking, it was known only as the wave-like beat of rhythm. Rhythm’s power to shape forms had been developed to represent Apollonian states. Apollo’s music was Doric architecture in sounds, but in sounds only hinted at, like those of the cithara. Precisely the element that makes up the character of Dionysian music, and therefore of music in general, is carefully kept away as un-Apollonian: the shattering power of sound, the unified flow of melody, and the completely incomparable world of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb, human beings are driven to develop all their symbolic abilities to their highest intensity. Something never felt before presses for expression: the destruction of the veil of Maya, oneness as the spirit of the species, indeed of nature. Now the essence of nature must express itself symbolically. A new world of symbols is needed. First comes the full symbolism of the body, not just the symbolism of the mouth, face, and words, but the complete gesture of dance, moving every limb rhythmically. Then the other symbolic powers, those of music, suddenly grow with wild force in rhythm, dynamics, and harmony. To grasp this total unleashing of all symbolic powers, a person must already have reached that height of self-abandonment that seeks symbolic expression through these powers. Thus the dithyrambic servant of Dionysus is understood only by his own kind! How astonished the Apollonian Greek must have been to look at him! His astonishment was all the greater because it was mixed with the horror of realizing that all this was not really so foreign to him after all. Indeed, his Apollonian consciousness only covered this Dionysian world from his sight like a veil.\n\n### Section 3\n\nTo understand this, we must take down the artful building of *Apollonian culture*, stone by stone, as it were, until we see the foundations on which it rests. The first things we notice are the magnificent figures of the *Olympian* gods standing on its pediments. Their deeds, shown in reliefs that shine far into the distance, decorate its friezes. Apollo stands among them as one god beside others, with no claim to first place, but we must not let that confuse us. The same drive that took visible form in Apollo gave birth to this whole Olympian world. In this sense, we may regard Apollo as its father. What enormous need gave rise to so radiant a company of Olympian beings?\n\nAnyone who approaches these Olympians with another religion in his heart, looking for moral elevation, even holiness, for disembodied spirituality, for loving looks full of compassion, will soon have to turn away in disappointment and irritation. Nothing here suggests self-denial, spirituality, or duty. Only a lush, indeed triumphant existence speaks to us here, in which everything that exists is made divine, whether good or evil. The observer may stand quite taken aback before this fantastic overflow of life. He may ask with what magic potion in their bodies these high-spirited people must have enjoyed life, so that wherever they look, Helen smiles back at them, the ideal image of their own existence, “floating in sweet sensuality.” But we must call out to this observer, who has already turned to leave: “Do not go away. First listen to what Greek folk wisdom says about this very life, which spreads before you here with such inexplicable cheerfulness. The old story goes that King Midas hunted for a long time in the forest for the wise *Silenus*, companion of Dionysus, without catching him. When Silenus finally fell into his hands, the king asked what was the very best and most excellent thing for human beings. Stiff and motionless, the daemon remained silent. At last, forced by the king, he broke into shrill laughter and these words: ‘Wretched creatures of a day, children of chance and toil, why do you force me to tell you what it would be most beneficial for you not to hear? The very best thing is completely beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to *be*, to be *nothing*. But the second best thing for you is—to die soon.’”\n\nHow does the Olympian world of gods relate to this folk wisdom? As a tortured martyr’s ecstatic vision relates to his torments.\n\nNow the enchanted mountain of Olympus seems to open up and show us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence. To be able to live at all, he had to place before them the shining dream creation of the Olympians. There was that enormous distrust of the Titanic powers of nature; Moira, mercilessly enthroned above all knowledge; the vulture of Prometheus, the great friend of humanity; the terrible fate of wise Oedipus; the ancestral curse of the house of Atreus, which forces Orestes to murder his mother. In short, there was the forest god’s entire philosophy, together with its mythical examples, which brought the melancholy Etruscans to ruin. Through the Olympians, that artistic *world in between*, the Greeks continually overcame it anew, or at least covered it up and removed it from sight. Out of the deepest necessity, the Greeks had to create these gods in order to live. We should probably imagine the process like this: from the original Titanic order of gods, an order of terror, the Apollonian drive for beauty gradually developed the Olympian order of gods, an order of joy, as roses burst out of a thornbush. How else could this people, so sensitive, so fiercely desiring, so uniquely capable of *suffering*, have endured existence if it had not been shown to them in their gods, surrounded by a higher glory? The same drive that calls art into life, as the supplement and completion of existence that tempts us to keep living, also brought the Olympian world into being. In it, the Greek “will” held up to itself a transfiguring mirror. Thus the gods justify human life by living it themselves—the only sufficient justification of God! Existence in the bright sunshine of such gods is felt to be desirable in itself. The real *pain* of the Homeric people concerns leaving it, above all leaving it soon. Reversing the wisdom of Silenus, we could now say of them: “The very worst thing for them is to die soon, and the second worst is to die at all.” When a lament does sound, it speaks again of short-lived Achilles, of the human race changing and passing like leaves, of the fall of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest hero to long to keep living, even as a day laborer. At the Apollonian stage, the “will” desires this existence so fiercely, and the Homeric person feels so much at one with it, that even lament becomes a song in its praise.\n\nHere we must make something clear. This harmony, indeed unity, between human beings and nature, which modern people look at with such longing, and for which Schiller established the special term “naive,” is by no means a simple, seemingly unavoidable condition that arises on its own. It is not something we *must* encounter at the entrance to every culture as a paradise of humanity. Only an age that tried to imagine Rousseau’s Emile as an artist as well, and believed it had found in Homer just such an artist-Emile raised close to nature’s heart, could believe that. Wherever we meet the “naive” in art, we must recognize the highest achievement of Apollonian culture. This culture must always first overthrow an empire of Titans and kill monsters. Through powerful deceptive images and pleasurable illusions, it must have overcome a terrifying depth in its view of the world and an acutely sensitive capacity for suffering. But how rarely the naive is achieved—that complete absorption in the beauty of semblance! How inexpressibly great *Homer* is, therefore. As an individual, he stands in the same relationship to that Apollonian popular culture as the individual dream-artist stands to the capacity for dreaming of the people and of nature in general. Homeric “naivety” can be understood only as the complete victory of Apollonian illusion. It is the kind of illusion that nature so often uses to achieve its aims. An illusory image hides the true goal. We reach out our hands toward that image, and nature achieves its goal through our deception. In the Greeks, the “will” wanted to look at itself, transfigured in genius and the world of art. To glorify itself, its creatures had to feel that they themselves deserved glorification. They had to see themselves again in a higher sphere, without this perfected world of vision acting as a command or a reproach. This is the sphere of beauty in which they saw their mirror images, the Olympians. With this reflection of beauty, the Greek “will” fought against the talent for suffering and for the wisdom of suffering that went hand in hand with its artistic talent. As the monument to its victory, Homer stands before us, the naive artist.\n\n### Section 4\n\nThe analogy with dreams teaches us something about this naive artist. Picture a dreamer who, in the middle of the illusion of the dream world and without disturbing it, calls to himself: “It is a dream; I want to keep dreaming it.” From this we must infer a deep inner pleasure in looking at dreams. On the other hand, to dream at all with this inner pleasure in looking, we must have completely forgotten the day and its terrible intrusiveness. Under the guidance of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, we may explain all these phenomena roughly as follows. Of life’s two halves, waking and dreaming, we certainly think the first far more preferable, important, worthy, and worth living—indeed, the only half really lived. Yet, however paradoxical it may seem, I would assert, for that mysterious ground of our being whose appearance we are, precisely the opposite valuation of the dream. The more I see those all-powerful artistic drives in nature, and in them a passionate longing for semblance, for deliverance through semblance, the more I feel driven to a metaphysical assumption. What truly exists, the primal unity, as that which eternally suffers and is full of contradictions, also needs the enchanting vision, the pleasurable semblance, for its continual deliverance. We, completely caught in this semblance and made up of it, are compelled to experience it as what truly does not exist: that is, as a constant becoming in time, space, and causality, or, in other words, as empirical reality. Let us therefore set aside our own “reality” for a moment. Let us understand our existence as we experience it, and that of the world in general, as a representation produced by the primal unity at every moment. Then we must now regard the dream as the *semblance of semblance*, and therefore as an even higher satisfaction of the primal desire for semblance. For this same reason, nature’s innermost core takes that indescribable pleasure in the naive artist and the naive artwork, which is likewise only “semblance of semblance.” *Raphael*, himself one of those immortal “naive” artists, showed us in a symbolic painting how semblance is taken down one level into semblance: the primal process of the naive artist and also of Apollonian culture. In his *Transfiguration*, the lower half, with the possessed boy, the despairing bearers, and the helpless, frightened disciples, shows us the reflection of eternal primal pain, the world’s only ground. Here “semblance” is the reflection of eternal contradiction, the father of things. Out of this semblance a new, vision-like world of semblance rises like an ambrosial fragrance. Those caught in the first semblance see nothing of it: a radiant floating in the purest bliss and a painless contemplation shining from wide-open eyes. Here, in the highest artistic symbolism, we have before our eyes that Apollonian world of beauty and its foundation, the terrible wisdom of Silenus. Through intuition, we grasp their mutual necessity. But Apollo once again appears to us as the principle of individuation made divine. Only in this principle is the eternally achieved goal of the primal unity, its deliverance through semblance, fulfilled. With grand gestures he shows us how the whole world of torment is needed, so that it drives the individual to produce the vision that delivers him. Then, absorbed in looking at it, the individual sits calmly in his rocking boat in the middle of the sea.\n\nTreating individuation as divine, if we think of this as issuing commands and rules at all, means recognizing only one law: the individual. That means keeping within the individual’s boundaries, *measure* in the Greek sense. As an ethical god, Apollo demands measure from his followers, and self-knowledge so that they can keep to it. So alongside the aesthetic necessity of beauty run the demands “Know yourself” and “Not too much!” Self-conceit and excess, meanwhile, were regarded as the truly hostile spirits of the non-Apollonian sphere, and therefore as qualities of the pre-Apollonian age, the age of the Titans, and of the world outside the Apollonian, the world of barbarians. Because of his Titanic love for human beings, Prometheus had to be torn apart by vultures. Because of his excessive wisdom, which solved the Sphinx’s riddle, Oedipus had to plunge into a bewildering whirlpool of crimes. This was how the Delphic god interpreted the Greek past.\n\nThe Apollonian Greek also thought the effect produced by the *Dionysian* was “Titanic” and “barbaric.” Yet he could not hide from himself that he was also inwardly related to those overthrown Titans and heroes. Indeed, he had to feel something more: his whole existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden foundation of suffering and knowledge, which the Dionysian revealed to him again. And look! Apollo could not live without Dionysus! The “Titanic” and the “barbaric” were ultimately just as necessary as the Apollonian! Now imagine the ecstatic sound of the Dionysian celebration entering this world built on semblance and moderation and held in check by artifice, in ever more enticing, magical melodies. Imagine all the *excess* of nature in pleasure, suffering, and knowledge sounding out in them, rising to a piercing scream. What could Apollo’s chanting artist, with his ghostly harp music, amount to beside this demonic song of the people? The Muses of the arts of “semblance” grew pale before an art that spoke the truth in its intoxication. The wisdom of Silenus cried out “Misery! Misery!” against the cheerful Olympians. Here the individual, with all his limits and measures, sank into the self-forgetfulness of Dionysian states and forgot Apollo’s rules. *Excess* revealed itself as truth. Contradiction, bliss born from pain, spoke of itself from the heart of nature. And so, wherever the Dionysian broke through, the Apollonian was canceled and destroyed. But it is just as certain that wherever the first assault was withstood, the Delphic god’s authority and majesty expressed themselves more rigidly and threateningly than ever. I can explain the *Doric* state and Doric art only as a permanent armed camp of the Apollonian. Only through unceasing resistance to the Titanic-barbaric nature of the Dionysian could such a defiantly unyielding art, enclosed in fortifications, such a warlike and harsh education, and such a cruel and ruthless state endure for long.\n\nUp to this point, we have developed in more detail what I noted at the beginning of this essay: how the Dionysian and the Apollonian ruled Greek life through ever new, successive births, each intensifying the other. Under the rule of the Apollonian drive for beauty, the Homeric world developed out of the “bronze” age, with its battles of Titans and its harsh folk philosophy. This “naive” splendor was swallowed in turn by the flooding stream of the Dionysian. In opposition to this new power, the Apollonian rose to the rigid majesty of Doric art and its view of the world. In this way, the earlier history of Greece, through the struggle of these two hostile principles, falls into four great artistic stages. Unless we regard the last period reached, the period of Doric art, as the peak and purpose of these artistic drives, we are now pushed to ask further about the ultimate plan behind this becoming and activity. Here the magnificent and highly praised artwork of *Attic tragedy* and the dramatic dithyramb presents itself to our eyes as the shared goal of both drives. After a long earlier struggle, their mysterious marriage glorified itself in such a child—who is both Antigone and Cassandra.\n\n### Section 5\n\nWe now approach the real goal of our inquiry: to understand the Dionysian-Apollonian genius and his artwork, or at least to gain an intuitive understanding of that mystery of unity. Our first question here is where the new seed that later developed into tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb first made itself felt in the Greek world. Antiquity itself gives us a visual answer. In sculptures, engraved gems, and similar works, it places *Homer and Archilochus* side by side as the founding fathers and torchbearers of Greek poetry. It does so with the sure feeling that only these two should be regarded as equally original natures, from whom a stream of fire flows onward through all later Greek generations. Homer, the aged dreamer absorbed in himself, the model of the Apollonian, naive artist, now looks in astonishment at the passionate head of Archilochus, that warlike servant of the Muses driven wildly through existence. Modern aesthetics knew only how to add the interpretation that here the first “subjective” artist was set against the “objective” one. This interpretation does little for us. We recognize the subjective artist only as a bad artist. In every kind and level of art, our first and foremost demand is that the subjective be overcome, the artist freed from the “I,” and every individual will and desire silenced. Indeed, without objectivity, without pure contemplation free from personal interests, we cannot believe in even the smallest truly artistic creation. So our aesthetics must first solve this problem: how is the “lyric poet” possible as an artist? The experience of every age shows that he always says “I” and sings through the whole chromatic scale of his passions and desires before us. It is precisely this Archilochus, beside Homer, who frightens us with the cry of his hatred and mockery, with the drunken outbursts of his desire. As the first so-called subjective artist, isn’t he therefore really a nonartist? But then where does the reverence shown to him as a poet come from—reverence shown especially by the Delphic oracle itself, the hearth of “objective” art, in some very remarkable pronouncements?\n\n*Schiller* shed light on his own process of composing poetry through a psychological observation that he himself could not explain, though he did not find it troubling. He admits that the preparatory state before the act of composing did not consist of a series of images before and within him, with thoughts arranged in a causal order. Rather, it was a *musical mood*: “At first my feeling has no definite, clear object; this forms only later. A certain musical state of mind comes first, and only then does the poetic idea follow.” Now add the most important phenomenon of all ancient lyric poetry: the union, indeed identity, *of the lyric poet with the musician*, which was everywhere taken as natural. Compared with this, our modern lyric poetry looks like a statue of a god without a head. On the basis of the aesthetic metaphysics set out earlier, we can now explain the lyric poet as follows. First, as a Dionysian artist, he has become completely one with the primal unity, its pain and contradiction. He produces the image of this primal unity as music, if music has rightly been called a repetition of the world and a second casting of it. But now, under the influence of Apollonian dreaming, this music becomes visible to him again as if in a *symbolic dream image*. That reflection of primal pain in music, without images or concepts and with its deliverance in semblance, now produces a second reflection, as a single symbol or example. The artist has already given up his subjectivity in the Dionysian process. The image that now shows him his unity with the heart of the world is a dream scene. It makes perceptible that primal contradiction and primal pain, together with the primal pleasure of semblance. The lyric poet’s “I” therefore sounds from the depths of being. His “subjectivity,” in the sense used by modern aesthetic theorists, is an imagined thing. When Archilochus, the Greeks’ first lyric poet, declares his raging love and also his contempt to the daughters of Lycambes, it is not his passion that dances before us in an orgiastic frenzy. We see Dionysus and the maenads. We see the intoxicated enthusiast Archilochus sunk into sleep—as Euripides describes such sleep for us in The Bacchae, on a high mountain pasture in the midday sun. Now Apollo approaches and touches him with the laurel. The sleeper’s Dionysian-musical enchantment now seems to spray sparks of images around him: lyric poems, which at their highest development are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.\n\nThe sculptor, and likewise the epic poet who is related to him, is absorbed in the pure contemplation of images. The Dionysian musician has no image at all, but is himself entirely primal pain and its primal echo. From the mystical state of self-abandonment and unity, the lyric genius feels a world of images and symbols growing. This world has a completely different coloring, causal order, and speed from the world of the sculptor and epic poet. The epic poet lives in these images, and only in them, with joyful contentment. He never tires of looking lovingly at their smallest details. Even the image of angry Achilles is only an image to him. He enjoys its angry expression with that dreamlike pleasure in semblance, so that this mirror of semblance protects him from becoming one with his figures and merging with them. The lyric poet’s images, by contrast, are nothing but *himself*, as it were only different forms in which he becomes an object. That is why, as the center that sets that world in motion, he may say “I.” But this selfhood is not the same as that of a waking, empirically real person. It is the only selfhood that truly exists at all, eternal and resting at the foundation of things. Through its images, the lyric genius sees right through to that foundation. Now let us imagine him seeing among these images *himself* as a person without genius: that is, his “subject,” the whole swarm of subjective passions and impulses of will directed at a particular thing that seems real to him. If it now seems that the lyric genius and the person without genius attached to him are one, and that the former is speaking that little word “I” about himself, this semblance can no longer mislead us. It certainly misled those who called the lyric poet the subjective poet. In truth, Archilochus, the passionately inflamed person who loves and hates, is only a vision of the genius. This genius is no longer Archilochus, but the genius of the world, and expresses his primal pain symbolically in that image of the person Archilochus. By contrast, Archilochus the subjective person who wills and desires can never, under any circumstances, be a poet. But it is by no means necessary for the lyric poet to see only the appearance of the person Archilochus before him as a reflection of eternal being. Tragedy proves how far the lyric poet’s world of visions can move away from that appearance, even though it admittedly lies closest to him at first.\n\n*Schopenhauer* did not hide from himself the difficulty that the lyric poet presents for a philosophical understanding of art. He believes he has found a way out, but I cannot follow him along it. Yet he alone, in his profound metaphysics of music, had been given the means to remove that difficulty decisively. I believe I have done so here in his spirit and in his honor. Instead, he identifies the distinctive nature of song as follows (Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, S. 295): “It is the subject of willing, that is, one’s own willing, that fills the singer’s consciousness, often as a released, satisfied willing (joy), but still more often as an obstructed willing (sorrow). It is always an emotion, a passion, a stirred-up state of mind. Yet alongside this and at the same time, the sight of the surrounding natural world makes the singer conscious of himself as the subject of pure, will-less knowing. The unshakable, blissful calm of this knowing now contrasts with the pressure of willing, which is always limited and still needy. The feeling of this contrast, this interplay, is really what the song as a whole expresses, and what makes up the lyrical state in general. In this state, pure knowing seems to approach us to free us from willing and its pressure. We follow, but only for moments. Again and again, willing, the memory of our personal aims, tears us away from calm contemplation. But again and again, the immediate beauty of our surroundings, in which pure, will-less knowledge presents itself to us, draws us away from willing. That is why in song and in the lyrical mood, willing (the personal interest in a goal) and pure contemplation of the surroundings before us are strangely mixed together. Connections between the two are sought and imagined. The subjective mood, the state of the will, imparts its coloring to the surroundings being contemplated, and these in turn reflect their coloring onto that mood. A genuine song is the imprint of this entire state of mind, so mixed and divided.”\n\nWho could fail to recognize in this description that lyric poetry is being characterized as an incompletely achieved art, an art that seems always to be leaping and rarely reaching its goal? Indeed, it is described as a half-art whose *essence* is supposed to consist in a strange mixture of willing and pure contemplation: that is, of the nonaesthetic and the aesthetic state. We argue instead that this entire contrast between the subjective and the objective, by which even Schopenhauer still classifies the arts as if using a measuring rod of value, has no place at all in aesthetics. The subject, the individual who wills and pursues his selfish aims, can be thought of only as art’s opponent, not its origin. But insofar as the subject is an artist, he is already freed from his individual will. He has become something like a medium through which the one truly existing subject celebrates its deliverance in semblance. For above all, this must be clear to us, to humble *and* elevate us: the whole comedy of art is certainly not performed for us, say for the sake of our improvement and education. Nor are we the real creators of that art world. But we may assume that for its true creator we ourselves are already images and artistic projections, and that our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art. For only as an *aesthetic phenomenon* are existence and the world eternally *justified*. Of course, our awareness of this significance of ours is hardly different from the awareness painted warriors have of the battle shown on their canvas. Thus all our knowledge of art is at bottom completely illusory, because as knowers we are not one and identical with that being who, as the sole creator and spectator of that comedy of art, gives himself eternal enjoyment. Only insofar as the genius merges, in the act of artistic creation, with that primal artist of the world does he know anything about the eternal essence of art. For in that state he is, in a marvelous way, like the uncanny image in the fairy tale that can turn its eyes and look at itself. Now he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator.\n\n### Section 6\n\nAs for Archilochus, scholarly research has found that he introduced the *folk song* into literature, and that because of this deed he holds his unique place beside Homer in the general esteem of the Greeks. But what is the folk song, as opposed to the thoroughly Apollonian epic? It is nothing other than the lasting trace of a union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Its enormous spread across all peoples, growing through ever new births, is evidence for us of how strong that double artistic drive of nature is. This drive leaves its traces in the folk song in the same way that the orgiastic movements of a people make themselves permanent in its music. Indeed, it would also have to be provable historically that every period rich in folk songs was at the same time stirred most powerfully by Dionysian currents. We must always regard these currents as the underlying ground and precondition of the folk song.\n\nFor us, though, the folk song counts first of all as a musical mirror of the world, as original melody that now looks for a parallel dream appearance and expresses it in poetry. *So melody is the first and universal thing*, and for that reason it can undergo several objectifications, in several texts. In the simple judgment of the people it is also by far the more important and the more necessary part. Melody gives birth to poetry out of itself, and does so again and again. This is all that *the stanza form of the folk song* wants to tell us. I always looked at this phenomenon with astonishment, until I finally found this explanation. Whoever examines a collection of folk songs from this point of view, for example The Boy’s Magic Horn, will find countless examples of how the continually birthing melody sprays sparks of images around itself. In their colorfulness, their sudden changes, even their mad tumbling over one another, these images reveal a force utterly foreign to epic semblance and its calm flowing on. From the standpoint of the epic, this uneven and irregular world of images in lyric poetry can simply be condemned. And the solemn epic rhapsodes of the Apollonian festivals in the age of Terpander certainly did condemn it.\n\nIn the poetry of the folk song, then, we see language strained to the utmost to *imitate music*. That is why a new world of poetry begins with Archilochus, one that contradicts the Homeric world at its deepest ground. With this we have named the only possible relationship between poetry and music, word and tone: the word, the image, the concept looks for an expression analogous to music, and now suffers the force of music itself. In this sense we may distinguish two main currents in the history of the Greek language, depending on whether the language imitated the world of appearances and images or the world of music. One only needs to think more deeply about the linguistic difference in coloring, sentence structure, and vocabulary between Homer and Pindar to grasp the meaning of this opposition. It even becomes tangibly clear that between Homer and Pindar the *orgiastic flute melodies of Olympus* must have sounded. Even in the age of Aristotle, in the midst of an infinitely more developed music, they still swept people away into drunken enthusiasm. And in their original effect they certainly provoked all the poetic means of expression of the people of that time to imitate them. Here I recall a familiar phenomenon of our own day, one that our aesthetics finds merely offensive. Again and again we see how a Beethoven symphony forces individual listeners to speak in images. A comparison of the different worlds of images that a single piece of music produces may look quite fantastically colorful, even contradictory. But to exercise one’s poor wit on such comparisons, and to overlook the phenomenon, which truly deserves an explanation, is exactly in the manner of that aesthetics. Even when the composer himself has spoken about a composition in images—for example, when he calls a symphony pastoral, one movement “Scene at the Brook,” and another “Merry Gathering of Country Folk”—these are likewise only ideas that are likenesses, born from the music—and not, say, the imitated objects of the music—ideas that cannot teach us anything about the *Dionysian* content of the music, and that have no exclusive value beside other images. We must now transfer this process of music discharging itself in images to a youthfully fresh, linguistically creative crowd of people, in order to get an inkling of how the strophic folk song arises and how the whole power of language is stirred up by the new principle of imitating music.\n\nIf we may regard lyric poetry as the imitative shining forth of music in images and concepts, we can now ask: “What does music *appear* as in the mirror of imagery and concepts?” *It appears as will*, taking the word in Schopenhauer’s sense, that is, as the opposite of the aesthetic mood, which is purely contemplative and free of will. Here we must distinguish, as sharply as possible, the concept of essence from the concept of appearance. For music, in its essence, cannot possibly be will, because as will it would have to be banished completely from the realm of art—for will is what is unaesthetic in itself. But it appears as will. To express its appearance in images, the lyric poet needs every stirring of passion, from the whisper of affection to the rumble of madness. Under the urge to speak about music in Apollonian likenesses, he understands all of nature, and himself within it, only as that which eternally wills, desires, and longs. But insofar as he interprets music in images, he himself rests in the quiet calm of the sea that belongs to Apollonian contemplation, however much everything he sees through the medium of music is in pressing, driving motion around him. Indeed, when he catches sight of himself through the same medium, his own image shows itself to him in a state of unsatisfied feeling. His own willing, longing, groaning, and rejoicing is a likeness by which he interprets music to himself. This is the phenomenon of the lyric poet: as an Apollonian genius he interprets music through the image of will, while he himself, completely released from the craving of will, is a pure, untroubled eye of the sun.\n\nThis whole discussion insists that lyric poetry depends on the spirit of music just as much as music itself, in its complete boundlessness, does not *need* the image and the concept but only *tolerates* them beside itself. The lyric poet’s poetry can say nothing that was not already contained, in the greatest possible generality and universal validity, in the music that forced him to speak in images. For this very reason, the world symbolism of music can in no way be fully captured in language. Music refers symbolically to the primal contradiction and primal pain in the heart of the primal unity, and so it symbolizes a sphere that is above all appearance and before all appearance. Compared with it, every appearance is rather only a likeness. So *language*, as the organ and symbol of appearances, can never and nowhere turn the innermost depth of music outward. Whenever language takes up the imitation of music, it stays in only an external contact with music, while the deepest meaning of music cannot be brought one step closer to us by all lyrical eloquence.\n\n### Section 7\n\nWe must now call on all the artistic principles discussed so far to find our way through the labyrinth that we have to name *the origin of Greek tragedy*. I do not think I am saying anything absurd when I say that the problem of this origin has not even been seriously posed so far, let alone solved. This is true however often the scattered scraps of ancient tradition have been stitched together by clever combination and torn apart again. This tradition tells us with complete decisiveness *that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus*, and that originally it was only chorus and nothing but chorus. That gives us the duty to look into the heart of this tragic chorus as the real original drama. We must not let ourselves be satisfied in any way by the usual stock phrases about art—that the chorus is the ideal spectator, or that it has to represent the people over against the princely region of the stage. That last explanation sounds lofty to many a politician. It suggests that the unchanging moral law was presented by the democratic Athenians in the people’s chorus, which always turns out to be right over against the passionate excesses and extravagances of kings. A remark of Aristotle’s may suggest this idea ever so strongly. Still, it has no influence on the original formation of tragedy, because the whole opposition of people and prince, indeed every political and social sphere, is excluded from those purely religious origins. But even with regard to the classical form of the chorus that we know from Aeschylus and Sophocles, we would consider it blasphemy to speak here of a presentiment of a “constitutional popular representation.” Others have not shrunk from this blasphemy. The ancient constitutions of states did not know a constitutional popular representation in practice, and I hope they did not even “have a presentiment” of one in their tragedy.\n\nMuch more famous than this political explanation of the chorus is the idea of A. W. Schlegel. He recommends that we regard the chorus in a way as the sum and extract of the crowd of spectators, as the “ideal spectator.” Held up against that historical tradition that tragedy was originally only chorus, this view shows itself for what it is: a crude, unscientific, yet brilliant claim. It got its brilliance only from its concentrated form of expression, from the truly German bias for everything called “ideal,” and from our momentary astonishment. For we are astonished as soon as we compare the theater audience we know so well with that chorus, and ask ourselves whether it could ever be possible to idealize out of this audience anything analogous to the tragic chorus. We quietly deny this, and now we wonder just as much at the boldness of Schlegel’s claim as at the totally different nature of the Greek audience. For we had always thought that the right spectator, whoever they may be, must always stay aware that they have a work of art before them and not an empirical reality. The tragic chorus of the Greeks, however, is compelled to recognize real beings in the flesh in the figures on the stage. The chorus of Oceanids really believes it sees the Titan Prometheus before it, and takes itself to be just as real as the god of the stage. And that is supposed to be the highest and purest kind of spectator, to hold Prometheus to be bodily present and real, as the Oceanids do? And it would be the sign of the ideal spectator to run onto the stage and free the god from his tortures? We had believed in an aesthetic audience. We had considered the individual spectator more capable the better able they were to take the work of art as art, that is, aesthetically. And now Schlegel’s expression suggested to us that the perfect ideal spectator lets the world of the stage act on them not aesthetically at all, but bodily and empirically. “Oh, these Greeks!” we sigh; “they overturn our aesthetics!” But since we were used to it, we repeated Schlegel’s saying whenever the chorus came up.\n\nBut that very explicit tradition speaks against Schlegel here. The chorus by itself, without a stage—that is, the primitive form of tragedy—and that chorus of ideal spectators do not fit together. What kind of art form would that be, one drawn out of the concept of the spectator, whose real form would have to be the “spectator as such”? The spectator without a spectacle is a nonsensical concept. We fear that tragedy’s birth can be explained neither from respect for the moral intelligence of the masses nor from the concept of the spectator without a play. We consider this problem too deep to be even touched by such shallow ways of looking at it.\n\nSchiller had already shown a far more valuable insight into the meaning of the chorus in his famous preface to The Bride of Messina. He regarded the chorus as a living wall that tragedy draws around itself, to shut itself off cleanly from the real world and to preserve its ideal ground and its poetic freedom.\n\nWith this chief weapon of his, Schiller fights against the common idea of the natural, against the illusion that is usually demanded in dramatic poetry. The day itself on the stage is only artificial, he says, the architecture only symbolic, and metrical language ideal in character. Even so, the error still prevails overall: it is not enough to tolerate merely as a poetic freedom what is in fact the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus, he says, is the decisive step by which war is openly and honestly declared on every naturalism in art.—It is this kind of view, it seems to me, for which our age, which fancies itself superior, uses the dismissive slogan “pseudo-idealism.” I fear that, with our present worship of the natural and the real, we have arrived at the opposite pole of all idealism, namely the region of the waxworks. There is art in these too, as in certain popular novels of the present day. Only let no one torment us with the claim that this art has overcome the “pseudo-idealism” of Schiller and Goethe.\n\nOf course it is an “ideal” ground on which, according to Schiller’s correct insight, the Greek satyr chorus, the chorus of original tragedy, walks: a ground raised high above the real walking path of mortals. For this chorus the Greek built the floating scaffolding of a fictional *state of nature* and placed fictional *beings of nature* on it. Tragedy grew up on this foundation, and for that reason alone it was, of course, relieved from the beginning of any painstaking copying of reality. Still, this is not a world fancifully dreamed up at random between heaven and earth. It is rather a world with the same reality and credibility that Olympus and its inhabitants had for the believing Greek. The satyr, as the Dionysian chorus member, lives in a reality granted by religion, under the sanction of myth and cult. That tragedy begins with him, and that the Dionysian wisdom of tragedy speaks out of him, is a phenomenon as strange to us as the origin of tragedy from the chorus altogether. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for our reflection if I put forward this claim: the satyr, the fictional being of nature, stands to the cultured person in the same relation as Dionysian music stands to civilization. Of civilization Richard Wagner says that music cancels it out as daylight cancels out lamplight. In the same way, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself canceled out in the face of the satyr chorus. And this is the immediate effect of Dionysian tragedy: the state and society, indeed the gulfs between one person and another, give way to an overpowering feeling of unity that leads back to the heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort—with which, as I already hint here, every true tragedy sends us away—is that life at the foundation of things, despite all change of appearances, is indestructibly powerful and full of joy. This comfort appears with bodily clarity as the satyr chorus, as a chorus of beings of nature who live on indestructibly, so to speak, behind all civilization, and who remain eternally the same despite all change of generations and all the history of peoples.\n\nWith this chorus the deep-thinking Greek comforts himself. This Greek is uniquely capable of the most delicate and the heaviest suffering. With a sharp gaze he has looked into the terrible work of destruction in so-called world history, as well as into the cruelty of nature, and he is in danger of longing for a Buddhist denial of the will. Art saves him, and through art—life saves him for itself.\n\nThe rapture of the Dionysian state, with its destruction of the usual barriers and limits of existence, contains during its duration a *lethargic* element, in which everything personally experienced in the past is submerged. In this way, through this gulf of forgetting, the world of everyday reality and the world of Dionysian reality are separated from each other. But as soon as that everyday reality returns to consciousness, it is felt as such with disgust. An ascetic, will-denying mood is the fruit of those states. In this sense the Dionysian person resembles Hamlet. Both have once looked truly into the essence of things. They have *understood*, and acting disgusts them. For their action can change nothing in the eternal essence of things. They feel it as ridiculous or shameful that they are expected to set right again a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires being veiled in illusion—that is the lesson of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Hans the Dreamer, who from too much reflection, from an excess of possibilities, so to speak, never gets to act. Not reflection, no!—true knowledge, insight into the terrifying truth, outweighs every motive that drives toward action, in Hamlet as in the Dionysian person. Now no comfort has any hold. The longing reaches beyond a world after death, beyond the gods themselves. Existence, together with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond, is denied. Aware of the truth once seen, the human being now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being. Now they understand what is symbolic in the fate of Ophelia. Now they recognize the wisdom of the forest god Silenus. It disgusts them.\n\nHere, in this greatest danger to the will, *art* approaches as a saving, healing sorceress. Only art can bend those disgusted thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into ideas that one can live with. These ideas are the *sublime*, as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the *comic*, as the artistic discharge of the disgust at the absurd. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art. In the middle world of these Dionysian companions, those fits of disgust described just now were spent.\n\n### Section 8\n\nThe satyr and the idyllic shepherd of our more recent age are both products of a longing for the original and the natural. But with what a firm, fearless grip the Greek seized his forest man, and how bashfully and softly the modern person toyed with the flattering picture of a tender, fluting, soft-natured shepherd! In his satyr the Greek saw nature on which no knowledge had yet worked, nature in which the bolts of culture had not yet been broken open. That is why, for him, the satyr did not yet merge with the ape. On the contrary, the satyr was the original image of the human being, the expression of the human being’s highest and strongest stirrings. He was an inspired reveler, delighted by the nearness of the god. He was a suffering companion, in whom the suffering of the god is repeated. He was a proclaimer of wisdom out of the deepest breast of nature. He was a symbol of the sexual omnipotence of nature, which the Greek is used to viewing with reverent wonder. The satyr was something sublime and divine. He had to seem so especially to the painfully broken gaze of the Dionysian person. The dressed-up, lying shepherd would have offended such a person. His eye rested with sublime satisfaction on nature’s grand script, unveiled and undiminished. Here the illusion of culture was wiped away from the original image of the human being. Here the true human being revealed himself, the bearded satyr, shouting for joy up to his god. Before him the cultured person shrank into a lying caricature. For these beginnings of tragic art, too, Schiller is right: the chorus is a living wall against onrushing reality, because it—the satyr chorus—portrays existence more truthfully, more really, and more completely than the cultured person, who commonly takes himself to be the only reality. The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world, as the fantastic impossibility of a poet’s brain. It wants to be exactly the opposite, the unvarnished expression of truth, and for that very reason it must throw off the lying finery of the supposed reality of the cultured person. The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture, which poses as the only reality, is like the contrast between the eternal core of things, the thing in itself, and the whole world of appearances. Tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal life of that core of existence, amid the continual passing away of appearances. In the same way, the symbolism of the satyr chorus already expresses in a likeness that original relationship between the thing in itself and appearance. That idyllic shepherd of the modern person is only a counterfeit of the sum of illusions of education that he takes for nature. The Dionysian Greek wants truth and nature in their highest force—he sees himself enchanted into a satyr.\n\nUnder such moods and insights the ecstatic crowd of Dionysus’s servants rejoices. Their power transforms them even before their own eyes, so that they imagine they see themselves as restored spirits of nature, as satyrs. The later constitution of the tragic chorus is the artistic imitation of that natural phenomenon. With it, however, a separation of Dionysian spectators from those under the Dionysian spell became necessary. Only we must always keep in mind that the audience of Attic tragedy found itself again in the chorus of the orchestra, and that at bottom there was no opposition between audience and chorus. For everything is only one great, sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs, or of those who let themselves be represented by these satyrs. Schlegel’s saying must open itself to us here in a deeper sense. The chorus is the “ideal spectator” insofar as it is the only *beholder*, the beholder of the visionary world of the stage. An audience of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks. In their theaters the seating area was built in terraces rising in concentric arcs. This made it possible for everyone to actually *survey* the whole cultured world around them, and in full, satisfied gazing to imagine themselves a member of the chorus. From this insight we may call the chorus, at its primitive stage in original tragedy, a self-mirroring of the Dionysian person. This phenomenon can be made clearest by the process of the actor. If truly gifted, the actor sees the image of the role he is to play hovering before his eyes so that he can almost touch it. The satyr chorus is first of all a vision of the Dionysian mass, just as the world of the stage is in turn a vision of this satyr chorus. The force of this vision is strong enough to make the gaze dull and insensitive to the impression of “reality,” to the educated people lounging in the rows of seats all around. The form of the Greek theater recalls a lonely mountain valley. The architecture of the stage looks like a shining cloud image that the Bacchae, roaming in the mountains, see from the heights. It is the glorious frame in whose middle the image of Dionysus is revealed to them.\n\nThat original artistic phenomenon, which we bring up here to explain the tragic chorus, is almost offensive given our scholarly view of the elementary artistic processes. Yet nothing can be more certain than that the poet is a poet only because he sees himself surrounded by figures who live and act before him, and into whose innermost being he looks. Because of a peculiar weakness of modern talent, we tend to imagine the original aesthetic phenomenon as too complicated and abstract. For the genuine poet, the metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a substitute image that really hovers before him in place of a concept. For him a character is not a whole composed of pieced-together individual traits, but a person who is insistently alive before his eyes. This person differs from a painter’s comparable vision only in that it keeps living and acting on. What makes Homer describe things so much more vividly than all other poets? Because he looks at so much more. We talk about poetry so abstractly because we are all in the habit of being bad poets. At bottom the aesthetic phenomenon is simple. If one only has the ability to see a lively play continuously and to live always surrounded by crowds of spirits, one is a poet. If one only feels the urge to transform oneself and to speak out of other bodies and souls, one is a dramatist.\n\nDionysian excitement is able to pass this artistic gift on to a whole crowd: to see itself surrounded by such a host of spirits, with whom it knows itself to be inwardly one. This process of the tragic chorus is the original *dramatic* phenomenon: to see oneself transformed before oneself, and now to act as if one had really entered another body, another character. This process stands at the beginning of the development of drama. Here is something different from the rhapsode, who does not fuse with his images but, like the painter, sees them with a contemplative eye outside himself. Here there is already a giving up of the individual by entering into a foreign nature. And this phenomenon appears like an epidemic: a whole crowd feels enchanted in this way. The dithyramb is therefore essentially different from every other choral song. The maidens who solemnly walk to the temple of Apollo with laurel branches in their hands, singing a processional song, remain who they are and keep their civic names. The dithyrambic chorus is a chorus of transformed people, in whom their civic past and their social position are completely forgotten. They have become the timeless servants of their god, living outside all spheres of society. All other choral lyric of the Greeks is only an enormous intensification of the Apollonian individual singer. In the dithyramb, by contrast, a community of unconscious actors stands before us, who look at one another as transformed.\n\nEnchantment is the precondition of all dramatic art. In this enchantment the Dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr, *and as a satyr he in turn beholds the god*, that is, he sees in his transformation a new vision outside himself, as the Apollonian completion of his state. With this new vision the drama is complete.\n\nFrom this insight we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus that again and again discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. Those choral parts with which tragedy is interwoven are thus, in a way, the mother’s womb of the whole so-called dialogue, that is, of the entire world of the stage, of the drama proper. In several successive discharges, this original ground of tragedy radiates out that vision of the drama. The vision is thoroughly a dream appearance and in that respect epic in nature. On the other hand, as the objectification of a Dionysian state, it represents not Apollonian redemption in semblance but, on the contrary, the shattering of the individual and his becoming one with primal being. The drama is thus the Apollonian way of making Dionysian insights and effects perceptible to the senses, and by this it is separated from the epic as by an enormous gulf.\n\nThe *chorus* of Greek tragedy, the symbol of the whole Dionysian-excited mass, finds its full explanation in this view of ours. We were used to the position of a chorus on the modern stage, especially an opera chorus. So we could not understand at all how the tragic chorus of the Greeks could be older, more original, indeed more important than the real “action”—as the tradition so clearly reported. We also could not reconcile that reported high importance and originality with the fact that the chorus was nevertheless composed of lowly, serving beings—at first even only of goatlike satyrs. And the orchestra in front of the stage always remained a riddle to us. Now we have come to see that the stage, together with the action, was at bottom and originally conceived only as a *vision*. The only “reality” is the chorus, which generates the vision out of itself and speaks of it with the whole symbolism of dance, tone, and word. In its vision this chorus beholds its lord and master Dionysus, and is therefore eternally the *serving* chorus. It sees how he, the god, suffers and glorifies himself, and therefore does not *act* itself. In this position of complete service toward the god, it is nevertheless the highest, that is, the Dionysian, expression of *nature*. For that reason it speaks, like nature, in inspiration, in oracles and sayings of wisdom. As the one who *suffers with* the god, it is at the same time the *wise* one, proclaiming truth out of the heart of the world. So arises that fantastic and apparently offensive figure of the wise and inspired satyr, who is at the same time “the simple-minded human being” in contrast to the god. He is an image of nature and its strongest drives, indeed a symbol of them, and at the same time a proclaimer of its wisdom and art: musician, poet, dancer, seer of spirits in one person.\n\n*Dionysus*, the actual hero of the stage and center of the vision, is, according to this insight and according to tradition, not truly present at first, in the very oldest period of tragedy. He is only imagined as present. That is, originally tragedy is only “chorus” and not “drama.” Later the attempt is made to show the god as a real one, and to present the visionary figure, together with its transfiguring frame, as visible to every eye. With this the “drama” in the narrower sense begins. Now the dithyrambic chorus is given the task of exciting the mood of the listeners to such a Dionysian degree that, when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they do not see the misshapen, masked man, but a visionary figure born, as it were, from their own rapture. Imagine Admetus, deep in thought, remembering his wife Alcestis, who has just died, and consuming himself entirely in seeing her with his mind—how suddenly a veiled female figure, similar in shape and similar in walk, is led toward him. Imagine his sudden, trembling unrest, his stormy comparing, his instinctive conviction—and we have an analogue to the feeling with which the Dionysian-excited spectator saw the god stride toward him on the stage, the god with whose suffering the spectator had already become one. Involuntarily the spectator transferred the whole image of the god, trembling magically before his soul, onto that masked figure, and dissolved its reality, as it were, into a ghostly unreality. This is the Apollonian dream state, in which the world of day is veiled, and a new world, clearer, more understandable, more gripping than the first and yet more shadowlike, is born anew before our eyes in continual change. Accordingly we recognize in tragedy a thoroughgoing contrast of style. Language, color, mobility, and dynamics of speech come apart as wholly separate spheres of expression, on one side in the Dionysian lyric of the chorus and on the other in the Apollonian dream world of the stage. The Apollonian appearances in which Dionysus objectifies himself are no longer “an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life,” as the music of the chorus is. They are no longer those merely felt forces, not condensed into an image, in which the inspired servant of Dionysus senses the nearness of the god. Now the clarity and firmness of epic shaping speaks to him from the stage. Now Dionysus no longer speaks through forces, but as an epic hero, almost in the language of Homer.\n\n### Section 9\n\nEverything that comes to the surface in the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, in its dialogue, looks simple, clear, and beautiful. In this sense, the dialogue is an image of the Greek, whose nature reveals itself in dance. In dancing, the greatest strength remains only a potential, but shows itself in the suppleness and richness of the movement. In the same way, the speech of Sophocles’ heroes surprises us with its Apollonian precision and brightness. We immediately imagine that we can see into the deepest core of their being, and are a little surprised that the way to that core is so short. But suppose we look past the hero’s character as it comes to the surface and becomes visible. At bottom, it is no more than a light-image projected onto a dark wall—an appearance through and through. Suppose instead that we enter the myth projected in these bright reflections. We suddenly experience something that reverses a familiar optical effect. When we make a determined effort to look at the sun and turn away blinded, we see dark, colored spots before our eyes, as if they were a remedy. In the opposite way, those bright images of Sophocles’ hero—in short, the Apollonian quality of the mask—are necessary products of a look into the terrifying depths of nature. They are like shining spots that heal eyes injured by a horrifying night. Only in this sense can we believe we have rightly understood the serious and important idea of “Greek cheerfulness.” In our own time, though, we encounter its misunderstood version everywhere: cheerfulness as comfortable ease, free from danger.\n\nThe figure who suffers most on the Greek stage, the ill-fated *Oedipus*, was understood by Sophocles as a noble person. Despite his wisdom, he is destined for error and misery. But in the end, his immense suffering makes him exert a magical, blessing power on those around him, one that continues even after his death. The noble person does not sin: that is what this deeply thoughtful poet wants to tell us. His actions may destroy every law, every natural order, even the moral world itself. Yet those very actions create a higher, magical circle of effects that establish a new world on the ruins of the overthrown old one. This is what the poet wants to tell us insofar as he is also a religious thinker. As a poet, he first shows us a wonderfully tangled knot of a legal case. The judge slowly unravels it, link by link, to his own destruction. The genuinely Greek delight in this unraveling through argument is so great that it gives the whole work a touch of superior cheerfulness. Everywhere, it takes the edge off the horrifying circumstances underlying the case. In “Oedipus at Colonus,” we find this same cheerfulness, but raised into an endless transfiguration. Facing the old man overwhelmed by misery, who is exposed to everything that happens to him purely as someone who *suffers*, stands a supernatural cheerfulness. It comes down from the divine realm and suggests that, through his completely passive conduct, the hero achieves his greatest power to act, extending far beyond his life. In contrast, his conscious plans and efforts earlier in life had only led him into passivity. In this way, the tangled knot of the case in the Oedipus story, which no mortal eye can unravel, is slowly undone. And the deepest human joy comes over us at this divine counterpart to reasoning through arguments. Even if this explanation has done justice to the poet, we can still ask whether it has exhausted the myth’s content. Here it becomes clear that the poet’s entire interpretation is just that light-image which healing nature holds before us after we have looked into the abyss. Oedipus, his father’s murderer, his mother’s husband! Oedipus, who solved the Sphinx’s riddle! What does this mysterious set of three fateful deeds tell us? An ancient folk belief, especially widespread in Persia, says that a wise magician can be born only from incest. With Oedipus, who solves the riddle and marries his mother, in mind, we must immediately interpret it this way: where prophetic and magical powers have broken the spell of the present and future, the rigid law that separates things into individuals, and nature’s own magic in general, some monstrous violation of nature—incest, in that case—must have come first as the cause. How else could someone force nature to give up its secrets, except by successfully resisting it—that is, through something unnatural? I see this insight expressed in that terrible set of three events in Oedipus’ fate. The same person who solves the riddle of nature—that Sphinx with its double nature—must also break nature’s most sacred laws as his father’s murderer and his mother’s husband. Indeed, the myth seems to whisper to us that wisdom, and specifically Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural horror. Anyone whose knowledge plunges nature into the abyss of destruction must also experience nature’s dissolution in himself. “The point of wisdom turns against the wise person: wisdom is a crime against nature.” The myth calls out terrifying statements like these to us. But the Greek poet touches the myth’s grand and frightening statue of Memnon like a sunbeam, so that it suddenly starts to sing—in the melodies of Sophocles!\n\nAgainst this glory of passivity I now set the glory of action that shines around Aeschylus’ *Prometheus*. What Aeschylus the thinker had to tell us here, but as a poet only lets us sense through his symbolic picture, the young Goethe knew how to reveal in the daring words of his Prometheus:\n\n“Here I sit, making people\nIn my own image,\nA race that will be like me,\nTo suffer, to cry,\nTo enjoy life and be glad,\nAnd to pay no attention to you,\nLike me!”\n\nRising to the stature of a Titan, the human being fights to win his own culture and forces the gods to join forces with him. Through wisdom that is entirely his own, he holds existence and its limits in his hand. In its basic idea, this poem about Prometheus is the true hymn to impiety. Yet its most wonderful feature is its deeply Aeschylean drive toward *justice*. On one side is the boundless suffering of the daring “individual.” On the other is the distress of the gods, even a foreboding of a twilight of the gods. These two worlds of suffering have a power that forces reconciliation and metaphysical oneness. All this strongly recalls the central point and main principle of Aeschylus’ view of the world: above gods and humans, Moira sits enthroned as eternal justice. Given the astonishing boldness with which Aeschylus places the Olympian world on his scales of justice, we must remember that this deeply thoughtful Greek had an unshakably solid foundation for metaphysical thought in his mystery rites. All his skeptical impulses could therefore discharge themselves against the Olympians. The Greek artist in particular felt a dark sense of mutual dependence in relation to these gods. It is precisely this feeling that Aeschylus’ Prometheus symbolizes. The Titan-like artist found in himself the defiant belief that he could create human beings and at least destroy Olympian gods. He could do this through his higher wisdom, though he was forced to pay for it with eternal suffering. The glorious “ability” of great genius, for which even eternal suffering is too small a price, the stern pride of the *artist*: these are the content and soul of Aeschylus’ poetry. Meanwhile, in his Oedipus, Sophocles strikes up the opening notes of the *saint’s* victory song. But even Aeschylus’ interpretation of the myth does not measure the full depth of its astonishing terror. Rather, the artist’s joy in bringing things into being, the cheerfulness of artistic creation that defies every disaster, is only a bright image of clouds and sky reflected in a black lake of sadness. The Prometheus legend is an original possession of the entire family of Aryan peoples, and evidence of their gift for profound tragedy. Indeed, it may not be unlikely that this myth has the same characteristic meaning for the Aryan nature that the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic nature, and that the two myths are related like brother and sister. The Prometheus myth rests on the tremendous value that a naive early humanity placed on *fire* as the true safeguard of every rising culture. But those contemplative early humans saw it as a violation, a theft from divine nature, for people to control fire freely instead of receiving it only as a gift from heaven, as a lightning bolt that kindles a fire or the sun’s warming blaze. So the very first philosophical problem presents a painful, insoluble conflict between humanity and god, setting it like a boulder at the entrance to every culture. Humanity wins the best and highest things it can share in through a violation, and must then accept its consequences: the whole flood of suffering and grief with which the offended gods in heaven afflict—and must afflict—the nobly striving human race. This is a harsh thought. Through the *dignity* it gives to the violation, it stands in a strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall. That myth saw curiosity, deceptive pretenses, susceptibility to seduction, lust—in short, a series of mainly female inclinations—as the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan idea is its exalted view of *active sin* as the specifically Promethean virtue. This also provides the ethical foundation of pessimistic tragedy: the *justification* of human evil, both human guilt and the suffering it brings on. The evil in the nature of things—which the contemplative Aryan is not inclined to explain away—the conflict at the heart of the world, reveals itself to him as an intermingling of different worlds, a divine and a human world, for example. Each is justified as an individual, but as a separate entity beside another, each must suffer for its individuality. When the individual heroically presses toward the universal, tries to step beyond the spell of individuality and wants to be the *one* being of the world itself, he experiences in himself the primal conflict hidden in things. That is, he commits a violation and suffers. Thus the Aryans understand violation as male, and the Semites understand sin as female, just as the primal violation is committed by a man and the primal sin by a woman. Besides, the witches’ chorus says:\n\n“We aren’t so particular about it:\nA woman does it in a thousand steps;\nBut however fast she goes,\nA man does it in a single jump.”\n\nAnyone who understands that deepest core of the Prometheus legend—the necessity of violation imposed on the individual with Titanic ambitions—must also feel how un-Apollonian this pessimistic idea is. Apollo wants to bring individual beings to rest precisely by drawing boundaries between them. With his demands for self-knowledge and moderation, he keeps reminding them that these boundaries are the world’s most sacred laws. But this Apollonian tendency must not make form freeze into Egyptian stiffness and coldness. The attempt to prescribe a course and a territory for each individual wave must not kill the movement of the whole lake. So, from time to time, the high tide of the Dionysian once again destroyed all those small circles in which the one-sidedly Apollonian “will” tried to imprison the Greek world. This suddenly swelling Dionysian tide then lifts the individual little crests of the waves onto its back, as Prometheus’ brother, the Titan Atlas, lifts the earth. This Titanic urge to become, as it were, an Atlas for all individuals, and carry them higher and higher, farther and farther on a broad back, is what the Promethean and Dionysian have in common. In this respect, Aeschylus’ Prometheus is a Dionysian mask. But in that deep drive toward justice mentioned earlier, Aeschylus reveals to an understanding observer his descent on his father’s side from Apollo, the god of individuality and the boundaries of justice. So the dual character of Aeschylus’ Prometheus, his simultaneously Dionysian and Apollonian nature, might be expressed in this conceptual formula: “Everything that exists is just and unjust, and equally justified in both.”\n\nThat is your world! That is what you call a world!—\n\n### Section 10\n\nAn unquestionable tradition tells us that Greek tragedy in its earliest form dealt only with the sufferings of Dionysus, and that for a long time Dionysus was its only stage hero. But we can say with equal certainty that, right up to Euripides, Dionysus never stopped being the tragic hero. All the famous figures of the Greek stage—Prometheus, Oedipus, and the rest—are only masks of that original hero, Dionysus. A god stands behind all these masks. That is the one essential reason for the characteristic “ideal quality” of those famous figures, which has so often inspired amazement. Someone—I do not know who—has claimed that all individuals, as individuals, are comic and therefore not tragic. From this we could conclude that the Greeks simply *could not* tolerate individuals on the tragic stage. They do seem to have felt that way. In general, Plato’s distinction between the “Idea” and the “idol,” or copy, and his different valuation of the two, are deeply rooted in the Greek character. To use Plato’s terms, we could describe the tragic figures of the Greek stage roughly like this: the one truly real Dionysus appears in a multitude of forms, wearing the mask of a struggling hero and caught, as it were, in the net of the individual will. As the god now speaks and acts in this appearance, he resembles an individual who makes mistakes, strives, and suffers. That he *appears* at all with this epic precision and clarity is the work of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams. Through this symbolic appearance, Apollo explains the chorus’ Dionysian state to it. But in truth this hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, the god who experiences in himself the suffering of being divided into individuals. Wonderful myths tell how the Titans cut him to pieces as a boy, and how in this state he is now worshiped as Zagreus. This suggests that the dismemberment, the specifically Dionysian *suffering*, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire. We should therefore see the state of being divided into individuals as the source and original basis of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself. The Olympian gods came from this Dionysus’ smile, and human beings from his tears. In his existence as a dismembered god, Dionysus has the double nature of a cruel, savage demon and a mild, gentle ruler. But those fully initiated in the mysteries placed their hope in a rebirth of Dionysus. We must now try to understand this as the end of division into individuals. Their roaring song of celebration rang out for this coming third Dionysus. Only in this hope is there a ray of joy on the face of the torn world, shattered into individuals. The myth illustrates this through Demeter, sunk in eternal grief. For the first time she *rejoices* again when she is told that she can give birth to Dionysus *once more*. In the ideas just described, we already have all the elements of a profound and pessimistic view of the world, and with them *tragedy’s teaching of the mysteries*: the basic insight that everything that exists is one; the view that division into individuals is the original basis of evil; and art as the joyful hope that the spell of this division can be broken, as the foreboding of a restored unity.—\n\nIt was suggested earlier that Homeric epic is the poetry of Olympian culture, through which that culture sang its own song of victory over the terrors of the battle with the Titans. Now, under the overwhelming influence of tragic poetry, the Homeric myths are reborn once again. In this migration of their souls, they show that Olympian culture, too, has meanwhile been defeated by a still deeper view of the world. The defiant Titan Prometheus had warned his Olympian tormentor that one day his rule would face the greatest danger unless he joined forces with Prometheus in time. In Aeschylus, we see the alliance of the frightened Zeus, fearful of his own end, with the Titan. In this way, the earlier age of the Titans is brought back up from Tartarus into the light after all. The philosophy of wild, naked nature looks at the myths of the Homeric world as they dance past, and it wears the unveiled face of truth. They turn pale and tremble before this goddess’ lightning gaze—until the mighty fist of the Dionysian artist forces them into the service of the new god. Dionysian truth takes over the entire realm of myth as a set of symbols for *its* insights. It expresses them partly in the public worship of tragedy, partly in the secret performances of dramatic mystery festivals, but always beneath the old mythical covering. What power was it that freed Prometheus from his vultures and turned myth into a vehicle for Dionysian wisdom? It was the Herculean power of music. Reaching its highest expression in tragedy, music knows how to interpret myth with a new and deeply profound meaning. Earlier, we already had to identify this as music’s most powerful ability. For every myth is destined to creep gradually into the narrow confines of a supposedly historical reality, and to be treated by some later age as a one-time event claiming historical truth. The Greeks were already well on their way to using ingenuity and arbitrary decisions to recast their whole mythical dream of youth as a *history of their youth* based on historical events and practical causes. This is how religions usually die: an orthodox dogmatism, with its strict, rational scrutiny, organizes a religion’s mythical premises into a fixed set of historical events. People begin anxiously defending the myths’ credibility while resisting any natural continuation of their life and growth. In other words, the feeling for myth dies, and in its place comes religion’s claim to historical foundations. The newborn genius of Dionysian music now took hold of this dying myth. In its hand, the myth blossomed once more, with colors it had never shown before and a fragrance that awakened a longing foreboding of a metaphysical world. After this last blaze of brightness, it collapses. Its leaves wither, and soon antiquity’s mocking Lucians snatch at the faded, ruined flowers carried off by every wind. Through tragedy, myth reaches its deepest content and its most expressive form. Once again it rises like a wounded hero, and all its remaining strength, together with the wise calm of someone dying, burns in its eye with one last powerful light.\n\nWhat did you want, you sacrilegious Euripides, when you tried to force this dying figure into your compulsory service once again? It died under your violent hands. Now you needed a counterfeit, masked myth, which, like the ape of Heracles, could do no more than dress itself up in the old finery. And just as myth died on you, so did the genius of music. However greedily you reached out to plunder every garden of music, you still managed to produce only counterfeit, masked music. And because you abandoned Dionysus, Apollo abandoned you too. Drive all the passions out of their resting places and trap them in your circle; sharpen and polish a sophist’s argumentative technique for your heroes’ speeches—even your heroes have only imitated, masked passions, and speak only imitated, masked speeches.\n\n### Section 11\n\nGreek tragedy died differently from all the older arts related to it. It died by suicide, as a result of an insoluble conflict—in other words, tragically. All the others faded away in old age, dying the most beautiful and peaceful of deaths. If a happy natural state means leaving life without convulsions and with beautiful descendants, then the end of those older arts shows us such a state. They slowly sink away, and before their dying eyes their more beautiful offspring already stand, impatiently lifting their heads with a bold gesture. The death of Greek tragedy, in contrast, left an enormous emptiness, deeply felt everywhere. Once, in the time of Tiberius, Greek sailors at a lonely island heard the shattering cry, “Great Pan is dead.” Now a painful lament seemed to sound through the Greek world: “Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself has been lost with it! Away, away with you stunted, skinny latecomers! Away to Hades, so that for once you can eat your fill of the crumbs left by the old masters!”\n\nBut when a new kind of art did bloom after all, honoring tragedy as its predecessor and teacher, people were horrified to see that it really did bear its mother’s features—but the very features she had shown in her long death struggle. *Euripides* fought this death struggle of tragedy. The later art form is known as *New Attic Comedy*. In it, tragedy’s degenerate form lived on, a memorial to its extremely painful and violent passing.\n\nThis connection makes the passionate affection that the poets of New Comedy felt for Euripides understandable. So Philemon’s wish is no longer surprising: he was willing to have himself hanged at once, just to visit Euripides in the underworld—if only he could be sure that the dead man still had his wits about him. If we want to identify very briefly, without claiming to give an exhaustive account, what Euripides shares with Menander and Philemon, and what made him such an exciting model for them, it is enough to say that Euripides brought *the spectator* onto the stage. Anyone who has recognized the material from which the Promethean tragedians before Euripides shaped their heroes, and how far they were from intending to put a faithful mask of reality onstage, will also understand Euripides’ completely different aim. Through him, the person of everyday life came out of the audience and onto the stage. The mirror that had previously shown only great, bold features now displayed that painstaking accuracy which conscientiously reproduces even nature’s unsuccessful lines. Odysseus, the typical Greek of the older art, now sank in the hands of the newer poets to the figure of the little Greek, who from now on stands at the center of dramatic interest as the good-natured, sly household slave. In Aristophanes’ “Frogs,” Euripides takes credit for using his home remedies to free tragic art from its pompous bulk. This is felt above all in his tragic heroes. Essentially, the spectator now saw and heard his own double on Euripides’ stage, and was delighted that this double knew how to speak so well. But it did not stop at delight: people learned to speak from Euripides themselves. He boasts of this himself in his contest with Aeschylus: through him, the people have now learned how to observe, conduct discussions, and draw conclusions skillfully and with the cleverest sophistical arguments. This transformation of public speech is what made New Comedy possible in the first place. From now on, it was no longer a secret how, and with what sayings, everyday life could be represented onstage. Ordinary middle-class mediocrity, on which Euripides based all his political hopes, now got its say. Until then, demigods had determined the character of speech in tragedy, and drunken satyrs or half-human beings in comedy. So Aristophanes’ Euripides praises himself for presenting common, familiar, everyday life and activity, which everyone is qualified to judge. If the whole crowd now philosophizes, manages its land and property, and conducts its lawsuits with unheard-of cleverness, this is his achievement and the result of the wisdom he has instilled in the people.\n\nNew Comedy could now address a crowd prepared and enlightened in this way. Euripides had, in a sense, become its chorus trainer, except that this time it was the chorus of spectators that had to be trained. As soon as it had learned to sing in Euripides’ key, that chess-like form of drama arose: New Comedy, with its constant triumph of cunning and deviousness. Meanwhile Euripides—the chorus trainer—was praised without end. People would even have killed themselves to learn more from him, if they had not known that tragic poets were just as dead as tragedy. With tragedy, though, the Greek had given up his belief in his own immortality: not only belief in an ideal past, but also belief in an ideal future. The words from the familiar epitaph, “frivolous and cranky in old age,” also apply to the aging Greek world. The moment, the joke, frivolity, and whim are its highest gods. The fifth class, the slaves, now comes to power, at least in outlook. If we can still speak of “Greek cheerfulness” at all, it is the cheerfulness of the slave, who has no serious responsibilities, no great goals to strive for, and knows nothing in the past or future to value more highly than the present. It was this semblance of “Greek cheerfulness” that so outraged the profound and formidable people of the first four centuries of Christianity. To them, this effeminate flight from seriousness and terror, this cowardly satisfaction with comfortable pleasure, seemed not only contemptible but the truly anti-Christian outlook. Their influence accounts for the fact that the view of ancient Greece which lived on for centuries clung with almost invincible stubbornness to that pale pink shade of cheerfulness. It was as though there had never been a sixth century with its birth of tragedy, its mysteries, its Pythagoras and Heraclitus. Indeed, it was as though the artworks of the great age did not exist at all. Yet not one of them can be explained as growing out of such a senile, slavish pleasure in existence and cheerfulness. Each points to an entirely different view of the world as the basis of its existence.\n\nWe just claimed that Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage in order, at the same time, to make the spectator truly capable of judging drama in the first place. This makes it seem that the older tragic art had never escaped a mismatch with its audience. We might be tempted to praise Euripides’ radical aim of achieving a fitting relationship between artwork and audience as an advance beyond Sophocles. But “audience” is only a word, not at all a uniform, unchanging entity. Where would an artist’s obligation to accommodate a force whose strength lies only in numbers come from? And if, in his gifts and intentions, he feels above each individual spectator, how could he feel more respect for the collective expression of all these abilities, inferior to his own, than for the comparatively most gifted individual spectator? In truth, no Greek artist treated his audience with greater boldness and self-sufficiency over a long life than Euripides himself. Even when the crowd threw itself at his feet, he still had the defiance to slap his own tendency in the face in public—the same tendency through which he had won over the crowd. If this genius had felt the slightest reverence for the audience’s pandemonium, he would have collapsed under the club blows of his failures long before the middle of his career. This reflection shows us that our statement was only provisional: Euripides brought the spectator onto the stage to make the spectator truly capable of judgment. We must look for a deeper understanding of his aim. Conversely, everyone knows that Aeschylus and Sophocles fully enjoyed public favor throughout their lives and long afterward. So there can be no question of a mismatch between artwork and audience in these predecessors of Euripides. What drove this richly gifted artist, constantly urged to create, so violently off the path over which the sun of the greatest poets’ names and the cloudless sky of public favor shone? What strange consideration for the spectator drove him toward the spectator? How could he, out of too much respect for his audience—disrespect his audience?\n\nHere is the solution to the riddle just presented: as a poet, Euripides felt above the crowd, but not above two of his spectators. He brought the crowd onto the stage. But he revered those two spectators as the only competent judges and masters of all his art. Following their directions and warnings, he transferred into the souls of his stage heroes the whole world of feelings, passions, and experiences that had previously gathered on the audience benches as an invisible chorus at every festival performance. He yielded to their demands when he looked for new words and a new tone for these new characters. In their voices alone he heard valid judgments of his work, as well as encouragement promising victory whenever he found himself condemned once again by the court of the audience.\n\nOne of these two spectators is—Euripides himself, Euripides *as a thinker*, not as a poet. We could say of him that, as with Lessing, the extraordinary abundance of his critical talent continually nourished a secondary impulse toward artistic creation, even if it did not produce that impulse. With this gift, with all the clarity and agility of his critical thinking, Euripides had sat in the theater and worked to make out the masterpieces of his great predecessors, feature by feature, line by line, as though they were paintings that had darkened. Here he met with something that should not surprise anyone initiated into the deeper secrets of Aeschylean tragedy. In every feature and every line, he noticed something that would not fit any measure: a certain deceptive precision, together with a mysterious depth, even infinity, in the background. Even the clearest figure still had a comet’s tail that seemed to point into the uncertain, into what could not be made clear. The same twilight lay over the structure of the drama, especially the meaning of the chorus. And how doubtful the solutions to the ethical problems remained to him! How questionable the treatment of the myths! How uneven the distribution of good and bad fortune! Even in the language of older tragedy, much offended him, or at least puzzled him. In particular, he found too much pomp for simple situations, too many figures of speech and monstrous expressions for the characters’ simplicity. So he sat in the theater, restlessly brooding, and admitted to himself, as a spectator, that he did not understand his great predecessors. But since he considered understanding the true root of all enjoyment and creation, he had to ask and look around to see whether anyone thought as he did and likewise admitted that these works could not be measured. But the crowd, along with its best individuals, had only a suspicious smile for him. Yet no one could explain to him why, despite his doubts and objections, the great masters were still right. In this agonizing state, he found *the other spectator*, who did not understand tragedy and therefore did not value it. Allied with him, he could dare to leave his isolation and begin the tremendous fight against the artworks of Aeschylus and Sophocles—not with polemical writings, but as a dramatist setting *his* idea of tragedy against the traditional one.—\n\n### Section 12\n\nBefore we name this other spectator, let us pause a moment to recall the impression described earlier: something divided and impossible to measure in the very nature of Aeschylean tragedy. Think of our own puzzlement at the *chorus* and the *tragic hero* of that tragedy. We could reconcile neither of them with our habits or with tradition—until we rediscovered that very duality as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, the expression of two interwoven artistic drives, *the Apollonian and the Dionysian*.\n\nTo remove that original, all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy, and to rebuild tragedy in a pure, new form on non-Dionysian art, morality, and a non-Dionysian view of the world: this is Euripides’ aim, now revealed to us in a clear light.\n\nAt the end of his life, Euripides himself used a myth to put the question of this aim’s value and meaning before his contemporaries in the most forceful way. Should the Dionysian be allowed to exist at all? Should it not be violently rooted out of Greek soil? Certainly, the poet tells us, if only it were possible. But the god Dionysus is too powerful. His most rational opponent—like Pentheus in “The Bacchae”—is unexpectedly enchanted by him, and afterward runs to his doom under this spell. The judgment of the two old men, Cadmus and Tiresias, also seems to be the old poet’s judgment: the reflections of the cleverest individuals cannot overturn those ancient popular traditions, that endlessly perpetuated worship of Dionysus. Indeed, in the face of such marvelous powers, it is appropriate to show at least a diplomatically cautious participation. Even so, the god may take offense at such lukewarm involvement and finally turn the diplomat—as he does Cadmus here—into a dragon. This is what we are told by a poet who resisted Dionysus with heroic strength throughout a long life, only to end his career by glorifying his opponent and committing suicide. He is like a dizzy man who throws himself from a tower simply to escape the terrible spinning that he can no longer bear. That tragedy is a protest against the possibility of carrying out his aim. Alas, it had already been carried out! The astonishing thing had happened: by the time the poet took it back, his aim had already won. Dionysus had already been driven off the tragic stage, specifically by a demonic power speaking through Euripides. In a certain sense, Euripides too was only a mask. The god speaking through him was not Dionysus, nor Apollo, but a completely newborn demon called *Socrates*. This is the new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic. It destroyed the artwork that was Greek tragedy. Euripides may try to comfort us by taking back his position, but he does not succeed. The most magnificent temple lies in ruins. What use to us are its destroyer’s laments and his admission that it was the most beautiful of all temples? And even the fact that art critics of every age have turned Euripides into a dragon as punishment—who could be satisfied with that miserable compensation?\n\nLet us now take a closer look at that *Socratic* tendency with which Euripides fought and defeated Aeschylean tragedy.\n\nWe must now ask: even if carried out in its most ideal form, what goal could Euripides’ intention of basing drama solely on the non-Dionysian have had? What form of drama was left if it was not to be born from the womb of music, in that mysterious Dionysian twilight? Only *dramatized epic*. But in this Apollonian field of art, a *tragic* effect is impossible to achieve. The content of the events presented makes no difference here. Indeed, I would claim that in his planned “Nausicaa,” Goethe could not have made the suicide of that idyllic creature—which was to fill the fifth act—moving in a tragic way. The power of the epic-Apollonian is so enormous that, before our eyes, it transforms the most terrifying things through that delight in semblance and release through semblance. The poet of dramatized epic can no more merge completely with his images than the epic reciter can. He is still a calm, unmoving act of contemplation, looking with wide eyes and seeing the images *before* him. At the deepest level, the actor in this dramatized epic always remains a reciter. The sacred quality of inward dreaming rests on all his actions, so that he is never wholly an actor.\n\nHow, then, does a play by Euripides compare with this ideal of Apollonian drama? As the younger reciter compares with the solemn reciter of ancient times—the younger one who describes his own nature this way in Plato’s “Ion”: “When I say something sad, my eyes fill with tears. But if what I say is frightening and terrible, the hair on my head stands on end with horror, and my heart pounds.” Here we no longer detect that epic absorption in semblance, that emotionless coolness of the true actor, who precisely in his highest activity is entirely semblance and delight in semblance. Euripides is the actor with the pounding heart and hair standing on end. As a Socratic thinker, he draws up the plan; as a passionate actor, he carries it out. He is not a pure artist either in planning or in carrying it out. So Euripidean drama is something both cold and fiery, equally capable of freezing and burning. It cannot achieve the Apollonian effect of epic. At the same time, it has freed itself as far as possible from Dionysian elements. Now, to have any effect at all, it needs new means of stimulation, which can no longer lie within the only two artistic drives, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These means are cool, paradoxical *thoughts* in place of Apollonian visions, and fiery *emotions* in place of Dionysian ecstasies. And these thoughts and emotions are imitated with extreme realism, not immersed in the pure air of art at all.\n\nWe have now recognized at least this much: Euripides did not succeed at all in basing drama solely on the Apollonian. Instead, his non-Dionysian tendency went astray into a naturalistic, unartistic one. We can therefore move closer to the nature of *aesthetic Socratism*. Its highest law runs roughly like this: “Everything must be rational to be beautiful.” It parallels the Socratic statement, “Only the person who knows is virtuous.” With this rule in hand, Euripides measured every detail and corrected it according to the principle: language, characters, dramatic structure, and choral music. What we so often tend to count as poetic shortcomings and a step backward in Euripides, compared with Sophocles’ tragedy, is mostly the product of that penetrating critical process, that daring rationality. Euripides’ *prologue* can serve as an example of how productive this rationalistic method was. Nothing could run more counter to our stage technique than the prologue in a drama by Euripides. A single person appears at the beginning of the play and tells us who they are, what precedes the action, what has happened so far, and even what will happen during the play. A modern playwright would call this a deliberate and unforgivable abandonment of the effect of suspense. We already know everything that will happen. Who will want to wait for it actually to happen? For this is certainly not the exciting relationship between a prophetic dream and a reality that occurs later. Euripides reasoned quite differently. The effect of tragedy never rested on epic suspense, on the stimulating uncertainty about what would happen now and afterward. Instead, it rested on those great rhetorical and lyrical scenes in which the main hero’s passion and argument swelled into a broad, powerful river. Everything prepared the way for intense emotion, not for action. Whatever did not prepare for that emotion was considered objectionable. But what makes it hardest for listeners to surrender with pleasure to such scenes is a missing link, a gap in the fabric of the preceding story. As long as listeners still have to work out what this or that person means, or what underlies this or that conflict of inclinations and intentions, they cannot yet become fully absorbed in the suffering and actions of the main characters, or breathlessly share their suffering and fear. The tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles used the most ingenious artistic means to put all the threads needed for understanding into the spectator’s hands in the first scenes, seemingly by chance. This feature demonstrates that noble artistry which, as it were, disguises the *necessary* formal elements and makes them appear accidental. Still, Euripides thought he noticed a peculiar restlessness in the spectator during those first scenes, as they worked out the arithmetic problem of the preceding story. As a result, the poetic beauty and intense emotion of the opening were lost on them. He therefore placed the prologue before the opening itself and put it in the mouth of someone who could be trusted. A god often had to guarantee the course of the tragedy to the audience, so to speak, and remove every doubt about the reality of the myth. Similarly, Descartes could prove the reality of the world we experience only by appealing to God’s truthfulness and inability to lie. Euripides needs this same divine truthfulness once more at the end of his drama, to assure the audience of his heroes’ future. This is the job of the notorious god lowered onto the stage by a machine. Between the epic preview and the look beyond the end lies the dramatic, lyrical present, the actual “drama.”\n\nSo, as a poet, Euripides is above all the echo of his conscious insights. This is precisely what gives him such a memorable position in the history of Greek art. Thinking of his work as a critic and creator, he must often have felt that he was to bring the opening of Anaxagoras’ book to life for drama. Its first words are: “In the beginning everything was together; then reason came and created order.” And if Anaxagoras, with his “Nous,” appeared among philosophers like the first sober person among nothing but drunks, Euripides too may have understood his relationship to the other tragic poets through a similar image. As long as the mind, the sole organizer and ruler of the universe, was still excluded from artistic creation, everything was still together in a chaotic primal mush. This is how Euripides had to judge; this is how he, as the first “sober” poet, had to condemn the “drunken” poets. Sophocles said of Aeschylus that he did the right thing, although unconsciously. This was certainly not said in Euripides’ sense. He would have accepted only that Aeschylus did the wrong thing *because* he created unconsciously. Even the divine Plato generally speaks only ironically of the poet’s creative power insofar as it is not conscious insight, and puts it on a level with the gift of the prophet and interpreter of dreams. The poet, he says, cannot compose until he has become unconscious and reason no longer lives in him. Like Plato, Euripides set out to show the world the opposite of the “unreasoning” poet. His basic aesthetic principle, “Everything must be conscious to be beautiful,” is, as I said, the parallel of the Socratic principle, “Everything must be conscious to be good.” Accordingly, we can regard Euripides as the poet of aesthetic Socratism. But Socrates was that *second spectator*, who did not understand older tragedy and therefore did not value it. Allied with him, Euripides dared to be the herald of a new kind of artistic creation. If this brought older tragedy to its end, then aesthetic Socratism is the murderous principle. But since the struggle was directed against the Dionysian element of older art, we recognize Socrates as Dionysus’ opponent: the new Orpheus who rises against Dionysus. Although destined to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian court, he nevertheless forces even the overwhelmingly powerful god to flee. Just as when he fled from Lycurgus, king of the Edonians, Dionysus saved himself in the depths of the sea: that is, in the mystical waters of a secret cult gradually spreading over the whole world.\n\n### Section 13\n\nPeople in antiquity already noticed that Socrates and Euripides were moving in closely related directions. The clearest expression of this sound instinct was the story circulating in Athens that Socrates regularly helped Euripides write his plays. Supporters of the “good old days” named the two in the same breath when listing the people who were misleading the public in their own time. They blamed their influence for the way the old, solid strength of body and mind, the strength of the men of Marathon, was increasingly sacrificed to a questionable enlightenment. Meanwhile, physical and mental powers continued to waste away. Aristophanes’ comedy generally speaks of these men in this tone, half indignant and half contemptuous. This horrifies modern readers. They are happy enough to give up Euripides, but cannot get over their amazement that Aristophanes presents Socrates as the first and foremost *Sophist*, the mirror and embodiment of every sophistic ambition. Their only comfort is to pillory Aristophanes himself as a dissolute, lying Alcibiades of poetry. I will not defend Aristophanes’ deep instincts against these attacks here. Instead, I will continue to demonstrate how closely Socrates and Euripides belonged together in the feelings of the ancient world. We should remember, in particular, that Socrates opposed tragic art and stayed away from performances of tragedy. He appeared in the audience only when a new play by Euripides was being performed. But the most famous close pairing of their names occurs in the pronouncement of the Delphic oracle. It called Socrates the wisest of human beings, but also ruled that Euripides deserved second prize in the contest of wisdom.\n\nSophocles was named third in this ranking. Compared with Aeschylus, he could boast that he did what was right because he *knew* what was right. Clearly, what sets these three men apart together as the three “knowing men” of their time is precisely the degree of clarity in this *knowledge*.\n\nSocrates gave the sharpest expression to this new and unprecedented high regard for knowledge and insight. He discovered that he was the only person who admitted to himself that he *knew nothing*. On his critical journey through Athens, he visited its greatest statesmen, speakers, poets, and artists. Everywhere he found people imagining that they knew. To his amazement, he realized that all these celebrities lacked sound and reliable insight even into their own occupation. They practiced it only by instinct. “Only by instinct”: this phrase brings us to the heart and center of the Socratic tendency. With it, Socratism condemns existing art and existing ethics alike. Wherever it turns its examining gaze, it sees a lack of insight and the power of delusion. From that lack it concludes that what exists is inwardly wrong and worthless. Starting from this one point, Socrates believed he had to correct existence. He, a single individual, enters a world with a look of disdain and superiority, as the forerunner of a wholly different kind of culture, art, and morality. Yet we would count ourselves supremely fortunate if we could reverently catch hold of even a corner of that world’s robe.\n\nThis is the enormous misgiving that takes hold of us every time we face Socrates. Again and again it drives us to understand the meaning and purpose of this most questionable figure of antiquity. Who is this person who can dare, all alone, to reject the Greek spirit? In Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus, in Phidias, in Pericles, in the Pythia and Dionysus, that spirit is assured of our astonished worship, as both its deepest abyss and its greatest height. What demonic power can dare to pour this magic drink into the dust? What demigod is this, whom the chorus of the spirits of humanity’s noblest people must address in these words: “Woe! Woe! You have destroyed it, the beautiful world, with your mighty fist; it falls, it breaks apart!”\n\nThe extraordinary phenomenon called the “daimonion of Socrates” gives us a key to his nature. In certain situations, when his immense intellect began to waver, he found firm support in a divine voice that spoke at such moments. Whenever this voice comes, it always *warns* him *off*. In this completely abnormal nature, instinctive wisdom appears only to *obstruct* conscious knowledge here and there. In all productive people, instinct is precisely the creative, affirmative force, while consciousness acts critically and gives warnings. But in Socrates instinct becomes the critic and consciousness the creator—a genuine monstrosity caused by a deficiency! What we see here is a monstrous lack of any mystical capacity. Socrates could therefore be called the distinctive *non-mystic*. His logical nature has grown as excessively, through a kind of additional conception, as instinctive wisdom has in the mystic. On the other hand, the logical drive appearing in Socrates was completely unable to turn against itself. In its unchecked flow it displays a natural force of the kind we encounter, with startled amazement, only in the very greatest instinctive powers. Anyone who has felt even a breath of the divine innocence and certainty of Socrates’ approach to life in Plato’s writings also feels something else. The enormous driving wheel of logical Socratism is moving, as it were, *behind* Socrates. We must look through him as through a shadow to see it. Yet he himself had some inkling of this relationship. This shows in the dignified seriousness with which he asserted his divine calling everywhere, even before his judges. It was basically as impossible to refute him on this point as it was to approve of his influence, which dissolved the instincts. In this conflict, which could not be resolved, only one form of condemnation was appropriate once he had been brought before the tribunal of the Greek state: exile. They could have sent him across the border as something wholly puzzling, impossible to classify or explain. No later generation would then have had the right to accuse the Athenians of a shameful act. But Socrates himself seems to have made sure that the sentence was death, not merely exile. He did so with complete clarity and without the natural horror of death. He went to his death with the same calm with which, in Plato’s account, he leaves the drinking party at first light, the last of the drinkers to depart, and begins a new day. Behind him, on the benches and the floor, his sleepy drinking companions remain to dream of Socrates, the true man of love. *The dying Socrates* became a new ideal for noble Greek youth, one never seen before. Above all, Plato, the typical young Greek, threw himself before this image with all the passionate devotion of his enthusiastic soul.\n\n### Section 14\n\nNow imagine Socrates turning his single great Cyclops’ eye toward tragedy. The lovely madness of artistic inspiration had never glowed in that eye. Imagine how it was unable to look with pleasure into the Dionysian depths. What could it actually have seen in the “sublime and highly praised” art of tragedy, as Plato calls it? Something thoroughly unreasonable, with causes that seemed to have no effects and effects that seemed to have no causes. Moreover, the whole thing was so colorful and varied that it must repel a levelheaded person, while providing dangerous tinder for excitable and sensitive souls. We know the only kind of poetry he understood: *the Aesopian fable*. Surely he understood it with the same smiling indulgence with which honest, good Gellert praises poetry in the fable of the bee and the hen:\n\n“You see in me what use it has:\nTo tell someone who has little sense\nThe truth by means of an image.”\n\nBut tragic art did not even seem to Socrates to “tell the truth.” Quite apart from that, it addressed people who had “little sense,” not philosophers. This gave him two reasons to keep away. Like Plato, he counted it among the flattering arts, which present only what is pleasant, not what is useful. He therefore demanded that his followers abstain and keep strictly apart from such unphilosophical attractions. He was so successful that the young writer of tragedies, Plato, first burned his poems so that he could become Socrates’ student. But where unconquerable talents fought against Socrates’ principles, those principles, together with the force of his enormous personality, were still strong enough to push poetry itself into new and previously unknown positions.\n\nPlato himself is an example. In condemning tragedy and art in general, he certainly went no less far than his teacher’s naive cynicism. Yet an irresistible artistic need forced him to create an art form inwardly related to the existing forms he had rejected. Above all, the new artwork must not be open to Plato’s main objection to the older art: that it imitated an illusory image and so belonged to a sphere even lower than the world of experience. We therefore see Plato trying to go beyond reality and present the idea underlying that pseudo-reality. But by this roundabout route Plato the thinker had reached exactly the place where he had always been at home as a poet, and from which Sophocles and all the older art solemnly protested against his objection. Tragedy had absorbed all the earlier kinds of art. In an unusual sense, the same can be said of the Platonic dialogue. Made by mixing all the existing styles and forms, it hovers between narrative, lyric, and drama, between prose and poetry. In doing so, it also broke the strict older rule requiring a single linguistic form. The *Cynic* writers went still further along this path. With the greatest mixture of styles, shifting back and forth between prose and metrical forms, they also produced a literary image of the “Socrates gone mad” whom they regularly portrayed in their lives. The Platonic dialogue was, so to speak, the boat in which the shipwrecked older poetry escaped with all its children. Crowded into a narrow space and fearfully obedient to their one helmsman, Socrates, they now sailed into a new world. That world could never get enough of the fantastic spectacle of this procession. In fact, Plato gave all later generations the model of a new art form: the *novel*. It can be described as the Aesopian fable raised to an infinitely higher power. In it, poetry lives under dialectical philosophy in a hierarchy like the one that placed this same philosophy under theology for many centuries: as a servant. This was the new position into which Plato pushed poetry under the pressure of the demonic Socrates.\n\nHere *philosophical thought* grows over art and forces it to cling tightly to the trunk of dialectic. The *Apollonian* tendency has enclosed itself in a cocoon of logical schematism. We noticed something similar in Euripides, as well as a translation of the *Dionysian* into naturalistic emotion. Socrates, the dialectical hero of Plato’s drama, reminds us of the related nature of Euripides’ hero. That hero must defend his actions with arguments and counterarguments, and so often risks losing our tragic sympathy. For who could fail to recognize the *optimistic* element in the nature of dialectic? It holds its festival of rejoicing in every inference and can breathe only in cool clarity and consciousness. Once this optimistic element has entered tragedy, it must gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions and necessarily drive tragedy to destroy itself—ending in its fatal leap into bourgeois drama. Just consider the consequences of these Socratic propositions: “Virtue is knowledge; one sins only out of ignorance; the virtuous person is the happy person.” These three basic forms of optimism contain the death of tragedy. Now the virtuous hero must be a dialectician. Now there must be a necessary, visible connection between virtue and knowledge, belief and morality. Now Aeschylus’ transcendental resolution of justice is degraded into the shallow, brazen principle of “poetic justice,” with its usual god from the machine.\n\nIn relation to this new Socratic, optimistic world of the stage, how does the *chorus* now appear—and with it the whole musical, Dionysian foundation of tragedy? As something incidental, a reminder of tragedy’s origin that could easily be done without. Yet we have seen that the chorus can be understood only as the *cause* of tragedy and of the tragic in general. The awkwardness about the chorus already appears in Sophocles. This is an important sign that tragedy’s Dionysian ground is already beginning to crumble in his work. He no longer dares to entrust the main effect to the chorus. Instead, he limits its scope so much that it now seems almost on the same level as the actors, as though it had been lifted out of the orchestra and onto the stage. This completely destroys its nature, even if Aristotle approves precisely this conception of the chorus. Sophocles recommended this shift in the chorus’ position through his practice, at any rate, and, according to tradition, even in a written work. It is the first step toward the chorus’ *destruction*. The stages of this destruction follow one another with frightening speed in Euripides, Agathon, and the newer comedy. Optimistic dialectic uses its chains of inference as a whip to drive *music* out of tragedy. In other words, it destroys tragedy’s nature. That nature can be understood only as the manifestation and translation into images of Dionysian states, as the visible symbolization of music, as the dream world of Dionysian intoxication.\n\nWe therefore have to assume that an anti-Dionysian tendency was at work even before Socrates, and merely found an expression of unprecedented power in him. If so, we must not shrink from asking what a phenomenon like Socrates points toward. After all, in the face of Plato’s dialogues we cannot understand him as a merely destructive, negative power. The immediate effect of the Socratic drive certainly tended toward the breakdown of Dionysian tragedy. Yet a profound experience in Socrates’ own life forces us to ask whether Socratism and art *necessarily* stand only at opposite poles, and whether the birth of an “artistic Socrates” would really be self-contradictory.\n\nFor this tyrannical logician did sometimes feel, in relation to art, a gap, an emptiness, a half reproach, a duty he might have neglected. As he tells his friends in prison, the same dream vision often came to him, always saying the same thing: “Socrates, practice music!” Until his last days, he reassures himself with the thought that his philosophy is the highest art of the Muses. He does not really believe that a deity would remind him to practice that “common, popular music.” Finally, in prison, to relieve his conscience completely, he agrees to practice even this music he thinks so little of. In this spirit he writes a hymn of introduction to Apollo and puts some Aesopian fables into verse. Something like his warning divine voice drove him to these exercises. It was his Apollonian insight that, like a barbarian king, he did not understand a noble image of a god and risked offending a deity—through his failure to understand. Those words from Socrates’ dream vision are the only sign of a misgiving about the limits of the logical nature. Perhaps, he must have asked himself, what I cannot understand is not necessarily unreasonable? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is excluded? Perhaps art is even a necessary counterpart and supplement to science?\n\n### Section 15\n\nFollowing these last questions and their intimations, we must now say how Socrates’ influence has spread over later generations, right up to this moment and indeed into the whole future. It is like a shadow that keeps growing in the evening sun. We must say how this influence repeatedly forces the creation of *art* anew—art in its widest and deepest, already metaphysical sense—and how, being endless itself, it guarantees that art too will be endless.\n\nBefore we could recognize this, before the innermost dependence of all art on the Greeks, the Greeks from Homer to Socrates, had been convincingly demonstrated, our experience of these Greeks had to resemble the Athenians’ experience of Socrates. Almost every age and level of culture has at some point tried, in deep frustration, to free itself from the Greeks. In their presence, everything people themselves had achieved, everything seemingly completely original and sincerely admired, suddenly seemed to lose its color and life. It shrank into a failed copy, even a caricature. So time and again heartfelt rage breaks out against that presumptuous little people who dared to call everything foreign “barbaric” for all time. Who are these people, we ask, who can show only a brief historical splendor, institutions with a ridiculously limited scope, and a questionable moral worth, and who are even marked by ugly vices? Yet they claim the dignity and special position among nations that genius holds among the masses. Unfortunately, people have not been lucky enough to find a cup of hemlock with which such a being could simply be disposed of. All the poison that envy, slander, and rage produced was not enough to destroy that self-sufficient magnificence. So people feel ashamed and afraid before the Greeks—unless someone prizes truth above everything and therefore dares to admit this truth too: the Greeks hold the reins of our culture and every culture. But almost always, chariot and horses are made of inferior material, unworthy of their drivers’ glory. The drivers then think it a joke to send such a team plunging into the abyss, which they themselves clear with Achilles’ leap.\n\nTo show that Socrates too deserves the dignity of such leadership, we need only recognize in him the model of a way of existing unknown before him: the model of the *theoretical person*. Our next task is to understand this person’s meaning and goal. Like the artist, the theoretical person takes endless satisfaction in what exists. This satisfaction protects both of them against the practical ethics of pessimism and its eyes of Lynceus, which shine only in the dark. Whenever truth is unveiled, the artist gazes in delight only at what still remains a covering even after the unveiling. The theoretical person, by contrast, enjoys and takes satisfaction in the discarded covering. The greatest pleasure this person seeks is the process of unveiling, always happily succeeding through one’s own efforts. Science would not exist if its concern were only with that *one* naked goddess and nothing else. For then its followers would feel like people trying to dig a hole straight through the earth. Each sees that even with the greatest effort, lasting a lifetime, he can dig through only a tiny part of its enormous depth. Before his eyes, the next person’s work fills that part back in. A third person therefore seems sensible in choosing, on his own initiative, a new spot for his drilling attempts. Now suppose someone convincingly proves that this direct route cannot reach the goal on the opposite side of the earth. Who would still want to go on working in those old depths, unless meanwhile he had learned to find satisfaction in discovering precious stones or laws of nature? That is why Lessing, the most honest theoretical person, dared to say that searching for truth mattered more to him than truth itself. This revealed the fundamental secret of science, to the astonishment and even annoyance of scientific people. Admittedly, beside this isolated insight, this excess of honesty if not high spirits, stands a profound *delusion* that first entered the world in the person of Socrates. It is the unshakable belief that thought, guided by causality, reaches into the deepest abysses of being, and that thought can not only know being but even *correct* it. This sublime metaphysical delusion accompanies science as an instinct. Again and again it leads science to its limits, where it must turn into *art*—*the real goal of this mechanism*.\n\nNow let us look at Socrates by the torchlight of this idea. He appears as the first person who, led by this scientific instinct, could not only live but—far more important—also die. That is why the image of the *dying Socrates*, the man whom knowledge and reasoning have freed from the fear of death, is the coat of arms above the entrance to science. It reminds everyone of science’s purpose: to make existence appear understandable and therefore justified. Of course, when reasoning is not enough, *myth* must ultimately serve this purpose too. I have just described myth as a necessary consequence, indeed as the aim, of science.\n\nThink of Socrates as the initiator into the mysteries of science. After him, one school of philosophy replaces another, like wave following wave. An unimagined universality of the desire for knowledge spreads through the broadest reaches of the educated world. Regarded as the proper task of everyone with higher abilities, science is carried out onto the open sea, from which it has never since been completely driven back. Only through this universality was a shared net of thought stretched over the whole globe, even opening views onto the laws of an entire solar system. Anyone who pictures all this, along with today’s astonishingly high pyramid of knowledge, cannot help seeing Socrates as the single turning point and vortex of so-called world history. Imagine that this whole incalculable amount of energy spent on that worldwide tendency had *not* served knowledge. Suppose it had been used for the practical—that is, selfish—goals of individuals and peoples instead. General wars of annihilation and continual migrations of peoples would probably have weakened the instinctive joy in living so much that suicide would have become customary. An individual might then feel his last remnant of duty when, like an inhabitant of the Fiji Islands, he strangled his parents as their son, or his friend as a friend. This would be a practical pessimism that could even produce a horrifying ethic of genocide out of pity. Such pessimism, moreover, exists and has existed everywhere in the world where art in some form, especially as religion and science, has not appeared as a remedy and defense against that pestilential breath.\n\nAgainst this practical pessimism, Socrates is the original model of the theoretical optimist. With the belief just described that the nature of things can be fully understood, this optimist gives knowledge and understanding the power of a universal medicine and sees error as evil itself. To penetrate those underlying reasons and separate true knowledge from semblance and error seemed to the Socratic person the noblest, indeed the only truly human calling. Similarly, from Socrates onward, the mechanism of concepts, judgments, and inferences was valued above all other abilities as nature’s highest activity and most admirable gift. Even the most sublime moral actions, impulses of compassion, self-sacrifice, and heroism, and that hard-won ocean calm of the soul that the Apollonian Greek called self-restraint, were derived by Socrates and his like-minded successors, down to the present day, from the dialectic of knowledge. Accordingly, they declared these things teachable. Anyone who has personally experienced the pleasure of Socratic knowledge, and feels how it tries in ever-widening circles to embrace the whole world of appearances, will thereafter feel no stronger spur toward existence than the desire to complete that conquest and weave the net so firmly that nothing can penetrate it. To someone in this state of mind, Plato’s Socrates appears as the teacher of a completely new form of “Greek cheerfulness” and happiness in existence. This seeks an outlet in action. It will generally find that outlet in drawing ideas out of noble young men and educating them, with the ultimate aim of producing genius.\n\nBut now science, spurred on by its powerful delusion, rushes unstoppably to its limits. There the optimism hidden in the nature of logic breaks down. For the circumference of the circle of science has infinitely many points. We still cannot even see how the circle could ever be completely measured. Yet a noble and gifted person inevitably reaches such boundary points on the circumference, even before the midpoint of life, and stares into what cannot be illuminated. Here, to his horror, he sees logic coil around itself at these limits and finally bite its own tail. Then a new form of knowledge breaks through: *tragic knowledge*. Simply to be bearable, it needs art as a protection and remedy.\n\nWith eyes strengthened and refreshed by the Greeks, let us look at the highest spheres of the world surrounding us. We see the hunger for insatiable, optimistic knowledge, exemplified in Socrates, turn into tragic resignation and a need for art. At its lower levels, however, that same hunger must express hostility to art and inwardly detest Dionysian, tragic art above all. The struggle of Socratism against Aeschylean tragedy, for example, has illustrated this.\n\nHere, with moved hearts, we knock at the gates of the present and the future. Will that “turning” lead to ever-new forms of genius, and specifically to a *Socrates who practices music*? Will the net of art spread over existence, even under the names of religion or science, be woven ever more firmly and finely? Or is it destined to be torn to shreds amid the restlessly barbaric activity and turmoil that now calls itself “the present”? Worried but not without comfort, we stand aside for a little while as observers allowed to witness those enormous struggles and transitions. Ah! The spell of these struggles is that anyone who watches them must also fight them!\n\n### Section 16\n\nThrough this detailed historical example, we have tried to make one point clear: tragedy dies when the spirit of music disappears, just as surely as it can be born only from that spirit. To make this claim seem less strange, and also to show where our insight came from, we must now face similar phenomena in the present with an open gaze. We must enter the very struggles that, as I just said, are being fought in the highest spheres of our present world between insatiable, optimistic knowledge and the tragic need for art. Here I will set aside all the other opposing drives that work against art, and especially tragedy, in every age. Even today they spread with such confidence of victory that, among the theatrical arts, for example, only farce and ballet flourish with any luxuriance, putting out blossoms whose scent perhaps does not please everyone. I want to speak only of the *most distinguished opposition* to the tragic view of the world. By this I mean science, which is optimistic in its deepest nature, with its ancestor Socrates at its head. Soon I will also name the powers that seem to me to guarantee *a rebirth of tragedy*—and what other happy hopes for the German spirit!\n\nBefore we plunge into these struggles, let us put on the armor of the insights we have gained so far. Others work hard to derive the arts from a single principle, treating it as the necessary source of life for every artwork. In contrast, I keep my eyes fixed on those two Greek gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus. I recognize in them the living, visible representatives of *two* worlds of art, different in their deepest nature and highest goals. Apollo stands before me as the glorifying spirit of the principle of individuation. Only through him can release in semblance truly be achieved. But under Dionysus’ mystical cry of joy, the spell of individuation is broken. The way lies open to the Mothers of being, to the innermost core of things. An enormous gulf thus opens between the visual art of form, as Apollonian art, and music, as Dionysian art. Only one of the great thinkers saw this opposition clearly enough to give music a character and origin distinct from all the other arts, even without the guidance of this Greek symbolism of the gods. Unlike all the other arts, he held, music is not a copy of appearance but a direct copy of the will itself. It therefore presents *the metaphysical counterpart to everything physical in the world*, the thing in itself as the counterpart to every appearance. (Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, p. 310). This is the most important insight in all aesthetics. Taken seriously, it is where aesthetics first begins. Richard Wagner has set his seal on it, confirming its eternal truth, when he states in “Beethoven” that music must be judged by completely different aesthetic principles from all the visual arts, and not at all by the category of beauty. An erroneous aesthetics, however, guided by a misdirected and degenerate art, has become accustomed to taking the concept of beauty valid in the world of visual form and demanding a similar effect from music as from works of visual art: namely, the arousal of *pleasure in beautiful forms*. Once I recognized that enormous opposition, I felt a strong urge to approach the nature of Greek tragedy, and with it the deepest revelation of the Greek genius. Only now did I believe I possessed the magic power to move beyond the phrases of our customary aesthetics and bring tragedy’s fundamental problem vividly before my mind. This gave me such a strangely distinctive view into the Greek world that I had to feel our so proudly self-important scholarship on classical Greece had so far mainly known only how to feast on shadow plays and externals.\n\nPerhaps we can touch on that fundamental problem with this question: what aesthetic effect arises when the Apollonian and Dionysian powers of art, separate in themselves, become active alongside each other? Or, more briefly: how does music relate to image and concept? Richard Wagner praises Schopenhauer for unsurpassable clarity and transparency of presentation on precisely this point. Schopenhauer discusses it most fully in the following passage, which I will reproduce here at its full length. Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, p. 309: “From all this it follows that we can regard the world of appearances, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing. That thing itself is therefore the only link between them that makes their analogy possible. We must know it to understand that analogy. Accordingly, when considered as an expression of the world, music is a language of the highest degree of universality. Its relation even to the universality of concepts is roughly like their relation to individual things. But its universality is by no means the empty universality of abstraction. It is of a completely different kind and is combined with clear definition throughout. In this it resembles geometrical figures and numbers. As the universal forms of all possible objects of experience, applicable to all of them in advance of experience, these are nevertheless not abstract, but directly perceptible and completely definite. All possible efforts, impulses, and expressions of the will, all those processes within human beings that reason throws into the broad negative concept of feeling, can be expressed through the infinitely many possible melodies. But they are always expressed in the universality of form alone, without material content; always only as they are in themselves, not as appearances—as though they were their innermost soul without a body. Music has this intimate relationship with the true nature of all things. This also explains why, when appropriate music accompanies any scene, action, event, or setting, it seems to unlock its most secret meaning for us and serves as its truest and clearest commentary. It likewise explains why someone who gives himself over entirely to the impression of a symphony feels as if every possible event in life and the world were passing before him. Yet on reflection he can point to no similarity between that play of sounds and the things that appeared in his mind. For, as I have said, music differs from all the other arts in this: it is not a copy of appearance, or more precisely of the will’s adequate objectivity, but a direct copy of the will itself. It therefore presents the metaphysical counterpart to everything physical in the world, the thing in itself as the counterpart to every appearance. Accordingly, we could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will. This explains why music immediately gives heightened significance to every painting, indeed to every scene of actual life and the world. Of course, it does so all the more, the more closely its melody corresponds to the inner spirit of the given appearance. This is the basis on which we can set a poem to music as a song, a visual presentation as pantomime, or both as opera. Such individual images of human life, set beneath the universal language of music, are never connected with it or matched to it by any complete necessity. Their relation to it is only that of an arbitrarily chosen example to a general concept. In the definite form of reality, they present what music states in the universality of form alone. For melodies are, in a sense, like general concepts, an abstraction from reality. Reality—that is, the world of individual things—provides what can be perceived, what is particular and individual, the single case, for both the universality of concepts and the universality of melodies. But these two universalities are in a certain respect opposites. Concepts contain only the forms first abstracted from perception, as though they were the outer shell peeled off things, and are therefore abstractions in the strictest sense. Music, on the other hand, gives the innermost core preceding all form, or the heart of things. This relationship could be expressed very well in the language of the Scholastics: concepts are universals after the thing, music gives universals before the thing, and reality gives universals in the thing. But, as I have said, a relationship between a composition and a visual presentation is possible at all because the two are merely very different expressions of the same inner nature of the world. When such a relationship really exists in an individual case—when the composer has known how to express in music’s universal language the movements of the will that form the core of an event—then the melody of the song, the music of the opera, is expressive. But the analogy the composer has found between the two must have arisen from a direct knowledge of the world’s nature, without his reason being aware of it. It must not be a consciously intentional imitation mediated by concepts. Otherwise the music does not express the inner nature, the will itself, but merely imitates its appearance inadequately, as all music that is strictly imitative does.”—\n\nFollowing Schopenhauer’s teaching, then, we understand music immediately as the language of the will. We feel our imagination stirred to give form to the invisible yet so vividly moving spirit world that speaks to us, and to embody it for ourselves in an analogous example. On the other hand, an image or concept gains heightened significance under the influence of music that truly corresponds to it. Dionysian art therefore generally has two effects on the Apollonian artistic capacity. Music prompts us to *see the Dionysian universal in symbolic images*. Music then makes the symbolic image stand out *with the highest significance*. From these facts, understandable in themselves and open to any deeper observation, I infer music’s ability to give birth to *myth*—that is, the most meaningful example—and specifically to *tragic* myth: the myth that speaks of Dionysian knowledge in symbolic images. In the case of the lyric poet, I have shown how music struggles within the poet to express its nature in Apollonian images. Now let us imagine that music at its highest intensity must also seek its fullest expression in images. We must then consider it possible that music can also find the symbolic expression of its own Dionysian wisdom. And where else should we look for this expression, if not in tragedy and in the concept of *the tragic* in general?\n\nThe tragic cannot honestly be derived from the nature of art as people usually understand it, solely under the categories of semblance and beauty. Only through the spirit of music do we understand joy in the destruction of the individual. For individual examples of such destruction merely make clear to us the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art. This art expresses the will in its omnipotence, as though behind the principle of individuation: eternal life beyond all appearance and despite all destruction. The metaphysical joy in the tragic translates instinctive, unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images. The hero, the highest appearance of the will, is negated to our delight because he is only an appearance, and his destruction does not touch the will’s eternal life. “We believe in eternal life,” tragedy cries, while music is the immediate idea of this life. The artist who works in visual forms has a completely different goal. Here Apollo overcomes the individual’s suffering through a radiant glorification of *the eternity of appearance*. Here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life. In a certain sense, a lie erases pain from nature’s features. In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism, that same nature speaks to us in its true, undisguised voice: “Be as I am! Beneath the unceasing change of appearances, I am the primal mother, eternally creative, eternally compelling existence, eternally satisfied by this change of appearances!”\n\n### Section 17\n\nDionysian art too wants to convince us of the eternal joy of existence. But we are to seek this joy not in appearances, but behind them. We are to recognize that everything that comes into being must be ready for a painful end. We are forced to look into the terrors of individual existence—and yet we are not to freeze in horror. Metaphysical comfort momentarily pulls us out of the machinery of changing forms. For brief moments we really are the primal being itself and feel its unrestrained hunger and joy in existence. The struggle, torment, and destruction of appearances now seem necessary to us, given the excess of countless forms of existence pushing and shoving their way into life, given the overflowing fertility of the world-will. The raging sting of these torments pierces us at the very moment when we have, as it were, become one with the immeasurable primal joy in existence, and when, in Dionysian rapture, we sense that this joy is indestructible and eternal. Despite fear and pity, we are happily alive—not as individuals, but as the *one* living being with whose joy in procreation we have merged.\n\nThe history of Greek tragedy’s origin now tells us with luminous certainty how the Greeks’ tragic artwork really was born from the spirit of music. Through this idea, we believe we have for the first time done justice to the chorus’ original and so astonishing meaning. At the same time, however, we must admit that the meaning of tragic myth set out earlier never became conceptually clear to Greek poets, let alone Greek philosophers. In a sense, their heroes speak more superficially than they act. Myth by no means finds its adequate objective expression in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and the visible images reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself can put into words and concepts. The same thing is observed in Shakespeare. His Hamlet, for example, speaks more superficially than he acts in a similar sense. The lesson of Hamlet mentioned earlier must therefore be drawn not from the words, but from a deepened view and overview of the whole. Of course, Greek tragedy reaches us only as spoken drama. I have even suggested that this mismatch between myth and word could easily tempt us to think it shallower and less meaningful than it is. We might therefore also assume it had a more superficial effect than ancient testimony says it must have had. How easily we forget that what the poet of words failed to achieve—the highest spiritualization and ideality of myth—he could achieve at every moment as a creative musician! We, admittedly, must reconstruct the overwhelming power of the musical effect almost by scholarly means if we are to receive anything of that incomparable comfort that must belong to true tragedy. Yet we would have felt even this overwhelming musical power as such only if we had been Greeks. Compared with the infinitely richer music we know and are familiar with, we believe we hear in the entire development of Greek music only the youthful song of musical genius, sung with a timid awareness of its strength. As the Egyptian priests say, the Greeks are eternal children. In tragic art too, they are only children who do not know what a sublime toy has come into being under their hands—and is being smashed to pieces.\n\nThe spirit of music struggles toward revelation in images and myth, with increasing intensity from the beginnings of lyric poetry to Attic tragedy. Then, just after achieving a rich flowering, this struggle suddenly breaks off and seems to disappear from the surface of Greek art. Meanwhile, the Dionysian view of the world born from this struggle lives on in the mysteries. Through the strangest transformations and degenerations, it never stops attracting more serious natures. Might it not one day rise again from its mystical depths as art?\n\nThe question that concerns us here is whether the opposing power against which tragedy broke has enough strength for all time to prevent the artistic reawakening of tragedy and the tragic view of the world. Ancient tragedy was pushed off its course by the dialectical drive toward knowledge and the optimism of science. If so, this fact would imply an eternal struggle between *the theoretical* and *the tragic view of the world*. Only after the spirit of science has been led to its limits, and the demonstration of those limits has destroyed its claim to universal validity, could we hope for a rebirth of tragedy. As the symbol of that form of culture, we would have to set up *Socrates practicing music*, in the sense discussed earlier. In this contrast, by the spirit of science I mean the belief that first came to light in the person of Socrates: that nature can be fully understood and knowledge can cure everything.\n\nAnyone who remembers the immediate consequences of this restlessly advancing spirit of science will at once recall how it destroyed *myth*. Through that destruction, poetry was driven from its natural, ideal ground and became homeless. If we were right to credit music with the power to give birth to myth again from within itself, we must also look for the spirit of science along the path where it opposes this myth-creating power of music. This happens in the development of the *newer Attic dithyramb*. Its music no longer expressed the inner nature, the will itself, but reproduced appearance inadequately through an imitation mediated by concepts. Truly musical natures turned away from this inwardly degenerate music with the same disgust they felt toward Socrates’ art-killing tendency. Aristophanes’ sure instinct certainly grasped the truth when he included Socrates himself, Euripides’ tragedy, and the music of the newer dithyrambic poets in the same feeling of hatred, sensing the signs of a degenerate culture in all three phenomena. Through this newer dithyramb, music was sacrilegiously made into an imitative portrait of appearance—for example, of a battle or a storm at sea—and so was completely robbed of its myth-creating power. Suppose music tries to excite our pleasure only by forcing us to look for external similarities between an event in life or nature and certain rhythmic figures and characteristic musical sounds. Suppose our understanding is to find satisfaction in recognizing these similarities. Then we are dragged down into a state of mind in which receiving myth is impossible. For myth asks to be felt and seen as a single example of a universality and truth gazing into infinity. Truly Dionysian music confronts us as just such a universal mirror of the world-will. The visible event reflected in this mirror immediately expands, for our feeling, into the image of an eternal truth. Conversely, the tone painting of the newer dithyramb immediately strips such a visible event of every mythical quality. Now music has become a poor copy of appearance, and is therefore infinitely poorer than appearance itself. Through this poverty, it even degrades appearance itself in our feelings. Thus, for example, a battle imitated musically in this way is exhausted in marching noise, signal calls, and the like, and our imagination is held fast to precisely these superficial details. Tone painting is therefore the opposite in every respect of the myth-creating power of true music. Through it, appearance becomes still poorer than it is, whereas through Dionysian music the individual appearance is enriched and expanded into an image of the world. It was a powerful victory for the un-Dionysian spirit when, in the development of the newer dithyramb, it alienated music from itself and degraded it into a slave of appearance. Euripides, who in a higher sense must be called thoroughly unmusical by nature, is for this very reason a passionate supporter of the newer dithyrambic music. With a robber’s lavishness, he uses all its showpieces and mannerisms.\n\nWe see the power of this un-Dionysian, anti-mythical spirit operating in another direction when we look at the growing predominance of *character portrayal* and psychological refinement in tragedy from Sophocles onward. A character is no longer to be allowed to expand into an eternal type. On the contrary, artfully added minor traits and shadings, and the most delicate definition of every line, are to make the character seem so individual that the spectator no longer feels the myth at all. Instead, the spectator feels the artist’s powerful truth to nature and ability to imitate. Here too we see the victory of appearance over the universal, and pleasure in the individual specimen, as though it were an anatomical preparation. We are already breathing the air of a theoretical world that values scientific knowledge more highly than the artistic reflection of a universal rule. The movement toward the characteristic advances quickly. Sophocles still paints whole characters and harnesses myth to unfold them with refinement. Euripides already paints only large individual character traits that find expression in violent passions. In the newer Attic comedy, only masks with *one* expression remain: frivolous old men, cheated pimps, cunning slaves, endlessly repeated. Where has the myth-making spirit of music gone now? What remains of music is either music of excitement or music of recollection: either a stimulant for dulled, worn-out nerves, or tone painting. For the former, the words set to it hardly matter anymore. Already in Euripides, things become quite sloppy as soon as his heroes or choruses begin to sing. How far might this have gone with his brazen successors?\n\nBut the new un-Dionysian spirit reveals itself most clearly in the *endings* of the newer dramas. At the end of the old tragedy, one could feel the metaphysical comfort without which pleasure in tragedy cannot be explained at all. Perhaps the reconciling sound from another world rings out most purely in Oedipus at Colonus. Now that the spirit of music has fled from tragedy, tragedy is, strictly speaking, dead. For where could that metaphysical comfort now be found? People therefore sought an earthly resolution of the tragic dissonance. After fate had tortured the hero sufficiently, he reaped his well-deserved reward in a splendid marriage or honors from the gods. The hero had become a gladiator who, after being thoroughly mauled and covered with wounds, was occasionally granted his freedom. The god from the machine has replaced metaphysical comfort. I do not mean that the advancing un-Dionysian spirit destroyed the tragic view of the world everywhere and completely. We know only that this view had to flee out of art into a kind of underworld, degenerating into a secret cult. But over the broadest surface of the Greek world raged the consuming breath of that spirit. It reveals itself in the form of “Greek cheerfulness” discussed earlier as a senile, unproductive joy in existence. This cheerfulness is the opposite of the magnificent “naivety” of the older Greeks. As we have described it, that naivety must be understood as the blossom of Apollonian culture growing from a dark abyss, as the victory the Greek will wins over suffering and the wisdom of suffering by reflecting itself in beauty. The noblest form of that other, Alexandrian “Greek cheerfulness” is the cheerfulness *of the theoretical person*. It shows the very characteristics I have just derived from the un-Dionysian spirit. It fights Dionysian wisdom and art. It tries to dissolve myth. Instead of metaphysical comfort, it offers an earthly harmony, indeed a god from the machine of its own: the god of machines and melting pots. In other words, it offers the powers of nature’s spirits, understood and used in the service of a higher selfishness. It believes in correcting the world through knowledge, in a life guided by science. And it really can confine an individual within a very narrow circle of solvable tasks, inside which he cheerfully says to life: “I want you: you are worth knowing.”\n\n### Section 18\n\nIt is an eternal phenomenon. The greedy will always finds some way to keep its creatures in life and force them to go on living, by spreading an illusion over things. One person is held fast by the Socratic delight in knowing, and by the delusion that knowing can heal the eternal wound of existence. Another is caught in the seductive veil of beauty that art waves before their eyes. Yet another is caught by metaphysical comfort, the belief that beneath the whirl of appearances eternal life flows on, indestructible. I will say nothing of the commoner illusions, which are almost stronger still, and which the will keeps ready at every moment. Those three levels of illusion exist only for the more nobly endowed natures. These natures feel the weight and burden of existence with a deeper displeasure, and they can only be tricked out of that displeasure by specially chosen stimulants. Everything we call culture is made of these stimulants. Depending on the proportions of the mixture, we get a culture that is mainly *Socratic*, or *artistic*, or *tragic*. Or, if you will allow examples from history: there is either an Alexandrian culture, or a Hellenic one, or a Buddhist one.\n\nOur whole modern world is caught in the net of Alexandrian culture. Its ideal is the *theoretical person*, equipped with the highest powers of knowing and working in the service of science. The original model and ancestor of that person is Socrates. All our means of education had this ideal in view from the start. Every other kind of existence has to struggle up painfully on the side, as an existence that is allowed, not one that is intended. In an almost frightening way, for a long time the educated person was found only in the form of the scholar. Even our poetic arts had to develop out of scholarly imitations. And in the main effect of rhyme we can still see how our poetic form arose from artificial experiments with a language that was not native, a truly scholarly one. How incomprehensible a true Greek would find *Faust*, the modern cultured person, who is perfectly understandable to us. This is the Faust who storms through all the academic faculties without being satisfied, and who, out of a drive for knowledge, gives himself over to magic and the devil. We only need to set him beside Socrates for comparison to see that modern people are beginning to sense the limits of that Socratic delight in knowing. Out of the wide, barren sea of knowledge, they long for a shore. Once, speaking to Eckermann about Napoleon, Goethe remarked: “Yes, my good friend, there is also a productivity of deeds.” In his charming, naive way he was reminding us that the person who is not theoretical strikes modern people as something hard to believe and astonishing. It takes the wisdom of a Goethe all over again to find such a strange form of existence understandable, even forgivable.\n\nAnd now we must not hide from ourselves what lies concealed in the womb of this Socratic culture. It is an optimism that imagines itself to have no limits! We must not be alarmed now when the fruits of this optimism ripen. Such a culture has leavened society through and through, down to its lowest layers, and that society gradually begins to tremble with extravagant surges and desires. The belief in earthly happiness for everyone, and the belief that such a universal culture of knowledge is possible, gradually turn into the threatening demand for an Alexandrian earthly happiness. They turn into the summoning of a Euripidean god from the machine! We should take note: Alexandrian culture needs a class of slaves if it is to last. But in its optimistic view of existence it denies that such a class is necessary. So when its beautiful words of seduction and reassurance about the “dignity of the human being” and the “dignity of labor” have lost their effect, it moves gradually toward a horrifying destruction. There is nothing more terrible than a barbarian class of slaves that has learned to see its existence as a wrong and is getting ready to take revenge, not only for itself but for all generations. Who will dare, in the face of such threatening storms, to appeal with confident courage to our pale and tired religions? Down to their foundations they have degenerated into religions for scholars. Myth, the necessary precondition of every religion, is already paralyzed everywhere. Even in this realm that optimistic spirit has come to rule, the very spirit we have just named the seed of destruction in our society.\n\nThe disaster that slumbers in the womb of theoretical culture is slowly beginning to frighten modern people. Restless, they reach into the store of their experience for ways to avert the danger, without really believing in those ways themselves. In other words, they are beginning to sense their own consequences. Meanwhile, great natures with broad gifts have acted with unbelievable level-headedness. They have known how to use the very equipment of science to lay out the limits of knowing in general, and how conditioned it is. In doing so they have decisively denied the claim of science to universal validity and universal purposes. In this demonstration, for the first time, a delusion was recognized for what it is: the delusion that, with causality as its guide, claims it can fathom the innermost essence of things. The immense courage and wisdom of *Kant* and *Schopenhauer* won the hardest victory of all. It was the victory over the optimism hidden in the very nature of logic, which in turn is the foundation of our culture. That optimism believed that all the riddles of the world can be known and fathomed. It relied on the eternal truths, which it never questioned. It treated space, time and causality as completely unconditioned laws of the widest possible validity. Kant showed that these laws in fact only served to raise mere appearance, the work of Maya, to the one highest reality. They put appearance in the place of the innermost and true essence of things, and so they made real knowledge of that essence impossible. That is, to use a saying of Schopenhauer’s, they put the dreamer to sleep even more soundly (W. a. W. u. V. I, p. 498). With this insight a culture is ushered in that I dare to call tragic. Its most important mark is that wisdom takes the place of science as the highest goal. Wisdom is not deceived by the seductive distractions of the sciences. It turns with an unmoved gaze to the picture of the world as a whole, and tries to take the eternal suffering into itself, with a feeling of sympathetic love, as its own suffering. Imagine a rising generation with this fearless gaze, with this heroic reach toward the immense. Imagine the bold stride of these dragon-slayers, and the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all the weakling doctrines of that optimism, in order to “live resolutely” in the whole and the full. Must the tragic person of this culture not long for a new art, as they educate themselves toward seriousness and terror? Must they not long for the art of metaphysical comfort, for tragedy, as the Helen who belongs to them, and cry out with Faust:\n\nAnd should I not, by the most yearning force,\nDraw into life that one and only form?\n\nSocratic culture has now been shaken from two sides. It can hold the scepter of its infallibility only with trembling hands. First, it is afraid of its own consequences, which it is at last beginning to sense. Second, it is no longer convinced, with its earlier naive confidence, that its foundation is valid forever. So it is a sad spectacle to watch the dance of its thinking. Longingly, it keeps throwing itself at new figures to embrace them, and then suddenly, shuddering, lets them go again, as Mephistopheles lets go of the seductive lamias. This is indeed the mark of that “break” which everyone is in the habit of calling the primal suffering of modern culture. The theoretical person is frightened by the consequences, and, unsatisfied, no longer dares to trust themselves to the terrible icy stream of existence. Anxiously they run up and down the bank. They no longer want to have anything whole, whole even with all the natural cruelty of things. That is how far the optimistic way of looking at things has made them soft. On top of that, they feel that a culture built on the principle of science must perish once it begins to become *illogical*, that is, once it begins to flee back from its own consequences. Our art reveals this general distress. It is useless to lean on all the great productive periods and natures by imitating them. It is useless to gather the whole “world literature” around modern people for their comfort, and to set them down among the art styles and artists of every age, so that they can give them names, as Adam did with the animals. They still remain the eternally hungry, the “critic” without desire or strength, the Alexandrian person. At bottom this person is a librarian and proofreader, and goes miserably blind from book dust and misprints.\n\n### Section 19\n\nWe cannot describe the innermost content of this Socratic culture more sharply than by calling it *the culture of opera*. In this field the culture has spoken out, with a naivety all its own, about what it wants and what it knows. That is astonishing when we hold the origin of opera and the facts of its development up against the eternal truths of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. First I recall how the representational style and recitative began. Is it believable that this wholly externalized music of opera, which is incapable of devotion, could be welcomed and cherished with such enthusiastic favor, as if it were the rebirth of all true music? And that by an age out of which the unspeakably sublime and holy music of Palestrina had just risen? On the other hand, who would want to blame only the amusement-hungry luxury of those Florentine circles, and the vanity of their dramatic singers, for the delight in opera that spread so impetuously? In the same period, indeed among the same people, a passion for a half-musical way of speaking awoke. This happened right beside the vaulted structure of Palestrina’s harmonies, on which the whole Christian Middle Ages had been building. I can explain it to myself only by a *tendency from outside art* that was at work in the very nature of recitative.\n\nThe listener wants to hear the words clearly beneath the singing. The singer meets this wish by speaking more than singing, and by sharpening the emotional expression of the words in this half-song. By sharpening the emotional force in this way, the singer makes the words easier to understand and overcomes the half of the music that is left over. The real danger that now threatens the singer is giving the music the upper hand at the wrong moment. That would immediately destroy both the emotional force of the speech and the clarity of the words. Yet at the same time the singer always feels the urge to let out the music and to show off the voice like a virtuoso. Here the “poet” comes to the singer’s aid. The poet knows how to offer plenty of occasions for lyrical outcries, for repeating words and maxims, and so on. At these places the singer can now rest in the purely musical element, with no regard for the words. In the representational style, speech that is forceful with feeling but only half sung alternates with outcries that are fully sung. This quickly shifting effort works now on the listener’s concepts and ideas, now on the listener’s musical ground. It is so completely unnatural, and so deeply opposed to the artistic drives of the Dionysian and the Apollonian alike, that we have to conclude recitative has an origin outside all artistic instincts. By this description, recitative is to be defined as a mixing of epic and lyric delivery. It is by no means an inwardly lasting mixture, which could not be achieved with things so utterly unlike. It is the most external, mosaic-like gluing together, and nothing like it has any model in nature or experience. *But this was not the opinion of the inventors of recitative:* they themselves believed, and their age with them, that the representational style had solved the secret of ancient music. Only that secret, they thought, could explain the immense effect of an Orpheus, an Amphion, and even of Greek tragedy. The new style was regarded as the reawakening of the most effective music, the music of ancient Greece. Indeed, the general and thoroughly popular view saw the Homeric world *as the primal world*. So people could give themselves over to the dream that they had now climbed back down into the paradise-like beginnings of humanity. In that time music, too, must necessarily have had the unsurpassed purity, power and innocence that the poets tell of so touchingly in their shepherd plays. Here we see into the innermost coming-to-be of this truly modern art form, opera. A powerful need forces an art into being here, but it is a need of a nonaesthetic kind: the longing for the idyll, the belief in a primeval existence of the artistic and good human being. Recitative was regarded as the rediscovered language of that primal human being. Opera was regarded as the rediscovered land of that idyllically or heroically good creature, who at the same time follows a natural artistic drive in all its actions. Whatever it has to say, it sings at least a little, so as to sing at once in full voice at the slightest stirring of feeling. It does not matter to us now that the humanists of the time used this newly created picture of the paradisal artist to fight the old church idea of the human being as inherently corrupt and lost. So opera is to be understood as the opposing dogma of the good human being. But with that dogma a comfort had also been found against the pessimism toward which the serious-minded people of that time, in the dreadful insecurity of all conditions, were most strongly pushed. It is enough that we have recognized how the real magic of this new art form, and so its origin, lies in the satisfaction of a wholly nonaesthetic need. That need was the optimistic glorification of the human being as such, and the view of the primal human being as naturally good and artistic. This principle of opera has gradually turned into a threatening and horrifying *demand*, which we, in the face of the socialist movements of the present day, can no longer ignore. The “good primal human being” wants their rights. What paradisal prospects!\n\nBeside this I place another confirmation, just as clear, of my view that opera is built on the same principles as our Alexandrian culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical person, the critical layperson, not of the artist. It is one of the strangest facts in the history of all the arts. It was the demand of truly unmusical listeners that above all one must understand the words. So a rebirth of music was to be expected, they said, only if someone discovered some manner of singing in which the text ruled over the counterpoint like a master over a servant. For the words, they said, were as much nobler than the accompanying system of harmony as the soul is nobler than the body. In the beginnings of opera, the combination of music, picture and word was handled with the amateurish, unmusical crudeness of these views. In the spirit of this aesthetic, the first experiments also came about in the distinguished lay circles of Florence, through poets and singers whom those circles patronized. The person who is powerless in art produces a kind of art for themselves, precisely because they are the unartistic human being as such. Because they have no sense of the Dionysian depth of music, they turn their enjoyment of music into an intellectual rhetoric of words and tones for passion in the representational style, and into the sensual pleasure of vocal artistry. Because they cannot see a vision, they force the stage machinist and the set designer into their service. Because they do not know how to grasp the true nature of the artist, they conjure up before them, to their own taste, the “artistic primal human being,” that is, the human being who sings and speaks verses in passion. They dream themselves into a time when passion was enough to produce songs and poems, as if every emotion had been able to create something artistic. The precondition of opera is a false belief about the artistic process. It is that idyllic belief that really every feeling human being is an artist. In the sense of this belief, opera is the expression of amateurism in art, which dictates its laws with the cheerful optimism of the theoretical person.\n\nIf we wished to unite the two ideas just described, both at work in the origin of opera, under one concept, we would have nothing left but to speak of an *idyllic tendency of opera*. For this we would need to use only Schiller’s way of putting it and his explanation. Either, he says, nature and the ideal are an object of grief, when nature is presented as lost and the ideal as unattained. Or both are an object of joy, when they are imagined as real. The first gives the elegy in the narrower sense, the other the idyll in the widest sense. Now we must point out at once what the two ideas in the origin of opera have in common: in them the ideal is not felt as unattained, nor nature as lost. According to this feeling, there was a primeval age of humanity in which human beings lay at the heart of nature. In this naturalness they had also reached the ideal of humanity, in a paradisal goodness and artistry. We were all supposed to descend from this perfect primal human being. Indeed, we would still be that being’s faithful likeness. We would only have to throw something off ourselves in order to recognize ourselves again as this primal human being. We would do it by freely shedding superfluous scholarship and overly rich culture. The educated person of the Renaissance let their operatic imitation of Greek tragedy lead them back to such a harmony of nature and ideal, to an idyllic reality. They used this tragedy as Dante used Virgil, to be led as far as the gates of paradise. From there they went on further by themselves. They passed from an imitation of the highest Greek art form to a “restoration of all things,” to a re-creation of the original art world of human beings. What confident good-naturedness these daring efforts show, right in the womb of theoretical culture!—a good-naturedness that can be explained only by the comforting belief that “the human being as such” is the eternally virtuous opera hero, the eternally fluting or singing shepherd. Such a person must in the end always find themselves again as that, if they should ever really have lost themselves for a time. It is only the fruit of that optimism, which rises here out of the depths of the Socratic view of the world like a sweetish, seductive column of fragrance.\n\nWritten on the face of opera, then, is by no means that elegiac pain of an eternal loss. It is rather the cheerfulness of eternal rediscovery, the comfortable pleasure in an idyllic reality, which at least one can picture as real at every moment. One may sense now and then that this supposed reality is nothing but fantastic, silly trifling. Anyone who could measure it against the terrible seriousness of true nature, and compare it with the actual primal scenes of humanity’s beginnings, would have to call out to it in disgust: Away with the phantom! Even so, one would be fooling oneself to think that such a trifling thing as opera could be chased away simply by a forceful shout, as one chases off a ghost. Whoever wants to destroy opera must take up the fight against that Alexandrian cheerfulness. It speaks out so naively in opera about its favorite idea, and opera is its true art form. But what can art itself expect from the working of an art form whose origins do not lie in the aesthetic realm at all? This art form has instead stolen across into the artistic territory from a half-moral sphere, and only here and there has it managed to disguise its hybrid origin. On what juices does this parasitic thing, opera, feed, if not on those of true art? Must we not suspect that, under its idyllic seductions and its Alexandrian flattering arts, the highest task of art, the one truly to be called serious, will degenerate into an empty, distracting tendency toward amusement? That task is to free the eye from the look into the horror of night, and to rescue the subject from the cramp of the stirrings of the will by the healing balm of semblance. What becomes of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, with such a mixing of styles as I demonstrated from the nature of the representational style? Where music is regarded as the servant and the text as the master, where music is compared to the body and the text to the soul? Where the highest goal will at best be aimed at a descriptive tone-painting, much as formerly in the New Attic dithyramb? Where music is completely estranged from its true dignity of being the Dionysian mirror of the world, so that nothing is left for it but to imitate the formal nature of appearance, as a slave of appearance, and to stir an external delight in the play of lines and proportions. Looked at strictly, this fateful influence of opera on music simply coincides with the whole development of modern music. The optimism lurking in the origin of opera and in the nature of the culture it represents has succeeded, with alarming speed, in stripping music of its Dionysian destiny in the world. It has stamped on music a character of playing with forms and giving pleasure. Only the metamorphosis of the Aeschylean human being into the Alexandrian person of cheerfulness may perhaps be compared with this change.\n\nBut suppose we were right, in the example just indicated, to connect the disappearance of the Dionysian spirit with a highly striking but so far unexplained transformation and degeneration of the Greek human being. Then what hopes must spring to life in us, if the surest omens guarantee us *the reverse process, the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit* in our present world! It is not possible that the divine strength of Heracles will go slack forever in the luxurious servitude to Omphale. Out of the Dionysian ground of the German spirit a power has risen that has nothing in common with the basic conditions of Socratic culture. It can be neither explained nor excused by them. Rather, that culture feels it to be the terribly inexplicable, the overpoweringly hostile. This power is *German music*, as we must understand it above all in its mighty course like the sun’s, from Bach to Beethoven and from Beethoven to Wagner. What can the knowledge-hungry Socratism of our day do, at best, with this demon rising from inexhaustible depths? No formula can be found, either from the jagged points and arabesques of operatic melody or with the help of the arithmetical counting board of the fugue and of contrapuntal dialectic, in whose thrice-mighty light one could make that demon submit and force it to speak. What a spectacle, when our aestheticians now, with the catching-net of a “beauty” of their own, strike and grab at the genius of music romping before them with incomprehensible life, in movements that want to be judged by eternal beauty no more than by the sublime. One need only look at these patrons of music once, in the flesh and up close, when they cry so tirelessly Beauty! Beauty! See whether they look like nature’s favorite children, formed and spoiled in the lap of the beautiful, or whether they are not rather looking for a lying, concealing form for their own coarseness, and an aesthetic pretext for their own sober lack of feeling. I am thinking, for example, of Otto Jahn. But before German music the liar and hypocrite had better watch out. For it is precisely German music that, in the midst of all our culture, is the only pure, clear and purifying spirit of fire. From it and toward it, as in the teaching of the great Heraclitus of Ephesus, all things move in a double orbit. Everything we now call culture, education, civilization will one day have to appear before the unerring judge, Dionysus.\n\nLet us remember next how the spirit of *German philosophy*, flowing from the same sources, was able, through Kant and Schopenhauer, to destroy the contented delight in existence of scientific Socratism by showing its limits. Let us remember how this showing introduced an infinitely deeper and more serious view of ethical questions and of art, which we can call outright *Dionysian wisdom* put into concepts. Where does the mystery of this unity between German music and German philosophy point us, if not to a new form of existence, about whose content we can inform ourselves only by guessing from Hellenic analogies? For the Hellenic model keeps an immeasurable value for us, who stand at the dividing line between two different forms of existence. All those transitions and struggles are also stamped in it in a classic, instructive form. Only we, as it were, live through the great main epochs of the Hellenic character by analogy in *reverse* order. For example, we now seem to be walking backward from the Alexandrian age to the period of tragedy. At the same time we have the feeling that the birth of a tragic age can mean, for the German spirit, only a return to itself, a blessed finding of itself again. For a long time immense powers pressing in from outside had forced it, while it lived on in helpless barbarism of form, into servitude under their own form. Now at last, after its homecoming to the original spring of its being, it may dare to stride along boldly and freely before all peoples, without the leading strings of a Romance civilization. It needs only to know how to keep learning, unswervingly, from one people, the Greeks. Just to be able to learn from them at all is already a high honor and a distinguishing rarity. And when did we ever need these highest of teachers more than now, when we are living through *the rebirth of tragedy* and are in danger of knowing neither where it comes from nor being able to explain to ourselves where it wants to go?\n\n### Section 20\n\nAt some point an impartial judge should weigh when, and through which men, the German mind has struggled hardest to learn from the Greeks. We can confidently say that Goethe, Schiller, and Winckelmann deserve this particular praise for their noble struggle to develop themselves. But we would have to add that, since their time and the immediate effects of that struggle, efforts to follow the same path toward education and the Greeks have grown weaker and weaker, for reasons we cannot understand. To avoid losing all hope in the German mind, might we conclude that even these fighters failed at some crucial point to reach the heart of Greek life and establish a lasting bond of love between German and Greek culture? Perhaps an unconscious awareness of that failure made even more serious people doubtfully ask whether, after such predecessors, they could get any further along this path of education, or reach its goal at all. Since then, we have therefore seen judgments about the Greeks’ value for education deteriorate in a deeply troubling way. People express pitying superiority in all kinds of camps, both intellectual and anti-intellectual. Elsewhere, utterly ineffective fine words play around with “Greek harmony,” “Greek beauty,” and “Greek cheerfulness.” The very people whose honorable task could be to draw tirelessly from the Greek riverbed for the good of German education—the teachers in higher educational institutions—have become especially good at settling their accounts with the Greeks early and comfortably. They often go so far as to abandon the Greek ideal with skepticism and completely reverse the true purpose of all study of antiquity. Anyone in these circles who has not used up all his energies trying to become a reliable proofreader of ancient texts or a natural historian examining language under a microscope may also try to acquire a “historical” understanding of Greek antiquity alongside other ancient cultures. But he invariably uses the methods and superior airs of our present educated historians. The actual educational power of higher institutions has probably never been lower or weaker than it is today. The “journalist,” the day’s slave made of paper, has beaten the teacher in higher education in every aspect of education. All that remains for the teacher is a transformation we have already witnessed many times: he too must now adopt the journalist’s way of speaking and the “light elegance” of that world, fluttering about as a cheerful, educated butterfly. How painfully confused people educated in this way must be when they stare at a phenomenon such as the reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the rebirth of tragedy! It could only be understood by analogy with the deepest reaches of Greek genius, which has so far remained beyond understanding. In no other artistic period have so-called education and actual art faced each other with such estrangement and hostility as we see today. We understand why education this weak hates true art: it fears that art will destroy it. But surely an entire kind of culture—the Socratic-Alexandrian kind—must have run its course if it could taper off into such a delicate, feeble tip as our present education! Even heroes such as Schiller and Goethe were not allowed to break open the enchanted gate leading into the Greeks’ magic mountain. Their bravest struggles took them no further than the longing gaze Goethe’s Iphigenia sends from barbarian Tauris across the sea toward home. What hope would remain for the followers of such heroes if the gate did not suddenly open by itself on a completely different side, untouched by all the efforts of earlier culture—to the mystical sound of tragedy’s reawakened music?\n\nLet no one try to undermine our belief in a rebirth of Greek antiquity that still lies ahead. That belief alone gives us hope that the German mind can be renewed and purified through music’s fiery magic. What else could we name that might awaken any comforting expectation for the future amid the desolation and exhaustion of our present culture? We look in vain for a single root with strong branches, for a patch of fertile, healthy soil. Everywhere there is dust, sand, rigidity, and withering. Someone stranded in hopeless isolation could choose no better symbol than Dürer’s knight with Death and the Devil: the armored knight with his hard, bronze gaze who knows how to travel his terrifying road, undistracted by his dreadful companions, yet without hope, alone with his horse and dog. Our Schopenhauer was such a Dürer knight. He had no hope at all, but he wanted the truth. There is no one like him.—\n\nBut how suddenly that wilderness of our exhausted culture, described in such dark colors, changes when Dionysian magic touches it! A storm wind seizes everything that is worn out, rotten, broken, or stunted. It wraps it all in a whirling red cloud of dust and carries it into the air like a vulture. Our bewildered eyes search for what has vanished. What they see looks as though it has risen from a buried depth into golden light: so full and green, so richly alive, so immeasurably filled with longing. Tragedy sits amid this abundance of life, suffering, and pleasure, in a state of sublime delight. It listens to a distant, sorrowful song. The song tells of the Mothers of Being, whose names are Delusion, Will, and Woe.—Yes, my friends, join me in believing in Dionysian life and in the rebirth of tragedy. The time of the Socratic human being is over. Crown yourselves with ivy, take the thyrsus staff in your hands, and do not be surprised when tigers and panthers lie down affectionately at your knees. Just dare now to be tragic human beings: you are to be redeemed. You are to lead the Dionysian procession from India to Greece! Prepare yourselves for a hard fight, but believe in your god’s miracles!\n\n### Section 21\n\nReturning from these words of encouragement to the mood appropriate for contemplation, I repeat that only the Greeks can teach us what such a sudden, almost miraculous awakening of tragedy means for the deepest foundations of a people’s life. The people who celebrate the tragic mysteries are the people who fight the battles against Persia. And the people who have fought those wars in turn need tragedy as an essential restorative drink. Who would have expected this particular people to express basic political feeling, natural attachment to home, and the original masculine desire for battle with such steady strength, after the most powerful convulsions of the Dionysian spirit had stirred them to their depths for several generations? Whenever Dionysian excitement spreads widely, we can always feel that its release from the individual’s chains first makes itself known by weakening political instincts, even to the point of indifference or hostility. On the other hand, Apollo, who creates states, is also the genius of the principle of individuation. Neither the state nor attachment to home can live without an affirmation of individual personality.\n\nFor a people starting from orgiastic ecstasy, there is only one road: the road to Indian Buddhism. With its longing for nothingness, Buddhism needs those rare ecstatic states that lift people above space, time, and individuality if it is to be bearable at all. Those states in turn demand a philosophy that teaches people to overcome the indescribable distress of the intervening states through an idea. A people starting from the absolute authority of political impulses is just as inevitably drawn toward extreme worldliness. The Roman empire is its grandest but also its most terrifying expression.\n\nPlaced between India and Rome and pressed toward a tempting choice, the Greeks managed to invent a third form, in classical purity. They did not keep it for their own use for long, but for that very reason it became immortal. That the gods’ favorites die young is true in everything. It is equally certain that they then live forever with the gods. We should not demand that the very noblest things have the tough durability of leather. The crude staying power found, for example, in the Roman national impulse probably does not belong among the necessary qualities of perfection. But what remedy enabled the Greeks, in their great period, not to exhaust themselves either in ecstatic brooding or in a consuming pursuit of world power and worldly honor, despite the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political impulses? How did they instead achieve that wonderful blend found in a fine wine that both fires us up and puts us in a reflective mood? We must remember the immense power of *tragedy*, which excites, purifies, and releases the energies of a people’s whole life. We will only begin to understand its highest value when, as it did for the Greeks, it comes before us as the embodiment of every preventive healing power: the mediator between a people’s strongest qualities, which in themselves are also the most dangerous.\n\nTragedy absorbs the highest orgiastic ecstasy of music. It thus brings music itself to perfection, among the Greeks as among us. But it then places the tragic myth and the tragic hero beside it. Like a mighty Titan, the hero takes the whole Dionysian world onto his back and relieves us of its weight. At the same time, through that same tragic myth in the person of its hero, tragedy can free us from the greedy urge for this existence. Its warning hand reminds us of another kind of being and a higher pleasure, for which the struggling hero prepares himself with a sense of what is coming, through his destruction rather than his victories. Tragedy places a sublime symbolic image—the myth—between its music’s universal reach and the listener who is open to Dionysian experience. It makes the listener imagine that music is only a supreme means of representation for bringing the myth’s world of visible forms to life. Trusting this noble illusion, music can now move its limbs in a dithyrambic dance and give itself freely to an orgiastic feeling of liberty. As music in itself, without that illusion, it would not dare revel in this feeling. Myth protects us from music, while also giving music its highest freedom. In return, music gives tragic myth a metaphysical significance so powerful and convincing that words and images could never achieve it without this unique help. In particular, through music the tragic spectator gains a sure foretaste of a supreme pleasure, reached by a path through destruction and negation. He seems to hear the deepest abyss of things speaking clearly to him.\n\nPerhaps these last sentences have only given this difficult idea a provisional expression, immediately understandable to very few people. If so, this is precisely where I must keep encouraging my friends to try again. I ask them to prepare themselves to understand the general statement by looking at a single example from our shared experience. For this example I cannot turn to people who use the images of events onstage, or the characters’ words and emotions, as aids to approaching musical feeling. None of them speaks music as a native language. Even with those aids, they get no further than the entrance halls of musical perception and are never permitted to touch its innermost sanctuaries. Some, such as Gervinus, do not even reach the entrance halls by this route. I must instead turn only to those who are directly related to music, who find their mother’s womb in it, so to speak, and who connect with things almost exclusively through unconscious musical relationships. I ask these genuine musicians whether they can imagine someone capable of perceiving the third act of “Tristan and Isolde,” without any help from words or images, purely as an immense symphonic movement, without gasping his life away as every wing of his soul stretches out convulsively. Someone who, as happens here, has placed his ear against the heart chamber of the world’s will, who feels its raging desire for existence pour from there into every vein of the world as a thundering torrent or the finest spray of a stream—should he not suddenly break apart? Should he be able to hear, inside the miserable glass shell of a human individual, the echo of countless cries of pleasure and pain from the “vast realm of the world’s night,” without rushing irresistibly back to his original home during this shepherds’ round dance of metaphysics? Yet if such a work can be perceived as a whole without denying individual existence, if such a creation could be made without smashing its creator, where do we find the solution to this contradiction?\n\nHere the tragic myth and the tragic hero push between our highest musical excitement and that music. At bottom, they are only a symbolic image of the most universal facts, which music alone can speak of directly. But if we felt as purely Dionysian beings, myth as an image would remain beside us completely ineffective and unnoticed. It would not distract us for even a moment from listening to the echo of universals before things. Here, however, the *Apollonian* power bursts out, directed toward restoring the individual who has almost been shattered. It brings the healing balm of a delightful illusion. Suddenly we think we see only Tristan, lying still and dazed, asking himself, “The old tune—why does it wake me?” What previously struck us as a hollow sigh from the center of being now seems only to tell us how “desolate and empty is the sea.” Where we thought we were breathlessly fading away as all our feelings stretched out convulsively, with very little still tying us to this existence, we now hear and see only the mortally wounded hero who nevertheless does not die, with his desperate cry: “Longing! Longing! To long while dying, not to die of longing!” Earlier, after such an excess and abundance of consuming agonies, the horn’s jubilation cut into our hearts almost like the greatest agony of all. Now the jubilant Kurwenal stands between us and this “jubilation in itself,” turned toward the ship carrying Isolde. However powerfully compassion reaches into us, in a certain sense compassion nevertheless saves us from the world’s primal suffering. In the same way, the symbolic image of myth saves us from directly contemplating the supreme idea of the world, and thought and language save us from the unrestrained outpouring of the unconscious will. Through that splendid Apollonian illusion, even the world of sound seems to confront us as a world of visible forms. It seems that here too only Tristan and Isolde’s fate has been shaped and given a sculptural form in a material of the greatest delicacy and expressiveness.\n\nIn this way the Apollonian pulls us out of Dionysian universality and makes us delight in individuals. It attaches our compassion to them. Through them it satisfies our sense of beauty, which thirsts for great and sublime forms. It leads images of life past us and encourages us to grasp in thought the core of life they contain. With the immense force of the image, the concept, ethical teaching, and sympathetic feeling, the Apollonian lifts people out of their orgiastic self-destruction. It deceives them about the universal character of the Dionysian process, making them imagine that they see one particular picture of the world, such as Tristan and Isolde, and should simply *see* it better and more deeply *through music*. What is beyond Apollo’s healing magic, if it can even make us imagine that the Dionysian really serves the Apollonian by strengthening its effects, and that music is essentially an art of representation for Apollonian content?\n\nThrough the preestablished harmony between the completed drama and its music, drama reaches a supreme degree of visibility that a drama of words alone could not otherwise attain. Every living figure onstage becomes simpler before us in the independently moving melodic lines, taking on the clarity of a curved line. We hear these lines side by side in changes of harmony that respond with the greatest delicacy to the movement of the action. Through these changes, the relationships between things become immediately perceptible to our senses, never merely abstract. We also recognize through them that the true nature of a character and a melodic line reveals itself purely only in these relationships. Music thus makes us see more, and more inwardly, than usual, and spread the action onstage before us like a delicate web. To our spiritualized eye, which looks within, the stage world is both infinitely expanded and illuminated from inside. What comparable result could a poet working with words offer? Using a much less perfect mechanism, he struggles to achieve that inward expansion and illumination of the visible stage world indirectly, starting from words and concepts. Musical tragedy also adds words, but it can at the same time place beside them the ground from which they arise, their birthplace, and make clear to us from within how words come into being.\n\nBut we could say just as firmly that the process described here is only a splendid semblance: the Apollonian *illusion* mentioned earlier, whose effect is meant to relieve us of the Dionysian pressure and excess. At bottom, the relationship between music and drama is exactly the reverse. Music is the actual idea of the world; drama is only a reflection of that idea, one particular shadow image of it. The identity between a melodic line and a living figure, or between harmony and the relationships defining that figure’s character, is true in the opposite sense from what we might suppose while watching musical tragedy. We may move the figure as visibly as possible, bring it to life, and illuminate it from inside. It always remains only an appearance, with no bridge leading from it into true reality, into the heart of the world. Music, however, speaks from that heart. Countless appearances of that kind could pass before the same music without ever exhausting its nature. They would always be only its outward images. The popular and completely false opposition between soul and body explains nothing about the difficult relationship between music and drama and confuses everything. Yet the unphilosophical crudeness of that opposition seems, for who knows what reasons, to have become a favorite article of faith among our aesthetic thinkers. Meanwhile, they have learned nothing about the opposition between appearance and the thing in itself, or, for equally unknown reasons, have not wanted to learn anything about it.\n\nOur analysis might seem to have shown that the Apollonian in tragedy wins a complete victory, through its illusion, over music’s original Dionysian element, and makes music serve its own purpose: the greatest possible clarification of the drama. If so, a very important qualification must be added. At the most essential point of all, that Apollonian illusion is broken through and destroyed. With music’s help, the drama unfolds before us with every movement and figure illuminated clearly from within, as though we were watching fabric take shape through a loom’s rising and falling movements. As a whole, it achieves an effect *beyond every Apollonian artistic effect*. In tragedy’s total effect, the Dionysian regains the upper hand. Tragedy closes with a sound that could never come from the realm of Apollonian art. The Apollonian illusion thus reveals itself for what it is: a veil maintained throughout the tragedy over its actual Dionysian effect. That effect is so powerful that, at the end, it drives the Apollonian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and denies both itself and its Apollonian visibility. We could therefore truly symbolize the difficult relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy through a brotherly alliance of the two gods. Dionysus speaks Apollo’s language, but finally Apollo speaks Dionysus’s language. With this, the highest goal of tragedy and of art altogether is reached.\n\n### Section 22\n\nLet an attentive friend recall, from his own experience, the effect of a genuine musical tragedy in its pure, unmixed form. I think I have described both sides of that effect in a way that will now allow him to interpret his own experiences. He will remember that, as he watched the myth moving before him, he felt himself raised toward a kind of complete knowledge. His eyes seemed no longer limited to surfaces but able to penetrate within. With music’s help, he seemed to see the movements of the will, the struggle of motives, and the swelling stream of passions made visible to the senses, like a wealth of vividly moving lines and figures. Through them he could dive into the subtlest secrets of unconscious impulses. He becomes aware that the drives directing him toward visibility and transfiguration have been intensified to their highest degree. Yet he feels just as clearly that this long series of Apollonian artistic effects does *not* produce the happy lingering in contemplation free from willing that a sculptor or epic poet—the truly Apollonian artists—produces in him through art. In other words, it means the justification of the world of individual existence achieved in that contemplation, which is the summit and essence of Apollonian art. He looks at the transfigured world onstage and nevertheless denies it. He sees the tragic hero before him in epic clarity and beauty, yet takes pleasure in his destruction. He understands the action onstage to its depths, yet gladly takes refuge in what cannot be understood. He feels that the hero’s actions are justified, yet is even more uplifted when those actions destroy the person responsible for them. He shudders at the sufferings that will strike the hero, yet senses in them a higher, far more powerful pleasure. He sees more, and more deeply, than ever, yet wishes he were blind. Where should we trace this remarkable division within him, this breaking of the Apollonian summit, if not to *Dionysian* magic? While apparently exciting Apollonian impulses to their highest pitch, that magic can still force this overflowing Apollonian power to serve it. *Tragic myth* can only be understood as Dionysian wisdom put into images through Apollonian artistic means. It leads the world of appearances to the boundaries where it denies itself and tries to take refuge again in the womb of the one true reality. There it seems to join Isolde in singing this metaphysical swan song:\n\nIn the sea of delight’s\nsurging swell,\nin the waves of fragrance’s\nringing sound,\nin the world breath’s\nall-embracing flow—\nto drown—to sink—\nunconscious—supreme pleasure!\n\nThrough the genuinely aesthetic listener’s experiences, we thus bring the tragic artist himself before our minds. Like a richly productive god of individual existence, he creates his figures, in a sense that hardly allows us to understand his work as an “imitation of nature.” But then his immense Dionysian drive swallows this whole world of appearances. Behind that world, and through its destruction, it lets us sense a supreme original artistic joy in the womb of the primal unity. Our aesthetic thinkers have nothing to report about this return to our original home, the brotherly alliance of the two artistic gods in tragedy, or the listener’s simultaneous Apollonian and Dionysian excitement. Instead, they tirelessly describe what is truly tragic as the hero’s struggle against fate, the victory of a moral order in the world, or a release of emotions brought about by tragedy. Their persistence makes me think that they may not be people open to aesthetic excitement at all, and that perhaps they count only as moral beings when they listen to tragedy. Since Aristotle, there has never been an explanation of the tragic effect from which we could infer artistic states or aesthetic activity in listeners. Sometimes the account says that serious events drive compassion and fear toward a relieving release. Sometimes we are supposed to feel uplifted and inspired by the victory of good and noble principles, or by the hero’s sacrifice in the spirit of a moral view of the world. I certainly believe that this, and only this, is tragedy’s effect on many people. But it follows just as clearly that all these people, along with the aesthetic thinkers interpreting for them, have experienced nothing of tragedy as a supreme *art*. That release of troubled feelings, Aristotle’s catharsis, which philologists cannot quite decide whether to classify as a medical or a moral phenomenon, recalls a remarkable insight of Goethe’s. “Without a lively interest in suffering,” he says, “I too have never managed to work on any tragic situation, so I have preferred to avoid such situations rather than seek them out. Might one of the ancients’ advantages also have been that even the greatest emotional intensity was only aesthetic play for them, whereas for us the truth of nature must contribute to the creation of such a work?” After our splendid experiences, we can now answer this deeply thoughtful final question with yes. Musical tragedy in particular has astonished us by showing how even the greatest emotional intensity can truly be only aesthetic play. We may therefore believe that only now can the original phenomenon of the tragic be described with some success. Anyone who can still speak only of those substitute effects from outside aesthetics, and feels unable to rise above the process of suffering and moral feeling, may well despair of his aesthetic nature. We can recommend as a harmless alternative that he interpret Shakespeare in Gervinus’s manner and diligently hunt down “poetic justice.”\n\nWith the rebirth of tragedy, the *aesthetic listener* has also been reborn. Until now, a strange substitute usually occupied his seat in the theater: the “critic,” with pretensions that were half moral and half scholarly. In his previous sphere, everything was artificial, coated with only a semblance of life. The performing artist really no longer knew what to do with a listener who behaved so critically. Together with the playwright or opera composer who inspired him, he anxiously searched for the last traces of life in this demanding, empty being, incapable of enjoyment. Yet the audience had consisted of just such “critics.” Students, schoolboys, and even the most harmless female creature had already been prepared, without knowing it, by education and newspapers to perceive a work of art in the same way. Faced with such an audience, artists of a nobler nature counted on arousing moral and religious forces. An appeal to the “moral order of the world” served as a substitute where a powerful artistic spell should really have enchanted the genuine listener. Or the playwright presented a grander, or at least exciting, political or social tendency of the present so clearly that the listener could forget his critical exhaustion. He could then give himself to emotions like those felt in patriotic or warlike moments, before Parliament’s speakers’ platform, or when crime and vice are condemned. This estrangement from art’s actual aims sometimes had to lead to an outright cult of the message. But here, as has always happened in every artificially contrived art, those tendencies deteriorated with tremendous speed. For example, the aim of using theater as a means of morally educating the people, taken seriously in Schiller’s time, is already counted among the unbelievable relics of an education we have left behind. While the critic came to rule in theater and concert, the journalist in school, and the press in society, art deteriorated into entertainment of the lowest kind. Aesthetic criticism was used to bind together a vain, distracted, selfish, and also miserably unoriginal social world. Its meaning is revealed by Schopenhauer’s parable of the porcupines. Never has there been so much chatter about art, and so little respect for it. But can we still socialize with someone who can chat about Beethoven and Shakespeare? Let everyone answer according to his own feelings. His answer will in any case show what he means by “education”—provided he tries to answer at all and has not already been struck silent with surprise.\n\nOn the other hand, someone endowed by nature with nobler and more delicate gifts, even if he had gradually become a critical barbarian in the way described, might have a different story to tell. A successful performance of Lohengrin, for example, may have affected him in a way as unexpected as it was completely incomprehensible. Perhaps he simply lacked any guiding hand to take hold of him, warn him, and explain what had happened. So that feeling, incomprehensibly different and entirely beyond comparison, which shook him then, remained isolated. Like a mysterious star, it shone briefly and went out. For that moment, he had sensed what an aesthetic listener is.\n\n### Section 23\n\nAnyone who wants to examine closely whether he is related to the true aesthetic listener or belongs among Socratic, critical people need only ask himself honestly what he feels when he encounters a *miracle* represented onstage. Does it offend his historical sense, with its insistence on strict psychological cause and effect? Does he allow the miracle through a kindly concession, as something understandable to children but foreign to himself? Or does he experience something else? This lets him measure how far he is capable of understanding *myth* at all: the concentrated picture of the world which, as a shortened expression of appearance, cannot do without miracles. On close examination, however, almost everyone will probably feel so broken down by the critical and historical spirit of our education that he can only make the former existence of myth believable to himself through scholarship and the help of abstract ideas. But without myth, every culture loses its healthy, creative natural power. Only a horizon enclosed by myths brings an entire cultural movement together as a unity. Only myth saves all the powers of imagination and the Apollonian dream from aimless wandering. Myth’s images must be the unseen, ever-present guardian spirits under whose protection the young soul grows up, and through whose signs the grown man interprets his life and struggles. Even the state knows no unwritten laws more powerful than its mythical foundation, which guarantees its connection to religion and its growth out of mythical ideas.\n\nNow place beside this the abstract human being, guided by no myths, abstract education, abstract customs, abstract law, and the abstract state. Bring to mind the artistic imagination’s lawless wandering, restrained by no native myth. Imagine a culture with no fixed and sacred original home, condemned instead to exhaust every possibility and feed poorly on every culture. That is the present, the outcome of the Socratic impulse directed toward destroying myth. The person without myth now stands forever hungry among all the pasts, digging and burrowing for roots, even if he must dig for them in the most remote ancient worlds. What do our dissatisfied modern culture’s immense historical need, its gathering of countless other cultures around itself, and its consuming desire for knowledge point to, if not the loss of myth, of its mythical home and mythical mother’s womb? Ask whether this culture’s feverish and deeply disturbing activity is anything other than a hungry person’s greedy grabbing and hunting for food. Who would still want to give anything to such a culture? Nothing it swallows can satisfy it, and at its touch even the strongest, healthiest food usually turns into “history and criticism.”\n\nWe would also have to despair painfully of our German nature if it had already become as inseparably entangled with its culture, indeed as completely one with it, as we can observe to our horror in civilized France. For a long time that unity of people and culture was France’s great advantage and the cause of its enormous predominance. Looking at it now, however, we may be forced to count ourselves fortunate that our own deeply questionable culture has so far had nothing in common with the noble core of our national character. All our hopes instead reach longingly toward this perception: beneath this restless cultural life, jerking up and down, and these educational convulsions, a splendid, inwardly healthy, ancient power lies hidden. Only in momentous times does it stir with tremendous force, then it dreams again toward a future awakening. The German Reformation grew out of this depth. In its chorale the future melody of German music first sounded. Luther’s chorale sounded so deep, brave, and full of soul, so overwhelmingly good and tender, like the first beckoning Dionysian call emerging from a densely overgrown thicket as spring approaches. In an answering, competing echo came that festive procession of Dionysian enthusiasts, consecrated and exuberant. We owe German music to them—and we will owe them *the rebirth of German myth*!\n\nI know that I must now lead the friend who follows sympathetically to a high place of solitary reflection, where he will have few companions. I call out to encourage him: we must hold fast to our radiant guides, the Greeks. To purify our aesthetic understanding, we have so far borrowed from them those images of two gods, each ruling a separate artistic realm. Greek tragedy has given us a sense of how they touch and strengthen each other. We had to see the destruction of Greek tragedy as caused by a remarkable tearing apart of these two original artistic drives. This process went together with a degeneration and transformation of the Greek national character, calling us to think seriously about how necessarily and closely art and the people, myth and custom, tragedy and the state, are joined at their foundations. That destruction of tragedy was also the destruction of myth. Until then the Greeks were involuntarily compelled to connect everything they experienced immediately with their myths, and indeed to understand it only through that connection. Even the immediate present therefore had to appear to them at once in the light of eternity and, in a certain sense, timeless. The state and art both immersed themselves in this stream of the timeless to find relief from the burden and greed of the moment. A people, like an individual, is worth exactly as much as its ability to stamp its experiences with eternity. In this way it is, so to speak, removed from worldliness and shows its unconscious inner conviction that time is relative and that life’s true meaning is metaphysical. The opposite happens when a people starts understanding itself historically and smashing the mythical fortifications around it. This is usually linked to a decisive turn toward worldliness, a break with the unconscious metaphysics of its former existence, with all the ethical consequences involved. Greek art, especially Greek tragedy, held back the destruction of myth above all. Art had to be destroyed too before people could cut themselves off from their native soil and live without restraint in the wilderness of thought, custom, and action. Even now, that metaphysical drive tries to create a form of transfiguration for itself, though a weakened one, in the Socratic character of science that urges people to live. But on lower levels, the same drive led only to a feverish search that gradually lost itself in a pandemonium of myths and superstitions piled up from everywhere. The Greek sat in the middle of it with his heart still unsatisfied, until he learned either to mask that fever with Greek cheerfulness and Greek frivolity, as a little Greek, or to numb himself completely in some dully stupefying Oriental superstition.\n\nSince the reawakening of Alexandrian-Roman antiquity in the fifteenth century, after a long interlude that is hard to describe, we have come strikingly close to that condition. At the heights we find the same overflowing desire for knowledge, the same unsatisfied happiness in discovery, the same immense worldliness. Alongside it are homeless wandering, a greedy pushing toward foreign tables, a frivolous worship of the present or a dully numbed withdrawal: everything viewed from the standpoint of the age, of the “present day.” These matching symptoms suggest a matching lack at the heart of this culture: the destruction of myth. It seems almost impossible to transplant a foreign myth with lasting success without doing disastrous damage to the tree through that transplanting. Perhaps the tree may someday be strong and healthy enough to cast out that foreign element again through a terrible struggle. Usually, however, it must waste away in sickness and stunted growth, or consume itself in diseased overgrowth. We think so highly of the pure and vigorous core of German nature that we dare to expect precisely this casting out of forcibly implanted foreign elements from it, and consider it possible that the German mind will return to itself. Some may think that this mind must begin its struggle by casting out the Romance influence. They might see outward preparation and encouragement for this in the victorious bravery and bloody glory of the last war. But they must seek the inner necessity in an effort always to remain worthy of the sublime pioneers on this path: Luther as well as our great artists and poets. Yet they must never believe that they can fight such battles without their household gods, without their mythical home, without a “restoration” of everything German! If the German looks around timidly for a guide to take him back to the home long lost, whose roads and paths he hardly knows anymore, he need only listen to the delightfully beckoning call of the Dionysian bird swaying above him, wanting to show him the way there.\n\n### Section 24\n\nAmong musical tragedy’s distinctive artistic effects, we had to emphasize an Apollonian *illusion*. It is meant to save us from becoming directly one with Dionysian music, while allowing our musical excitement to discharge itself in an Apollonian realm, through a visible intermediate world placed between us and the music. We thought we had observed that this very discharge made that intermediate world of the action onstage—the drama altogether—visible and understandable from within to a degree unattainable in any other Apollonian art. Here that art seemed to have been given wings and raised up by the spirit of music. We therefore had to recognize the highest intensification of its powers, and see in that brotherly alliance of Apollo and Dionysus the summit of both Apollonian and Dionysian artistic aims.\n\nYet precisely when music illuminated the Apollonian image from within, the image failed to produce the distinctive effect of weaker degrees of Apollonian art. An epic or a stone brought to life can compel the watching eye toward calm delight in the world of individual existence. Here that result could not be achieved, despite greater vitality and clarity. We watched the drama and penetrated its moving inner world of motives with a searching gaze. Yet we felt as though only a symbolic image were passing before us, whose deepest meaning we thought we could almost guess. We wanted to pull it aside like a curtain to see the original image behind it. The picture’s greatest clarity did not satisfy us, because it seemed to reveal something and conceal something at the same time. Its revelation through images seemed to invite us to tear the veil and uncover the mysterious background. But that very complete, illuminated visibility held our eyes spellbound and stopped them from penetrating deeper.\n\nSomeone who has never experienced this need to look and at the same time long to go beyond looking will hardly be able to imagine how distinctly and clearly these two processes coexist, and are felt together, in contemplating tragic myth. Genuinely aesthetic spectators will confirm that this coexistence is the most remarkable of tragedy’s distinctive effects. Now transfer this experience of the aesthetic spectator to an analogous process in the tragic artist, and you will understand the origin of *tragic myth*. It shares with the Apollonian artistic realm the full pleasure of seeming and looking. At the same time it denies that pleasure and finds still higher satisfaction in destroying the visible world of seeming. Tragic myth’s immediate content is an epic event glorifying a struggling hero. But where does its puzzling characteristic come from? Why are the sufferings in the hero’s fate, the most painful acts of overcoming, the most agonizing conflicts between motives—in short, examples of Silenus’s wisdom, or, in aesthetic terms, the ugly and the disharmonious—repeatedly represented in countless forms with such fondness, precisely during a people’s most flourishing and youthful age? Must it not be because a higher pleasure is perceived in all this?\n\nThat life really is so tragic would do very little to explain the origin of an art form. After all, art is not merely an imitation of natural reality. It is a metaphysical addition to natural reality, placed beside it in order to overcome it. Insofar as tragic myth belongs to art at all, it fully shares this metaphysical aim of transfiguration that belongs to art as a whole. But what does it transfigure when it presents the world of appearances through the image of a suffering hero? Least of all the “reality” of that world of appearances, since it tells us precisely: “Look! Look closely! This is your life! This is the hour hand on the clock of your existence!”\n\nDid myth show this life in order to transfigure it for us by doing so? If not, where does the aesthetic pleasure lie with which we let these images too pass before us? I am asking about aesthetic pleasure. I know very well that many of these images can sometimes also produce moral enjoyment, perhaps in the form of compassion or a moral triumph. But anyone wanting to derive the tragic effect solely from these moral sources, as has been customary in aesthetics for far too long, should not imagine that he has thereby done something for art. Art must demand purity in its own realm above all. The first requirement in explaining tragic myth is precisely to seek its distinctive pleasure within the purely aesthetic sphere, without straying into compassion, fear, or moral sublimity. How can the ugly and the disharmonious, the content of tragic myth, awaken aesthetic pleasure?\n\nHere we need to make a bold leap into a metaphysics of art. I repeat the earlier proposition that existence and the world appear justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. In this sense, tragic myth in particular must convince us that even the ugly and the disharmonious are an artistic game the will plays with itself in the eternal fullness of its pleasure. This original phenomenon of Dionysian art is difficult to grasp. It becomes directly understandable and immediately accessible only through the remarkable significance of *musical dissonance*. More generally, music placed beside the world can alone give us an idea of what it means to justify the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. The pleasure produced by tragic myth comes from the same home as the pleasurable feeling of dissonance in music. The Dionysian, with its primal pleasure perceived even in pain, is the common womb from which music and tragic myth are born.\n\nHave we not now made the difficult problem of the tragic effect much easier by bringing in the musical relationship of dissonance? We now understand what it means, in tragedy, to want to look and at the same time long to go beyond looking. With dissonance used artistically, we would have to describe the same state by saying that we want to hear and at the same time long to go beyond hearing. That reaching toward infinity, that beating of longing’s wings amid the greatest pleasure in clearly perceived reality, reminds us that in both states we must recognize a Dionysian phenomenon. Again and again it reveals the playful building and smashing of the world of individuals as an outpouring of primal pleasure. It is much like Heraclitus the Obscure’s comparison of the world-forming power to a child who moves stones back and forth in play, builds piles of sand, and knocks them down again.\n\nTo judge a people’s Dionysian capacity correctly, we therefore must think not only of its music. We must just as necessarily consider its tragic myth as the second witness to that capacity. Given this extremely close relationship between music and myth, we can likewise suppose that the degeneration and corruption of one will be linked to the withering of the other, if a weakening of myth expresses a weakening of Dionysian power at all. A look at the development of German life should leave us in no doubt about either. In opera and in the abstract character of our existence without myth, in art degraded to mere amusement and in a life guided by concepts, we discovered the nature of Socratic optimism: equally unartistic and destructive of life. For our comfort, however, there were signs that the German mind nevertheless rests and dreams in an inaccessible depth, undestroyed in its splendid health, depth, and Dionysian strength, like a knight who has sunk into sleep. From that depth the Dionysian song rises to us, letting us understand that this German knight still dreams his ancient Dionysian myth in visions both blessed and solemn. Let no one believe that the German mind has lost its mythical home forever, when it still understands so clearly the birds’ voices telling of that home. One day it will find itself awake, with all the freshness of morning after an immense sleep. Then it will kill dragons, destroy the treacherous dwarfs, and awaken Brünnhilde. Even Wotan’s spear will not be able to block its way!\n\nMy friends, you who believe in Dionysian music also know what tragedy means for us. In it we have tragic myth, reborn from music. In that myth you may hope for everything and forget what is most painful! What is most painful for us all is the long degradation in which German genius lived, estranged from house and home, serving treacherous dwarfs. You understand these words, just as you will understand my hopes in the end.\n\n### Section 25\n\nMusic and tragic myth equally express a people’s Dionysian capacity and cannot be separated. Both come from an artistic realm beyond the Apollonian. Both transfigure a region in whose chords of pleasure dissonance, like the terrifying picture of the world, fades away with a seductive sound. Both play with the sting of distress, trusting their extraordinarily powerful magic. Through this play, both justify the existence even of the “worst world.” Here, measured against the Apollonian, the Dionysian reveals itself as the eternal and original artistic power that calls the whole world of appearances into existence. Within that world a new, transfiguring semblance becomes necessary to keep the living world of individual existence attached to life. If we could imagine dissonance becoming human—and what else is a human being?—that dissonance would need a splendid illusion in order to live, an illusion covering its own nature with a veil of beauty. This is Apollo’s true artistic purpose. Under his name we gather all those countless illusions of beautiful seeming that make existence worth living at every moment and urge us to experience the next one.\n\nYet only so much of that foundation of all existence, the world’s Dionysian ground, may enter an individual’s consciousness as the Apollonian power of transfiguration can overcome again. These two artistic drives are therefore forced to develop their strengths in strict proportion to each other, according to the law of eternal justice. Where the Dionysian powers rise as violently as we are witnessing, Apollo must already have descended to us wrapped in a cloud. A coming generation will probably see the richest effects of his beauty.\n\nAnyone could feel most surely, through intuition, why that effect is necessary if he once felt himself transported back into ancient Greek life, even in a dream. Imagine walking beneath tall Ionic colonnades, looking up toward a horizon cut off by pure and noble lines, with reflections of your transfigured figure beside you in shining marble. All around are people walking solemnly or moving gently, their voices sounding harmoniously and their gestures moving in rhythm. With beauty continually pouring in like this, would you not have to raise your hand to Apollo and cry: “How fortunate you Greek people are! How great Dionysus must be among you, if the Delian god thinks such spells necessary to heal your dithyrambic madness!” But an old Athenian, looking up at someone in this mood with Aeschylus’s sublime gaze, might reply: “But say this too, strange visitor: how much this people must have suffered to become so beautiful! Now follow me to tragedy, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both gods!”","download_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/birth-of-tragedy/translations/trn_birth_of_tragedy_plain.txt"}],"retex_markdown_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/birth-of-tragedy/retex.md"}}