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April 6 - April 9, 2024
Might the scientific approach be nothing but fear, flight from pessimism?
I am convinced that art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life
Mankind’s most true delusion seems To be revealed to him in dreams: All poesy and versification Is merely dream interpretation.
We take pleasure in the immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak to us, and nothing is indifferent or unnecessary.
Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of the whole of nature reveals itself to the supreme gratification of the primal Oneness amidst the paroxysms of intoxication.
the phenomenon that pain is experienced as joy, that jubilation tears tormented cries from the breast. At the moment of supreme joy we hear the scream of horror or the yearning lamentation for something irrevocably lost.
‘Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you – is to die soon.’
The Greeks knew and felt the fears and horrors of existence: in order to be able to live at all they had to interpose the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians between themselves and those horrors.
Thus the gods provide a justification for the life of man by living it themselves – the only satisfactory form of theodicy!
The true goal is veiled by a phantasm: we stretch our hands towards one thing, and nature deceives us to achieve the other.
the new aesthetic has been able to contribute only the interpretation that here the ‘objective’ artist stood face to face with the first ‘subjective’ artist. This interpretation is of little use to us, because we know the subjective artist only as a bad artist, and throughout the whole of art we demand above all else the conquest of the subjective, release from the ‘self, and the silencing of all individual will and craving; indeed we cannot imagine a truly artistic creation, however unimportant, without objectivity, without a pure and disinterested contemplation.
(‘For me, feeling does not at first have a clearly defined object. This is only formed later on. A certain musical atmosphere of moods precedes it, and the poetic idea only comes afterwards.’)
The genuine song is the copy or impression of the whole of this mingled and divided state of mind.
in so far as the subject is an artist, he is already liberated from his individual will and has become a medium through which the only truly existent subject celebrates his redemption through illusion.
Thus all of our knowledge of art is utterly illusory, because we, as knowing subjects, are not identical with that being which, as sole creator and spectator of that comedy of art, prepares an eternal enjoyment for itself.
now he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor and audience.
Melody, then, is both primary and universal, which is why it can therefore bear various objectifications in various texts. It is also more important and necessary by far in the naïve estimation of the people.
He is saved by art, and through art life has saved him for itself.
The ecstasy of the Dionysiac state, abolishing the habitual barriers and boundaries of existence, actually contains, for its duration, a lethargic element into which all past personal experience is plunged.
Understanding kills action, action depends on a veil of illusion -this is what Hamlet teaches
This is the Apolline dream state, in which the daylight world is veiled and a new world, more distinct, comprehensible and affecting than the other and yet more shadowy, is constantly reborn before our eyes.
From the smile of this Dionysus were born the Olympian gods, from his tears mankind.
