The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music

by Friedrich Nietzsche

A tempting and challenging, sharp-eyed courage that craves the terrible as one craves the enemy, the worthy enemy, against whom it can test its strength?

a lack, out of deprivation, melancholy, pain.

Thus the man who is responsive to artistic stimuli reacts to the reality of dreams as does the philosopher to the reality of existence; he observes closely, and he enjoys his observation: for it is out of these images that he interprets life, out of these processes that he trains himself for life.

Thus the gods provide a justification for the life of man by living it themselves – the only satisfactory form of theodicy!

then we must see the dream as the illusion of illusion,15 and hence as an even higher satisfaction of the original desire for illusion.

while of course our awareness of our meaning differs hardly at all from the awareness that warriors painted on canvas have of the battle portrayed.

For this very reason, the world-symbolism of music cannot be exhaustively interpreted through language, because it symbolically refers to the primal contradiction and the primal suffering within the primal Oneness, and thus symbolizes a sphere beyond and prior to all phenomena.

naturalism, against the illusionism

the daylight itself is merely artificial, the architecture is merely symbolic and the metrical language is idealized, delusions still predominate;

naturalism

wax museums.

vanquished.

Movement is the original art form. The movement of reading. Eyes sliding right to left.

Understanding kills action, action depends on a veil of illusion

This suggests that dismemberment, the true Dionysiac suffering, amounts to a transformation into air, water, earth and fire, and that we should therefore see the condition of individuation as the source and origin of all suffering and hence as something reprehensible.

Only from the spirit of music can we understand delight in the destruction of the individual.

However distinctly we move, enliven and illuminate that character from within, it remains mere phenomenon, without a bridge to reality itself, to the heart of the world. But music speaks from that heart;