The Birth of Tragedy Chap. 9 by Friedrich Nietzsche Lyrics
Everything which comes to the surface in the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy, in the dialogue, looks simple, translucent, beautiful. In this sense the dialogue is an image of the Greek man, whose nature reveals itself in dancing, because in dancing the greatest power is only latent, but it betrays its presence in the lithe and rich movement. Thus, the language of the Sophoclean heroes surprises us by its Apollonian clarity and brightness, so that we immediately imagine that we are glimpsing the innermost basis of their being, with some astonishment that the path to this foundation is so short.
However, once we look away from the character of the hero as it surfaces and becomes perceptible — a character who is basically nothing more than a light picture cast onto a dark wall, that is, an illusion through and through — we penetrate instead into the myth which projects itself in this bright reflection. At that point we suddenly experience a phenomenon which is the reverse of a well-known optical one. When we make a determined attempt to look directly at the sun and turn away blinded, we have dark coloured specks in front of our eyes, like a remedy, as it were. Those illuminated illusory pictures of the Sophoclean hero, briefly put, the Apollonian mask, are the reverse of that, necessary
creations of a glimpse into the inner terror of nature, bright spots, so to speak, to heal us from the horrifying night of the crippled gaze. Only in this sense can we think of correctly grasping the serious and significant idea of “Greek serenity”; whereas, nowadays we certainly come across the undoubtedly misconceived idea that this serenity is a condition of secure contentment on all the pathways and bridges of the present.
The most painful figure of the Greek stage, the ill-fated Oedipus, is understood by Sophocles as the noble man who is destined for error and misery in spite of his wisdom, but, who through his immense suffering, at the end exerts a magically beneficial effect around him, which still has an effect beyond his death.1 The noble man does not sin — that’s what the profound poet wishes to tell us: through Oedipus’ actions every law, every natural principle of order, indeed, the moral world may collapse, but because of these very actions a higher magical circle of consequences is created, which founds a new world on the ruins of the old world, which has been overthrown. Insofar as the poet is also a religious thinker, that is what he wishes to say to us; as a poet, he shows us first a wonderfully complicated legal knot, which the judge slowly undoes, link by link, in the process destroying himself. The real joy for the Greek in this dialectical solution is so great that because of it a sense of powerful serenity invests the entire work, which always breaks the sting of the dreadful assumptions of that plot.
In Oedipus in Colonus we run into this same serenity, but elevated in an immeasurable transfiguration. In contrast to the old man afflicted with excessive suffering, a man who is exposed purely as a man suffering from everything which happens to him — there stands the supernatural serenity which descends from the sphere of the gods and indicates to us that the hero in his purely passive conduct achieves his highest activity, which reaches out far over his own life; whereas, his conscious striving in his earlier life led him only to passivity. Thus, for the mortal eye the inextricably tangled legal knot of the Oedipus story is slowly untangled — and the most profound human joy suffuses us with this divine dialectical companion piece.
If we have done justice to the poet with this explanation, one can still nonetheless ask whether the content of the myth has been exhausted in that explanation. And here we see that the entire conception of the poet is simply nothing other than that illuminated image which healing nature holds up before us after a glimpse into the abyss. Oedipus the murderer of his father, the husband of his mother, Oedipus the solver of the riddle of the sphinx! What does the secret trinity of these fatal events tell us? There was a very ancient folk belief, especially in Persia, that a wise magus could be born only out of incest. Looking at Oedipus as the solver of riddles and emancipator of his mother, what we have to interpret immediately is the fact that right there where, through prophecy and magical powers, the spell of present and future is broken, that rigid law of individuation and the essential magic of nature in general, an immense natural horror — in this case incest — must have come first as the original cause. For how could we have compelled nature to yield up her secrets, if not for the fact that we fight back against her and win, that is, if not for the fact that we commit unnatural actions?
I see this insight stamped out in that dreadful trinity of Oedipus’s fate: the same man who solves the riddle of nature — of that ambiguous sphinx — must also break the most sacred natural laws when he murders his father and marries his mother. Indeed, the myth seems to want to whisper to us that wisdom, and especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural atrocity, that a man who through his knowledge pushes nature into the abyss of destruction also has to experience in himself the disintegration of nature. “The spear point of knowledge turns itself against the wise man. Wisdom is a crime against nature.”1 The myth calls out such terrible statements to us, but, like a ray of sunlight,
the Greek poet touches the awe-inspiring and fearful Memnon’s Column of myth, so that it suddenly begins to play music — Sophoclean melodies.2
Now I’m going to compare the glory of passivity with the glory of activity which illuminates Aeschylus’s Prometheus. What Aeschylus the thinker had to say to us here, but what Aeschylus as a poet could only hint to us through a metaphorical picture — that’s something young Goethe knew how to reveal to us in the bold words of his Prometheus:
“Here I sit — I make men
in my own image,
a race like me,
to suffer, to weep,
to enjoy life and rejoice,
and to ignore you,
as I do.”3
Man, rising up into something Titanic, is victorious over his own culture and compels the gods to unite with him, because in his autonomous wisdom he holds their existence and the limits to their authority in his hand. The most marvellous thing in that poem of Prometheus, which is, according to its basic ideas, essentially a hymn celebrating impiety, is, however, the deep Aeschylean impulse for justice: the immeasurable suffering of the brave “individual,” on the one hand, and, on the other, the peril faced by the gods, in fact, a presentiment of a twilight of the gods, the compelling power for a metaphysical oneness, for a reconciliation of both these worlds of suffering — all this is a most powerful reminder of the central point and major claim of the Aeschylean world view, which sees Fate [Moira] enthroned over gods and men as eternal justice.
In considering the astonishing daring with which Aeschylus places the Olympian world on his scales of justice, we must remind ourselves that the deep-thinking Greek had an unshakably firm basis for metaphysical thinking in his mystery cults and that he could unload all his sceptical moods onto the Olympians. The Greek artist, in particular, with respect to these divinities, felt a dark sense of reciprocal dependency, and this sense is symbolized directly in Aeschylus’s Prometheus. The Titanic artist discovered in himself the defiant belief that he could make men and, at the very least, destroy Olympian gods — and he could do this through his higher wisdom, which he, of course, was compelled to atone for with eternal suffering. The magnificent “capability” of the great genius, for whom eternal suffering itself is too cheap a price, the stern pride of the artist — that is the content and soul of Aeschylean poetry; whereas, Sophocles in his Oedipus sounds out the prelude to the victory song of the holy man.
But also that meaning which Aeschylus gave the myth does not fully measure the astonishing depth of its terror. On the contrary, the artist’s joy in being, the serenity of artistic creativity in spite of every impiety, is only a light picture of cloud and sky mirrored in a dark lake of sorrow. The Prometheus saga is a primordial possession of the Aryan population collectively and documentary evidence of their talent for the profoundly tragic. In fact, it could well be the case that for the Aryan being this myth has the same characteristic significance as the myth of the Fall does for the Semitic peoples and that both myths are related, like brother and sister.
The pre-condition of that Prometheus myth is the extraordinary value which a naive humanity associates with fire as the true Palladium of every rising culture.1 But the fact that man freely controls fire and does not receive it merely as a gift from heaven, as a blazing lightning flash or warming rays of the sun, appeared to those contemplative primitive men as an outrage, a crime against divine nature. And so right away the first philosophical problem posed an awkward insoluble contradiction between man and god and pushed it, like a boulder, right up to the door of every culture. The best and loftiest thing which mankind can be blessed with men acquire through a crime, and now they must accept the further consequences, namely, the entire flood of suffering and troubles with which the offended divine presences must afflict the nobly ambitious human race: an austere notion which, through the value which it gives to the crime, stands in a curious contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall, in which curiosity, lying falsehoods, temptation, lust, in short, a series of predominantly female emotions was looked upon as the origin of evil.
What distinguishes the Aryan conception is the lofty view of the active transgression as the essentially Promethean virtue. With this, at the same time the ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy is established, together with the justification of human evils, that is, both of human guilt and of the forfeit of suffering caused by that guilt. The impiety in the essence of things — that’s what the thinking Aryan is not inclined to quibble away — the contradiction in the heart of the world reveals itself to him as the interpenetration of different worlds, for example, a divine and a human world, each of which is right individually but which must, as one individual alongside another one, suffer for its individuality. With this heroic push of the individual into the universal, with this attempt to stride out over the limits of individuation and to wish to be oneself a world being, man suffers in himself the original contradiction hidden in things, that is, he violates the laws, and he suffers. Just as among the Aryans crime is seen as male and among the Semites sin is seen as female, so the original crime was also committed by a man, the original sin by a woman. In this connection, the chorus of witches [in Goethe’s Faust] says:
We’re not so particular in what we say:
Woman takes a thousand steps to get her way.
But no matter how quickly she can hurry on,
With just one leap the man will get it done.
Anyone who understands that innermost core of the Prometheus saga — namely, the imperative requirement that the individual striving like a Titan has to fall into crime — must also sense at the same time the un-Apollonian quality of this pessimistic idea, for Apollo wants to make individual beings tranquil precisely because he establishes border lines between them and, with his demands for self-knowledge and moderation, always reminds them once again of the most sacred laws of the world. However, to prevent this Apollonian tendency from freezing form into Egyptian stiffness and frigidity and to make sure the movement of the entire lake does not die away through the attempt of the Apollonian to prescribe to the individual waves their path and their extent, from time to time the high flood of the Dionysian once again destroys all those small circles in which the one-sided Apollonian “will” seeks to confine the Greek spirit. Now that suddenly rising flood of the Dionysian takes the single small wave crest of the individual on its back, just as the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, shouldered the Earth. This Titanic impulse to become, as it were, the Atlas of all individuals and to bear them on one’s wide back, higher and higher, further and further, is the common link between the Promethean and the Dionysian.1
In this view, the Aeschylean Prometheus is a Dionysian mask, while, in that previously mentioned deep desire for justice Aeschylus betrays, to the one who understands, his paternal descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and just boundaries. And so the double nature of the Aeschylean Prometheus, his simultaneously Dionysian and Apollonian nature, can be expressed in an understandable formula with the following words: “Everything present is just and unjust and equally justified in both.” That is your world! That’s what one calls a world!2
Footnotes:
1Sophocles wrote two surviving plays about the tragedy of Oedipus, king of Thebes: Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus . The first tells the story of how Oedipus, the wisest man in Thebes, suffers horribly from his own investigations into the murder of his predecessor. The second depicts the reception, years later, of the very old and suffering Oedipus, now near death, by the Athenians.
1The quotation comes from Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 316.
2Memnon’s Column: an immense structure in Thebes (in Egypt) beside the temple of Amenhotep III (1400 BC) which gave out sounds when warmed by the sun.
3In Goethe’s poem, Prometheus addresses these words to Zeus, the chief Olympian god. Prometheus, a Titan, was punished savagely by Zeus for stealing fire from heaven and giving it to human beings. Prometheus also knew a secret prophecy that the minor goddess Thetis, whom Zeus wanted to have sex with, would have a son more powerful than his father. Aeschylus (525-456 BC), an Athenian tragedian, presents a version of the story in his play Prometheus Bound, part of a trilogy in which two plays have not survived. Goethe: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German’s greatest writer, author of a poem called Prometheus , in which the mythic Prometheus hurls his defiance at Zeus.
1Palladium: The Palladium is the divine image or statue which acted as the protector of the state. In a famous incident in the Trojan War, Odysseus and Diomedes stole the Palladium from Troy.
However, once we look away from the character of the hero as it surfaces and becomes perceptible — a character who is basically nothing more than a light picture cast onto a dark wall, that is, an illusion through and through — we penetrate instead into the myth which projects itself in this bright reflection. At that point we suddenly experience a phenomenon which is the reverse of a well-known optical one. When we make a determined attempt to look directly at the sun and turn away blinded, we have dark coloured specks in front of our eyes, like a remedy, as it were. Those illuminated illusory pictures of the Sophoclean hero, briefly put, the Apollonian mask, are the reverse of that, necessary
creations of a glimpse into the inner terror of nature, bright spots, so to speak, to heal us from the horrifying night of the crippled gaze. Only in this sense can we think of correctly grasping the serious and significant idea of “Greek serenity”; whereas, nowadays we certainly come across the undoubtedly misconceived idea that this serenity is a condition of secure contentment on all the pathways and bridges of the present.
The most painful figure of the Greek stage, the ill-fated Oedipus, is understood by Sophocles as the noble man who is destined for error and misery in spite of his wisdom, but, who through his immense suffering, at the end exerts a magically beneficial effect around him, which still has an effect beyond his death.1 The noble man does not sin — that’s what the profound poet wishes to tell us: through Oedipus’ actions every law, every natural principle of order, indeed, the moral world may collapse, but because of these very actions a higher magical circle of consequences is created, which founds a new world on the ruins of the old world, which has been overthrown. Insofar as the poet is also a religious thinker, that is what he wishes to say to us; as a poet, he shows us first a wonderfully complicated legal knot, which the judge slowly undoes, link by link, in the process destroying himself. The real joy for the Greek in this dialectical solution is so great that because of it a sense of powerful serenity invests the entire work, which always breaks the sting of the dreadful assumptions of that plot.
In Oedipus in Colonus we run into this same serenity, but elevated in an immeasurable transfiguration. In contrast to the old man afflicted with excessive suffering, a man who is exposed purely as a man suffering from everything which happens to him — there stands the supernatural serenity which descends from the sphere of the gods and indicates to us that the hero in his purely passive conduct achieves his highest activity, which reaches out far over his own life; whereas, his conscious striving in his earlier life led him only to passivity. Thus, for the mortal eye the inextricably tangled legal knot of the Oedipus story is slowly untangled — and the most profound human joy suffuses us with this divine dialectical companion piece.
If we have done justice to the poet with this explanation, one can still nonetheless ask whether the content of the myth has been exhausted in that explanation. And here we see that the entire conception of the poet is simply nothing other than that illuminated image which healing nature holds up before us after a glimpse into the abyss. Oedipus the murderer of his father, the husband of his mother, Oedipus the solver of the riddle of the sphinx! What does the secret trinity of these fatal events tell us? There was a very ancient folk belief, especially in Persia, that a wise magus could be born only out of incest. Looking at Oedipus as the solver of riddles and emancipator of his mother, what we have to interpret immediately is the fact that right there where, through prophecy and magical powers, the spell of present and future is broken, that rigid law of individuation and the essential magic of nature in general, an immense natural horror — in this case incest — must have come first as the original cause. For how could we have compelled nature to yield up her secrets, if not for the fact that we fight back against her and win, that is, if not for the fact that we commit unnatural actions?
I see this insight stamped out in that dreadful trinity of Oedipus’s fate: the same man who solves the riddle of nature — of that ambiguous sphinx — must also break the most sacred natural laws when he murders his father and marries his mother. Indeed, the myth seems to want to whisper to us that wisdom, and especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural atrocity, that a man who through his knowledge pushes nature into the abyss of destruction also has to experience in himself the disintegration of nature. “The spear point of knowledge turns itself against the wise man. Wisdom is a crime against nature.”1 The myth calls out such terrible statements to us, but, like a ray of sunlight,
the Greek poet touches the awe-inspiring and fearful Memnon’s Column of myth, so that it suddenly begins to play music — Sophoclean melodies.2
Now I’m going to compare the glory of passivity with the glory of activity which illuminates Aeschylus’s Prometheus. What Aeschylus the thinker had to say to us here, but what Aeschylus as a poet could only hint to us through a metaphorical picture — that’s something young Goethe knew how to reveal to us in the bold words of his Prometheus:
“Here I sit — I make men
in my own image,
a race like me,
to suffer, to weep,
to enjoy life and rejoice,
and to ignore you,
as I do.”3
Man, rising up into something Titanic, is victorious over his own culture and compels the gods to unite with him, because in his autonomous wisdom he holds their existence and the limits to their authority in his hand. The most marvellous thing in that poem of Prometheus, which is, according to its basic ideas, essentially a hymn celebrating impiety, is, however, the deep Aeschylean impulse for justice: the immeasurable suffering of the brave “individual,” on the one hand, and, on the other, the peril faced by the gods, in fact, a presentiment of a twilight of the gods, the compelling power for a metaphysical oneness, for a reconciliation of both these worlds of suffering — all this is a most powerful reminder of the central point and major claim of the Aeschylean world view, which sees Fate [Moira] enthroned over gods and men as eternal justice.
In considering the astonishing daring with which Aeschylus places the Olympian world on his scales of justice, we must remind ourselves that the deep-thinking Greek had an unshakably firm basis for metaphysical thinking in his mystery cults and that he could unload all his sceptical moods onto the Olympians. The Greek artist, in particular, with respect to these divinities, felt a dark sense of reciprocal dependency, and this sense is symbolized directly in Aeschylus’s Prometheus. The Titanic artist discovered in himself the defiant belief that he could make men and, at the very least, destroy Olympian gods — and he could do this through his higher wisdom, which he, of course, was compelled to atone for with eternal suffering. The magnificent “capability” of the great genius, for whom eternal suffering itself is too cheap a price, the stern pride of the artist — that is the content and soul of Aeschylean poetry; whereas, Sophocles in his Oedipus sounds out the prelude to the victory song of the holy man.
But also that meaning which Aeschylus gave the myth does not fully measure the astonishing depth of its terror. On the contrary, the artist’s joy in being, the serenity of artistic creativity in spite of every impiety, is only a light picture of cloud and sky mirrored in a dark lake of sorrow. The Prometheus saga is a primordial possession of the Aryan population collectively and documentary evidence of their talent for the profoundly tragic. In fact, it could well be the case that for the Aryan being this myth has the same characteristic significance as the myth of the Fall does for the Semitic peoples and that both myths are related, like brother and sister.
The pre-condition of that Prometheus myth is the extraordinary value which a naive humanity associates with fire as the true Palladium of every rising culture.1 But the fact that man freely controls fire and does not receive it merely as a gift from heaven, as a blazing lightning flash or warming rays of the sun, appeared to those contemplative primitive men as an outrage, a crime against divine nature. And so right away the first philosophical problem posed an awkward insoluble contradiction between man and god and pushed it, like a boulder, right up to the door of every culture. The best and loftiest thing which mankind can be blessed with men acquire through a crime, and now they must accept the further consequences, namely, the entire flood of suffering and troubles with which the offended divine presences must afflict the nobly ambitious human race: an austere notion which, through the value which it gives to the crime, stands in a curious contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall, in which curiosity, lying falsehoods, temptation, lust, in short, a series of predominantly female emotions was looked upon as the origin of evil.
What distinguishes the Aryan conception is the lofty view of the active transgression as the essentially Promethean virtue. With this, at the same time the ethical basis of pessimistic tragedy is established, together with the justification of human evils, that is, both of human guilt and of the forfeit of suffering caused by that guilt. The impiety in the essence of things — that’s what the thinking Aryan is not inclined to quibble away — the contradiction in the heart of the world reveals itself to him as the interpenetration of different worlds, for example, a divine and a human world, each of which is right individually but which must, as one individual alongside another one, suffer for its individuality. With this heroic push of the individual into the universal, with this attempt to stride out over the limits of individuation and to wish to be oneself a world being, man suffers in himself the original contradiction hidden in things, that is, he violates the laws, and he suffers. Just as among the Aryans crime is seen as male and among the Semites sin is seen as female, so the original crime was also committed by a man, the original sin by a woman. In this connection, the chorus of witches [in Goethe’s Faust] says:
We’re not so particular in what we say:
Woman takes a thousand steps to get her way.
But no matter how quickly she can hurry on,
With just one leap the man will get it done.
Anyone who understands that innermost core of the Prometheus saga — namely, the imperative requirement that the individual striving like a Titan has to fall into crime — must also sense at the same time the un-Apollonian quality of this pessimistic idea, for Apollo wants to make individual beings tranquil precisely because he establishes border lines between them and, with his demands for self-knowledge and moderation, always reminds them once again of the most sacred laws of the world. However, to prevent this Apollonian tendency from freezing form into Egyptian stiffness and frigidity and to make sure the movement of the entire lake does not die away through the attempt of the Apollonian to prescribe to the individual waves their path and their extent, from time to time the high flood of the Dionysian once again destroys all those small circles in which the one-sided Apollonian “will” seeks to confine the Greek spirit. Now that suddenly rising flood of the Dionysian takes the single small wave crest of the individual on its back, just as the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Atlas, shouldered the Earth. This Titanic impulse to become, as it were, the Atlas of all individuals and to bear them on one’s wide back, higher and higher, further and further, is the common link between the Promethean and the Dionysian.1
In this view, the Aeschylean Prometheus is a Dionysian mask, while, in that previously mentioned deep desire for justice Aeschylus betrays, to the one who understands, his paternal descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and just boundaries. And so the double nature of the Aeschylean Prometheus, his simultaneously Dionysian and Apollonian nature, can be expressed in an understandable formula with the following words: “Everything present is just and unjust and equally justified in both.” That is your world! That’s what one calls a world!2
Footnotes:
1Sophocles wrote two surviving plays about the tragedy of Oedipus, king of Thebes: Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus . The first tells the story of how Oedipus, the wisest man in Thebes, suffers horribly from his own investigations into the murder of his predecessor. The second depicts the reception, years later, of the very old and suffering Oedipus, now near death, by the Athenians.
1The quotation comes from Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 316.
2Memnon’s Column: an immense structure in Thebes (in Egypt) beside the temple of Amenhotep III (1400 BC) which gave out sounds when warmed by the sun.
3In Goethe’s poem, Prometheus addresses these words to Zeus, the chief Olympian god. Prometheus, a Titan, was punished savagely by Zeus for stealing fire from heaven and giving it to human beings. Prometheus also knew a secret prophecy that the minor goddess Thetis, whom Zeus wanted to have sex with, would have a son more powerful than his father. Aeschylus (525-456 BC), an Athenian tragedian, presents a version of the story in his play Prometheus Bound, part of a trilogy in which two plays have not survived. Goethe: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German’s greatest writer, author of a poem called Prometheus , in which the mythic Prometheus hurls his defiance at Zeus.
1Palladium: The Palladium is the divine image or statue which acted as the protector of the state. In a famous incident in the Trojan War, Odysseus and Diomedes stole the Palladium from Troy.