The following material looks like it will be presented in audio form only gradually over the course of the next few weeks.
I am posting it already, however, since some notion of the wider context of the ideas that I have already expounded in audio form may be conducive to these ideas’ comprehension.
ONE
Let us consider the opening paragraphs.
We will have achieved much for scientific study of aesthetics when we come, not merely to a logical understanding, but also to the certain and immediate apprehension of the fact that the further development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian... We take these names from the Greeks, who gave a clear voice to the profound secret teachings of their contemplative art, not in ideas, but in the powerfully clear forms of their divine world. With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we establish our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in origin and purposes, between the visual arts, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian…
In order to bring those two drives closer to us, let us think of them first as the separate artistic worlds of dream and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
§
Those who have read around a little in the culture of the time will immediately recognize the influence, in these lines from 1872, of Wagner’s study of Beethoven, written two years before in 1870 and mentioned in The Birth of Tragedy’s, and thereby also of an essay of Schopenhauer’s comprised in Schopenhauer’s second major publication, Parerga and Paralipomena: namely, a long essay on Spirit Seeing and Everything Connected Therewith.
The notion of the dream is the key link here.
In the Spirit Seeing essay, dating from before 1850, Schopenhauer develops a theory of dreams as states of consciousness that connect directly with that essence of the world that he called “the Will”.
The argument is very dense and complex and involves – this should be borne in mind – a distinction between “deep sleep dreams”, which penetrate to the essence of things but remain incommunicable, and “morning dreams”, which form a kind of bridge between the incommunicable truth and human communicability.
§
In his 1870 essay on Beethoven Wagner elaborates a link between Schopenhauer’s Traumwelt and the Klangwelt.
Schopenhauer had indeed already independently developed a theory of music as the only artform that related not indirectly but directly to the Will as World-Essence.
But it is, I think, only in Wagner’s essay of 1870 that the triadic association
‘music’/ ‘dream’ / ‘world-essence’
Is fully theoretically established.
§
As we can see from the lines quoted, Nietzsche in fact, only two years later, takes this triadic association apart again.
He nominates something opposed to the dream – Dionysian Rausch – as the real means of access to the World-Essence.
But he also, in these opening lines, seems to be doing honour to and preserving the Wagnerian model of 1870.
This inasmuch as he cites here lines from Die Meistersinger, a work regarding which a very good argument can be made that it consists precisely in a staging of this expanded Schopenhauerian model whereby the musician perceives the essence of the world (Will) and perceives it in and as a dream.
Hans Sachs to Walther von Stolzing
Mein Freund, das grad’ ist Dichters Werk,
dass er sein Träumen deut’ und merk’.
Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn
wird ihm im Traume aufgethan:
all’ Dichtkunst und Poëterei
ist nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei.
§
It is difficult to argue with what Nietzsche seems to be implying here: namely, that the dialogue between Hans Sachs and Walther is a dramatic prefiguration, in the 1860s, of what Wagner was going to argue theoretically in 1870.
This is in fact an academic orthodoxy in Schopenhauer and Wagner studies today.
It is hard to dismiss it in view particularly of one detail.
There is indeed an unignorable emphasis, in what Sachs and Walther say about Walther’s dream, on the fact that this dream is a Morgentraum – i.e. exactly the sort of communicable dream that Schopenhauer, and later Wagner, had talked about.
§
Nonetheless, I have my reservations about the use of the Meistersinger scene here.
The scene is placed in direct logical continuity with the first illustration of the Apollonian ide, from Lucretius
quippe etenim iam tum divum mortalia saecla
egregias animo facies vigilante videbant
et magis in somnis mirando corporis auctu.
his igitur sensum tribuebant propterea quod
membra movere videbantur vocesque superbas
mittere pro facie praeclara et viribus amplis
Even then in sooth the races of mortal men would see in waking mind glorious forms,
would see them in sleep of yet more marvelous size of body.
To these then they would attribute sense,
because they seemed to move their limbs and to utter lofty words suitable to their glorious aspect and surpassing powers.
And they would give them life everlasting, because their face would ever appear before them and their form abide.
§
It seems to me that what is principally established here is the notion of the passivity and receptivity of the Apollonian artist.
If a certain Christian pathos is added to it, what Lucretius evokes here recalls, it seems to me, nothing so much as “the soul resting in peace” captured by Johann Georg Jacobi, brother of the more famous philosopher, in a poem belonging to a body of work which – though it was scorned, it seems, by the other literati of the Goethezeit – certainly went to create some beautiful Lieder by Schubert and others:
Und die nie der Sonne lachten,
Unterm Mond auf Dornen wachten,
Gott, im reinen Himmelslicht,
Einst zu sehn von Angesicht
§
The Meistersinger passage, as I say, follows directly on from this, implying an identical passivity and receptivity.
But although the cited words do, of course, appear in the Meistersinger scene, it is a complete misrepresentation of it to present it as an exposition of the “passive / visionary” understanding of art.
The whole gist and pathos of this scene is Sachs’s weaning of Walter off such a vision and a teaching him to respect activity and artificiality in art.
The main gist of what Sachs imparts to Walther in this scene is not a doctrine of “poet as seer” but rather runs directly contrary to this vision.
The moment Auftun (“revelation”) here is driven very much into the background by the moment of deuten and werken, which is the real essence and substance of what Sachs has to teach the younger man.
Sachs, in what he says to von Stolzing, strips away so much of the element of oneiric vision and inspiration that the young man is inspired to ask:
So wär’s nicht Traum, doch Dichterei?
§
The philosophy of artistic creation expounded in Die Meistersinger is actually, taken as a whole, a convincing defence of intellectualism and intellectual artifice – things that Nietzsche can be construed as taking sides against right from the start of this book of 1872, which opens with a contrasting of “logical insight” with “immediate intuition” which seems very much in favour of the latter.
The scene in which Hans Sachs teaches Walther von Stolzing how to make a poem out of a dream is in fact perhaps the greatest testimony in Wagner’s whole oeuvre to his towering genius, since it is a profoundly romantic defence of anti-romantic values.
The humility that we hear in lines like
Das waren hoch bedürft’ge Meister,
von Lebensmüh’ bedrängte Geister:
in ihrer Nöten Wildnis
sie schufen sich ein Bildnis,
dass ihnen bliebe
der Jugendliebe
ein Angedenken, klar und fest,
d’ran sich der Lenz erkennen lässt
is the humility that also expresses itself as Sachs’s yielding of Eva to the younger man: a humility derived from that of the knightly lover in “courtly love”, the practice that forms the very core of the Romantic Age in a sense of the term, equivalent to the Middle Ages, that has really only survived in architectural terminology.[1]
It is a defence of classicism and classicist intellectualism nonetheless – and is thus a sort of anticipation (clearly unconscious at the time) of the rejection of The Birth of Tragedy’s romanticism enunciated fifteen years later in the 1886 preface.
TWO
§
Now let us look at the paragraphs describing the Dionysian.
In the same place Schopenhauer also described for us the tremendous awe which seizes a man when he suddenly doubts his ways of comprehending illusion, when the principle of reason, in any one of its forms, appears to suffer from an exception. If we add to this awe the ecstatic rapture, which rises up out of the same collapse of the principium individuationis from the innermost depths of a human being, indeed, from the innermost depths of nature, then we have a glimpse into the essence of the Dionysian, which is presented to us most closely through the analogy to intoxication.
Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the bond between man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, no matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation with her prodigal son, man…If someone were to transform Beethoven’s Ode to Joy into a painting and not restrain his imagination when millions of people sink dramatically into the dust, then we could come close to the Dionysian. Now the slave a free man; now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power or “saucy fashion” have established between men. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united with his neighbour, reconciled and fused together, but also as one with him... Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community... The enchantment speaks out in his gestures. Just as the animals now speak and the earth gives milk and honey, so something supernatural also echoes out of him: he feels himself a god; he himself now moves in as lofty and ecstatic a way as he saw the gods move in his dream. The man is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art: the artistic power of all of nature, to the highest rhapsodic satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals itself here in the transports of intoxication. The finest clay, the most expensive marble — man — is here worked and chiselled, and the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries rings out to the chisel blows of the Dionysian world artist: “Do you fall down, you millions? World, do you have a sense of your creator?”
§
It is a complex, subtle passage.
There is a reference back to Lucretius and the Apollonian
he feels himself a god; he himself now moves in as lofty and ecstatic a way as he saw the gods move in his dream.
§
There is also here a further, more specific indication that Nietzsche was under the spell of Wagner’s essay of 1870 as he wrote this paragraph:
Nietzsche adopts here the (contested) text of the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth that Wagner makes a point of endorsing in his essay:
now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power or “saucy fashion” have established between men.
jetzt zerbrechen alle die starren, feindseligen Abgrenzungen, die Noth, Willkür oder „freche Mode“ zwischen den Menschen festgesetzt haben.
§
But the most remarkable thing about the passage is that, in moving beyond the idea
Man feels himself a god; he himself now moves in as lofty and ecstatic a way as he saw the gods move in his dream
to
Man is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art
Nietzsche takes us into regions that someone considering The Birth of Tragedy from the point of view of Nietzsche’s work as a whole has to view as decidedly non- and even anti-Nietzschean.
Very much to the fore here are phrases and images that we associate first and foremost with those forces and those ways of speaking that the Nietzsche of the 1880s despised and dismissed as “tarantulas” (see the chapter of this name in Zarathustra):
“the bond between man and man”, “the freeing of slaves” and the breaking down of all divisions of order and rank, “a global gospel of harmony”.[2]
§
Now, one might initially be tempted to put this early fall into something like slave morality down to the influence of Wagner.
Wagner, it is true, is associated today with a “right-wing” culture that rejects – or is at least generally taken (by those who don’t look too closely) to have rejected and to reject – this harmonistic, “all-in-one-ist”, anti-hierarchical vision.
But it does in fact make much more sense for Wagner to endorse these ideas than it does for Nietzsche to endorse them.
Especially if we accept Nietzsche’s characterization of it, Wagner’s life is a kind of great circle or uroboros in which the head of a certain unitarian-egalitarian “All-in-One-ism” eventually swallows its own tail.
Wagner’s thought and creativity begin in a certain Left-Hegelian social revolutionism (admittedly with a racist/nationalist colouring) and end in a “taking of the knee before the Cross” (which for Nietzsche, whose description of the aged Wagner of “Parsifal” this is, is just the embrace of “socialism” under another form).
§
The interesting thing, though, is that – as far as I am aware, at least – Wagner does not anywhere expound a vision of orgiastic collective ecstasy such as the one expounded here by Nietzsche at the end of the first chapter of The Birth of Tragedy as part of his initial description of the Dionysian.
If any place in Wagner’s works called for such an exposition, it would have been the Beethoven monograph that preceded Nietzsche’s book by two years.
He speaks here at length about the Ninth – but what he says about it is not al all “orgiastic”; it is rather very restrained and precise.
He devotes many lines, as I have said, to that very fine detail of the various revisions and re-revisions, by Schiller
§
The problem, then, is not that of whether the former socialist Wagner exerted any influence on Nietzsche which pushed him here in a collectivist / egalitarian / “leftist” direction.
The problem should rather be that of how both men responded to, and developed, the Schopenhauerian metaphysics which they had both, separately and independently, embraced.
(It is an important part of Nietzsche’s biography that it was not Wagner that brought him to Schopenhauer. On the contrary, it was Nietzsche’s discovery, on first meeting Wagner toward the end of his period in Leipzig in November 1868 (just a few months before taking up his Basel professorship), that Wagner too was an avid reader of the philosopher he had discovered in a Leipzig bookshop at the start of his studies there, in October 1865, that really sealed the attraction of the younger man to the older one).
The Schopenhauerian metaphysic is indisputably “left-coded” – if we construe the notion “left” in the broadest cosmic sense of a propensity to “All-in-One-ness”.
Schopenhauer sees, indeed, the notion of “the Will as world-essence” as a negative thing, much like what the Hindus call samsara.
But the fact that all things – all animate and even apparently inanimate entities – are sunk in this negative condition by their very nature provides an ontological foundation for the “slave-moral” “All-in-One-ist” ethics that I have alluded to above and that we certainly see in the final paragraph of the first chapter of The Birth of Tragedy.
§
Contrary to the conclusion one might be inclined to jump to, given the background of Wagner’s intellectual origins in the Left-Hegelian socialism of the 1840s, Wagner seems to have resisted rather better than Nietzsche the “leftist” gravitational force of this Schopenhauerian metaphysic.
We see here the elements of a “left Nietzscheanism” of a different nature from the “left Nietzscheanism” that has grown up on the basis of the development of a quite different component element of Nietzsche’s thought – the “critique of truth per se” which is only difficultly discernible in this work of 1872 – since the 1970s.
Such a collectivistic “Dionysian socialism” did have its day, though, in the cultural artefacts of the 1900-1920 period which seem so quaint, indeed almost surreal and incomprehensible, to us today but that earned Nietzsche classification, during that period, as “one of the new socialist authors”.
§
These “left Nietzschean” works of the 1900s and 1910s were, of course, distortions of Nietzsche and involved a wilful looking away from much that he wrote in his late, best period.
But this passage from The Birth of Tragedy gives a clear indication of the collectivist/egalitarian thinker that Nietzsche might have become if he had maintained his allegiance to the Schopenhauerian metaphysic.
That Nietzsche saved himself from this was a function, of course, of his substitution, after the end of the 1870s, of Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of the Will” with a “metaphysics of the Will to Power”.
§
But we touch here, of course, on one of the most vexed and nuanced questions of Nietzsche scholarship.
It is, indeed, certainly the case that Nietzsche was, at least for by far the greater part of his intellectual career, attempting to carry out just such a substitution.
Since the earliest of the Pre-Socratics the form of the essential question of philosophy has always been:
“what is the universe (made of)?”
And do ye know what “the universe” is to my mind?
Nearly three thousand years later, Schopenhauer seemed ready and willing to have his philosophy forced into the narrow framework of an answer to this question.
He wrote, in a line he left behind among his unpublished notes
Meine ganze Philosophie läßt sich zusammenfassen in dem einen Ausdruck: die Welt ist die Selbsterkenntnis des Willens.
My whole philosophy can be summed up as ‘the world is the Will’s knowing of itself’.
Nietzsche appears not to refuse this same question. The famous passage of his that his sister took, likewise from his unpublished notes, and made the concluding passage of what she presented as his magnum opus is longer but begins with the Pre-Socratic question:
And do ye know what “the universe” is to my mind?
It concludes
This world is the Will to Power — and nothing else! And even ye yourselves are this will to power — and nothing besides!
§
Considered in these terms, Nietzsche would have saved his thought from the collectivist/egalitarian consequences of the metaphysic of “the Will” by creating, with the metaphysic of “the Will to Power”, a worldview whereby the individual entity is endowed with some quality that prevents its subsumption in this orgiastic “All-in-One-ism” evoked at the end of the first chapter of The Birth of Tragedy.
But the problem can also be considered in other terms.
A significant measure of plausibility has to be conceded to the argument – very popular among recent Nietzsche scholars – that Nietzsche ought not to have yielded to the temptation to prove himself the equal of Schopenhauer, Kant or Plato by playing the same (metaphysical) game as they did.
Nietzsche was actually – so runs the argument of many post-Montinarian Nietzsche commentators – in the course of creating a new question for philosophy distinct from this question that had defined it for three millennia. But a failure of nerve – or a sense of a need to “prove himself” by standards hallowed by time – led to his attempting to create another “system” in the classical form.
§
These questions are too deep and complex for us to try to do justice to them here.
I think, though, that we can get some useful perspective on them by taking up a vantage point at the opposite end of Nietzsche’s short – but, considered in terms of the number of radical intellectual evolutions gone through, also very long – authorial career: namely in that “great time of harvest” of 1888, which produced such works as The Antichrist, Ecce Homo and The Wagner Case.
We perhaps cannot say for certain whether it was because, at this point, Nietzsche had moved beyond metaphysics (in the sense of “yet another answer to the Pre-Socratic question”) altogether or whether it was because he had succeeded in formulating a metaphysics that avoided the pitfall of all previous metaphysics, namely the reduction of the world to one or another form of the “All-in-One”.
But the fact certainly is, in any case, that the philosophical contributions he has to make, in this last active year of 1888, to the understanding of musical artworks are of an entirely qualitatively different nature from those which he had made in 1872.
The difference certainly has, if not everything, then at least very much, to do with the abandonment of this idea, fundamental to The Birth of Tragedy, that the creation of a work of art is an essentially metaphysical activity and that the artwork is a window to be looked through into some single Ground of Being that is of a nature entirely different from the (on the surface) various and human concerns of the work itself.
The many pages that Nietzsche wrote on Bizet’s Carmen, for example, in the final months of his life – but also what he writes of Wagner in The Wagner Case and of Brahms in the Second Postscript to this book – clearly adopt a line of ontological orientation that is radically different from this.
It might perhaps be hoped that this line is susceptible of identification with the line that Walter Benjamin took half a century later in the section of his Origin of German Tragic Drama in which he takes critical issue with the philosophy of art of The Birth of Tragedy, particularly with the proposition that I have especially highlighted above to the effect that
In the Dionysian artwork “Man is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art”.
Benjamin in fact cites a later, more expatiatory formulation of this idea from the fifth chapter of The Birth of Tragedy (one that comprises a proposition that has become one of Nietzsche’s most famous – and is indeed, arguably, as applicable to his mature thought as it is to this product of the thinking of his youth in which it initially occurs).
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. 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.
Benjamin then goes on to critique this in the following words:
The abyss of aestheticism opens up, and this intuition of genius in the end lost all its concepts to it, so gods and heroes, defiance and suffering—the pillars of the tragic edifice—evaporate into nothing. Where art occupies the center of existence, to the point that the human being is made into a manifestation of art instead of being recognized precisely as its ground—human existence as the eternal theme of its creations rather than man as creator—then it is over with sober reflection altogether.
[1] The under-interpretation seems odd, because Nietzsche knew die Meistersinger well. In a letter of this year to his mother and sister, describing his move to Basel to take up his professorial chair, he tells of how, encountering on his journey some students who were on their way to Karlsruhe to see a production of Die Meistersinger, he impulsively decided to join them, putting off his arrival in Basel to the next day. Here he writes: Dieser Lockung konnte ich nicht widerstehen: ich stieg aus, ließ mein Billet auch für den nächsten Tag als gültig erklären und erquickte mich Abends an einer vortrefflichen Aufführung dieser meiner Lieblingsoper.
[2] This although we also discover, indeed, if we look with an eye adjusted to this intent, fore-echoes in this passage of the Nietzsche who “philosophized with a hammer” of the latter half of the 1880s: the pitiless “former of the raw material Man”.
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