The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism
Nietzsche · en
Concerning this naïve artist the analogy of dreams will enlighten us to
some extent. When we realise to ourselves the dreamer, as, in the midst
of the illusion of the dream-world and without disturbing it, he calls
out to himself: "it is a dream, I will dream on"; when we must thence
infer a deep inner joy in dream-contemplation; when, on the other hand,
to be at all able to dream with this inner joy in contemplation, we
must have completely forgotten the day and its terrible obtrusiveness,
we may, under the direction of the dream-reading Apollo, interpret
all these phenomena to ourselves somewhat as follows. Though it is
certain that of the two halves of life, the waking and the dreaming,
the former appeals to us as by far the more preferred, important,
excellent and worthy of being lived, indeed, as that which alone is
lived: yet, with reference to that mysterious ground of our being of
which we are the phenomenon, I should, paradoxical as it may seem, be
inclined to maintain the very opposite estimate of the value of dream
life. For the more clearly I perceive in nature those all-powerful art
impulses, and in them a fervent longing for appearance, for redemption
through appearance, the more I feel myself driven to the metaphysical
assumption that the Verily-Existent and Primordial Unity, as the
Eternally Suffering and Self-Contradictory, requires the rapturous
vision, the joyful appearance, for its continuous salvation: which
appearance we, who are completely wrapt in it and composed of it, must
regard as the Verily Non-existent,--_i.e.,_ as a perpetual unfolding
in time, space and causality,--in other words, as empiric reality.
If we therefore waive the consideration of our own "reality" for the
present, if we conceive our empiric existence, and that of the world
generally, as a representation of the Primordial Unity generated every
moment, we shall then have to regard the dream as an _appearance of
appearance,_ hence as a still higher gratification of the primordial
desire for appearance. It is for this same reason that the innermost
heart of Nature experiences that indescribable joy in the naïve artist
and in the naïve work of art, which is likewise only "an appearance of
appearance." In a symbolic painting, _Raphael_, himself one of these
immortal "naïve" ones, has represented to us this depotentiating of
appearance to appearance, the primordial process of the naïve artist
and at the same time of Apollonian culture. In his _Transfiguration,_
the lower half, with the possessed boy, the despairing bearers, the
helpless, terrified disciples, shows to us the reflection of eternal
primordial pain, the sole basis of the world: the "appearance" here
is the counter-appearance of eternal Contradiction, the father of
things. Out of this appearance then arises, like an ambrosial vapour, a
visionlike new world of appearances, of which those wrapt in the first
appearance see nothing--a radiant floating in purest bliss and painless