Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/497

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NOTES
481

their very "health" presents, when the glowing light of the Dionysian revelers rushes past them (ibid., sect. 1).

u Nietzsche even says that from the nature of art as ordinarily conceived (Apollinic art), tragic art cannot be honestly derived, the pleasure connected with the latter being pleasure in the annihilation of beautiful forms, even the fairest, while Apollinic art strives (by its appropriate means, picture and story) to eternalize them. Tragedy and music alike are born of another realm. See The Birth of Tragedy, sects. 16 and 25. Meyer remarks that it is doubtful whether Dionysus can be described as a "Kunstgott": "he became that first for Nietzsche" (op. cit., p. 248).

v Nietzsche draws attention to Euripides' description in the "Bacchæ" of Archilochus (the first lyric, as contrasted to epic, poet among the Greeks), who, a drunken reveler, sinks down and falls asleep on the high mountains under the midday sun, when the dream-god comes to him and touches him with the laurel—as if to show that the lyric (i.e., essentially Dionysiac) outpourings of love and hate, though so different from the calm and measured movements of epic art, may yet win Apollinic consecration (Birth of Tragedy, sect. 6).

w This particularly holds of the first great tragic dramatist, Æschylus. As to the ancient view of Æschylus as Dionysus-inspired (the view, e.g., of Pausanias, Athenaeus, and Quintilian), see Symonds, op. cit., I, 373-4. Plato regarded poetic inspiration as akin to madness ("Phædrus"); "all good poets compose their beautiful poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed" ("Ion"), the analogy in "Ion" being the behavior of Bacchantes under the influence of Dionysus. Symonds cites the phrase "con furie," with which Italians sometimes describe the manner of production of a Tintoretto or a Michael Angelo (op. cit., II, 394-5).

x Nietzsche remarks on the different type of language used by the characters in the dialogue from that of the chorus—it is clear, firm, almost like that of Homer, i.e., Apollinic, not turgid, glowing, Dionysiac (Birth of Tragedy, end of sect. 8). Symonds appears to note the same contrast (without giving it this interpretation), in saying, "When the Athenians developed tragedy, they wrote their iambics in pure Attic, but they preserved a Dorian tone in their choruses " (op. cit., I, 305) .

CHAPTER V

a "Matter itself is only given as sensation" (Werke, 1st ed., X, 429); this after saying that the development of matter into a thinking subject is "impossible." Cf. the comment on Democritus' "enormous petitio principii" (ibid., X, 114). I cannot locate these passages in the second edition of the Werke, from which I ordinarily quote.

b It is not contradictory to this when Nietzsche speaks, as he sometimes does, of picturing (vorstellen) as an action of the brain—this is merely a part of the ordinary empirical view of things; cf. the guarded language as to Anaxagoras, in "Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," sect. 15, and also the express statement, "The sensation is not the result of the cell, but the cell is the result of the sensation, i.e., an artistic projection, an image" (Werke, IX, 194).

c I have indicated some of the main points of Schopenhauer's metaphysics in the following articles: "Schopenhauer's Type of Idealism" (The Monist, January, 1911), "Schopenhauer's Contact with Pragmatism" (Philosophical Review, March, 1910), "Schopenhauer's Contact with Theology" (Harvard Theological Review, July, 1911).

d Nietzsche speaks of the "Ur-Einen" repeatedly in The Birth of Tragedy; the subjectivity of time and space, hence of succession and