nietzsche's idea of myth, by benjamin bennett

Nietzsche's Idea of Myth: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Eighteenth-CenturyAestheticsAuthor(s): Benjamin BennettReviewed work(s):Source: PMLA, Vol. 94, No. 3 (May, 1979), pp. 420-433Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461929 .Accessed: 23/09/2012 12:13

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BENJAMIN BENNETT

Nietzsche's Idea of Myth: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

I

IT IS NOT surprising that The Birth of Tragedy has been read with something of an anthropo- logical bias, as if it were an attempt to explain

the origin of art or of culture in general, for it was published in the midst of the great nine-

teenth-century development of anthropology as a science, and Nietzsche himself later boasted of

having "discovered" the Dionysian. The strength of this bias can be measured by its effect even on Walter Kaufmann, who sets out specifically to show that the Dionysian is not the sole principal focus of The Birth of Tragedy. Basing his argument quite plausibly on Nietzsche's treatment of

"Dionysian barbarians,"' Kaufmann maintains that Nietzsche, if forced to choose, would "favor" the Apollonian over the Dionysian because the latter, taken by itself, is in essence a "destructive disease." But there is obviously something wrong here, for Nietzsche also expresses direct scorn for the opinion that the Dionysian orgies of

Babylon were mere "Volkskrankheiten" 'cultural sicknesses' (Ch. i, p. 25). The text, to be sure, presents certain difficulties: although Nietzsche denies that the Dionysian is essentially pathological, he also notes that pre-Hellenic Dionysian festivals tended toward sheer bestiality, toward "that abominable mixture of lasciviousness and

cruelty which has always seemed to me the true 'witches' brew'" (Ch. ii, p. 28). But there is

nothing to justify coming down as firmly on one side of the question as Kaufmann does, or as those critics whom he opposes had done before him.

The difficulty here, which hinges on the idea of what the Dionysian is "essentially," is re- solved easily enough once we understand the an-

thropological assumption that Kaufmann receives uncritically from his tradition, the

assumption that cultural movements are most

nearly pure, closest to their essence, in their oldest or most primitive manifestations. The

Dionysian appears as mere licentiousness before it appears as art; therefore it is in essence licen- tious, a chaotic force that must be modified before it can have positive cultural value. This is Kaufmann's reasoning, but it is not Nietzsche's, and its premise represents a serious error. For Nietzsche, the pure and the primitive are not identical but tend, in fact, to be opposed. This much, I think, he learned from Hegel and the

Hegelians; the Dionysian, in its early manifestations, is not pure, does not show its ultimate essence, any more than the early manifestations of Spirit represent pure Spirit for Hegel. Nietz- sche says specifically that, like the Apollonian, the

Dionysian is a "kiinstlerische Macht" 'artistic

power' or "Kunsttrieb" 'art drive' and therefore has "revealed" its true nature ("sich . . . offenbarte") only in art, only in its later forms (Ch. ii, pp. 26-28); he is repelled by the primitive manifestations of the Dionysian precisely because they are not yet pure, but, because they hold promise, he is unwilling to characterize them as a "disease." The Apollonian and the

Dionysian are related by "mutual necessity" (Ch. iv, p. 35), not in the sense that they modify each other, but in the sense that they intensify each other ("sich gegenseitig steigernd"), so that the whole essence of each may be revealed (Ch. iv, p. 37); and this idea is in turn indis-

pensable in Nietzsche's general argument that Greek tragedy represents "the culmination of the Apollonian as well as the Dionysian artistic aims" (Ch. xxiv, p. 146). The Apollonian and the Dionysian are not born pure but, rather, become pure-they "become what they are," in a favorite phrase of both Hegel and Nietzsche-

through their historical development and inter- action.

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This point has a special bearing on Nietz- sche's idea of myth, for in regard to myth we tend almost automatically to associate the pure with the primitive. Perhaps we can understand Nietzsche's idea most easily by comparing it with Cassirer's in Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Cassirer's thinking, though based on a sound knowledge of the anthropology of his time, takes a more comprehensive view of man than does most technical anthropology, and Cas- sirer is of course aware of Nietzsche. Therefore, when Cassirer argues that there is a stage in cultural development at which myth no longer happens,' he apparently implies a scientific and

philosophical refutation of Nietzsche's specula- tions concerning a "rebirth" of the mythical (Ch. xxiii, p. 143), and this refutation seems to be generally accepted. The recent French

philosopher-critics, for example, rescue the

mythical in Nietzsche only by reducing it to an effect of the practice of metaphor; and Jaspers, in order to systematize Nietzsche's thinking, simply abandons the idea of the mythical in all but a very limited sense.3

My first main point is not that Cassirer is

wrong but rather that his idea of myth (and the normal idea of myth in anthropology) is irrele- vant to The Birth of Tragedy. I will argue that with regard to the idea of myth, as well as to the

concept of the Dionysian, the pure and the primitive are distinct for Nietzsche and that Nietzsche's idea of myth belongs not to the history of

anthropology but rather to the history of aesthetics, as a direct development of eighteenth- century thinking on the phenomenon of artistic illusion.4

II

It is in Chapters xxiii and xxiv of The Birth of Tragedy that Nietzsche comes closest to an an-

thropological definition of myth. We read there that before the advent of Socratism the Greeks had been "compelled involuntarily to associate all experience instantly with their myths, indeed to comprehend experience solely via this association, whereupon even the immediate present necessarily appeared to them sub specie aeterni and in a sense as timeless" (Ch. xxiii, p. 143).

Myth, moreover, is spoken of as "unconscious

metaphysics" (Ch. xxiii, p. 144); the term

"mythical homeland," which suggests the autoch- thonous and preconscious, is used twice (Ch. xxiii, p. 145; Ch. xxiv, p. 150); and Nietzsche also talks of a "rebirth of the German myth" (Ch. xxiii, p. 143), which he appears to con- ceive as an atavistic awakening of belief in Wotan and company (Ch. xxiv, p. 150). Taken

together with the earlier discussion of a characteristic "Aryan" myth, the myth of Prome- theus as created by "a naive mankind" (Ch. ix, p. 65), all this seems to expose Nietzsche to the

charge of promulgating a mystical anthropology that flouts simple logic, let alone scientific method. If myth is an unconscious Schopen- hauerian metaphysics, how can it be reborn in an age conscious of Schopenhauer? If myth renders experience timeless, how can it be reborn in the era of Hegel and historicism?

The rest of the text seems only to add to these

problems. If we ask, for example, precisely who the "naive" creators of myths were, we are puz- zled to find that Nietzsche goes out of his way to

deny the applicability of the term "naive" to Homer and the myths of the Olympians (Ch. iii, pp. 33-34). Moreover, he repeatedly refers to

myths as "Exempel" 'exempla' (Ch. iii, p. 32; Ch. xvi, p. 103; Ch. xvii, p. 108) illustrating some distinguishable general truth-a notion that directly contradicts the idea of "unconscious metaphysics," at least if we take the latter as more or less equivalent to Cassirer's idea that in myth the image and the meaning are entirely undistinguishable. Indeed, Nietzsche speaks ex-

plicitly of the "Inhalt" 'content' of a myth as distinct from the myth itself (Ch. ix, p. 62; Ch. x, p. 70), and he once even uses the word

"Mythus" to refer to the allegorical vehicle by which Euripides expresses a conscious opinion about religion and art (Ch. xii, p. 78).5

There are other problems as well. When Nietzsche commits himself to a specific idea of how modern culture will develop historically, when he says "that we are experiencing by anal-

ogy the great main epochs of Greece, but as it were in reverse order, that now, for example, we

appear to be progressing from the Alexandrian

age backward toward the period of tragedy" (Ch. xix, p. 124), he seems to be talking mere nonsense. This statement conflicts, at least, with the idea that ours is a "mythless existence" (Ch. xxiv, p. 149) and the idea that myth in turn is

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the indispensable condition of a culture's

"healthy, creative natural power" (Ch. xxiii, p. 141). How shall we produce tragedy without first possessing this creative power? Is it possible for tragedy to precede myth in history? Or is German critical philosophy-that "in Begriffe gefasste dionysische Weisheit" 'Dionysian wisdom in conceptual form' (Ch. xix, p. 124) which itself seems to be a contradiction in terms -somehow able to carry out myth's function? At least Nietzsche appears relatively modest about his own position in intellectual history; he does not claim to exercise as a thinker the

"myth-creating power" of music (Ch. xvii, pp. 107-09); rather, he concedes freely that his

undertaking belongs to the realm of "aestheti- sche Wissenschaft" 'aesthetic science' (Ch. i, p. 21)-if this, too, is not a contradiction in terms.Y Perhaps science itself somehow includes a latent mythical power; Nietzsche in fact does at one point use the word "Mythus" to refer to a set of significant images that serves the "sublime

metaphysical delusion" of science (Ch. xv, p. 95), the belief that scientific method can master the whole of existence. But how shall we recon- cile this aspect of myth with the idea of "the

ceaselessly forward-thrusting spirit of science"

by which "myth is annihilated" (Ch. xvii, p. 107)?

We can deal eventually with all these problems if we hold fast to one basic point, that the

pure and the primitive are distinct concepts. Clearly Nietzsche admits the existence of primitive myth, produced by "naive mankind," but the later development of myth in conscious art is an intensification, not a modification, of the es-

sentially mythical; in conscious art, myth becomes more fully itself. The Olympian myths, for example, achieve their proper being only in the complex artificiality of the Homeric poems, even though they do not originate there; and

myth then attains still higher perfection, its maximum mythicalness, its "deepest content," in the art of tragedy (Ch. x, p. 70). Nietzsche

says:

Die metaphysische Freude am Tragischen ist eine Uebersetzung der instinctiv unbewussten diony- sischen Weisheit in die Sprache des Bildes.

The metaphysical joy awakened by the tragic is a translation of Dionysian wisdom, the consciousness

of which had been instinctively suppressed, into the idiom of imagery. (Ch. xvi, p. 104)7

And this translation toward increased consciousness is effected by "die Befahigung der Musik, den Mythus d.h. das bedeutsamste Exempel zu

gebaren" 'the ability of music to give birth to

myth, i.e., to the most significant exemplum' (Ch. xvi, p. 103). Thus myth is born-appears, in other words, on an unprecedented level of

purity-in a sophisticated art form, where it contributes to philosophical consciousness by providing visible illustrative examples of the truth. Here we also think of the ideas of "symbol" and "symbolism," terms Nietzsche uses pri- marily with reference to tragedy (e.g., Ch. viii, pp. 58-59; Ch. xvi, p. 104) and defines

quite exactly in an earlier essay, "Die dionysische Weltanschauung": "Now, in tragedy, the truth is symbolized, it makes use of appearance. ... Appearance is now decidedly not enjoyed as

appearance [als Schein], but as a symbol, a sign for the truth" (Werke, Pt. IIi, Vol. II [1973], p. 63). Myth is most powerful in tragedy precisely because we are no longer caught up in the mythical image itself (in "Schein als Schein," in the

Apollonian) but, rather, see through it in the direction of truth; this separation of image and

meaning is an indication for Cassirer that myth is dead, whereas for Nietzsche it is nothing of the kind.

I do not mean that Nietzsche is disputing what later became Cassirer's idea of myth; I wish merely to show how Nietzsche uses the word and how important this usage is if we are to make sense out of The Birth of Tragedy. Again, primitive myth does exist, but myth as

employed in sophisticated, "symbolic" art forms is more profound and intense, more nearly pure, than in its primitive phase. Myth, like the Di-

onysian that generates it, is essentially an artistic

phenomenon, revealing its whole nature only gradually, in the development of art. Thus, if modern Germans produce "true" music (Ch. xvii, p. 109), there is no special reason why such music should not generate true myth, and it is even conceivable that a new mythical content

might appear "under the old mythical cloak" of Germanic legend (Ch. x, p. 69), filling the

legends with new life and meaning in the same

way that music reinterpreted and revitalized the

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"moribund myths" of Greece (Ch. x, p. 70). But if myth is essentially art and is fully itself

only in conscious art forms, how shall we ac- count for primitive, or "naive," myth? We must

distinguish somehow among levels of artistic in-

tensity, and a method of doing this is suggested clearly by the underlying metaphysics of The Birth of Tragedy:

Hier zeigt sich das Dionysische, an dem Apollini- schen gemessen, als die ewige und urspriingliche Kunstgewalt, die iiberhaupt die ganze Welt der Erscheinung in's Dasein ruft.

[At its philosophical deepest,] the Dionysian, measured against the Apollonian, appears as the eternal and original artistic power that calls the whole phenomenal world into existence.

(Ch. xxv, pp. 150-51)

That is to say, reality itself, the whole world as we experience it, is essentially art. This is Nietz- sche's version of the Schopenhauerian proposition "The world is my idea," and this is what Nietzsche means earlier when he says that "nur als aesthetisches Phinomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt" 'only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence, or the world, eternally justified' (Ch. v, p. 43). Our normal relation to existence, our taking of the world as

"plumpe Wirklichkeit" 'gross reality' (Ch. i, p. 24) rather than as beautiful artistic illusion, is a false relation (or, in Nietzsche's careful termi-

nology, an "unjustifiable" relation), and the

general function of myth, as a "concentrated world image" or "abbreviation of the phenomenal" (Ch. xxiii, p. 141), is to correct this relation by referring reality to an artistically ordered structure; myth serves in this way even in its

primitive phase, when its structure is not yet rec-

ognized as an artistic creation. Hence myth becomes most fully itself, fulfills its function most

effectively, in conscious art, when it becomes

"symbol," an illusion we enjoy while seeing through it toward the truth it expresses; for in this form myth awakens in us the truest possible relation to the phenomenal in general. It teaches, by analogy with its own nature, that the whole

phenomenal world is only the created, artificial

symbol of a generating truth behind it.8 Myth is thus basically the same in both its primitive and its revealed forms; it is the measure of our aesthetic relation to reality, of our ability to take

the world as an "aesthetic phenomenon," and its

development might be called the aesthetic educa- tion of man.

To put it differently, our relation to reality is

normally passive, whereas our relation to art is active, or at least voluntary. Reality is normally thought of as a given, which we must accept and deal with on its terms, whereas a work of art, being the product of a human volition and inten- tion like our own, is more subject to our judgment; if we accept it, we do so voluntarily, so that our acceptance becomes an image of the act of creation itself.9 The function of myth, in other words, is to place us in an active or artistic relation even to reality, and this idea in turn reminds us of Nietzsche's later doctrine of amor fati or of Schiller's idea that existence must be overcome by an act of free affirmation.10 Myth is thus not properly an object of belief, and in fact Nietzsche makes the point that an insistence on the "credibility" of myth is a sign that the

myth is dead (Ch. x, p. 70). We must relate to

myth not as believers but as conscious creators, and the myth itself must therefore be pliable, responsive to the creative intent of different indi- viduals. Here we think of the liberties taken by Sophocles or the explicit choice made by Pindar, in the First Olympian, between available myths of Pelops. The state of belonging to a mythical culture and understanding existence in terms of one's myths is thus not really a state at all but, rather, a constantly renewed act of artistic creation: 1

jene ganze Philosophie des Waldgottes . . . wurde von den Griechen durch jene kinstlerische Mittel- welt der Olympier fortwihrend von Neuem uber- wunden [last emphasis mine].

that whole pessimistic philosophy of the sylvan god [Silenus' pessimism] was conquered over and over again, for the Greeks, by the artistic mediating world of the Olympians. (Ch. iii, p. 32)

For the Greeks, even the process of sitting in a theater and watching was a repeated creative act, not a state: "in several successive discharges the dramatic vision is emitted by this ultimate

ground of the tragedy [i.e., the Dionysian energy of the chorus, hence of the rapt audience as well]" (Ch. viii, p. 58). Indeed, existence itself is a repeated creative act, not merely a state in which we find ourselves; existence is "eine in

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jedem Moment erzeugte Vorstellung des Ur- Einen" 'an ideation created in every instant by the Original One' (Ch. iv, p. 35), and in the

tragic theater we sense for a moment that "we are in truth that Original Being [Urwesen] itself" (Ch. xvii, p. 105), that the repeated act of creation can be regarded as our own.

Hence the opposition between myth and science. In essence science is a form of art, a creative, world-shaping activity; but it is an art that denies its own nature by conceiving of itself as the pure passive reception of facts, and so it hinders the development of myth as myth. In

merely experiencing the world, man is always essentially an artist or mythmaker, and the de-

velopment from primitive myth toward conscious art, toward myth's achieved consciousness of itself as myth, is thus man's development toward himself. This idea of development, moreover, as I have suggested, is clearly a Hegelian feature of Nietzsche's thought.

Let us note, however, that, although image and meaning tend to separate as myth culminates in conscious art, there are definite limits on how far this separation can go:

Zugleich aber miissen wir zugeben, dass die vorhin aufgestellte Bedeutung des tragischen Mythus den griechischen Dichtern, geschweige den griechischen Philosophen, niemals in begrifflicher Deutlichkeit durchsichtig geworden ist; ihre Helden sprechen gewissermaassen oberflachlicher als sie handeln; der Mythus findet in dem gesprochenen Wort durchaus nicht seine adaquate Objectivation. Das Gefiige der Scenen und die anschaulichen Bilder offenbaren eine tiefere Weisheit, als der Dichter selbst in Worte und Begriffe fassen kann.

At the same time, however, we must concede that the meaning of the tragic myth, as set forth above, never became conceptually clear or transparent for the Greek poets, let alone the Greek philosophers; to an extent their heroes speak more superficially than they act; the myth by no means receives an adequate objectification in the spoken word. In the drama the visible images and the structure of scenes reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself is able to grasp in words and concepts.

(Ch. xvii, pp. 105-06)

Now it is by no means immediately obvious what is meant here by the poet's inability to

"grasp" (fassen) his meaning verbally; surely Nietzsche has not forgotten that what he himself

quotes as the age-old Dionysian wisdom of Sile- nus (Ch. iii, p. 31) is stated explicitly in the best- known chorus of Oedipus at Colonus.12 We shall return to this passage from Nietzsche later and attempt to resolve the difficulty, but for the time being, at least one important problem in his

thinking on myth is clear. Myth necessarily im-

plies a historical tendency toward separation between image and meaning, as part of its increas-

ing consciousness of itself as artificial structure; at the same time, however, it is for some reason

impossible, or at least impermissible, even at the pinnacle of conscious art in tragedy, to demand an exact verbal formulation of the work's mean-

ing. And the very existence of this problem, again, is a measure of the distance between Nietzsche's idea of myth and Cassirer's.

III

It is evident that, at least in the abstract, there is an important parallel between Nietzsche's idea of myth and the idea of artistic illusion. Al-

though myth, as a "concentrated world image," represents reality for us, it is not merely a deci-

pherable allegory. The Homeric myths are a

"mediating world" placed between ourselves and existence for the specific purpose of concealing the true horror of our condition; and even in

tragic myth, where image and meaning are most

separate, the poet still cannot "grasp" verbally the truth behind what he envisions. Thus, by representing reality for us, myth in a strong sense is our reality; myth is the image that protects us from the despair of direct metaphysical knowledge (Ch. iii, pp. 31-32)-or, in tragic myth (which is also a "mediating world" [Ch. xxiv, p. 146]), from the overwhelming metaphysical power of the music-and so makes life possible. Essentially, then, myth is the world we live in.

To this extent myth requires that we take it as

reality. At the same time, however, Nietzsche

argues that it is not a reality we believe in but, rather, the product of a constantly renewed creative act on our part, so that we necessarily remain aware of its artificiality. This combination of active involvement and critical awareness is what myth has in common with artistic illusion. Nietzsche uses the analogy of dreams to make

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the point that, even when we are most deeply immersed in Apollonian illusion, we still experience "die durchschimmernde Empfindung ihres Scheins" 'the glimmering feeling of its illusoriness' (Ch. i, p. 22); in the midst of the dream we know that "It is a dream [and] wish to con- tinue dreaming it!" (Ch. i, p. 23; Ch. iv, p. 34); "that fine line which the dream image may not

overstep without becoming pathological-for then the illusion begins to deceive us as gross reality-that fine line is indispensable in the fig- ure of Apollo" (Ch. i, p. 24). This limitation on the extent to which we may be deluded applies interchangeably to myth and to the individual artwork; and it is clearest of all in tragic myth, which depends for its existence on our intense awareness of a truth deeper than that of the

image. The tragic image, the myth as generated by the music, "seemed to reveal Something, as well as to conceal it"; although we are absorbed in its "totally illuminated visibility," we also ex-

perience a longing "beyond our own gaze," a

longing in the direction of hidden truth (Ch. xxiv, p. 146). Myth, therefore-at least in its more fully developed Apollonian and tragic stages-is essentially artistic illusion, an illusion to which we submit while still knowing it to be mere illusion, and it is significant that what Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy about

myth as the precondition of cultural creativity is almost exactly what he says about artistic illusion in "Die dionysische Weltanschauung" (Werke, Pt. III, Vol. ii, p. 53).

This is more than a fortuitous similarity of ideas. In fact Nietzsche's notion of myth occu-

pies an important place in the history of the idea of artistic illusion, as we can begin to see by understanding how deeply The Birth of Tragedy is influenced by Schiller's aesthetics. Not only does Nietzsche affirm and develop the thinking of Schiller's "Ober den Gebrauch des Chors in der Trag6die" (Ch. vii, pp. 50-51), not only does he examine the concepts "naYve" and "sen- timental" (Ch. ii, p. 29, for the latter), not only does the incipient idea of amor fati recall a cen- tral argument in Schiller's Uber die iisthetische

Erziehung des Menschen and in the essay "Uber das Erhabene," but in fact the whole idea of "Der sch6ne Schein" 'beautiful illusion,' as Nietzsche uses it, is obviously Schillerian (Ch. i, p. 22 et passim). Moreover, the extremely im-

portant idea of myth or illusion as a constantly renewed creative act seems to owe something to Schiller's argument that the "reality of things is the things' own work; the appearance of things is man's work, and by enjoying appearance, the mind no longer enjoys what it receives, but what it itself does" (Sikular-Ausgabe, xnI, 105). In- deed, Nietzsche's entire approach, the basing of aesthetics on a theory of constitutive "Triebe" 'drives' in human nature, is the same as that of Uber die dsthetische Erziehung; and the reciprocity, or mutual necessity, of Apollonian and

Dionysian is clearly similar to the relation between Schiller's "Formtrieb" 'form drive' and "Stofftrieb" 'substance drive.'13

Schiller's main concern in his essay on the chorus, however, as well as in his theory of art as "Spiel" 'play,' is to define the extent and nature of artistic illusion, a task Nietzsche carries a

step further in his idea of myth. The idea of illusion, as received by Schiller, is characteristic of eighteenth-century thought, at least since

Baumgarten, and is set forth most simply by Moses Mendelssohn:

If an imitation has so much similarity with its original that our senses can convince themselves at least for a moment that they are seeing the original itself, I term this deception an aesthetic illusion.

Poetic language must address itself wholly to our senses; therefore all poetic speech must illude us [illudiren] aesthetically.

In order to be beautiful, an imitation must illude us aesthetically; our higher mental faculties, however, must remain assured that it is an imitation, not nature itself.14

And the problem raised by the idea that the aim of poetry is to "illude" the lower or (etymologi- cally) "aesthetic" mental faculties, while the higher rational faculties remain exempt, is that it does not seem to allow poetry an immediate moral function. Even Lessing is not sure of his ground here;'" but Kant and later Schiller approach the problem with new intellectual tools, and for our purposes it is sufficient to recall the solution Schiller fastens on: that the submission to aesthetic illusion is in itself morally valuable because our reason, by finding itself elevated above the illusive power acting on our lower faculties, is reminded of the true freedom it pos- sesses even outside the sphere of art. We always are rationally free, in essence, but the function

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of artistic illusion is to engage us in a mental exercise by which we are specifically reminded of our freedom and so encouraged to act

morally. This idea occurs, at varying degrees of depth

and subtlety, in practically all Schiller's aesthetic

writings. In the essay "Uber den Grund des

Vergniigens an tragischen Gegenstanden," Schiller argues that the business of tragedy is to

plunge us so deeply into a direct experience of the actual perversity ("Zweckwidrigkeit") of the world that we are compelled to discover in ourselves the free moral purposefulness ("Zweck- maBigkeit") by which we are raised above the world and enabled to live humanly. In "Uber das Erhabene," it is our sense of the illusoriness of "the pathetic" that enables us to experience our inner independence from the "artificial misfortune" we find in art and thus helps us develop a moral facility ("Fertigkeit") for dealing with real misfortune. In the twenty-sixth letter of Uber die dsthetische Erziehung, Schiller argues that "aesthetic illusion" trains us to distinguish that area of our existence in which we are truly free. And, finally, in the essay on the chorus in tragedy, which Nietzsche treats directly, we read that art, by not really deceiving us, actually makes us free, places us in an active or creative relation to existence as a whole (Sakular- Ausgabe, xi, 147; xII, 279; xvi, 120).

This basic idea, that artistic illusion promotes freedom indirectly, is also present in The Birth of Tragedy, but in a parodied form. Nietzsche

argues that the function of the tragic myth is to distract us from the music, so that the music can

express its metaphysical essence with a freedom that would otherwise overpower us, not affect us. "The myth protects us from the music, just as, on the other hand, it provides music with its

highest freedom" (Ch. xxi, p. 130). Myth for Nietzsche, like artistic illusion for Schiller, is a kind of intellectual diversionary tactic that fos- ters freedom, but freedom of a radically different sort from Schiller's. Though he reads Schiller

attentively and receives from him the idea of artistic illusion, Nietzsche is not willing to accept the glorification of reason or the relegation of art to an ancillary status with respect to moral-

ity.16 And it is this "transvaluation" that Nietzsche

carries out by expanding the idea of artistic illu-

sion into the general cultural notion of myth. In Nietzsche's view, the higher, or truth-seeking, mental faculties tend not to raise and stabilize human existence but to destroy it. This is the "Hamlet-doctrine," that knowledge of truth de-

stroys the will to live; "In der Bewusstheit der einmal geschauten Wahrheit sieht jetzt der Mensch iiberall nur das Entsetzliche oder Ab- surde des Seins . . . jetzt erkennt er die Weisheit des Waldgottes Silen: es ekelt ihn" 'In the consciousness of truth, once he has beheld it, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurd-

ity of being . . . now he acknowledges the wisdom of the sylvan god Silenus: he is revolted' (Ch. vii, p. 53). Hence the absolute necessity of

myth or illusion in general; we simply cannot live without it. And hence the relationship between myth and artistic, or self-conscious, illusion; for if we were not always at least dimly conscious of the horrible truth, we would have no incentive to renew constantly that creative act by which we maintain the mythical image. Hence also myth's inexorable historical tendency toward greater consciousness of itself as art. If we suppose that primitive myth is not so much art as belief, then it must be a fragile belief, since it contradicts the horrible truth without en-

listing our creative energy in the struggle to sup- press that truth. Therefore, in order not to lose their life-giving protective belief, the adherents of primitive myth are eventually obliged to exert themselves as conscious artists; they then become more deeply aware of the truth than they had been earlier, owing to the more obvious dis-

crepancy between illusion and truth in conscious art, and must now exert themselves more

strongly still. In this way myth progresses histor-

ically toward "symbol" and, for the Greeks, culminates in tragedy, an art form in which the truth is too strongly present to be concealed and can be dealt with only by being liberated and affirmed in the joy of "metaphysical consolation" (Ch. vii, p. 52; Ch. xvii, p. 105). This de-

velopment is part of what Nietzsche means when he says that tragedy "committed suicide" (Ch. xi, p. 71); tragedy is art intensified to the point where it must display and affirm precisely that truth which it is the nature of art, from primitive myth on, to conceal.

But then why does Nietzsche not give us a detailed description of this historical process? In

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fact he does, in his discussion of the history of science, in connection with which, as we have noted, he once even uses the term "myth." The scientific attitude originates, with the "demon" Socrates (Ch. xii, p. 79), as an unfettered "natural power" (Ch. xiii, p. 87) that sweeps away the remains of Greek mythical art; it is a natural or an instinctive defense mechanism by which we are protected against the merciless confrontation with truth that would otherwise follow necessarily on the culmination and col-

lapse, the "suicide," of artistic illusion in tragedy. Socratism is not excessively self-conscious but, rather, insufficiently so; it is an eruption of pure instinct, of precisely that "naivete" (Ch. xiii, p. 87) which Nietzsche denies is present in Homer. Socratic optimism, the notion that all existence is ultimately knowable, thus has the character of

primitive myth: it is an illusion not cognizant of its illusoriness. But primitive myth, again, is by nature a fragile illusion; both Euripides in the Bacchae and Socrates in his dream (Ch. xii, pp. 78-79; Ch. xiv, p. 92) experience deep uncer-

tainty about their basic attitudes. And Nietzsche is careful to point out that only "in its lower

stages" (Ch. xv, p. 98) is Socratic optimism opposed to art, whereas the true destiny of Socra- tism, like that of earlier Greek myth, is the pro- duction of "a new art" and ultimately a tragic art of "metaphysical consolation" (Ch. xviii, p. 115). The intermediate stages of science's pro- gress from primitive myth to conscious art, moreover, are suggested in the discussion of "theoretical man" (Ch. xv, p. 94), who, when he is honest with himself, as Lessing was (Ch. xv, p. 95), recognizes that perfect knowledge is not desirable after all; thus science begins to realize its true mythical or self-consciously illu-

sory nature. We shall return to Nietzsche's idea of how the

new art will come about, but let us now hold the main point fast. What disturbs Nietzsche in the eighteenth-century view of artistic illusion is the idea of higher and lower mental faculties, an idea that for Schiller places art in the service of

morality. Nietzsche attempts to overcome this value judgment by seeing artistic illusion as a

special case of the general cultural phenomenon of myth, which in turn owes its existence to the

presence of a dangerous antivital tendency in the

supposedly higher (truth-seeking, as opposed to

image-making) mental faculties. Thus Nietz- sche's idea of myth really belongs to the history of aesthetics; it is an attempt to go further toward Schiller's avowed but not achieved goal, toward a conception of absolute validity and

necessity in art, a conception of art as the true

generating center of human existence, serving no

purpose higher than itself. And this point, it seems to me, deepens our sense of the historical

position not only of Nietzsche's own thought but also of various literary tendencies in which Nietzsche plays a significant role--turn-of-the-

century aestheticism, for example, and modern

literary mythopoeia in general.

IV

We are now ready to anchor the argument more firmly in Nietzsche's text by defining the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Nietzsche re-

peatedly stresses the absolute reciprocity of the two drives. They are, he says, mutually neces-

sary, so that if one weakens or vanishes, then the other does too: "And since you, Euripides, abandoned Dionysus, Apollo abandoned you as well" (Ch. x, p. 71). They are also mutually intensifying, so that each increase or purification of one is accompanied by a similar development in the other; it is on this assumption that Nietz- sche bases his faith for the future: "Where

Dionysian forces make themselves felt as tem-

pestuously as in our experience, there also

Apollo, wrapped in a cloud, must already have descended among us; surely the next few genera- tions will behold his most opulently beautiful ef- fects" (Ch. xxv, p. 151). Apollonian art does not now flourish in our culture, but the existence of

Dionysian stirrings implies that Apollo must be here in some latent form.

It is not immediately apparent, however, how this absolute reciprocity is derived from the definitions of the drives. Nietzsche speaks of the

Dionysian most often as "Weisheit" 'wisdom,' whereas he calls the Apollonian "Illusion"; and whereas the former is a mental ability or attitude, the latter (as Nietzsche uses the word) is an object of cognition or a mental image. Thus, in order to coordinate the definitions, we must

identify the characteristic object of Dionysian wisdom and the characteristic mental attitude

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associated with Apollonian illusion, and at least for the Dionysian this is not difficult. Dionysian wisdom involves knowledge of truth ("Wahr- heit"), the horrible truth of the emptiness of existence, the truth that the best thing for man is not to exist in the first place (Ch. iv, p. 37; Ch. vii, p. 53; Ch. viii, pp. 54-55).

Yet this truth cannot be known in the way that we know a fact; it cannot be accepted. If we

genuinely believe that there is no valid reason for existing, then either we must simply die of

pessimism, as Nietzsche somewhat ludicrously imagines the "melancholy Etruscans" to have done (Ch. iii, p. 32), or else we must protect ourselves with a "tragic culture" (Ch. xviii, p. 112), by which Nietzsche does not mean a culture that produces tragedy. A tragic culture-for

example, Brahmanic India-is a culture where

"metaphysical consolation" itself, which in Dio-

nysian tragedy is our preterillusory affirmation of truth, functions as an illusion (see Ch. xviii, pp. 111-12). This is an important point. If we

simply accept the truth that existence is empty (which acceptance, or "Buddhist negation of the will," Nietzsche regards as a "danger" [Ch. vii, p. 52]), then the truth itself, the absolutely horrible truth, becomes an illusion for us, and we no longer confront it as truth; the Buddhist's

unworldly reconciliation with truth serves as a comfort, whereas in the truth as truth there is no comfort but only either despair or the extrava-

gantly world-affirming joy of tragedy. Tragic culture, therefore, unlike the "artistic culture" of Greece (Ch. xviii, p. 112), is not strongly Dio-

nysian, does not involve direct contact with truth.17 The truth is absolutely horrible, and the

only possible authentic relation to it, the only possible contact with the truth as truth, is the

activity of struggling against it. To go back to a

question raised above, we can now see why the Greek poet cannot "grasp in words and con-

cepts" his Dionysian wisdom, for such a grasp would constitute his acceptance of the truth as a conceivable, allowable, "transparent" state of affairs. The Greek poet thus authentically con- fronts truth precisely by not "grasping" it; in a

specific poetic context, like that of the Colonus, the truth can to a degree be spoken, or sung, but not grasped, not conceptually mastered, not ac-

cepted.18 And this necessary attitude of struggle against

truth, by which Dionysian wisdom is made authentic, is in turn the mental attitude characteristic of the Apollonian. As I have argued, myth in its purer form, as artistic illusion, is for Nietz- sche a constantly repeated creative act, and this ceaseless creativity, which is the essence of our

apparent submission to illusion, manifests the Apollonian drive, the struggle against truth. We

may thus schematize our results as follows, with brackets for the terms Nietzsche treats obscurely:

A pollonian Object: "Illusion" Attitude: [creation,

"Schaffen"l1'] Characteristic: active Tragic myth: Prometheus

Dionysian [truth] wisdom

passive Oedipus

By the last item I do not mean that the myths of Prometheus and Oedipus are respectively Apol- lonian and Dionysian; obviously every myth has both an Apollonian and a Dionysian aspect. But neither is it an accident that Nietzsche fastens on these two myths as especially characteristic of

tragedy. In Oedipus, the myth of "wisdom as a crime against nature" (Ch. ix, p. 63), the Dio-

nysian reveals the Apollonian; "the hero, by his

purely passive behavior, achieves his supreme activity" (Ch. ix, p. 62). And in Prometheus, the myth of the artist, the reverse happens; ti- tanic creativity is realized as a "higher wisdom" that foresees the Olympian "twilight of the

gods" (Ch. ix, p. 64). This interchange, or mutual revelation, of Apollonian and Dionysian drives is in turn specifically characteristic of

tragedy, the absolute climax of art, where each drive embraces the other's function without los-

ing its own. Now the myth, normally our Apol- lonian defense against truth, carries out the Dio-

nysian function of revealing the truth, by showing "the shattering of the individual" (Ch. viii, p. 58). And now, conversely, our normally pessimistic Dionysian wisdom is transformed into a kind of consolation, an affirmation of

creativity, a commitment to assertive, illusion-

creating action (normally the Apollonian); nature, in her Dionysian aspect, no longer whispers that it were better never to have been born but, rather, urges us:

Seid wie ich bin! Unter dem unaufhbrlichen Wech- sel der Erscheinungen die ewig schopferische, ewig

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zum Dasein zwingende, an diesem Erscheinungs- wechsel sich ewig befriedigende Urmutter!

Be as I am! Beneath the unceasing flux of phenomena, the eternally creative primal womb that forces this flux into existence and derives its satisfaction therefrom. (Ch. xvi, p. 104)

In any event, the question of why the drives must necessarily remain "in strict proportion to each other" (Ch. xxv, p. 151) can now be settled. To the extent that we confront the truth as truth (Dionysianly) we must also be in the

process of creating and of illuding ourselves

(Apollonianly) with a world in which human life is possible; otherwise we simply could not exist. And conversely, the brilliance and beauty -the obvious artificiality, or "createdness"-of the world in which we live (which means the illusion by which we live) are a direct measure of the extent to which we need illusion, that is, the extent to which we confront the truth as truth. The interchange between the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy is thus the revelation of an absolute bond between the two at all levels of development.

But this point raises another question. If our own relatively systematic discussion accurately represents Nietzsche's thought, why does Nietz- sche himself not argue more systematically? Why does he leave the Dionysian object and the

Apollonian attitude (both bracketed in the above scheme) more obscure than they have to be? The answer to this question has to do with Nietzsche's idea of his own work as a historical act within the process it describes, for in terms of this idea the form of The Birth of Tragedy turns out to be the maximum permissible sys- tematization of its subject matter.

Enough has been said above to explain why Nietzsche takes the "artistic drives" as his basic

concepts, instead of deducing these drives logic- ally, as we have, from a specific idea of truth. For if truth, as Nietzsche understands it, is used as the basis of a conceptual system that pretends to constitute a valid description of human nature and the human condition, then the very validity of the system must contradict the truth it is based on, namely, that the best thing for us is not to be, that human life is in the final analysis without meaning or valid order. And the same kind of argument applies to the idea of creation.

In one sense it is true to say that the Apollonian is the ceaselessly renewed act of artistic or mythical creation by which we surround ourselves with a world in which it is possible to live; the world of our experience is our own work of art, which we constantly create anew. But the purpose of this repeated creative act is precisely to illude ourselves about our existence, to rescue ourselves from the knowledge of an absolute

abyss in which nothing exists outside what we create. We may, therefore, become aware of the illusoriness of phenomena-Nietzsche implies that eventually we must-but if we speak of ourselves as the creators of the illusion, if we

speak (say, with Fichte) of the ego as world creator, then our pretended knowledge presup- poses a point of view wholly detached from the

illusory or phenomenal world; and such detach- ment is impossible, since our very existence de-

pends on our illudedness. That the Greeks were

"compelled" to relate all experience to their

myths is thus not really a limitation of Greek culture. If we imagine that our own less con-

sciously mythical existence is somehow broader, affording us a clearer, less prejudiced view of

things, then we are deceiving ourselves, for there

simply is no existence outside illusion; even science, as Nietzsche insists, is a form of artistic illusion. We can say that we are illuded, but we cannot say exactly how we are illuded without

pretending to know and accept the whole truth, and such a pretense is necessarily false.

We cannot accept the truth as we accept a fact, and we cannot know systematically our situation as the generating center of existence; this is essentially Schopenhauer's objection, and Nietzsche's, to the Fichtean terminology of

"ego" and "productive imagination." But for Nietzsche the unique function of art is that it leads us, despite the impossibility of knowledge, toward a valid intimation of what we truly are. Nietzsche himself, as a theorist, is willing to describe "our empirical existence, like that of the whole world, as an ideation created in every instant by the Original One" (Ch. iv, p. 35); but only beyond the realm of theory, only in the midst of the ritual of tragedy, does it hap- pen that "we are really, for a moment, the Origi- nal Being itself, and feel its immense appetite and desire for existence" (Ch. xvii, p. 105). Those fleeting moments in the theater are not a

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delusion but, rather, a revelation of the truth about ourselves as world creators, which truth is

by nature entirely inaccessible to theory and would therefore undermine the structure of any conceptual system that attempted to include or

"grasp" it as a constituent proposition. Thus, by choosing not to systematize his ideas fully, Nietzsche gives his treatise greater internal con- sistency and epistemological soundness than it would otherwise possess.

V

But does Nietzsche really want to construct a sound conceptual argument? Why should he want this? Why does he describe his work as a contribution to "aesthetic science"? Is this not a concession to precisely that Socratic quality of culture which must be overcome? By construct-

ing a conceptual system, or by practicing aesthetics as a science, does one not simply rein- force Socratic culture?

In fact one does, and in fact this is exactly what Nietzsche desires. Toward the middle of his book (Ch. xv, pp. 96-98; Ch. xviii, p. 112), he speaks repeatedly of the "net" of science or Socratic culture and concludes with a crucial

question: . . . wird jenes "Umschlagen" zu immer neuen Configurationen des Genius und gerade des musik- treibenden Sokrates fihren? Wird das uiber das Dasein gebreitete Netz der Kunst, sei es auch unter dem Namen der Religion oder der Wissenschaft, immer fester und zarter geflochten werden oder ist ihm bestimmt, unter dem ruhelos barbarischen Treiben und Wirbeln, das sich jetzt "die Gegenwart" nennt, in Fetzen zu reissen?

. . . will that "overturning" [the tendency of science to reach its limits and generate a need for art] lead toward ever new configurations of genius, and of the music-making Socrates in particular? Will the net that is spread over our existence, the net of art (even if under the name of religion or science), be woven constantly tighter and finer, or is it destined to be torn to shreds by the restlessly barbaric bustle and confusion that calls itself "the present age"?

(Ch. xv, p. 98)

A few commentators have supposed that what Nietzsche desires here is the tearing apart of the net, but in fact he wants the opposite. The net of

Socratism is for us "the net of art" (including those art forms, like religion and science, that we do not yet recognize as art), and if it is de- stroyed, then all hope for artistic renewal is lost. The net must therefore be perfected, and Nietz- sche is speaking hopefully when he sees Socrates' influence stretching "into the indefinite future" (Ch. xv, p. 93).

But why should it not be possible simply to overthrow Socratic culture and replace it with an artistic or Apollonian culture, once we have learned from the Greeks exactly what an artistic culture is? This question, in essence, has already been answered. What we learn from the Greeks is that our whole world is a ceaselessly re- created work of art, and that beyond this web of illusion is nothing but the abyss. Culture, in other words, or the web of human artifice, is existence, and to "overthrow" one's culture, however unsatisfactory one may find it, is thus to negate existence, or simply to commit suicide. For us, therefore, there is no way out of Socratic culture. We must transform our culture as it is into an artistic culture;20 we must realize its essential mythicalness.

And this is the task to which Nietzsche sets out to make his contribution in The Birth of Tragedy. German critical and idealistic philosophy, or "Dionysian wisdom in conceptual form," may perhaps not, strictly speaking, be

Dionysian wisdom as experienced by the Greeks; but according to Nietzsche, it does at least ef-

fectively destroy any faith we may still have had in the perfectibility of scientific knowledge, and it thus initiates "a culture . . . which I [Nietz- sche] venture to designate as tragic" (Ch. xviii, p. 114). A tragic culture, however-by which, as I have pointed out, Nietzsche means not a

quasi-Hellenic culture but rather a culture com-

parable to Indian Brahmanism-is not what we are aiming at. If we have learned anything from the Greeks, then what we will do is not accept our pessimistic thinking (which is what tragic culture does) but, rather, affirm the Socratic attitude despite Kant and Schopenhauer, despite our knowledge of its emptiness; for insofar as we do this, Socratic culture as a whole will take on for us the character of an artistic illusion, to which we submit while still knowing its illusoriness. What we will do is practice the absurd dis-

cipline of "aesthetic science," in which the sub-

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ject matter clashes with the very idea of science. Thus Socratism will be changed from blind belief into artistic illusion; in other words, it will be realized as a higher and more refined form of the

myth it has always been in essence. Or perhaps, in the interest of consistent terminology, we should speak of transformed Socratism as a

"mythical content" that will vitalize our tradi- tional fictional images. But, however it is de- scribed, Socratism must be affirmed by the striver for a new artistic age.

Nietzsche is not yet quite immodest enough, at this stage in his career, to assert that his own work will be sufficient to effect the cultural transformation in question. He regards The Birth of Tragedy, rather, as a contribution to the historical process characterized by a mysterious "unity between German music and German

philosophy" (Ch. xix, p. 124). German philosophy has transformed "the delight of Socratic

knowledge" into "tragic knowledge" (Ch. xv, p. 97) by destroying our faith in "the knowability and fathomability of all world riddles" (Ch. xviii, p. 114), and it has thus put us in danger of

becoming a "tragic culture"; but our growing pessimism is balanced by the affirmative energy of German music, the "myth-creating" power of which will transform our world view into a joy- ful artistic illusion, thus making possible a true artistic culture, a "rebirth of Hellenic antiquity" (Ch. xx, p. 127). The symbol of our present cultural state is Diirer's "Knight with Death and the Devil"; but this arid image is suddenly transformed, "plunged into an abundance of life, suf-

fering, and delight," when it is touched by "the

Dionysian magic" of music (Ch. xx, pp. 127- 28). What is needed, therefore, is only that the connection between philosophy and music be made, that the crumbling primitive-mythical fabric of science and the new energy of music be

brought into contact with each other, as the "moribund mythical structure" of Greece had been brought into contact with an earlier music; and the obvious vehicle for such contact in the

present age is "aesthetic science," the form of The Birth of Tragedy. Simply by being, on the one hand, "wissenschaftlich," Socratic, episte- mologically scrupulous and dealing, on the other hand, with the metaphysical forces of art, calling attention directly to the unfathomable mystery of music, Nietzsche's book attempts not only to

describe but also to be "the birth of tragedy," the crucial historical meeting ground of two forces that, once joined, will tend to realize Socratism's artistic destiny.

We can now also see why Nietzsche assumes that the present historical process will culminate

immediately in tragedy rather than in some other art form. In Greece the general mythical shape of the culture had not been tragic until Diony- sian music imposed a tragic interpretation on the

myths; but in Germany the life-giving myth (Socratism) has become tragic independently of music. German critical philosophy, as "Diony- sian wisdom in conceptual form," does not transcend Socratism but, rather, belongs to So- cratism; it is Socratism's own turning against itself, in that it uses "the arsenal of science itself . .. to demonstrate the limits and the contin-

gency of knowledge as such" (Ch. xviii, p. 114). Thus the interchange of Apollonian and Diony- sian, which is characteristic of tragedy, has al-

ready occurred in Germany; myth (i.e., science

grown self-critical) now already reveals the horrible truth, whereas the affirmative, life-

preserving function has already been assumed by music. Tragedy, therefore, and of all art only tragedy, is ready to be born. All that is needed is that philosophy and music be brought into direct contact; all that is needed, at least in the terms of a logic rather more internally consistent than what Nietzsche is usually credited with, is "aesthetic science," a science that, despite our

knowledge of the unacceptable truth behind it, is still practiced joyfully and affirmatively as a science. It is significant, therefore, and indicative of the essential continuity of Nietzsche's thought, that the later book, entitled Die frihliche Wis- senschaft 'Cheerful Science,' is the book that concludes by saying, "tragedy now begins."

Of course, it is fairly clear that Germany has not played that role in the growth of modern art which Nietzsche assigned it, any more than it has played the role Marx assigned it in the de-

velopment of communism. But this failure does not entirely invalidate Nietzsche's prophetic vision, or Marx's. Not only the search for a basic

continuity between myth and conscious art but also the notion of aesthetic science as an ironic, self-consciously illusory intellectual discipline has to an extent been realized in this century, in the increasing self-questioning complexity of

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literary philosophy and critical theory. More- over, the epistemological restraint of The Birth of Tragedy serves in some degree to detach Nietzsche's aesthetic-mythical argument from the rather forbidding metaphysics on which it is based. Thus the recognition that this argument arises in turn from an application of idealistic and dialectical philosophy (mainly Schopen-

hauer and Hegel) to questions of eighteenth- century aesthetics has the effect, again, of providing us with a freshly integrated historical sense of our own intellectual situation.

University of Virginia Charlottesville

Notes

1 Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychol- ogist, Antichrist (1950; rpt. New York: Meridian, 1956), pp. 108-09. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Trag6die, Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Mon- tinari, Pt. in, Vol. I (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972), Ch. ii, pp. 27-28. All references to Die Geburt der Tragbdie (The Birth of Tragedy) are identified by chapter and page number from this volume. All English transla- tions of Nietzsche, as well as of other German writers, are my own. Richard Schacht refers to the Babylonian orgies that repel Nietzsche as "pre-Dionysian savagery" ("Nietzsche on Art in The Birth of Tragedy," in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie and R. J. Sclafani [New York: St. Martin's, 1977], p. 287), but this phrase begs the question; Nietzsche says "Dionysian barbarians." Kaufmann's important point about the positive aspect of Socratism is developed in the argument below.

2 Ernst Cassirer, Das mythische Denken, Vol. ii of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), esp. Sec. 4, pp. 281-311.

3 See Jacques Derrida, "La Mythologie blanche," Poetique, 5 (1971), 1-52, and other items in this number of Poetique; also Bernard Pautrat, Versions du soleil (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971). And Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: Einfithrung in das Verstiindnis seines Philosophierens, 3rd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1950), pp. 366-74. Jaspers assumes something like Cassirer's idea of myth; he assumes that myth is a phenomenon of the past, which must be resurrected and, once resurrected, believed in (esp. p. 367). My point is that Nietzsche uses the word "myth" to refer to something always present and always being created, in varying degrees of intensity. The issue is thus basically word usage, and my argument below parallels Jaspers' on "Die Unmitteilbarkeit der Wahrheit" (p. 224).

4 For the sake of compactness I neglect certain thinkers, like Schelling, who are very important in the general area of myth and aesthetics. See my tentative discussion in "'Tis Sixty Years Since," German Quar- terly, 45 (1972), 684-702.

5 Pautrat, in an excellent discussion of one Nietz- schean "allegory," shows that for Nietzsche allegory is not at all a shallow or trivial mode (pp. 20-28).

6 The words "aesthetic science" immediately awaken

a number of associations in any mind familiar with earlier German philosophy: e.g., Kant's denial, in the Kritik der Urteilskraft, that beautiful science or a science of the beautiful is possible; and Hegel's idea of the science of art as superseding art itself. The phrase is thus meant to disturb and alert the reader.

7 It must be noted that the word "instinctiv" is an adverb, not an adjective; Nietzsche is talking, not about an "instinctive and unconscious" wisdom, but about an "instinctively unconscious" wisdom; i.e., we (or the Greeks) have an instinct that keeps this wisdom unconscious. I try to elucidate this idea below. See nn. 12, 18.

8 On a similar idea of teaching by analogy, see my "'Vorspiel auf dem Theater': The Ironic Basis of Goethe's Faust," German Quarterly, 49 (1976), 438- 55.

9 The classic statement of this idea is by pseudo- Longinus, who says that great poetry fills us with an extravagant pride, as if we were the creators of what we hear (Ch. vii, Sec. 2 [Paris MS., fol. 182^]).

10 This idea becomes increasingly prominent in Schil- ler's aesthetics as it develops chronologically, e.g., in the third letter of Uber die dsthetische Erziehung des Menschen (in Schillers Siimtliche Werke, Sakular-Aus- gabe [Stuttgart: Cotta, 1904], Vol. xii) and in the essays on the sublime and on the chorus in tragedy (Sakular-Ausgabe, Vols. xII, xvI). The general relation between Schiller and Nietzsche is discussed below. See also Schacht, pp. 281-82.

11 Thomas Mann, unlike most Nietzsche critics, un- derstood this point very well. See my "Casting Out Nines: Structure, Parody and Myth in Tonio Kr6ger," Revue des Langues Vivantes, 42 (1976), 142-46.

12 The Sophoclean passage is, in its standard but perhaps questionable translation: "The best thing is not to be born; but once born, by far the second best is to return as fast as possible whence one came" (Colonus, 11. 1225-28). This idea appears frequently in antiquity as the wisdom of Silenus, the best-known passage being Plutarch, Consolatio ad Apollonium, 115B-E. Again, the presence of precisely these words in a tragedy makes one wonder exactly what Nietzsche means by the poets' "unconsciousness." See n. 7 above.

13 In addition, Nietzsche mentions Schiller's thinking on lyric poetry (Ch. v, p. 39) and on the idyll (Ch.

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xix, p. 120); and the argument about how tragedy enabled the Greeks to maintain an attitude "between India and Rome" (Ch. xxi, p. 129), between actionless otherworldliness and crass this-worldliness, is exactly the type of political-aesthetic argument Schiller ad- vances in Uber die iisthetische Erziehung. Also, on the crucial Schillerian idea of "Spiel," compare Ch. xxiv, p. 148, and Ch. xxv, p. 150, as well as "Die dionysische Weltanschauung," where the definitions of Apollonian and Dionysian turn on this idea (Werke, Pt. II, Vol. II, p. 46).

14 Mendelssohn, "Von der Herrschaft iiber die Nei- gungen," Secs. 11, 12, in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Nicolai, Briefwechsel iiber das Trauerspiel, ed. Schulte-Sasse (Munich: Wink- ler, 1972), p. 99. See also Alexander Gottlieb Baum- garten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad

poema pertinentibus (1735; facs. rpt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1954), Secs. 7, 9.

15 In the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Lessing ap- proaches this question by way of the Aristotelian question of a character's "goodness," passes via a discussion of Richard 111 to Diderot's question of "general" and "specific" characters, and at the end of No. 95 leaves this last unanswered (Siimtliche Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker, 3rd ed., 23 vols. [Stuttgart: Goschen, 1886-1924], x, 187-88).

16 On Schiller's and Goethe's failures to achieve a complete understanding of Hellenic antiquity, see Ch. xx, p. 127; on the inapplicability of moral categories to tragedy, see Ch. xxii, pp. 138-39. Schiller claims, of course, that, far from subordinating art to morality, he shows that art cultivates an intermediate area between rational and sensual existence, thus enabling us to achieve wholeness of being; this wholeness, however, ultimately serves a moral freedom Nietzsche does not believe in. Nor, it appears, does Nietzsche believe in any mediation between the drives; the idea of "Spiel," which in Uber die isthetische Erziehung is the mediating force, is prominent in "Die dionysische Weltan- schauung," but it is almost entirely eliminated in the developed thought of The Birth of Tragedy.

17 Failure to grasp this point leads Paul de Man into a serious error in "Genesis and Genealogy in Nietzsche's

The Birth of Tragedy," Diacritics, 2, No. 4 (1972), 44-53. Misled by the words "metaphysical consolation," de Man equates tragic culture with "Dionysian" culture (p. 52), a misconception that makes it impossible to understand the reciprocity of the drives. Apollonian culture and "Dionysian culture" (a phrase Nietzsche does not use) are one and the same. The individual work of art can be either Apollonian or Dionysian to the exclusion of the other; but a whole culture is Apollonian precisely to the extent that it is Dionysian, and vice versa. If Apollonian Greece had not also been fundamentally Dionysian (see Ch. ii, p. 30), then Dionysian music would simply have been incomprehen- sibly alien to it and would never have gained entrance. Schacht also speaks of "tragic culture" as an object of "hope" for Nietzsche (p. 311); Schacht's essay, in general, is the perfect example of an otherwise admir- able argument that neglects the historicity of Nietzsche's "artistic drives" and falls into the trap of regarding the physiological states of dream and intoxication as "more fundamental" than the developed achievements of conscious art (p. 282).

18 We can now understand the locution "instinctively unconscious" (see n. 7). The instinct that keeps the truth unconscious or ungrasped is an instinct to confront the truth as truth.

1" In The Birth of Tragedy itself, Nietzsche is cautious with the word "schaffen," although he does use it to describe the origin of the Olympians (Ch. iii, p. 32). He had not yet been so cautious in "Die dionysische Weltanschauung," where he says of the origin of an- cient tragedy, "Der Ekel am Weiterleben wird als Mittel zum Schaffen empfunden" 'The revulsion against con- tinuing to live is felt as a means of creation' (Werke, Pt. IlI, Vol. II, p. 62); nothing in The Birth of Tragedy itself comes quite this close to my own description of the union of Apollonian and Dionysian above.

20 Again we are reminded of Schiller: "Wenn der Kiinstler an einem Uhrwerk zu bessern hat, so laBt er die Rader ablaufen; aber das lebendige Uhrwerk des Staats muB gebessert werden, indem es schlagt" 'When the craftsman has to fix a clockwork, he lets it run down; but the living clockwork of the state must be repaired while it is ticking' (Sakular-Ausgabe, xII, 9).

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nietzsche's idea of myth, by benjamin bennett

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