Text Selections from "The Birth of Tragedy", Sections 2, 3, 4. 

Indeed one could say that Apollo is the most sublime expression of imperturbable trust in this principle and of the calm sitting-there of the person trapped within it; one might even describe Apollo as the magnificent divine image (Gotterbild) of the principium individuationis, whose gestures and gaze speak to us of all the intense pleasure, wisdom and beauty of 'semblance'. In the same passage Schopenhauer has described for us the enormous horror which seizes people when they suddenly become confused and lose faith in the cognitive forms ofthe phenomenal world because the principle of sufficient reason, in one or other of its modes, appears to sustain an exception. If we add to this horror the blissful ecstasy which arises from the innermost ground of man, indeed of nature itself, whenever this break-down of the principium individuationis occurs, we catch a glimpse of the essence of the Dionysiac, which is best conveyed by the analogy of intoxication. These Dionysiac stirrings, which, as they grow in intensity, cause subjectivity to vanish to the point of complete self-forgetting, awaken either under the influence of narcotic drink, of which all human beings and peoples who are close to the origin of things speak in their hymns, or at the approach of spring when the whole of nature is pervaded by lust for life.

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So far we have considered the Apolline and its opposite, the Dionysiac, as artistic powers which erupt from nature itself, without the mediation of any human artist, and in which nature's artistic drives attain their first, immediate satisfaction: on the one hand as the image-world of dream, the perfection ofwhich is not linked to an individual's intellectual level or artistic formation (Bildung); and on the other hand as intoxicated reality, which has just as little regard for the individual, even seeking to annihilate, redeem, and release him by imparting a mystical sense of oneness. In relation to these unmediated artistic states in nature every artist is an 'imitator', and indeed either an Apolline dream-artist or a Dionysiac artist of intoxication or finally - as, for example, in Greek tragedy - an artist of both dream and intoxication at once. This is how we must think of him as he sinks to the ground in Dionysiac drunkenness and mystical self-abandon, alone and apart from the enthusiastic choruses, at which point, under the Apolline influence of dream, his own condition, which is to say, his oneness with the innermost ground of the world, reveals itself to him in a symbolic (gleichnishaft) dream-image. Having set out these general assumptions and contrasts, let us now consider the Greeks in order to understand the degree and level to which those artistic drives of nature were developed in them. This will enable us to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the relationship between the Greek artist and his models (Urbilder), or, to use Aristotle's expression, 'the imitation of nature'. Despite all the dream literature of the Greeks and numerous dream anecdotes, we can speak only speculatively, but with a fair degree of certainty, about the Greeks' dreams. Given the incredibly definite and assured ability of their eye to see things in a plastic way, together with their pure and honest delight in colour, one is bound to assume, to the shame of all those born after them, that their dreams, too, had that logical causality of line and outline, colour and grouping, and a sequence of scenes resembling their best bas-reliefs, so that the perfection  of their dreams would certainly justify us, if comparison were possible, in describing the dreaming Greeks as Homers and Homer as a dreaming Greek - and in a more profound sense than if a modern dared were to compare his dreaming with that of Shakespeare. 

By contrast, there is no need for speculation when it comes to revealing the vast gulf which separated the Dionysiac Greeks from the Dionysiac Barbarians. From all corners of the ancient world (leaving aside the modern one in this instance), from Rome to Babylon, we can demonstrate the existence of Dionysiac festivals of a type which, at best, stands in the same relation to the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, whose name and attributes were borrowed from the goat, stands to Dionysos himself. Almost everywhere an excess of sexual indiscipline, which flooded in waves over all family life and its venerable statutes, lay at the heart of such festivals. Here the very wildest of nature's beasts were unleashed, up to and including that repulsive mixture ofsensuality and cruelty which has always struck me as the true 'witches' brew'. Although news of these festivals reached them by every sea- and land-route, the Greeks appear, for a time, to have been completely protected and insulated from their feverish stirrings by the figure of Apollo, who reared up in all his pride, there being no more dangerous power for him to confront with the Medusa's head than this crude, grotesque manifestation of the Dionysiac. 

Apollo's attitude of majestic rejection is eternalized in Doric art. Such resistance became more problematic and even impossible when, eventually, similar shoots sprang from the deepest root of the Hellenic character; now the work of the Delphic God was limited to taking the weapons of destruction out of the hands of his mighty opponent in a timely act of reconciliation. This reconciliation is the most important moment in the history of Greek religion; wherever one looks, one can see the revolutionary consequences of this event. It was the reconciliation of two opponents, with a precise delineation of the borders which each now had to respect and with the periodic exchange ofhonorific gifts; fundamentally the chasm had not been bridged. Yet if we now look at how the power of the Dionysiac manifested itself under pressure from that peace-treaty, we can see that, in contrast to the Babylonian Sacaea, where human beings regressed to the condition of tigers and monkeys, the significance of the Greeks' Dionysiac orgies was that of festivals of universal release and redemption and days of trans- figuration. Here for the first time the jubilation of nature achieves expression as art, here for the first time the tearing-apart of the principium individuationis becomes an artistic phenomenon. That repulsive witches' brew of sensuality and cruelty was powerless here; the only reminder of it (in the way that medicines recall deadly poisons) is to be found in the strange mixture and duality in the affects ofthe Dionysiac enthusiasts, that phenomenon whereby pain awakens pleasure while rejoicing wrings cries ofagony from the breast. From highest joy there comes a cry of horror or a yearning lament at some irredeemable loss. In those Greek festivals there erupts what one might call a sentimental tendency in nature, as if it had cause to sigh over its dismemberment into individuals. The singing and expressive gestures of such enthusiasts in their two-fold mood was some- thing new and unheard-of in the Homeric-Greek world; Dionysiac music in particular elicited terror and horror from them. Although it seems that music was already familiar to the Greeks as an Apolline art, they only knew it, strictly speaking, in the form of a wave-like rhythm with an image-making power which they developed to represent Apolline states. 

The music of Apollo was Doric architectonics in sound, but only in the kind of hinted-at tones characteristic of the cithara. It keeps at a distance, as something un-Apolline, the very element which defines the character of Dionysiac music (and thus of music generally): the power of its sound to shake us to our very foundations, the unified stream of melody and the quite incomparable world of harmony. In the Dionysiac dithyramb35 man is stimulated to the highest intensification of his symbolic powers; some- thing that he has never felt before urgently demands to be expressed: the destruction of the veil of maya, one-ness as the genius of humankind, indeed of nature itself The essence of nature is bent on expressing itself; a new world of symbols is required, firstly the symbolism of the entire body, not just ofthe mouth, the face, the word, but the full gesture ofdance with its rhythmical movement ofevery limb. Then there is a sudden, tem- pestuous growth in music's other symbolic powers, in rhythm, dynamics, and harmony. To comprehend this complete unchaining of all symbolic powers, a man must already have reached that height ofself-abandonment which seeks symbolic expression in those powers: thus the dithyrambic servant of Dionysos can only be understood by his own kind! With what astonishment the Apolline Greeks must have regarded him! With an aston- ishment enlarged by the added horror of realizing that all this was not so foreign to them after all, indeed that their Apolline consciousness only hid this Dionysiac world from them like a veil.

3

In order to understand this, we need to dismantle the artful edifice of Apolline culture stone by stone, as it were, until we catch sight of the foundations on which it rests. The first things we observe here are the magnificent figures of the Olympian gods who stand on the gables of this building and whose deeds, represented in reliefs which can be seen gleaming from afar, adorn its friezes. If Apollo is also amongst their number, as just one god alongside others and without laying claim to the leading position, we should not allow this fact to confuse us. The very same drive which assumed sensuous form in Apollo gave birth to that entire Olympian world, and in this sense we are entitled to regard Apollo as its father. What, then, was the enormous need that gave rise to such a luminous company of Olympic beings? Anyone who approaches these Olympians with another religion in his heart and proceeds to look for signs ofmoral loftiness in them, or indeed holiness, or incorporeal spirituality, or a loving gaze filled with compassion, will soon be forced to turn his back on them in dismay and disappointment. Nothing here reminds us of asceticism (Askese), of spirituality and duty; everything here speaks only of over-brimming, indeed triumphant existence, where everything that exists has been deified, regardless of whether it is good or evil. Thus the spectator may stand in some perplexity before this fantastic superabundance of life, asking himself what magic potion these people can have drunk which makes them see Helen, 'hovering in sweet sensuality',36 smiling at them wherever they look, the ideal image oftheir own existence. Yet we must call out to this spectator who has already turned away: 'Do not go away, but listen first to what popular Greek wisdom has to say about this inexplicably serene existence you see spread out before you here.' 

An ancient legend recounts how King Midas hunted long in the forest for the wise Silenus, companion of Dionysos, but failed to catch him. When Silenus has finally fallen into his hands, the King asks what is the best and most excellent thing for human beings. Stiff and unmoving, the daemon remains silent until, forced by the King to speak, he finally breaks out in shrill laughter and says: 'Wretched, ephemeral race, children ofchance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.' 

How does the world of the Olympian gods relate to this piece of popular wisdom? The relationship is that of the ecstatic vision of a tortured martyr to his torments. The Olympian magic mountain now opens up, as it were, and shows us its roots. The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to live at all they had to place in front of these things the resplendent, dream-born figures of the Olympians. That enormous distrust of the Titanic forces of nature, that moira39 which throned, unpitying, above all knowledge, that vulture of man's great friend, Prometheus, that terrifying lot drawn by the wise Oedipus, that curse upon the family of Atreus which compels Orestes to kill his mother, in short that whole philosophy of the wood-god, together with its mythic examples, which destroyed the melancholy Etruscans - all this was constantly and repeatedly overcome by the Greeks, or at least veiled and withdrawn from view, by means of the artistic middle world of the Olympians. In order to be able to live, the Greeks were obliged, by the most profound compulsion, to create these gods. This process is probably to be imagined as taking place gradually, so that, under the influence of the Apolline instinct (Trieb) for beauty, the Olympian divine order of joy developed out of the original, Titanic divine order of terror in a series of slow transitions, in much the same way as roses burst forth from a thicket of thorns. How else could that people have borne existence' given their extreme sensitivity, their stormy desires, their unique gift for suffering, if that same existence had not been shown to them in their gods, suffused with a higher glory? 

The same drive which calls art into being to complete and perfect existence and thus to seduce us into continuing to live, also gave rise to the world of the Olympians in which the Hellenic 'Will' held up a transfiguring mirror to itself. Thus gods justify the life of men by living it themselves - the only satisfactory theodicy! Under the bright sunshine ofsuch gods existence is felt to be worth attaining, and the real pain of Homeric man refers to his departure from this existence, particularly to imminent departure, so that one might say of them, reversing the wisdom of Silenus, that 'the very worst thing for them was to die soon, the second worst ever to die at all'. Ifa lament is ever heard, it sings of short-lived Achilles, of the generations of men changing and succeeding one another like leaves on the trees, of the demise of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest hero to long to go on living, even as a day-Iaborer. So stormily does the 'Will', on the level of the Apolline, demand this existence, so utterly at one with it does Homeric man feel himself to be, that even his lament turns into a song in praise of being. 

At this point it must be said that this harmony, which modern men look on with such longing, this unity of man with nature, to which Schiller applied the now generally accepted art-word 'naive', is by no means such a simple, so-to-speak inevitable condition which emerges of  its own accord and which we would be bound to encounter at the threshold of every culture, as a human paradise; people could only believe this at a time when they were bent on thinking of Rousseau's Emile as an artist, and entertained the illusion that in Homer they had found just such an artist as Emile, reared at the heart of nature. Wherever we encounter the 'naive' in art, we have to recognize that it is the supreme effect of Apolline culture; as such, it first had to overthrow the realm of the Titans and slay monsters, and, by employing powerful delusions and intensely pleasurable illusions, gain victory over a terrifyingly profound view of the world and the most acute sensitivity to suffering. But how rarely is that complete enthrallment in the beauty of semblance which we call the naive actually achieved! And how ineffably sublime, for this very reason, is Homer, who, as an individual, stands in the same relation to that Apolline popular culture as the individual dream-artist does to the people's capacity for dreaming and indeed to that of nature in general. 

Homeric 'naivete' can be understood only as the complete victory of Apolline illusion; it is an illusion of the kind so frequently employed by nature to achieve its aims. The true goal is obscured by a deluding image; we stretch out our hands towards the image, and nature achieves its goal by means of this deception. In the Greeks the 'Will' wanted to gaze on a vision of itself as transfigured by genius and the world of art; in order that the Will might glorify itself its creatures too had to feel themselves to be worthy of glorification; they had to recognize a reflection of themselves in a higher sphere without feeling that the perfected world of their vision was an imperative or a reproach. This is the sphere ofbeauty in which they saw their mirror images, the Olympians. With this reflection (Spiegelung) of beauty the Hellenic 'Will' fought against the talent for suffering and for the wisdom of suffering which is the correlative of artistic talent; as a monument to its victory, Homer stands before us, the naive artist.

4 

The analogy with dream tells us something about this naive artist. If we imagine the dreamer calling out to himself in the midst of the illusory dream world, but without disturbing it, 'It is a dream, I will dream on', and if this compels us to conclude that he is deriving intense inward pleasure from looking at the dream, but if on the other hand the ability to dream with such inner pleasure in looking depends on us having entirely forgotten the day and its terrible importuning, then we may interpret all of these phenomena, under the guidance of Apollo, the diviner of dreams, roughly as follows. There is no doubt that, of the two halves of our lives, the waking and the dreaming half, the former strikes us as being the more privileged, important, dignified, and worthy of being lived, indeed the only half that truly is lived; nevertheless, although it may seem paradoxical, I wish to assert that the very opposite evaluation of dream holds true for that mysterious ground of our being of which we are an appearance (Erscheinung). The more I become aware of those all-powerful artistic drives in nature, and of a fervent longing in them for semblance, for their redemption and release in semblance, the more I feel myself driven to the metaphysical assumption that that which truly exists, the eternally suffering and contradictory, primordial unity, simultaneously needs, for its constant release and redemption, the ecstatic vision, intensely pleasurable semblance. 

We, however, who consist of and are completely trapped in semblance, are compelled to feel this semblance to be that which truly is not, i.e. a continual Becoming in time, space, and causality - in other words, empirical reality. If we ignore for a moment our own 'reality' and if we take our empirical existence, and indeed that of the world in general, to be a representation (Vorstellung) generated at each moment by the primordial unity, we must now regard dream as the semblance of the semblance and thus as a yet higher satisfaction of the original desire for semblance. It is for this very reason that the innermost core of nature takes indescribable pleasure in the naive artist and the naive work of art which is also only the 'semblance of semblance'. Raphael, himself one ofthose immortal 'naive' artists, has depicted for us in a symbolic painting the reduction of semblance to semblance, the primal process of the naive artist and also of Apolline culture. In his Transfiguration the lower half of the picture, with the possessed boy, the despairing bearers, and the frightened, helpless disciples, shows us a reflection of the eternal, primal pain, the only ground ofthe world; here 'semblance' is a reflection of the eternal contradiction, the father of all things. From this semblance there now rises, like some ambrosian perfume, a vision-like new world of semblance, ofwhich those who are trapped in the first semblance see nothing - a luminous hovering in purest bliss and in wide-eyed contemplation, free of all pain. Here, in the highest symbolism of art, we see before us that Apolline world of beauty and the ground on which it rests, that terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we grasp, intuitively, the reciprocal necessity of these two things. At the same time, however, we encounter Apollo as the deification of the principium individuationis in which alone the eternally attained goal of the primordial unity, its release and redemption through semblance, comes about; with sublime gestures he shows us that the whole world of agony is needed in order to compel the individual to generate the releasing and redemptive vision and then, lost in contemplation of that vision, to sit calmly in his rocking boat in the midst of the sea.

 If one thinks of it as in any sense imperative and prescriptive, this deification of individuation knows just one law: the individual, which is to say, respect for the limits of the individual, measure in the Hellenic sense. As an ethical divinity Apollo demands measure from all who belong to him and, so that they may respect that measure, knowledge of them- selves. Thus the aesthetic necessity of beauty is accompanied by the demands: 'Know thyself' and 'Not too much!', whereas getting above oneself and excess were regarded as the true hostile demons of the non- Apolline sphere, and thus as qualities of the pre-Apolline period, the age of the Titans, and of the extra-Apolline world, that of the barbarians. Prometheus had to be torn apart by vultures on account of his Titanic love for mankind; Oedipus had to be plunged into a confusing maelstrom of atrocities because his unmeasured wisdom solved the riddle of the Sphinx; these examples show how the Delphic god interpreted the Greek past. 

The Apolline Greek, too, felt the effect aroused by the Dionysiac to be 'Titanic' and 'barbaric'; at the same time he could not conceal from himself the fact that he too was related inwardly to those overthrown Titans and heroes. Indeed he was bound to feel more than this: his entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden ground of suffering and knowledge which was exposed to his gaze once more by the Dionysiac. And behold! Apollo could not live without Dionysos. The 'Titanic' and 'barbaric' was ultimately just as much of a necessity as the Apolline! Let us now imagine how the ecstatic sounds ofthe Dionysiac festival, with its ever more seductive, magical melodies, entered this artificially dammed-up world founded on semblance and measure, how in these melodies all the unmeasurable excess in nature found expression in pleasure, suffering and knowledge, in a voice which rose in intensity to a penetrating shout; let us imagine how little the psalm-singing artist of Apollo and the ghostly sound of his harp could mean in comparison with this daemonic popular song! The Muses of the arts of 'semblance' grew pale and wan when faced with an art which, in its intoxication, spoke the truth; the wisdom of Silenus called out 'Woe, woe!' to the serene Olympians. 

The individual, with all his limits and measure, became submerged here in the self-oblivion of the Dionysiac condition and forgot the statutes of Apollo. Excess revealed itself as the truth; contra- diction, bliss born of pain, spoke of itself from out of the heart of nature. Thus, wherever the Dionysiac broke through, the Apolline was suspended and annulled. But it is equally certain that, wherever the first onslaught was resisted, the reputation and majesty of the Delphic god was expressed in more rigid and menacing forms than ever before; for the only explanation I can find for the Doric state and Doric art is that it was a permanent military encampment of the Apolline: only in a state of unremitting resistance to the Titanic-barbaric nature of the Dionysiac could such a cruel and ruthless polity, such a war-like and austere form of education, such a defiantly aloof art, surrounded by battlements, exist for long. 

Up to this point I have simply expanded the observations I made at the beginning of this account: namely that the Dionysiac and the Apolline dominated the Hellenic world by a succession of ever-new births and by a process of reciprocal intensification; that, under the rule of the Apolline instinct for beauty, the Homeric world evolved from the 'iron' age with its Titanic struggles and its bitter popular philosophy; that this 'naive' magnificence was in turn engulfed by the flood of the Dionysiac when it broke over that world; and that the Apolline, confronted with this new power, rose up again in the rigid majesty of Doric art and the Doric view of the world. If, then, the struggle between these two hostile principles means that earlier Hellenic history breaks down into four great artistic stages, we must now ask what ultimate plan underlies all this to-ing and fro-ing - unless, that is, we are to regard the last of these periods, that of Doric art, as the pinnacle and goal of those artistic drives. At this point our gaze falls on the sublime and exalted art of Attic tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb as the common goal of both drives whose mysterious marriage, after a long preceding struggle, was crowned with such a child - who is both Antigone and Cassandra in one.