The Birth of Tragedy - 2 - The Death of Tragedy
Part Two
Quote
The realm of poetry does not lie outside the world, a fantastic impossibility, the product of a poet's mind; it wishes to be precisely the opposite of this, the unadorned expression of truth, and must for that very reason cast off the mendacious finery of the supposed reality of the man of culture.
Notes
🔥 The Greeks, according to Nietzsche, viewed the events and characters on the stage as somehow real, and not with an awareness that it's a play. They were immersed in it.
🔥 The birth of tragedy is the Greek tragic chorus who are somehow "above" normal life and can reflect on it. They take us out of the tragedy of existence through art.
🔥 Poetry, metaphor, drama, these aren't symbolic forms. They're real; they're visions into true reality.
🔥 Dionysus was the original tragic hero. All other characters are masks of him. And there are ideas around Dionysus that "individuation is the source of all evil" and that art "breaks the spell of individuation."
🔥 "How religions die", says Nietzsche, is that they insist their myths have historical reality (ie. Christianity). But music frees myths from those confines.
🔥 Euripides killed Greek tragedy with what he did to it. It had been a combination of Dionysus and Apollo - the chorus and the stage - but Euripides removed the Dionysiac elements and made tragedy more about morality and philosophy. And, actually, Euripides wasn't at the root of this change. It was Socrates.
🔥 Tragedy became no longer an immersion in art, but about the "thoughts and emotions" of a spectator viewing art. Euripides corrupted tragedy by trying to make his plays "intelligible" with moral and philosophical lessons.
🔥 Euripides explains what's going to happen in his plays, making it impossible for the audience to really experience it. Instead, they "understand" it.
🔥 "In people instinct is the power of creativity and perfection, and consciousness assumes a critical and discursive role," but Socrates wanted to reverse this. And, to boot, he had his "daemon" voice that spoke to him.
🔥 Plato transforms poetry to the dialogue, like a precursor to the novel. Again, it's a move towards making things "intelligible" and understandable, not immersive. It's didactic and moral. Not ecstatic or primordial.
🔥 This effect of Socrates (and Plato) has extended into our day and our view of art. Ancient Greece is seen as the foundation of our (modern European, for Nietzsche) culture. We have the "unshakeable thought" that rationality will allow us to understand the core of being and reality.
🔥 The "Socratic man" is always on the quest of making things intelligible. But this will inevitably hit a limit when we encounter the "ineffable," which is where you need art and tragedy as "both protection and remedy, if we are to bear it."