Section 9

Everything 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.

The 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!

Against 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:

“Here I sit, forming human beingsIn my own image,A race to be like me,To suffer, to weep,To enjoy and to rejoice,And to pay you no heed,Like me!”

Man, 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:

“We don’t take this so exactly:A woman gets it done in a thousand steps;But however she may hurry,A man does it in a single leap.”

Whoever 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.”

That is your world! That’s what you call a world!—

Everything 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.

The 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!

Against 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:

“Here I sit, making peopleIn my own image,A race that will be like me,To suffer, to cry,To enjoy life and be glad,And to pay no attention to you,Like me!”

Rising 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:

“We aren’t so particular about it:A woman does it in a thousand steps;But however fast she goes,A man does it in a single jump.”

Anyone 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.”

That is your world! That is what you call a world!—