Excavations
of The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit
of Music, On Truth and Life in an
Extra-Moral Sense & Twilight of
the Idols, edits in The Critical Tradition
by David H. Richter
Nietzsche writes that
Nietzsche writes that
The Greeks were keenly aware of the
terrors and horrors of existence; in order to be able to live at all they had
to place before them the shining fantasy of the Olympians. Their tremendous distrust
of the titanic forces of nature: Moira, mercilessly enthroned beyond the
knowable world; the vulture which fed upon the great philanthropist Prometheus;
the terrible lot drawn by wise Oedipus; the curse of the house of Atreus which
brought Orestes to murder his mother: that whole Panic philosophy, in short,
with its mystic examples, by which the gloomy Etruscans perished, the Greeks
conquered – or at least hid from view – again and again by means of this artificial
Olympus. In order to live at all the Greeks had to construct the Olympian hierarchy of joy by slow degrees
from the original titanic hierarchy of terror, as roses are seen to break from
a thorny thicket.
We ourselves are the very stuff of
such illusions, unfolding in time, space, and causality – what we label “empiric
reality”- conjuring a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and
anthropomorphisms; in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically
and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and embellished, and which after long
usage, seemed fixed, canonical, and binding to a people. Truths that are
illusions that we have forgotten are just that; metaphors that have become worn
out and being considered only as metal, no longer as coins.
We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for thus far we have heard only the obligation that society imposes in order to exist. To be truthful just means using the customary metaphors; that is, in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, as a herd, in a style binding upon all. Now man forgets, of course, that this is how things stand for him.. Unconsciously and after centuries of getting into the habit of it, he thus lies and arrives, through just this unconsciousness, this very obliviousness, at his sense of the truth.
Only by forgetting the primitive world of metaphor, only by hardening and stiffening the primal mass of images that gust in fervid fluency from the original wealth of human fantasy, only by means of an unconquerable faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting himself as subject, that is, as an artistically creative subject,does man live with any tranquility, security and constancy. If he could escape the prison walls of his faith for only an instant, it would be over at once for his “self-assurance.”
The intellect, that master of deception is free as long as it can deceive without doing harm, relieved from the slave duty it otherwise performs, it thus celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more profuse, rich, and proud, more nimble and daring; with creative pleasure it makes a muddle of metaphors and shifts the boundary stones of abstractions so that, for example, it calls the stream a moving path that carries man where he would otherwise walk. Now it has cast off the token of servitude thus far engaged in cheerless activity, attempting to show a poor individual the ways and means of the existence he craves, like a servant who goes out to pillage and loot for his master, it now has become master and may wipe away the expression of want from its features. Whatever it now does no longer bears the mark of distortion, as before, but that of disguise. It copies human life but takes it to be something good and seems quite content with it. That enormous scaffold and framework of concepts to which the needy man clings for dear life is merely a stage and plaything for the boldest feats of a liberated intellect; and when it smashes, jumbles, and ironically reassembles this framework, pairing what is most foreign and separating what is closest, it reveals that it has no need for such makeshifts of need and that it will no longer be guided by concepts, but by intuitions.
There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. No word exists for them, man is speechless in their sight or else he talks only in a great many forbidden metaphors and unheard-of phrasings so that by smashing and mocking the old conceptual barriers he might at least creatively approximate the impression of intuition in its mighty presence.
We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for thus far we have heard only the obligation that society imposes in order to exist. To be truthful just means using the customary metaphors; that is, in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, as a herd, in a style binding upon all. Now man forgets, of course, that this is how things stand for him.. Unconsciously and after centuries of getting into the habit of it, he thus lies and arrives, through just this unconsciousness, this very obliviousness, at his sense of the truth.
Only by forgetting the primitive world of metaphor, only by hardening and stiffening the primal mass of images that gust in fervid fluency from the original wealth of human fantasy, only by means of an unconquerable faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting himself as subject, that is, as an artistically creative subject,does man live with any tranquility, security and constancy. If he could escape the prison walls of his faith for only an instant, it would be over at once for his “self-assurance.”
The intellect, that master of deception is free as long as it can deceive without doing harm, relieved from the slave duty it otherwise performs, it thus celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more profuse, rich, and proud, more nimble and daring; with creative pleasure it makes a muddle of metaphors and shifts the boundary stones of abstractions so that, for example, it calls the stream a moving path that carries man where he would otherwise walk. Now it has cast off the token of servitude thus far engaged in cheerless activity, attempting to show a poor individual the ways and means of the existence he craves, like a servant who goes out to pillage and loot for his master, it now has become master and may wipe away the expression of want from its features. Whatever it now does no longer bears the mark of distortion, as before, but that of disguise. It copies human life but takes it to be something good and seems quite content with it. That enormous scaffold and framework of concepts to which the needy man clings for dear life is merely a stage and plaything for the boldest feats of a liberated intellect; and when it smashes, jumbles, and ironically reassembles this framework, pairing what is most foreign and separating what is closest, it reveals that it has no need for such makeshifts of need and that it will no longer be guided by concepts, but by intuitions.
There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. No word exists for them, man is speechless in their sight or else he talks only in a great many forbidden metaphors and unheard-of phrasings so that by smashing and mocking the old conceptual barriers he might at least creatively approximate the impression of intuition in its mighty presence.
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