Page 9 - GALIET WHIM WILL AND WOE: The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche IV

Galiet & Galiet
Nietzsche, relentless philosopher, poet, musician and master of aphorisms, stresses in The Birth of Tragedy the contraposition and tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian will.3 To this contraposition, two series of oppositions are subordinated: light and darkness, dream and drunkenness, appearance and reality, resolution and irresolution, action and inaction. The second series is properly tragic. In fact, while the first one is manifested in the plastic arts in that it reveals the individual, beauty, the particular, the eternity of the phenomenon, the second is manifested in music, in the universal, in nature (in the Greek sense of the word, phusis), which is omnipotent, all-encompassing,4 oniric and mysterious. Music is not, in fact, a mimesis of reality (like painting or poetry, as Plato postulated): it is reality itself, the very expression of the Will in Schopenhauer’s sense.5 This is why music is equivalent to universalia ante rem, plastic arts to universalia in re, and science to universalia post rem.6 Music, having given birth to myth and the tragic chorus, absorbs the individual, and for brief moments, he dwells in primordial self or being.
3 Nietzsche affirms, based on Schopenhauer and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, that life and Grecian culture move between two artistic poles: the Apollonian (plastic arts) and Dionysian (music). In these arts, rupture and creative discord exists. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, 1995.
4 This term signifies the Dionysian collective or community as oral and ecstatic in contrast to Apollo’s principium individuationis. Apollo’s individuation principle, in which the individual 3⁄4 as described in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, remains calm in the midst of turmoil as if he were a fragile ship in a tempestuous sea 3⁄4 is destroyed and crushed by the Dionysian realm. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Chapter 16. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, 1995.
5 Schopenhauer believes that art, unlike reason, reveals the eternal forms in varying degrees, passing, successively, from architecture to sculpture, to painting, to lyric, and tragic poetry to music. Music, in particular, is almost a revelation of the Will, because it is beyond every spatial representation; it is the very expression of sentiment just as it is: pure, real and removed from causal motivations. Music is the pure abstraction of suffering and joy, and consequently, the liberation of the Will’s suffering, given its serene vision and dominion. Music is the highest expression of universal language: geometry and number, hence a-priori. Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1969.
6 Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Chapter 16. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, 1995.
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