The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism
Nietzsche · en
sleeper now emits, as it were, picture sparks, lyrical poems, which in
their highest development are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.
The plastic artist, as also the epic poet, who is related to him, is
sunk in the pure contemplation of pictures. The Dionysian musician
is, without any picture, himself just primordial pain and the
primordial re-echoing thereof. The lyric genius is conscious of a
world of pictures and symbols--growing out of the state of mystical
self-abnegation and oneness,--which has a colouring causality and
velocity quite different from that of the world of the plastic artist
and epic poet. While the latter lives in these pictures, and only in
them, with joyful satisfaction, and never grows tired of contemplating
them with love, even in their minutest characters, while even the
picture of the angry Achilles is to him but a picture, the angry
expression of which he enjoys with the dream-joy in appearance--so
that, by this mirror of appearance, he is guarded against being unified
and blending with his figures;--the pictures of the lyrist on the other
hand are nothing but _his very_ self and, as it were, only different
projections of himself, on account of which he as the moving centre
of this world is entitled to say "I": only of course this self is
not the same as that of the waking, empirically real man, but the
only verily existent and eternal self resting at the basis of things,
by means of the images whereof the lyric genius sees through even to
this basis of things. Now let us suppose that he beholds _himself_
also among these images as non-genius, _i.e.,_ his subject, the whole
throng of subjective passions and impulses of the will directed to a
definite object which appears real to him; if now it seems as if the
lyric genius and the allied non-genius were one, and as if the former
spoke that little word "I" of his own accord, this appearance will no
longer be able to lead us astray, as it certainly led those astray who
designated the lyrist as the subjective poet. In truth, Archilochus,
the passionately inflamed, loving and hating man, is but a vision of
the genius, who by this time is no longer Archilochus, but a genius
of the world, who expresses his primordial pain symbolically in the
figure of the man Archilochus: while the subjectively willing and
desiring man, Archilochus, can never at any time be a poet. It is by no
means necessary, however, that the lyrist should see nothing but the
phenomenon of the man Archilochus before him as a reflection of eternal
being; and tragedy shows how far the visionary world of the lyrist may
depart from this phenomenon, to which, of course, it is most intimately
related.