The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism
Nietzsche · en
This cheerful acquiescence in the dream-experience has likewise been
embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: for Apollo, as the god of
all shaping energies, is also the soothsaying god. He, who (as the
etymology of the name indicates) is the "shining one," the deity of
light, also rules over the fair appearance of the inner world of
fantasies. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast
to the only partially intelligible everyday world, ay, the deep
consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dream, is at
the same time the symbolical analogue of the faculty of soothsaying
and, in general, of the arts, through which life is made possible and
worth living. But also that delicate line, which the dream-picture must
not overstep--lest it act pathologically (in which case appearance,
being reality pure and simple, would impose upon us)--must not be
wanting in the picture of Apollo: that measured limitation, that
freedom from the wilder emotions, that philosophical calmness of the
sculptor-god. His eye must be "sunlike," according to his origin; even
when it is angry and looks displeased, the sacredness of his beauteous
appearance is still there. And so we might apply to Apollo, in an
eccentric sense, what Schopenhauer says of the man wrapt in the veil
of Mâyâ[2]: _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ I. p. 416: "Just as in
a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with
howling mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his
frail barque: so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual sits
quietly supported by and trusting in his _principium individuationis_."
Indeed, we might say of Apollo, that in him the unshaken faith in
this _principium_ and the quiet sitting of the man wrapt therein have
received their sublimest expression; and we might even designate Apollo
as the glorious divine image of the _principium individuationis,_
from out of the gestures and looks of which all the joy and wisdom of
"appearance," together with its beauty, speak to us.