Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy (Chap. 5) lyrics

We are now approaching the essential goal of our undertaking, which aims at a knowledge of the Dionysian-Apollonian genius and its work of art, at least at an intuitive understanding of that mysterious unity. Here now, to begin with, we raise the question of where that new seed first manifests itself in the Hellenic world, the seed which later develops into tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb. On this question, cla**ical antiquity itself gives us illustrative evidence when it places Homer and Archilochus next to each other in paintings, cameos, and so on, as the originators and torch-bearers of Greek poetry, in full confidence that only these two should be equally considered completely original natures from whom a fire-storm flowed out over the entire later world of the Greeks.1 Homer, the ancient, self-absorbed dreamer, the archetype of the naive Apollonian artist, now stares astonished at the pa**ionate head of wild Archilochus, the fighting servant of the Muses, battered by existence. In its interpretative efforts, our more recent aesthetics has known only how to indicate that here the first “subjective” artist stands in contrast to the “objective” artist. This interpretation is of little use to us, since we recognize the subjective artist only as a bad artist and demand in every style of art and every high artistic achievement, first and foremost, a victory over the subjective, redemption from the “I,” and the silence of every individual will and desire; indeed, we are incapable of believing the slightest artistic creation true, unless it has objectivity and a purely disinterested contemplation. Hence, our aesthetic must first solve that problem of how it is possible for the “lyric poet” to be an artist, for he, according to the experience of all ages, always says “I” and sings out in front of us the entire chromatic sequence of the sounds of his pa**ions and desires. This very Archilochus startles us, alongside Homer, through the cry of his hate and scorn, through the drunken eruptions of his desire. By doing this, is not Archilochus, the first artist called subjective, essentially a non-artist? But then where does that veneration come from, which the Delphic oracle itself, the centre of “objective” art, showed to him, the poet, in very remarkable utterances. Schiller has illuminated his own writing process for us with a psychological observation which was inexplicable to him but which nevertheless did not appear questionable, for he confesses that when he was in a state of preparation, before he actually started writing, he did not have something like a series of pictures, with a structured causality of ideas, in front of him and inside him, but rather a musical mood (“With me, feeling at first lacks a defined and clear object; the latter develops for the first time later on. A certain musical emotional state comes first, and from this, with me, the poetic idea then follows.” If we now add the most important phenomenon of the entire ancient lyric, the union, universally acknowledged as natural, between the lyricist and the musician, in fact, their common identity — in comparison with which our recent lyrics look like the image of a god without a head — then we can, on the basis of the aesthetic metaphysics we established earlier, now account for the lyric poet in the following manner. He has, first of all, as a Dionysian artist, become entirely unified with the primordial oneness, with its pain and contradiction, and produces the reflection of this primordial oneness as music, if music can with justice be called a re-working of the world and its second casting. But now this music becomes perceptible to him once again, as in a metaphorical dream image, under the influence of Apollonian dreaming. That reflection, which lacks imagery and ideas, of the original pain in the music, together with its redemption in illusion, gives rise now to a second reflection as a particular metaphor or illustration. The artist has already surrendered his subjectivity in the Dionysian process; the image which now reveals to him his unity with the heart of the world is a dream scene, which symbolizes that original contradiction and pain, together with the primordial joy in illusion. The “I” of the lyric poet thus echoes out of the abyss of being. What recent aestheticians mean by his “subjectivity” is mere fantasy. When Archilochus, the first Greek lyric poet, announces his raging love and, simultaneously, his contempt for the daughters of Lycambes, it is not his own pa**ion which dances in front of us in an orgiastic frenzy: we see Dionysus and the maenads; we see the intoxicated reveller Archilochus sunk down in sleep — as Euripides describes it for us in the Bacchae, asleep in a high Alpine meadow in the midday sun — and now Apollo steps up to him and touches him with his laurel. The Dionysian musical enchantment of the sleeper now, as it were, flashes around him fiery images, lyrical poems, which are called, in their highest form, tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.1 The plastic artist, as well as his relation, the epic poet, is absorbed in the pure contemplation of images. The Dionysian musician totally lacks every image and is in himself only and entirely the original pain and original reverberation of that image. The lyrical genius feels a world of images and metaphors grow up out of the mysterious state of unity and of renunciation of the self. These have a colour, causality, and speed entirely different from that world of the plastic artist and of the writer of epic. While the last of these (the epic poet) lives in these pictures and only in them with joyful contentment and does not get tired of contemplating them with love, right down to the smallest details, and while even the image of the angry Achilles is for him only a picture whose expression of anger he enjoys with that dream joy in illusions — so that he, by this mirror of appearances, is protected against the development of that sense of unity and of being fused together with the forms he has created — the images of the lyric poet are, by contrast nothing but he himself and, as it were, only different objectifications of himself. He can say “I” because he is the moving central point of that world; only this “I” is not the same as the “I” of the awake, empirically real man, but the single “I” of true and eternal being in general, the “I” resting on the foundation of things, through the portrayal of which the lyrical genius looks right into that very basis of things. Now, let's imagine next how he also looks upon himself among these likenesses, as a non-genius, that is, as his own “Subject,” the entire unruly crowd of subjective pa**ions and striving of his will aiming at something particular, which seems real to him. If it now appears as if the lyrical genius and the non-genius bound up with him were one and the same and as if the first of these spoke that little word “I” about himself, then this illusion could now no longer deceive us, not at least in the way it deceived those who have defined the lyricist as a subjective poet. To tell the truth, Archilochus, the man of pa**ionately burning love and hate, is only a vision of the genius who is by this time no longer Archilochus but a world genius and who expresses his primordial pain symbolically in Archilochus as a metaphor for man; whereas, that subjectively willing and desiring man Archilochus can generally never ever be a poet. It is not at all essential that the lyric poet see directly in front of him only the phenomenon of the man Archilochus as a reflection of eternal being, and tragedy shows how far the visionary world of the lyric poet can distance itself from that phenomenon clearly standing near at hand. Schopenhauer, who did not hide from the difficulty which the lyric poet creates for the philosophical observation of art, believed that he had discovered a solution, something which I cannot go along with, when in his profound metaphysics of music he alone found a way of setting that difficulty decisively to one side, as I believe I have done here, in his spirit and with due honour to him. For the sake of comparison, here is how he describes the essential nature of song: The consciousness of the singer is filled with the subject of willing, that is, his own willing, often as an unleashed satisfied willing (joy), but also, and more often, as a restricted willing (sorrow), always as emotion, pa**ion, a turbulent state of feeling. However, alongside this condition and simultaneous with it, the singer, through a glimpse at the surrounding nature, becomes aware of himself as a subject of pure, will-less knowledge, whose imperturbable, blessed tranquilly now enters in contrast to the pressure of his always hindered, always still limited willing: the sensation of this contrast, this game back and forth, is basically what expresses itself in the totality of the song and what, in general, creates the lyrical state. In this condition, pure understanding, as it were, comes to us, to save us from willing and the pressure of willing; we follow along, but only moment by moment: the will, the memory of our personal goals, constantly removes this calm contemplation from us, but over and over again the next beautiful setting, in which pure will-less knowledge presents itself to us once again, entices us away from willing. Hence, in the song and the lyrical mood, willing (the personal interest in purposes) and pure contemplation of the setting which reveals itself are miraculously mixed up together: we seek and imagine relationships between them both; the subjective mood, the emotional state of the will, communicates with the surroundings we contemplate, and the latter, in turn, give their colour to our mood, in a reflex action. The true song is the expression of this entire emotional condition, mixed and divided in this way” (World as Will and Idea, I.3.51) Who can fail to recognize in this description that here the lyric has been characterized as an incompletely realized art, a leap, as it were, which seldom attains its goal, indeed, as a semi-art, whose essence is to consist of the fact that the will and pure contemplation, that is, the unaesthetic and the aesthetic conditions, must be miraculously mixed up together? In contrast to this, we maintain that the entire opposition of the subjective and the objective, which even Schopenhauer still uses as a measurement of value to cla**ify art, has generally no place in aesthetics, since the subject, the willing individual demanding his own egotistical purposes, can only be thought of as an enemy of art, not as its origin. But insofar as the subject is an artist, he is already released from his individual willing and has become, so to speak, a medium, through which a subject of true being celebrates its redemption in illusion. For we need to be clear on this point, above everything else, to our humiliation and ennoblement: the entire comedy of art does not present itself for us in order to make us, for example, better or to educate us, even less because we are the actual creators of that art world. We are, however, entitled to a**ume this about ourselves: for the true creator of that world we are already pictures and artistic projections and in the meaning of works of art we have our highest dignity — for only as an aesthetic phenomena are existence and the world eternally justified — while, of course, our consciousness of this significance of ours is scarcely any different from the consciousness which soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle portrayed there. Hence our entire knowledge of art is basically completely illusory, because, as knowing people, we are not one with and identical to that being who, as the single creator and spectator of that comedy of art, prepares for itself an eternal enjoyment. Only to the extent that the genius in the act of artistic creation is fused with that primordial artist of the world does he know anything about the eternal nature of art, for in that state he is, in a miraculous way, like the weird picture of fairy tales, which can turn its eyes and contemplate itself. Now he is simultaneously subject and object, simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator. Footnotes: 1Homer: the name given by the Greeks to the author of the Iliad and Odyssey (composed in the eighth century BC); Archilochus : (680 BC to c. 645 BC), Greek poet from the island of Paros. 1. . .maenads : These are the ecstatic female worshippers of Dionysus. Euripides : (480-406 BC), famous Greek tragedian. His last play, the Bacchae, was first produced after his d**h.