The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism
Nietzsche · en
Perhaps we may lead up to this primitive problem with the question:
what æsthetic effect results when the intrinsically separate
art-powers, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, enter into concurrent
actions? Or, in briefer form: how is music related to image and
concept?--Schopenhauer, whom Richard Wagner, with especial reference to
this point, accredits with an unsurpassable clearness and perspicuity
of exposition, expresses himself most copiously on the subject in
the following passage which I shall cite here at full length[21]
(_Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ I. p. 309): "According to all
this, we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as
two different expressions of the same thing,[20] which is therefore
itself the only medium of the analogy between these two expressions,
so that a knowledge of this medium is required in order to understand
that analogy. Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the
world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related
indeed to the universality of concepts, much as these are related to
the particular things. Its universality, however, is by no means the
empty universality of abstraction, but of quite a different kind, and
is united with thorough and distinct definiteness. In this respect it
resembles geometrical figures and numbers, which are the universal
forms of all possible objects of experience and applicable to them all
_a priori_, and yet are not abstract but perceptiple and thoroughly
determinate. All possible efforts, excitements and manifestations of
will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in
the wide, negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the infinite
number of possible melodies, but always in the universality of mere
form, without the material, always according to the thing-in-itself,
not the phenomenon,--of which they reproduce the very soul and essence
as it were, without the body. This deep relation which music bears to
the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable
music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to
disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most
accurate and distinct commentary upon it; as also the fact that whoever
gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony seems to see
all the possible events of life and the world take place in himself:
nevertheless upon reflection he can find no likeness between the music
and the things that passed before his mind. For, as we have said, music
is distinguished from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a
copy of the phenomenon, or, more accurately, the adequate objectivity
of the will, but the direct copy of the will itself, and therefore
represents the metaphysical of everything physical in the world, and
the thing-in-itself of every phenomenon. We might, therefore, just as
well call the world embodied music as embodied will: and this is the