The Birth of Tragedy - 3 - Music is the Ultimate Art Form
Part Three
Quote
While the critic held sway ... art degenerated to entertainment ... Never has so much talk, and so little thought, been devoted to art.
Notes
🔥 Apollo and Dionysus represent two worlds of art. One (Apollo) is individual, the other (Dionysus) collapses the individual.
🔥 Schopenhauer says music is different from all the other arts because it is not a replica of a phenomena. It's not an abstraction. It's a direct replica of the will.
🔥 The world might be said to be "embodied music."
🔥 You can't use music to imitate concepts, or else "music does not express the inner essence." Music and imagery can be powerful, but only when music serves as the foundation.
🔥 When music is subjugated to mere "tone-painting", it loses its power to connect to the eternal truth.
🔥 "Science and theoretical man" (ie Socrates) hold that nature can be subjugated by knowledge and understanding. But this will hit a limit, and that will lead to destruction and chaos.
🔥 Opera is an example of when words take over the music. With opera, "the supreme and properly serious task of art - that of rescuing the eye from gazing into the horrors of night and releasing the subject with the healing balm of illusion, from the conclusive stirrings of the will - might degenerate into an empty and frivolous amusement."
🔥 But German music is coming to the rescue, Nietzsche says. With Beethoven and Wagner. Also with their philosophers, Kant and Schopenhauer. They "destroy Socratism's complacent delight in existence by demonstrating its limitations." It's the rebirth of tragedy.
🔥 Myths are crucial for interpreting life and its struggles. "The state has no unwritten laws more powerful."
🔥 And yet Socratism - our current world - is bent on the destruction of myth and on abstraction in all areas of life. A person needs a connection to eternity. That does not come about with "understanding," but with immersion back into the primordial oneness.