Episode 119: Nietzsche on Tragedy and the Psychology of Art

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 119 is something like, what can ancient Greek tragedy tell us about human nature and the relationship between intellect and art? We read Friedrich Nietzsche's the Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of music from 1872. You can join the discussion, get the text and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:44 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:46 Jon: This is Jon Castro in Manhattan, New York.

0:50 Mark: We are back to Nietzsche. It occurred to me that our Nietzsche episodes are probably overall our best episodes.

0:57 Seth: Why do you suppose that is, Mark? It's about Nietzsche because he writes things that lend themselves very well to our format. That's my opinion.

1:05 Mark: Yeah, he's a dynamic writer. We generally know something about him, so that helps.

1:11 Seth: He mixes philosophy and humor.

1:13 Jon: Not in this essay.

1:14 Seth: No. God, no.

1:15 Jon: God knows, right? No, it's like you're reading that prologue and it's like, oh, Nietzsche. And then you read the. Then you move on and it's like, whoa.

1:27 Mark: Yes, this is the very young Nietzsche. This is only a year earlier than the On Truth and Lie essay that we did another episode on, but it is decades before the bulk of his

1:37 Dylan: coolest work, Genealogy of Morals.

1:39 Wes: I was under the misconception that this was actually his dissertation, but I think it turns out he never wrote a dissertation.

1:46 Mark: I actually just was the narrator for an audiobook on a biography of Nietzsche's life.

1:52 Seth: Wow.

1:52 Mark: That people can purchase if they want from Audible. If you search for my last name, I didn't write it, but. So, yes, this was sort of the end of his period as a professor. I forget the details, but he was the youngest, like, full professor. People were expecting great things, and it pretty much wrecked his reputation as a classicist.

2:12 Seth: Was he a classicist or philologist?

2:14 Mark: He was a philologist. I'm equating. Yes.

2:17 Seth: Same thing.

2:18 Mark: Are they not.

2:19 Seth: They are. Why do they have two different words for it then?

2:22 Wes: Because that was the old word,

2:27 Mark: And you could see why it would not work as a text of classical scholarship. It's not like this is chock full of footnotes. I would look at it as hermeneutics, as an interpretation of some portion of culture.

2:41 Jon: He also spends about as much time quoting Goethe as he does any of the Greeks.

2:48 Wes: Yeah, it's heavily influenced by the contemporary German scene.

2:50 Jon: He reaches for examples of what's happening in Greek art. And to make the point, he quotes

2:57 Seth: Goethe, specifically Faust, right?

3:00 Dylan: Yeah, a lot of Faust. I don't know Goethe very well, but great guy. Yeah. And there's a lot of plays. Right, that he wrote.

3:08 Jon: Right.

3:09 Mark: I think we need to try to have somebody sum up in a couple sentences overall, what is his argument? What is he trying to do here? Why are we bothering. Well, why are we bothering to read this is a separate question, but we should help answer that by saying what this is about. Who wants to.

3:22 Wes: So really, I think we should think of this as pivoting off of our recent Schopenhauer episodes. Well, for Schopenhauer, there sort of emerged this distinction between two kinds of music and everything else. Basically, Nietzsche starts out with this Apollonian Dionysian distinction between which are really two types of art. He's taking that from Schopenhauer's distinction between music, which sort of taps directly into the will, and other forms of art which do that in a mediated way via representations. So music is non representational. So that's this.

He's going to take that Apollonian Dionysian distinction between representational art and non representational art or music. He's going to elaborate that in the first six sections, and then from section seven onwards, he's going to apply that to ancient Greek tragedy and tell us the best examples of ancient Greek tragedy. Specifically, Aeschylus and Sophocles were great because they represented a synthesis of the Apollonian and Dionysian. That synthesis sort of fell apart at a certain point with the advent of Euripides, who he sees as highly influenced by the same cultural currents which led to Socrates, which is a sort of rise of the Apollonian at the expense of the Dionysian, leading to a much less greater presence of this chorus and the Dionysian principles which we can talk about in detail in Greek tragedy.

And then he gets on in the end to its sort of larger implications because he's concerned with the larger theme of, of course, contemporary times. There's sort of a parallel to this falling away of the Dionysian. He thinks in contemporary culture this is

5:01 Mark: important because the prime Dionysian, Apollonian descriptions are really basic psychological characteristics. And he thinks that art is important just in the way Schopenhauer was describing that it gave us metaphysical relief in some important way. And if you don't do it right, if you don't do it from the right motives, if you don't do it for the right combination of elements, then it doesn't actually work. The failure, the falling apart of tragedy was sort of really the debasement, the end of them as a great race of human beings. And so then he tries to apply that to Germany.

5:33 Seth: So a couple things I'd embellish on this. The first is, Wes, I might want to. I think it's ambiguous whether he thinks music is not a representational art or if it just represents nature somehow directly and unmediated. Whereas the Apollonian, we'll call it the linguistic.

5:52 Wes: We had that conversation too, during Schopenhauer. Right. Because Schopenhauer does call it a copy of the will.

5:57 Seth: Yes. And that's important for him precisely because he wants to argue that music is essentially the path to the will, you know, in the same voice that Schopenhauer was doing in the world as well, and representation. And then he wants to tie that into how Greek tragedy, specifically Sophocles and Aeschylus, essentially take that direct representation of the will, or that direct relationship to the will, and modify it appropriately so that the viewer, the ancient Greek viewer of tragedy, would feel a connectedness. It's a way to kind of create a connection to the will that he feels, I think, is lost in contemporary art. In fact, it's lost in art, starting with Euripides.

6:41 Dylan: It's a principle of unity that Dionysus represents. That's part of the direct connection of the will, is just a fundamental principle of unity with nature.

6:52 Seth: Right.

6:53 Dylan: On the other side, Apollonian is the principle of individuation, articulation and separation.

7:00 Mark: John, did you have an opening?

7:02 Jon: I was under the impression that he wasn't necessarily identifying Socrates with the Apollonian. It was something new, Socratism.

7:12 Mark: It was a later evolution. He, in fact, criticizes himself that this whole thing struck him as way too Hegelian. And in that, he means the thing that people that don't even know anything about Hegel know about Hegel, of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis. So he sees all these. You know, you've got the Dionysian, and it gets sort of papered over by the Apollonian, but the Dionysian kind of surges back. And so the synthesis of those things is tragedy. What Socrates represents is maybe a later evolution of the Apollonian. So it's sort of the resurgence, in a bad way, of certain elements of the Apollonian. But anyway.

7:49 Wes: But it's not all bad, because in the last chapter we'll see this pointing towards this idea that each resurgence of the Apollonian, it's redemptive in some way because art always relies on that tension of sort of rebelling against the scientific spirit.

8:05 Mark: Let's say the artistic Socrates would be the final move in the dialectic, then.

8:09 Wes: Yes.

8:10 Dylan: Where he realizes his Dionysian element and

8:12 Jon: starts, I wonder who that might be.

8:15 Wes: He's probably thinking that he is.

8:16 Seth: Yeah.

8:17 Mark: Fred Astaire.

8:18 Wes: Of course he is. The proper synthesis of musician and philosopher.

8:25 Seth: I thought Mark was gonna say somebody from Camper van Beethoven.

8:29 Jon: Oh, God.

8:30 Wes: But yeah, should we go into detail on the. So these first few chapters spell out this distinction between Apollonian and Diana.

8:37 Jon: Yep.

8:38 Wes: So one of the things that Dylan mentioned was the association of the Apollonian with the principle of individuation, which he mentions right here in this first section.

8:47 Mark: Well, maybe we should say what the word means, what Apollo has to do with any of this.

8:52 Seth: Wait, which translation are you guys using, by the way? Which edition do you have the Kaufman?

8:57 Dylan: I have the Cambridge.

9:00 Seth: Okay, Dylan, I have the Cambridge, too.

9:03 Mark: So I read the Kaufman, but then the one that I will link to for People Online is actually by a guy named ian Johnston from 2009. So that's a free one. It's the one that's linked from the Wikipedia page, and it's a very clear. I used that for my note taking after I read the Kaufman, though it doesn't. You have to, like, click through to get to the footnotes in the electronic version, which I did not bother to do. But I like Kaufman's footnotes a lot. He's sort of my guide for Nietzsche and always has been.

9:31 Seth: Yeah, I just checked my book out of the library, and this is the one they had. The introduction to the Cambridge edition is actually really good.

9:38 Wes: So the association with Apollo is. Apollo is the God of sunlight and the sun, and the Apollonian is associated with appearance. And specifically Nietzsche will use this phrase, mere appearance all the time and illusion and dreaming. Yeah. So I think on one hand we're meant to think of Schopenhauerian representation. Right. The sense in which it's an illusion. Right. Is the sense in which we've discussed many times in this podcast the idea that appearances are a cover for reality or for the unknowable things in themselves behind reality. So there's this sense in which appearance is a kind of error or illusion.

The aesthetic experience is to embrace the appearance as appearance is to not treat it as a means to, you know. So, for instance, the aesthetic experience of the Apple reuse, this same example is about appreciating the representation or the Appearance of the apple without worrying about the object itself and whether you can consume it. So that's on the sort of egotistical side. On the scientific side, it's not worrying about the reality of the object or questions of truth or things like that. You embrace the appearance as the appearance. It's just the aesthetic itself is the important part of that, not the underlying reality.

10:52 Dylan: He's also associated with prophecy, right?

10:55 Wes: Yes, the Delphic God. Yeah, the Delphic oracle.

11:01 Dylan: I had to think a little bit about how that link was being made up with the symbolism and light. But the way you were just saying it, Wes made it a little more clear why he would be associated with prophecy as opposed to Dionysus, and that not being so worried about the connectedness to reality, but interested in symbols.

11:19 Wes: Where does he make that explicit connection with prophecy?

11:22 Dylan: Nietzsche, in the first chapter, when he's talking about Apollo. This is a paragraph that starts with. The Greeks also expressed the joyous necessity of dream experience in their Apollo. He says the higher truth, the perfection of these dream states, in contrast to the only partially intelligible reality of the daylight world, together with the profound consciousness of the helping and healing powers of nature in sleep and dream, is simultaneously the symbolic analog of the power to prophecy and indeed of all the arts through which life is made possible and worth living.

11:54 Mark: That's interesting. My other translation is at the same time a symbolic analogy to the capacity to prophesy the truth as well as to art in general through which life is made possible and worth living. That putting the truth part in there.

12:06 Wes: So again, it's this association. Yeah. With the truth as opposed to.

12:09 Seth: Well, no, he's making a connection between dreaming and prophecy. His point is that the poets. He actually says the poets have the same experience to dreams as philosophers do to reality.

12:22 Wes: Good.

12:22 Mark: Schopenhauerian philosophers, not just philosophers in general. In other words, they see reality as an illusion, but as an illusion to be taken seriously.

12:31 Seth: Yes. He says every human being is fully an artist when creating the worlds of dream. And the lovely semblance of dream is the precondition of all the arts of image making. And that's the connection to Apollo, Del, and the idea of image making, including, as we shall see, an important half of poetry.

12:47 Wes: And the other thing here is the way prophecies rely on dreams. Right. They're interpretations of dreams.

12:52 Dylan: Yes.

12:53 Wes: You know, I did think, for instance here about the mentioning of dreams in our recent Freud episode on dreams. I thought about this difference between manifest content in the dream as mere appearance and then what Freud called the dream thoughts, which represent the more Dionysian element that gets worked over to the dream work and expressed in those dreams. And the interpretive faculty seems to me is meant to get us back to those dream thoughts. So it's still unclear to me how prophecy fits in exactly to the Apollonian, because I'm associating it here with sort of unwrapping the appearance of the dream and not merely treating it as appearance.

13:28 Jon: But is it the Apollonian mode about the creation of. For the artist, the creation of, but for the spectator, I guess the perception of enjoy in. I think he calls him a plastic artist several times. And I'm not sure what the connotation

13:43 Wes: is there, but I was thinking of sculpture.

13:45 Dylan: Sculpture, yeah, yeah.

13:46 Jon: The joy of that, of the pure beauty of it, the outsides of it. Which is why I'm still having trouble, and I know this is jumping ahead, but I'm still having trouble equating that with what Socrates is doing. In other words, I think his knock on Socrates is that he just doesn't understand tragedy. That in order to have the highest form of tragedy, you need both of those modes.

14:08 Seth: Right, yeah. We need to hold off on the Socrates piece.

14:11 Wes: Right, we can hold on to that. But there is a real tension here because for Schopenhauer, the world of representation, you can treat representations scientifically as well. Right. And be a scientist and seek out the truth of things. And the Apollonian, in its later association with Socrates, is associated with truth seeking. Whereas here, in this focus on mere appearance, it seems like if you're focused on the aesthetics, you're sort of leaving aside truth seeking. So there is a complicated relationship here. It's sort of a bifurcation within this realm of representation, which I think can be a little confusing.

14:45 Seth: Let me read something here. And then I think we need to bring in a notion of what the Dionysian represents. But in part one, it's page 16 of my version, the image of Apollo must also contain that delicate line which the dream image may not overstep if its effect is not to become pathological. So that in the worst case, the semblance would deceive us as if it were a crude reality. That freedom from wilder impulses, that wise calm of the image making God. So the function of the Apollonian image making process with respect to the dream, if the dream somehow is connected to this Dionysian element, which is the unity, the will, but more importantly, it's also wild and natural and potentially threatening and disturbing in the sense of madness.

Right. Where the Dionysian is this kind of unbridled natural passion. And the Apollonian he's building up here in its role as dream interpretation and prophecy is the image making out of that wild urge, that wild element so that it doesn't overtake us. Otherwise we might mistake the dream for reality and be completely overwhelmed. Right. And fall into terror.

16:00 Wes: This is completely parallel also to Freud. Right. Who sees dreams as a way of managing instincts and desires in such a way that they don't overwhelm us and wake us up.

16:10 Seth: Yep. That self governing function that he talks about.

16:14 Dylan: So. Dionysus.

16:15 Seth: Dionysus.

16:17 Mark: It's Dionysus, right?

16:18 Seth: I don't know. I don't know. We're the Greek scholars here.

16:21 Wes: Yeah, it's Dionysus. Dionysus.

16:25 Mark: There you go.

16:26 Wes: All right, so you can say it's oos, but you can say it whichever way you want.

16:29 Mark: I watched this four part YouTube thing by Gregory Sadler on the birth of tragedy and he calls him Dionysus the entire time.

16:38 Wes: None of these vowels are what the actual ancient Greek is.

16:41 Mark: So there's no wrong answer. That's the answer.

16:45 Dylan: Remind me. In the Kaufman, he calls it Apollonian and Dionysian.

16:51 Mark: Right. Apollinian as opposed to Apollonian, which everybody else says. And my other translation says. And he gives some. Well, you know, he could have used this German word which would have been. I think that's a Kaufman idiosyncrasy.

17:03 Dylan: So in the Cambridge, they translate it instead of the Dionysian or whatever you want, to the Dionysiac.

17:12 Seth: Okay, so Dionysus. Dionysus. Dionysus. Let me read another passage here. It's on the following page. From what I just read a second ago 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 of the phenomenal world. If we add to this horror the blissful ecstasy which arises from the innermost ground of man, indeed of nature itself. Whenever this breakdown of the principium individuationis occurs, we catch a glimpse of the essence of the Dionysiac, which is best conveyed by the analogy of intoxication.

17:51 Dylan: So read the next.

17:53 Seth: 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.

18:12 Dylan: So it's drugs and sex.

18:13 Seth: Basically it's rock and roll.

18:15 Wes: This is reminiscent again of Schopenhauer's idea that in aesthetic experience we're no longer individuated or we sort of regress to this unified will as opposed to being our own individual wills. So that's reminiscent of that. Although for Schopenhauer that's all aesthetic experience, including the plastic arts and painting and the rest of it.

18:37 Mark: I spent quite a bit of my thinking time here trying to map Nietzsche on Schopenhauer, that obviously he was very aware of Schopenhauer's theory, but he had some of his own thought. It was wrong in certain respects. It's interesting that Schopenhauer considers in the regular non musical contemplation of any work of art. Yeah. You, by getting away from your own personal interests and looking at the grapes with regard to their beautiful form, rather than the fact that you as a person, individual, want to eat them, you are becoming the pure, willless subject of knowledge.

19:08 Wes: Right.

19:09 Mark: And even though Nietzsche is giving a similar phenomenological account of the Apollonian contemplation, that it is also peaceful and it is contemplating the forms in a way that Kant would approve of in a disinterested way. But still what that is is part of being aware of the forms of things, are aware of the individuality of all the bits of experience, including yourself. So it's being very clear. He says this Apollonian take toward art naturally leads toward the directive to know yourself, to understand yourself, and to scientific, to the Socratic thing that we were talking about earlier.

19:48 Wes: One thing we should keep clear though, is that the grapes are no longer just the grapes. When you're having an aesthetic experience of them. They function like the Kantian schema, or let's say, you know, when you're working with a triangle in a geometric proof, there's a way in which it. You're not working with a particular triangle, it's representative of any triangle.

20:06 Mark: Well, are you seeing that in Nietzsche?

20:08 Wes: I'm sorry, I'm talking about Schopenhauer.

20:10 Mark: Okay.

20:10 Wes: The aesthetic experience is focused on these Platonic ideas for Schopenhauer, which is just. He compares them to these schema. So it's just in the sense. It's not. There's something about aesthetic experience too, where you're de. Individuating as the knower and then your knowledge is directed towards something general but concrete as well.

20:28 Mark: Yeah. So how does Nietzsche diverge from that? I mean, I think we'd have to say that not only would he have to say that you need to recognize yourself as an individual, but that he would have to toss out the Platonic form idea. Maybe. I'm not sure. He didn't seem to talk directly about the object of Apollonian contemplation.

20:45 Wes: Yeah, that's one of the interesting omissions here, is this lack of talk about Platonic forms and instead talk about mere appearance and then this association of the Dionysian with withdrawal from individuation and the association of the Apollonian with individuation. So Nietzsche is highlighting the way in which art still exists within a world of representation. You know, and we discussed this in the Schopenhauer episode as well. Even though there are these ways in which it's meant to be a withdrawal. Art happens in the medium of representations, and music is somehow different in giving us a direct conduit to the will.

21:20 Mark: So Nietzsche's account of beauty here is actually, I think, more in line with Plato's that whereas Schopenhauer wanted to say that, well, to be really consistent, Plato should have really been into artistic appreciation because that would let you see through the individual things to the forms. But Plato himself thought it was just an imitation. Enjoyment of any beauty is just enjoyment of these pale imitations of the true forms. And therefore creating artworks is creating imitations of imitations. And that's what Nietzsche says it's doing, but that it is aware that is creating imitations and that it is rejoicing in the very falseness. Well, not falseness in the very surface level.

22:01 Jon: I think, if I recall from Gay Science, a word that might be useful to use, there is magnification instead of an imitation of an imitation. If you look at the Section 8, Kaufman points out, Nietzsche seems to be equivocating between his own perspective and then returning to a Schopenhauerian perspective. The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing in itself, and the whole world of appearances. Just as tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal life of this core of existence, which abides through the perpetual destruction of appearances.

The symbolism of the satyr chorus proclaims this primordial relationship between the thing in itself and appearance, as if those are two separate things. Kaufman's note is that he's returning to Schopenhauer's perspective in contrast to the ending of the section directly before it, where I don't think he's holding up that distinction as an actual. The distinction between the thing in itself and mere appearance is even a true distinction in any way?

23:12 Wes: Well, I think so the Schopenhauerian perspective. Right. Is the thing in itself is the will and the appearance is the objectification of the will.

23:19 Mark: Right. So sometimes he talks as if the Dionysian is. As if, you know, that would be the thing in itself. You're expressing the will, whereas the Apollonian is cleaving toward the appearances. But I think what some of what John was saying was pointing to part of the Apollonian illusion is that you embrace appearance as appearance, but then that acknowledges that there is an underlying reality, but it's a projection, it's a fiction, it points to. It's where the Platonic forms and a whole Parmenidean take that. Yes, I'm appreciating these surface level things as the individual train of surface level things that they are.

But underneath it all given as the ground of this is an underlying, unchanging, eternal unity. And so that's not Schopenhauer's view of the thing in itself, that's the Platonic view. So that's sort of posited by the Apollonian take what Nietzsche ultimately thinks. I'm not sure.

24:12 Wes: Well, except to the extent that the one will is the unity underlying.

24:16 Jon: Right.

24:16 Mark: That's Schopenhauer's. And I think at this point Nietzsche agrees that really the truth of things, in other words, the Apollonians think that they. Here's the connection to Socrates again. So you can be a purely aesthetic Apollonian, but then if you become a philosopher as an Apollonian, then you think you drill under that to the underlying consistent unity, the form, something like that. But if you embrace the hard truth that the whole point of the Apollonian as a cultural movement is to put a shield in front of us to cover up the truth. And the truth, according to Nietzsche is exactly what Schopenhauer said it was that the underlying will, the thing in itself, is really pointless and scattered and you can't make any sense of it.

24:58 Wes: Blind striving, yes.

25:00 Mark: So it's hard for me to say whether Nietzsche actually completely agrees with Schopenhauer. I think he does, but you could very easily read him. And I think maybe this is what, I don't know, we'd have to talk about, have a different discussion about what Nietzsche's ultimate metaphysical views are in his later works. But I would think that it's not crazy to think that both of these takes on the thing in itself, Schopenhauer's that it's crazy Will and Plato's that it's single Parmidian unity. God, blah, blah, blah, blah. That these are both projections. That these are both hermeneutic readings on appearances. Bring it back, Seth.

25:34 Seth: All right. So on section two, not too long after the previous reading that I just did, Nietzsche says this. This is page 19. So far we have considered the Apollonian or the Apolline, and its opposite, the Dionysiac, as Apolline.

25:50 Mark: That's that version of that.

25:52 Wes: The Apolline and the Dionysiac.

25:54 Jon: Yes.

25:54 Seth: Look, I'm just. I'm just saying Oxbridge equals literal and pedantic. Okay.

26:00 Mark: Let's just call it the Appellate.

26:02 Seth: The Appellate

26:05 Mark: and the Disco.

26:06 Seth: And the Circle and the Disco. Okay. So far we have considered the Apollonian 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, on the other hand, as intoxicated reality in relation to these unmediated artistic states in nature, every artist is an imitator. That's in quotes. And indeed, either an Apollonian 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. I don't know if that helps clarify Nietzsche's metaphysical position, but.

26:53 Dylan: Well, I think that it makes it less hierarchical and it drives home this dual relation. And it's true that Nietzsche emphasizes the need to rekindle the Dionysian, but it seems to be mainly in reaction to the overabundance of the Apollonian tendency. Not that there is this example to me, of how it's not as if you would completely get to the truth of things by going straight Dionysian. It's not as if the Apollonian is a film on top of a more authentic core of the Dionysian.

27:32 Seth: Totally agree.

27:32 Jon: You can't have one without the other.

27:34 Wes: Well, yeah. Or the synthesis is. We require synthesis between these things. And we saw this in the gay science as well. That was one of the overriding. The whole. I mean, gay and science. Right.

27:45 Dylan: Yep.

27:45 Wes: The whole point is this synthesis.

27:47 Dylan: A Dionysian, Apollinian.

27:48 Wes: Yeah. Between this and later on. So here it's between the Dionysian and the Apollinian. And later on, it's more explicitly. And even in his Truth and Lie essay, it's between the scientific impulse which is a particular manifestation of the Apollonian and a non artistic one more broadly, between the artistic and the scientific. So this is sort of a lower level distinction within the artistic that will later on, Nietzsche will. Will elaborate into this the way in which science and art need to be synthesized.

28:16 Seth: So he moves on from that particular comment. He's trying to make the point these things come together in Greek tragedy. He's got quite a few steps to get there. I don't know if it will pay off for us to walk through all those steps.

28:30 Dylan: He has a nice paragraph at the very end of four which tries to summarize the sort of Hellenic history and the oscillation between the.

28:40 Seth: Okay, by all means, bring it.

28:42 Dylan: He says, up to this point I have simply expanded the observations I made at the beginning of this account, namely that the Dionysian and the Apollonian dominated the Hellenic world by a succession of ever new births and by a process of reciprocal intensification that under the rule of the Apollonian 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 Dionysian when it broke out over the world, and that the Apollonian, 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 this to ing and froing? Unless, that is, we are to regard the last of these periods, that of Doric art, as the pinnacle and goal of these 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 tribes whose mysterious marriage after a long preceding struggle was crowned with such a child who is both Antigone and Cassandra at once.

30:00 Mark: You're right, that's not hilarious.

30:04 Dylan: He's not very funny in this. And he also. This is a nice example of how he just tromps through this entire history with this huge interpretation of which he basically provides no evidence of earlier, but basically sort of tells you. And I think it's okay in the sense that if you take him for what he's saying, this is how he's understanding that history of Greek culture. And that's his interpretation, it holds water and stands up to scrutiny as a historical claim is one thing. But you see where he's Going with it in that the pinnacle of Attic tragedy is a manifestation or maybe an end result of this back and forth ness this to and fro in between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. And that's good enough to understand the birth of tragedy.

30:53 Wes: That to and froing he's talking about is. Well, someone might have to help me out with the chronology, but I think the Dionysian festivals come early. Right. And then there's this sort of Apollonian smackdown that he associates with epic poetry. Homer. Right. And so if you, you know.

31:08 Mark: Yeah, the classical Greek period, you might

31:11 Wes: say the way Homer writes it really is. Of course, he could have quoted verses and tried to justify it, but I think it's pretty well accepted that it's this focus on the appearances of things. There's not a lot about the thoughts and feelings of characters or it's dreamlike in a way.

31:27 Jon: It's that Erich Auerbach.

31:29 Wes: Yeah, mimesis. So he famously. Yeah. Has the same interpretation.

31:33 Jon: And then that it's this parade of gorgeous images. In that parade, there's no tension or mounting suspense as to what the end result of the epic is. The epic is being enjoyed as it passes in front of you.

31:46 Wes: Right. That's a great way to put it. And then he associates the Dionysian with the Titans. Right. And so they sort of the gods of Olympus, they rise up and defeat those Titans. So that's another example of the Apollonian defeating the Dionysian. And the significance of that is there's an optimism to that. The Titans sort of put us in direct contact with the horrors of the world. And especially, for instance, the myth of Prometheus, where the idea is that human self consciousness and knowledge and cleverness and technology and all those things and science, science itself, come at a great cost. Basically. It's like the Greek version of the Fall. And once you get to Attic tragedy, you're still dealing with the same old myths. Right. And the horribleness of it. But they get wrapped up in the. There's an Apollonian element to the tragedies as well.

32:34 Jon: But, Wes, when you were taking us through that survey there, we talked about the Homeric overcoming, but he says right after that that this naive splendor was again overwhelmed by the influx of the Dionysian. And that here is the summary that one, in new births ever following in mutually augmenting one another, controlled the Hellenic genius out of the Age of Bronze. This is number two. With its wars of the Titans and its rigorous folk philosophy, the Homeric world developed under the sway of the Apollonian impulse to beauty, which is what you were just discussing.

Right. Three, that this naive Homer, the naive artist, this naive splendor, was again overwhelmed by the influx of the Dionysians. So that's like an historical step. Right. And then four, against this new power, the Apollonian rose to the austere majesty of Doric art and the Doric view of the world. And then the final goal which he gets to next is Attic tragedy.

33:27 Wes: After the Homeric is the tragedy. That's the next stage?

33:31 Mark: I don't think so.

33:32 Wes: The Socratic era comes after. The synthesis comes after tragedy.

33:38 Seth: Right.

33:38 Wes: John just gave a chronology which ends with the resurgence of the Apollonian in Socratism. And the stage before that is.

33:46 Jon: I don't think he. No, no, no, I think that's a mistake, actually. I think he's saying, again, the translation is a little different than the one that was just read. If amid the strife of these two hostile principles, the older Hellenic history thus falls into four great periods of art, which are the four that I just kind of. I rehashed when I read them, we are now impelled to inquire after the final goal of these developments and processes. I think in the translation that came earlier, it was, unless we regard the last attained period of Doric art as the climax, Kaufman says less, perchance meaning unless we make the error, we don't want to make the error, that we should regard the last attained period, the period of Doric art, as the climax and aim of these artistic impulses. Unless, Wes, you're saying the climax of Attic tragedy comes directly before the Doric period.

34:33 Dylan: Well, so there are two sections that he doesn't seem to talk as much about in this evolution as the festival stuff, which is the earlier Dionysian, and then the Homeric stuff, which is the rise of the Apollonian. And then in this paragraph, he follows that Homeric world with that this naive magnificence was in turn engulfed by the flood of the Dionysian. And then the Apollonian, confronted with this new power, rose up again in the rigid majesty of Doric art. Those two steps he doesn't seem to talk a whole lot about to me in the previous sections, but they precede Attic tragedy.

35:10 Wes: Right.

35:10 Jon: And the Doric. The only clue inside the text that I could find as to what he meant by Doric, though, you guys, probably one of you might just know right off the tip of your tongue, but is that Kaufmann I identifies Doric with Sparta.

35:21 Mark: I just did a web search right here, and all of them are coming up with. The Doric is one of three main orders of classical Greek architecture.

35:28 Seth: Ionic.

35:29 Mark: Yes, that's one of the other ones. What I was picturing here is with regard to music, Doric music is what he's putting as a contrast. An Apollonian sort of music in contrast to the Dionysian music that came later. So it doesn't have any harmony in it. It's very sedate. You picture the guy with the lyre or the flute just doing, you know, this is the music that we're just all sitting around and so it's appreciating. That kind of music is very much like appreciating a sculpture. It's not very dynamic. It doesn't hit you over the head. It's just a thing that you sit and you contemplate and you're peaceful.

36:02 Wes: And what he's thinking of here is what everyone at the time associates with ancient Greek art, which is all these finds of pottery, the architecture, all this Apollonian stuff. That's the sum and substance of the Greek. That's the way people think of the ancient Greeks.

36:17 Mark: Don't worry about the term Doric Kouros, boy.

36:20 Wes: He's trying to say there's this leading up to all that. Leading up to this longest period of what we think of as Greek art, including Euripides is sort of the lead in to all that, but is a period where the Dionysian is still alive. The final stage of that is the Attic. Attic tragedy.

36:36 Jon: So again, in this progression that he's outlining, Wes, what you're saying is that the point where he says the naive splendor was again overwhelmed by the influx of the Dionysian.

36:44 Mark: That is.

36:45 Wes: That's Euripides. Sorry, yeah, it's before.

36:49 Dylan: It's before Euripides. Right.

36:50 Mark: Euripides is the end of the story of tragedy. So before we even get to tragedy, we have the straight up Apollonian, which you might think by thinking about this peaceful music and the pottery and the columns and stuff. Would that be an example of what he thinks is being presented as naive art?

37:05 Jon: I think Wes thinks that you're talking

37:06 Wes: about something after the naive art is Homeric.

37:10 Dylan: Is Homer. Yeah, Naive art's Homer.

37:12 Wes: What comes after that is Attic tragedy and folk music. And then what we end up with is Euripidean tragedy, Socratism, and then the rest of Greek art, which is what everyone else associates the Greeks with, which is highly Apollonian.

37:27 Jon: Right. And that's the flaw of that stage. And thank you, Wes, because I thought Those four were pointing toward Attic tragedy, but Attic tragedy is happening within that progression. So that final stage, the flaw in it, again harkening back to what someone said, is that that moment is the overreaction that creates a brittle, and I guess this is my own word, like a sort of sterile overreaction to the Dionysian force. We just happen to believe, because it came last, that that's the way that we should. Yeah, consider. Gotcha. Okay.

37:59 Mark: But we have the back and forth in the dialectic a few times before that. So the Homeric is Apollonian, basically, you know, you're saying that the raising, the heroes, the way that they worship the gods, all those images are very Apollonian. But what distinguishes that from this sterile period later is that it is consciously an attempt to tamp down on the recognition of really how freaking horrible the world actually is. So it's sort of a recognition of the truth, according to Schopenhauer, of existence. Life is nasty, brutish, short as glorified suffering. Yes.

38:32 Jon: Can I throw one adjustment to that which might maybe mark Nietzsche off as a little bit different than Schopenhauer. Although I think I. I think I see him kind of laboring under what you're talking about. He doesn't just identify the Dionysian with horror or terror, he also makes a passing reference to ecstasy.

38:50 Dylan: Right.

38:51 Jon: For him, those two things are sort of wrapped up together. I don't know much about Schopenhauer.

38:55 Mark: Right. No, this is. This is not okay. The way that Sadler put it was that the Dionysian, this is the guy that does a YouTube lectures. People can go watch it. It's a much slower pace than we're doing here. But is that the Apollonian and the Dionysian are two different cultural reactions to the same underlying awful truth of existence? The Dionysian is embracing it in some sense. This is sort of how Nietzsche is characterized overall. His philosophy in relation to Schopenhauer is that Schopenhauer sets up this thing, life sucks. Just like the Buddhists.

I believe that life is suffering. And so I, Schopenhauer, think that you should use art and philosophy as a way to escape life in some way, to live ascetically. And. And Nietzsche is saying, fine, Schopenhauer, I admit your diagnosis that life sucks, that it's full of conflict and turmoil, but I don't actually think that conflict and turmoil sucks. I want to embrace that cycle of desire and satiation and more desire, and that's what I'm going to go for. So you might say that's the Dionysian take on the suffering in the world.

40:02 Wes: I don't entirely agree with that, though.

40:04 Seth: Yeah, I don't either, because I think

40:05 Wes: the Dionysian is the horror of existence. Then there's the Apollonian stage of trying to cover that over the Olympian order of joy that overcomes what he calls the titanic divine order of terror. And then the proper thing is the synthesis of the two of the Dionysian. But there's no redemption in pure Dionysianism.

40:26 Mark: Right, Just intoxication. Yeah, what John was saying, this is

40:30 Jon: section one in the same work, Schopenhauer is depicted for us a tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena. Because the principle of sufficient reason seems to suffer an exception if we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that wells up from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature. At this collapse of the individual principle, we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian.

40:54 Wes: Yeah, it's both ecstatic and terrifying. I'm not saying that it's not. Also what we're talking about here is the paradox of lack of individuation which people yearn for, right? They yearn for it when they try and remain children all their lives and stay in some sense attached to some fantasy of their parents. But it's also terrifying because it means ceasing to exist or ceasing to fully exist as an individual. So it's a weird thing that we both want, and that is terrifying, but it's also.

41:25 Jon: We also want it because of the bliss that it engenders.

41:28 Wes: Yeah, sure, ecstasy is blissful. That retreat into that loss of self is actually blissful, but it's also a loss.

41:36 Seth: There's a blissful element, an ecstatic element. There's a horrifying element, but it's also completely unstructured. You can't have a functioning society and you can't have any kind of order and normalcy to life with it. And so part of what the Apollonian puts in contrast, right, is the Apollonian is a resistance to that ecstatic element. Not because it's ecstatic, it's a resistance because it's horrifying, but also because it breaks down the individual and it breaks down social order. In thinking about some of these classic Greek tragedies that we're about to get to, right, there's a whole way to read the Oresteia, which is about the overcoming of a kind of ur natural order with this rule of law.

It's a myth of telling that story about how Apollo actually, in the form of Athena as the lawgiver right imposes, society wins. Right. Like the Oresteia is like the end of this arc for Nietzsche, because law and order wins over the fates and some of the natural forces. But in nature's eyes, the whole order of the Olympian gods represents this personification of nature where there isn't a judgment in terms of good or bad as far as action and morality. And the joining of the Dionysian and the Apollonian is to say we have this wild, ecstatic nature, and there's no judgment on that.

We have this other part of us that tries to control it. And the coming together of the two in tragedy is our ability to directly experience that wild, ecstatic nature, recognize the drama of our existence like that, and then accept it. And that acceptance implies no judgment, I don't think.

43:22 Wes: Yeah, well put.

43:24 Dylan: Yeah, very well put.

43:27 Mark: Should we move toward wrapping up the first half?

43:32 Seth: Life sucks. And Creon is the model that tells

43:36 Wes: you that the first half of the podcast. Not of Nietzsche, because I don't think we've got.

43:40 Mark: No, no. I wanted to nail one more point just because I brought up the naive before we exit this portion of the discussion. This quote in this newer translation, whenever we encounter the naive in art. So this is the Homeric we're saying, but really this applies more globally. We have to recognize the highest effect of Apollonian culture, which always first has to overthrow the kingdom of the Titans and to kill monsters and through powerfully deluding images and joyful illusions, has to emerge victorious over the horrific depth of what we observe in the world in the most sensitive capacity for suffering.

But how seldom does the naive, that sense of being completely swallowed up by the beauty and appearance, succeed? I think this has implications for embracing authenticity or whenever you see an art, oh, that's so pure and so simple and beautiful, like, no, probably. Unless it was actually produced by a little kid. That kind of stuff generally is not produced by a little kid. It's produced by some adult that has grappled some major demons or maybe has to hold down. What was the name of the artist that, when we had Jay the artist on, he made fun of the painter who does all those scenes of beautiful snowy landscapes.

And do you remember who I'm talking about?

44:56 Jon: Thomas Kinkade.

44:57 Mark: Yes. Was Tom Thomas Kinkade. That that guy is the naive in art. And you don't get that as actually being naive. Like you have to be. I don't know anything about him or his personal life, but probably you have to be a very fucked up individual holding a lot back in.

45:14 Jon: Or you might just be devoid of content.

45:17 Wes: In case of Kinkade, you're saying.

45:19 Jon: Yeah. Like you have nothing to say. Yeah, I don't think he's repressing anything. I think he's an empty shell.

45:27 Seth: All right.

45:27 Jon: He's also dead.

45:28 Wes: So I could say this, Mark, you weren't. Were you actually arguing that he's. He's an example of the Apollonian?

45:35 Mark: Oh, yeah. Well, because. Yeah, the appeal of his stuff is all just on. Look at the pretty way that the light glistens over things. It's entirely supposed to be enjoying in a naive way. Forms and anybody can enjoy it. It's least common denominator.

45:52 Dylan: That's not how Homer works at all.

45:54 Wes: Yeah, Homer was preserving some of the terrible stuff that the naive art is reacting against. Right. You have war and killing and it's all described and great neutral detail and.

46:06 Mark: Well, Homer itself is not. I was thinking that's why I thought this was referring to the Doric and not the Homeric. But you're saying that Homeric is the naive. But I guess I don't see.

46:14 Jon: He directly says that he's a naive

46:16 Mark: artist and that, yes, Homeric naivete is only to be understood as a complete victory of the Apollonian illusion. So, yeah, Nietzsche is the one that's making that comparison. But it does seem like what is naive about it is the grand picture of the God as a shining, beautiful leader. Yeah, you know that part of it.

46:36 Seth: Do you want a quote?

46:38 Mark: Sure. Give me another quote.

46:39 Seth: All right. Wherever we encounter the naive. And this is page 24, section three,

46:43 Mark: I think you're about to read the entire exact thing that I read in a different translation, but go ahead.

46:48 Seth: Well, you want to hear it? Let's see what the Oxbridge fuckers can make this more clear. Wherever we encounter the naive in art, we have to recognize that it is the supreme effect of Apollonian culture. As such, it first has 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.

47:15 Wes: Quite similar.

47:16 Dylan: So. Yes, that is exactly the same sentence.

47:19 Wes: Sorry, it bears repeating.

47:23 Seth: It's something about what Mark said is. So do you guys remember how Zeus gains control, like overthrows the Titans, or at least his original father and then gains power with Kronos and stuff? Yeah, he has to castrate him.

47:40 Mark: Yeah, I thought it was Saturn castrated his father. Zeus didn't Castrate Saturn, Kronos. I mean, that's the Greek word.

47:50 Wes: No, actually it is Kronos castrates Uranus.

47:52 Mark: Yeah. So that's part of the.

47:54 Wes: Kills Kronos or Kronos swallowed his children. Well, then they break out and then he's banished to Tartarus.

48:00 Jon: Well, no, Zeus was never swallowed. He was like spirited away by.

48:04 Wes: Oh, yeah. It cuts him out of the stomach, though.

48:06 Jon: Yeah, right. He cuts them out.

48:07 Mark: Right.

48:08 Seth: I wanted to bring this up because it's definitely the transition from one era to the other. This notion of if we're going to buy into this idea that there are these different periods is not transition that's marked by enlightenment. That's not the right way to look at it. And that's the point that Dylan and Wes were making about Homer, is that Homer's not telling a story of gradual enlightenment or some sort of progress from the state of nature into a more civilized society. Each of these transitions is extremely violent and you're replacing one order of violence with another order of violence. And what Nietzsche likes about the Olympian gods is precisely that they. He says the gods justify the life of men by living it themselves. The only satisfactory theodicy.

49:01 Mark: Just to reorient us. Seth, could you just restate that more succinctly?

49:05 Seth: So we have spent some time talking about the different historical phases that Nietzsche alludes to in section 4. The only point I would like to make is that if you combine the notion of these four artistic stages with a Hegelian reading of Nietzsche where you're thinking in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, it will give a somewhat skewed reading. Precisely because if you're reading it in a Hegelian sense of some sort of progression in the form of spirit or knowledge or something world historical, precisely because these stages are all marked by violence, they all have certain aspects to them which are specific to the Greek world that are not bound up. And I don't think Nietzsche thinks they're bound up with our modern notion of progress and knowledge.

50:01 Mark: That seems part and parcel to me as the way that somebody like Marx or just anybody that is actually trying to make sense of Hegel because it's so difficult to make much sense of him at all, tries to apply this that Marx thought that the progression in a Hegelian fashion through history is all about bloody revolution and stuff.

50:20 Wes: The Apollinian movement during the Homeric period already includes what it's reacting to. So it's not like it's just a raw antithesis. Yeah, here's a famous Passage I actually wanted to read because it's so beautiful and it sums up the Apollonian so well. And it also says something towards this point. This is the third paragraph of section four. So suffering, primal and eternal, the sole ground of the world. The mere appearance here is the reflection of eternal contradiction. The father of things. From this mere appearance arises so from suffering and the primal and all that, like ambrosial vapor.

A new visionary world of mere appearances, invisible to those wrapped in the first appearance, A radiant, floating and purest bliss, a serene contemplation beaming from wide open eyes. Here we have presented in the most sublime artistic symbolism, that Apollonian world of beauty and its substratum, the terrible wisdom of Silenus. And intuitively we comprehend their necessary interdependence. Apollo, however, again appears to us as the apotheosis of the Principium individuationis, in which alone is consummated the perpetually attained goal of the primal unity, its redemption through mere appearance.

So this idea that even when the Apollonian is ascendant, it's still in this contact with the countervailing force, I take it as reading of the Homeric because it's heavily Apollonian. It doesn't attain to that synthesis that Attic Greek tragedy does. But it's not simply devoid of this thing that it's reacting to.

51:56 Seth: I'd like to point out that that's the quote I read earlier. So just like I reread Mark.

52:00 Wes: Oh, is it?

52:01 Seth: Sorry, I have been rereading.

52:03 Wes: There's a famous part with the bark in the ocean, and I meant to read that.

52:07 Jon: Can I ask a quick question?

52:08 Wes: That's at the very end of that.

52:10 Jon: Can I ask a quick question about this passage? The ending of it just says something striking in here is that Apollo, however, again appears to us as the apotheosis of the thing that I can't pronounce, in which alone is consummated the perpetually attained goal of the primal unity. What is a perpetually attained goal? Okay, so he's saying that the redemption through mere appearance is perpetually attained.

52:36 Wes: On the one hand, the principle of individuation is the goal of the Apollonian, and it divides up, and then the goal of the primal unity is unity. It's the dissolution of all distinctions between individuals, the dissolution of any individuality. So somehow this goal of the primal unity is given expression through the Apollonian. So with his sublime gestures, he shows us how necessary is the entire world of suffering, that by means of it, the individual may be impelled to realize the redeeming vision and then sunk in contemplation of it, sit quietly in his tossing bark amid the waves. So it's this idea of somehow confronting terror and being at total peace, treating it simply as an aesthetic phenomenon. I gave my best shot, and I don't know if anyone else could explain how it consummates the perpetually attained goal of the primal unity.

53:31 Jon: I just wanted to throw out that it almost made it sound as if. And again, this is what I was thinking was maybe a different take than the idea of a thing in and of itself and appearance as a duality, but that the mere appearance, or appearances in general, are just sort of an epiphenomena of the unity below.

53:52 Wes: Yeah. Or to use Schopenhauer's word, objectification, but

53:56 Jon: just something that you really actually can't draw a distinction between. It's just a part of that unity period.

54:02 Mark: I think that the passage that Wes read was getting at art, according to Schopenhauer, is supposed to be that Apollonian soothing, will less thing. So it's only by the separation, by creating a distinct thing, this painting, whatever, or even contemplating a particular tree, whatever the thing that you're deciding is beautiful is, it's only through the breaking that then you can attain the detached artistic stance that allows you to then lose your individuality. So it's only through the breaking that you regain the individuality. I think that's one of the paradoxes involved.

54:41 Wes: Through the breaking from the primal unity

54:43 Mark: into individuals that then you can retain. You can by contemplating that. And more generally, he says that all this suffering is only ever justified aesthetically.

54:54 Seth: Right.

54:54 Mark: What's the big quote about that?

54:56 Seth: Yeah, great, Great quote.

54:58 Wes: It's in paragraph eight of section five. He actually repeats this in a few places, I think, but it's towards the end of the paragraph. For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.

55:10 Seth: That's so awesome.

55:11 Wes: Yeah, yeah.

55:12 Mark: So the idea is that the world is this horrible suffering that, as Schopenhauer has so wisely taught us, but that the way to redeem that is through aesthetic contemplation and by gazing upon, or even through Dionysian art, identifying yourself with the hustle and bustle, the sturm and drang of existence. Does life have meaning? Life gets meaning through art. It looks like a tragedy, but once you sort of sit back and watch it as a movie, you're like, that's pretty awesome. That's not tragic.

55:46 Wes: Does that make sense in a trivializing Sort of way.

55:50 Jon: Yeah,

55:52 Dylan: I'm tripping over the way you're using tragic there, because I feel like in the end, the real rendition of meaning is going to be an addict tragedy.

56:04 Mark: Right. Okay, so maybe a better way of putting it is that seems like there's no redeeming value to life, that everything just sucks. But actually it's a tragedy. It's an aesthetic presentation of things that suck. And that is awesome. How about that?

56:17 Dylan: What I'm taking out of it is that he's reacting with a kind of optimism against Schopenhauer's pessimist.

56:24 Mark: Well, I guess it depends on how, right? So Schopenhauer thinks that art is a saving grace, that we can live. Art and philosophy are ways that we can live even happily, in a world that is ultimately horrible. It's just that the emphasis for him is still on the. Well, the best you could do is kind of what a stoic would do is to kind of, you know, hold tight and wait for your life to be over. That is the lesson of Silenus.

56:49 Seth: Silenus didn't say that. Nietzsche rephrases it. He's that there. Here's the part where he says that 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 demon remains silent until forced by the king to speak. Daemon, he finally breaks out in shrill laughter and says, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance 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.

57:30 Mark: In effect, Schopenhauer kind of buys that and like, thinks that the ideal ethical, the sage would be somebody who. You shouldn't actually kill yourself because that would be asserting the will in an objectionable way. But if you were to just let yourself starve to death, like, if you could actually get over your desire well enough, that would be probably the best thing you could do. So Nietzsche, yes, does not like that answer at all. He thinks that regardless of the cycle of desire and satiation, and there's just going to be more desire, why even bother? Nietzsche is going to say, of course you should bother. Like, in fact, affirm life. That cycle that having suffering is a thing to pit yourself against and show how awesome you are is ultimately very rewarding. Gives life its own meaning, doesn't he

58:17 Jon: flip Silenus's formulation when you're looking through the lens of the Apollonian a little bit later, that the answer becomes for the naive artist, the best thing is to live as long as possible. Does anybody else recall that?

58:32 Seth: I don't remember that.

58:33 Wes: I don't remember it either, but it's. Yeah, it sounds like a kind of reversal that makes sense, but.

58:39 Seth: Well, Mark, based on the way you're saying that, would that make Nietzsche a better Buddhist than Schopenhauer?

58:46 Mark: Very likely. When we actually had our Buddhism episode and the first thing we brought up was Schopenhauer's characterization and our guest Eric was very dismissive of that, that Buddhism is actually much more life affirming than that. So yeah, maybe you could be a Nietzschean Buddhist.

58:59 Wes: It's in section five that we just read from this idea that it's only as an aesthetic phenomenon, right, that existence in the world are eternally justified. And we should note here the context. It's in sections five and six that he really starts to show us what the synthesis of the Apollonian and the Dionysian look like. So for instance, in paragraph 4, section 5, the plastic artist, like the epic poet who is related to him, is absorbed in the pure contemplation of images. The Dionysian musician is without images himself, purely pure primordial pain and its primordial re.

Echoing the lyric. Genius is conscious of a world of images and symbols growing out of his state of mystical self abnegation and oneness. And then if you go on farther. So thus by this mirror of illusion he is protected against becoming one infused with his figures. This is actually a more complicated example than I wanted it to be.

59:54 Mark: Well, this was the very thing that we were tussling with when we brought this up in the first place of how the Apollonian and the Dionysian would reflect themselves in art. That it seems like even if you're. What you're doing in art is creating beautiful figures for it to be good art, it has to have some juice behind it, has to have some inspiration. And that is exactly the kind of synthesis, broadly speaking, that Nietzsche is talking about. That whereas you might think on your description, John of Kinkade, that there's just nothing going on there, that it's just pure form and there's no juice behind it at all. So there's no Dionysian coming in.

1:00:30 Jon: But I just don't, I don't think, I actually think in that example, I don't think Nietzsche would even consider him an artist of any Sort. Right.

1:00:38 Wes: I actually just read the wrong paragraph. That's why I got confused. It's paragraph three, the paragraph right before, which gives you an example of the synthesis. So.

1:00:47 Seth: Right.

1:00:47 Mark: Read it for us.

1:00:48 Wes: In the first place, as a Dionysian artist, he has identified himself. This is the lyricist, the identity of the lyricist with the musician, a Dionysian artist, he has identified himself with the primal unity, its pain and contradiction. You can see why I got confused, by the way, because the paragraphs start in exactly the same way. Assuming that music has been correctly termed a repetition and a recast of the world, we may say that he produces the copy of this primal unity as music. Primal unity, of course, means will. He's repeating Schopenhauer here with the idea that it's a copy of the will. Okay.

1:01:20 Mark: He's repeating him and he is tussling with him.

1:01:22 Wes: Yeah.

1:01:22 Mark: I mean, we had the same trouble. And like, is it a copy of the will? Is it an objectification expression of the will? We had a really hard time with that.

1:01:29 Wes: Yeah. So he's going on to say here. Now, however, under the Apollonian dream inspiration, this music reveals itself to him again as a symbolic dream image. Going on farther, the image that now shows him his identity with the heart of the world is a dream scene that embodies the primordial contradiction and primordial pain together with the primordial pleasure of mere appearance. So you remember where Schopenhauer said something like, a good song is like looking at a clock tower as you fall from a great height. This is sort of, I think, some of the inspiration here for Nietzsche, this idea that in music, even though there's the element of aesthetic withdrawal, Right.

That's the element of looking at a clock even though you're falling, it's like there's the passionate, terrible, emotive side of it, but then there's also the Apollonian looking at the clock side of it. So the song sort of gets at that in the sense that it's musical on the one hand, but it also has lyrics. It also has these symbolic representations.

1:02:28 Seth: Okay, so this is the point I wanted to get to. Nietzsche clearly says in this essay that he thinks the music comes before lyrics, that there is rhythm and meter and melody before there's harmony, before there's lyrics. And he talks about folk song that can have multiple lyrical instantiations. This is the part where just afterwards, he talks about Schiller talking about having a musical mood prior to his composition of poetry.

1:02:55 Wes: Section six is what you're looking for.

1:02:57 Seth: Yeah. I can't say that I fully understand what the difference of all of these elements of music are. Rhythm, meter, melody. I don't really understand exactly what the distinctions are. But Nietzsche's saying here when he talks about folk music, which I thought was identified with naive art, but this notion that there are songs that come up or melodies that come up which then get words associated with them. And we know that from our own folk music. Right? Folk music, if you think about as we know folk music Here in the 20th century in the United States, it's very simple and it just has some kind of a, like, you know, how many roads must a man walk down right before he did this kind of, this kind of stuff.

And then the lyrics are secondary in the sense of you can impose whatever lyrics you want on that melody, but the melody is kind of like a transport to put people in a certain kind of mood. Music is unifying. I mean, like, I think of, if anything is evidence of what he's putting forth in this essay. It's this notion of folk music that is intended to bring people together in a chorus singing lyrics which can change over time, but that the song itself is the glue that brings people together to have this kind of experience. Right. And then the, the words themselves are designed for some kind of consciousness raising activity.

But I just don't know enough about music to understand if he's actually playing with that here or if he's just loosely using these terms.

1:04:25 Mark: Well, let's read a little more of six. So this is at the beginning, he's contrasted Homer to Archilochus. Archilochus, how do you pronounce that?

1:04:34 Wes: It's one of those.

1:04:37 Mark: I think Archilochus sounds better. I don't know.

1:04:40 Wes: Okay, so it's probably Archilochus with respect

1:04:43 Mark: to Archilochus learned scholarship has revealed that

1:04:48 Wes: he introduced the folks. It's Archilochus.

1:04:50 Mark: With respect to Archilochus learned scholarship has revealed that he introduced the folk song into literature and that because of this achievement he earned that individual place next to Homer in the universal estimation of the Greeks. But what is the folk song in comparison to the completely Apollonian epic poem? What else but perpetuum vestigium, the eternal mark of a union between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, its tremendous expansion extending to all peoples and constantly increasing with new births, testifies to us how strong that artistic double. I don't want to just keep reading forever here.

1:05:18 Wes: Yeah, but I think you're reinforcing Seth's point, which is that this is representative of a union of the Apollonian, the Dionysian. And it's chronologically inconvenient for him. Right. And that's why he has to say it's vestigial or no, is it. Is it not chronological? Does it come later or earlier?

1:05:34 Mark: Maybe it says it's all over. It's in every culture, so it's got to be. It has elements of both.

1:05:40 Seth: It says, let me just a little bit further down, Mark. But above all else, we regard folk song as a musical mirror of the world, original melody, which then seeks for itself a parallel dream appearance and expresses this in poetry. Thus, melody is the primary and general element which can therefore undergo several objectifications in several texts.

1:06:04 Jon: Yeah.

1:06:04 Mark: And you say original melody. My translation says the primordial melody. So it's really trying to say that it's the musical mirror of the world. It's somehow written right off of melody

1:06:15 Seth: gives birth to poetry, and does so over and over again in ever new ways.

1:06:20 Wes: By the way, he's really just summarizing Schopenhauer, is he?

1:06:23 Mark: Okay, yeah. Well, Schopenhauer had made the point that Nietzsche spells out. And actually, after the part that. So we only officially read up to section 15 because that was the original end of the piece. So section 16 to 25 we haven't gotten into yet is about how he wants to apply this analysis of the ancient Greek to his present day.

1:06:42 Seth: Sure.

1:06:43 Mark: So some of the aesthetic points that he sets up here, he then uses later as a total extended screed against shitty things in the culture that he sees that he's in. And in particular, he hates opera. He doesn't like that they're not even really. They're only half singing. And it subjugates the music to the lyrics. And that's exactly the opposite, according to Schopenhauer, of the way it should be. That it should be, you got the primal melody and it inspires you to then come up with. It doesn't even have to be poetry. It could be any work of art like that.

Any work of art could be sort of, at root, musical in that you have to kind of be in a mood, in a musical mood, and then that inspires you to create this stuff. But if you think that you could then have a poem and it could give birth to the music, he thinks there's something wrong with that. Now, I actually don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. I think that the inspiration could go either way.

1:07:37 Seth: Yeah, that was one of my questions was if you ask A musician, do they put together the lyrics first of the music? If 100% of them say the music or the melody, then I would believe this. But I don't think that's true. The other thing is, given his point of view, it's a good thing Wagner never made any operas.

1:07:53 Mark: I'm pretty sure he did, but.

1:07:55 Seth: Yeah, that's called sarcasm.

1:07:58 Mark: Oh, sorry, sorry.

1:08:01 Jon: One consistent knock against operas, that the lyrics are lost in the music.

1:08:06 Mark: That would not be Nietzsche's knock against opera.

1:08:08 Jon: No, I know, but I think, like a lot of things in this essay, a lot of it is based on sort of contingent value judgments that he makes about music.

1:08:17 Dylan: About.

1:08:19 Mark: Yeah.

1:08:20 Jon: Like, for instance, identifying the Apollonian with the beat rather than the melody just strikes me as very strange.

1:08:28 Mark: Well, I thought the Apollonian, he identifies both with the beat and the melody. And it's only when you get dissonance, when you get harmony, when you get the added complexity, you can really get the Dionysian thing going. But it does sound like the Dionysian should be even more basic. It should be the inspiration behind the melody. It should be. So, to be charitable, you can interpret these things as dialectical. As soon as you create something tangible, then it becomes an image of sorts, I would think. Even if it's a tangible melody. Right. So it's a pattern of musical notes and you can sort of then sing that pattern again and again.

It becomes a thing that can be contemplated in the same way that a sculpture can be contemplated. So in that way, it is an Apollonian production. It is an image. It's not an image in the same way. It doesn't, like, represent something. At least, you shouldn't think that it represents the pastoral field or whatever. That's exactly the kind of thing he's arguing against.

1:09:24 Dylan: Do you think that Nietzsche agrees with that? Because I don't know that he does agree with that idea. At the very end of six, he says, this whole discussion firmly maintains that whereas lyric poetry depends utterly on the spirit of music, music itself, in its absolute sovereignty, has no need at all of images and concepts, but merely tolerates them as an accompaniment. Lyric poetry can say nothing that was not already contained in a condition of the most enormous generality and universal validity within the music which forced the lyric poet to speak its images.

And then, for this reason, it is impossible for language to exhaust the meaning of music's world symbolism, because music refers symbolically to the original contradiction and original pain at the heart of the primordial unity, and thus symbolizes a sphere which lies above and beyond all appearance. So that sounds like straight up Schopenhauer. And also that music is the juice of everything, but it's also non imaging imagistic.

1:10:28 Seth: Now this is why people who take ecstasy go to raves instead of poetry slams.

1:10:33 Dylan: Yeah, that's right.

1:10:34 Wes: They're plugging themselves. They were completely ingrained in the.

1:10:37 Mark: Well, well, if you're a Dionysiac, have

1:10:40 Wes: to listen to, you know, douche.

1:10:43 Dylan: Well, in fact they would. And importantly they would. They wouldn't get it. They wouldn't have that experience without it.

1:10:47 Seth: They don't have to do any imaging.

1:10:48 Mark: And if you're a Dionysic artist, according to this isn't it you're. You're really just trying to recreate the experience for people that they would have gotten more directly had they just taken psychedelic drugs. Just like if you're an Apollonian artist, you're just imitating, you know, maybe perfecting, maybe more developing, but you're basically doing something as derivative upon the experience of people having dreams, like taking drugs or getting drunk and having dreams. Those are the original nature born things upon which these artistic imitations are later developments. They inspire the art.

1:11:21 Wes: So how does this fit with his argument for a synthesis between the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Isn't this at tension with it? He seems to be saying that music devoid of the Apollonian imagistic side is superior.

1:11:35 Seth: Wes, I don't think he's saying it's superior. I think it's just there's a certain kind of primordial motive force that's associated with music, but it's uncontrolled and unstructured, even though there's such a thing as melody, whatever that is, and rhythm and meter.

1:11:51 Wes: I'm just looking at this last part here of six, where language as the organ and symbol of phenomena can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of music. Language in its attempt to imitate it can only be in superficial contact with music. While all the eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring the deepest significance of the latter one step nearer to us. The whole point is to combine these things. There's got to be a good reason for the Apollonian side as well. Unless that's already present here, even without the words.

1:12:22 Mark: I would think as soon as you instantiate a performance. Fine. Okay. Nietzsche's not going to agree with my characterization that once you create the melody, you've created a tangible thing. Maybe if he had recordings and really had the idea that you could actually take a little, you could make it, your fucking ringtone, you know, that is a tangible thing. But even just thinking about performances, as soon as you have a person that's doing it, then, well, you've got the image of that person as a performer that then creates this form that one could contemplate aesthetically, that you're not even just listening to the music anymore. You're looking at the grace with which the person is playing the flute or whatever.

1:13:01 Wes: That seems to me like a reach. The next sections, of course, he's going to apply all of this to Greek tragedy, so maybe that'll help us.

1:13:09 Seth: So what have we already talked about the notion of Greek tragedy, sorry, Attic tragedy, to be specific. It tells us that it's the end of the world as I know it and I feel fine. Right. There's a kind of a normative element that comes in with the poetic, with language that doesn't exist in the purely musical. You can go sit on a bluff, the waves are crashing against the shore, and you see the raw awesomeness of nature. Music can convey that to you, but it's purely experiential. It can't give any meaning or context to it in your life.

1:13:41 Wes: It's still meaningful. It's still.

1:13:43 Seth: It's a meaningful experience, but you can't contextualize it without language.

1:13:48 Wes: It's meaningful. It's still a copy of the will and it's communicating the emotional. And this is again pivoting off of Schopenhauer.

1:13:57 Dylan: But it's not going to provide any context, it's not going to provide any structure to it. It provides no individuation at all. That's the problem with it, is that it's pure experience. Maybe that's not quite the right phrase, but it's pure will. So mainlining the will won't provide you any context that you carry away with you. You can't have that individuation that you take back with you.

1:14:17 Wes: I'm sorry, I'm going to have to think about that on my own time.

1:14:20 Jon: If you're looking in section seven, which is where he starts to bring this all together, there's a paragraph right before he gets. He basically walks through the progression of what the Attic spectator gains from the experience of being present at the tragedy. Right before he gets into that, he says with this chorus. Again, this follows a discussion of the proper understanding of the development of the chorus. The profound Helene, uniquely susceptible to the tenderest and deepest suffering, comforts himself having looked boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so called world history as well as the cruelty of nature and being in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will.

Art saves him, and through art, life. So there's some sort of existential danger that comes from too close of an inspection or an encounter with that primordial unity. Like maybe it's when you return to yourself, you're basically faced with. He calls it nausea. You know, the belief that the quotidian aspects of life are just not meaningful in any way, and that this experience of the tragedy and using the chorus as a sort of a magnifying lens pulls you out of that, returns you to yourself, but without you having to deny what you've experienced.

1:15:44 Wes: Yeah, that seems to be on the right track. I was thinking of 7 as primarily, and the rest of it as an argument for the importance of the Dionysian element. The previous question was about why we need the Apollonian as well, and I think you did a good job of putting us in that direction.

1:16:00 Jon: The context for why this is important and why the experience needs to happen is that life may go off the rails if you don't learn how to focus this experience in some way. I don't know if he talks about it anywhere else.

1:16:13 Seth: No, I feel like he does earlier on in that same section. He says for this course, the Greeks built the hovering platform of a fictitious state of nature onto which they placed fictitious creatures of nature. Tragedy grew up on this foundation.

1:16:29 Mark: Right.

1:16:30 Seth: And what he means when he says that is that the tragedy finds its ground in this wild, violent kind of area, but there's no meaning that you can draw from that experience. The chorus doesn't give any context if you just experience it as these satiric creatures, this representation of nature.

1:16:55 Dylan: Right?

1:16:56 Seth: It has to have some context, as you mentioned. You have to see that in relation to your own experience now, and that's the Apollonian dimension. I mean, at least, Wes, as far

1:17:08 Wes: as I see it, by the way, we should mention here that Nietzsche and I, and I think this is actually not controversial, sees tragedy as sort of arising out of the dithyramb, or basically a chorus. So originally it's just people coming together to sing, and then the acting element gets added on later.

1:17:29 Seth: So here, this is a quote which.

1:17:31 Wes: Which. Where?

1:17:32 Seth: Oh, sorry, page 39, section.

1:17:35 Wes: Now just section seven and then how many?

1:17:37 Seth: Section seven. Perhaps it will serve as a starting point for thinking about this if I now assert that the Satyr, the fictitious creature of nature, bears the same relation to the cultured human being as Dionysiac music bears to civilization. And what I read that as saying is that the Dionysian bears the same relation to the Apollonian as wild nature does to civilization. So if you ask what the Apollonian brings to the equation, it's exactly the element of civilization, which is the assemblage of individual human beings into a community, as opposed to some kind of wild pack of animals or something like that.

1:18:20 Wes: He's not saying that here.

1:18:22 Seth: That's how I'm reading it.

1:18:23 Wes: Similarly, I believe the Greek man of culture felt himself nullified. Oh, maybe. Okay, maybe so. Let me read maybe. Maybe you're convincing me here. Felt himself nullified in the presence of the satiric chorus. And this is the most immediate fact of the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society, and quite generally the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature, the metaphysical comfort. Okay, he's telling us the purpose of the Dionysian element here, of the chorus itself.

1:18:51 Seth: Right. But you can't have civilization without the

1:18:54 Jon: Apollonian, and you can't have tragedy without the Apollonian either.

1:18:57 Seth: And you can't have tragedy because there's no place that you have to go to and from other than the original

1:19:02 Wes: function of the Apollonian covering things up. I don't see your argument here in the text. So I understand your argument. I just don't see that Nietzsche is making this argument. I understand the function of the Apollonian in the Homeric right, which is to redeem the horribleness. But now we are at the next stage and we are amping up the Dionysian side again.

1:19:22 Mark: Isn't it sublimation?

1:19:23 Wes: I still don't. I don't want to derail us, but continue. But no, I don't think tragedy is superior just to music, just given what went on in section six.

1:19:32 Seth: Because we're not simply animals living in the wild. Human beings have created culture, they've created society.

1:19:37 Wes: That sounds plausible to me. Yeah, I'm just saying I haven't seen it here yet in the text. That does sound plausible.

1:19:41 Dylan: So in the paragraph near the end of the same section, he links up tragedy and talks about the Dionysian man as similar to Hamlet. And he says a gulf of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday life and Dionysian experience. But as soon as daily reality re enters consciousness, it is experienced as such with a sense of revulsion. The fruit of those states is an ascetic will negating mood. In this sense, the Dionysian man is similar to Hamlet. Both have gazed into the true essence of things. They have acquired knowledge and they find action repulsive.

For their actions can do nothing to change the eternal essence of things. They regard it as laughable or shameful that they should be expected to set to rights a world. So out of joint, knowledge kills action. Action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of illusion. This is the lesson of Hamlet. Not that cheap wisdom about Jack the dreamer who does not get around to acting because he reflects too much out of excess of possibilities, as it were.

1:20:43 Jon: That's a great reading of Hamlet.

1:20:46 Mark: It's more just straight up Schopenhauer.

1:20:48 Seth: Right.

1:20:48 Mark: If you are wise, then you realize the futility of everything. And why would you bother to engage in the worldly activities that everybody goes through?

1:20:57 Dylan: But this, I think, goes to what Seth was saying is that the Apollonian is what gives structure and then therefore gives action. Otherwise, things just stop.

1:21:08 Wes: That makes sense. So it's still performing the same sort of function.

1:21:12 Jon: Yes.

1:21:12 Wes: We can't really redeem the horribleness of things without the Apollonian. We need the synthesis. Yeah, that makes sense.

1:21:18 Dylan: Yeah. In some ways, act in the face of them.

1:21:21 Wes: Yeah.

1:21:22 Dylan: Right.

1:21:22 Wes: I mean, the whole Hamlet thing, just fitting it in with this larger idea of art redeeming life. Yeah. So that lack of action is just a symptom of nihilism or a symptom of nausea or of giving up in the face of the horribleness of things. The I'm going to die and the world is, at bottom, meaningless and blah, blah, blah.

1:21:42 Mark: So I'm trying to figure out how this connects up with the notion of sublimation on the one hand, the notion of catharsis on the other. So you've got the idea that there's this constant conflict between the civilizing forces, the Apollonian, and the destabilizing wild forces, the Dionysian. And, you know, he talks about the Homeric period characterized as Sparta in particular. And its militancy is really about being extra vigilant against the Dionysian. It's all about awareness that we are these brutes that could at any point just go fucking ape shit.

And so we got to tamp down on that. And so Nietzsche is saying, of course, just being brutes and out of control would not be a way to live. We wouldn't have civilization at all. We wouldn't have works of art at all. But being soulless, completely in control of ourselves, tamping ourselves down, that's not that great either. So tragedy and other kinds of art that synthesize the two elements are basically sublimations we have an art form that has strict formal characteristics. It has rules that you have to obey when you, you know, you're not just getting up on stage and playing a crazy guitar chord and trying to break things.

You're acting within a form and creating beautiful poetry, the meter, all that stuff. But yet the Dionysian gets to exert itself in a way that then actually makes us feel like full human beings in a way that simply tamping down on our instincts would not. And that's that feeling of sublimation, that feeling of catharsis that you get with that release, that that's what's going on, and that's great.

1:23:19 Wes: If you wanted to start looking into psychoanalytic aesthetics, I would start with. And this is not a name drop, it's just a referral. Hanna Segal's Psychoanalytic Aesthetics. The idea here is that this becomes an outlet for the most terrible things, including our forbidden impulses. And tragedy is a great example of that.

1:23:37 Mark: Obviously, it's just hard to see in Nietzsche because Nietzsche is actually glorifying this, saying, this is really what it's at. Whereas on the Freudian picture that I was just laying out seems more like, well, this is kind of the best we could do. The world is bad, and our social reactions to it are life stultifying. And so it's certainly in advance. It's certainly better than that to have some sort of release, some sort of catharsis. But that doesn't measure up to Nietzsche's active advocacy of this as the glorification of the best kind of human being. There must be something more gone in Nietzsche than what I just laid out.

1:24:14 Seth: Isn't that so? Mark, you. You said something about, like, that being completely uptight, repressed, anal retentive. What was the word? Isn't that the Socratic extension of the Apollonian into knowledge and science?

1:24:28 Mark: Yeah, that's. Which just doesn't get the aspects of tragedy that were Dionysian. It's just like, I don't understand why. Why are the characters acting like that? Sort of. Some of the questions that we were asking ourselves in the discussion about Antigone, like, why is he doing that?

1:24:44 Seth: He should. That.

1:24:47 Mark: That is exactly the kind of thing that Nietzsche would have no tolerance for whatsoever.

1:24:51 Jon: And there's an intermediary step before you arrive there, which is the. When you get into the beginning of Section 8, he's talking about the contrast between the satire as an artistic outgrowth of the Dionysian impulse out of the religious festivals, but contrasting that with what he calls the man of culture. I think this is a pre scientific sort of step.

1:25:13 Mark: Isn't it really unfortunate that the term satyr s a t y R that we keep using to refer to goat men sounds like satire. And I think this would be very confusing to people. We're not talking about satire. Go ahead.

1:25:25 Seth: No, we're talking about satyrs.

1:25:27 Wes: It's actually not even goatmen, it's horsemen. But yeah, it only becomes goatmen during Roman. Roman times.

1:25:33 Mark: Oh, man, I'm out of touch. I've been drawing the wrong kind of satires.

1:25:37 Jon: I think you mean tragedy is the goat song.

1:25:40 Seth: You've been drawing the wrong kind of satyrs.

1:25:42 Mark: Let's call them satyr satyrs.

1:25:44 Wes: Yeah, satyr is good.

1:25:45 Seth: You must go and celebrate the Seder.

1:25:47 Wes: You know, this is an Interesting section 8 in this. I think what you were mentioning, John, was the contrast between the. What he calls the live culture and the truth of nature.

1:25:57 Jon: I think this ties back just as we go, if we're going through Section 8 and just thinking about it, if it ties back to the Raphael example, which I think you. Maybe two people read in different translations, that there's a connecting vision grounded in that unity that goes all the way up, which might be a card, I shouldn't add, but it goes all the way to the stage itself, the actual stage that the satires are surrounding as the wall against reality. There's a continuity from that primordial unity all the way to the actual action on the stage.

1:26:33 Wes: What do you mean exactly?

1:26:34 Jon: Well, he says what's happening on the stage is effectively this wonderful. Was it Schlegel who claims that the satire is the ideal spectator?

1:26:45 Seth: Right.

1:26:45 Mark: Well, just the chorus member in general.

1:26:47 Seth: That's one interpretation.

1:26:48 Mark: Yeah. Can we just get the historical thing? So there's things about the progression of tragedy itself and how it was developed. And we already made a couple points of this I just want to lay out, which is, for one, it used to be just the chorus, and the chorus is just telling a story. And that is why, when we were complaining a little about why doesn't more of the action, Antigone, with the suicides and stuff, why doesn't that happen on screen? Well, that's because it used to be there was no screen at all. There was no characters. It was just the chorus. And was the chorus originally supposed to be horsemen?

1:27:18 Seth: Yes, that's his claim.

1:27:20 Wes: I'm not sure if it's well accepted or if it's still something that's in contention, but yeah, these are Originally, satyrs.

1:27:26 Mark: So, okay, and then the satyrs, originally, when they introduced an actor, somebody to be beyond the chorus, it was only Dionysus himself, that that was the only character everybody agrees that in the history of. So it was the satyrs surrounding Dionysus. And then it sort of extended, expanded from there so that there were different characters. But Nietzsche makes the point that, well, they're really still acting just the different fates of Dionysus and Mark, just prior

1:27:51 Jon: to that moment, there's a moment where the people who are participating in religious jubilation are acting in a proto tragic way to envision or summon Dionysus, that the actor is a new addition after

1:28:06 Mark: that point, okay, they summon Dionysus and then Dionysus, necessarily, because he's got a Jesus sort of thing going, is killed as part of the ceremony, right? So that's sort of where tragedy comes in, is the hero has to be taken down. The sacrifice of Dionysus. And so, you know, with later tragedies, okay, it's Oedipus, it's Creon, it's Antigone, it's different characters, but they're all still reenacting being taken down in the same way Dionysus was, in the same way. The chorus doesn't necessarily represent satyrs anymore. They could represent the village elders, like they did in Antigone, or they could be frogs, like in Aristophanes.

The frogs. It could be any number of things, you know, if you want to understand it, says Nietzsche, you got to understand where it came from. And it is, in fact the error of the later tragedians. And then, worse than that, the sort of people that were writing the light comedies, the equivalent of sitcoms for us today, they kept taking elements out of what made tragedy great. Like, why do we have to have a chorus, even at all, speaking in unison? Or why do they have to talk in verse? Why do they have to act so strangely and unlike regular people?

I should be able to identify with the chorus. I should be able to identify with the characters there. As you get things more and more realistic, you lose the whole point of tragedy, even so far as why does it have to be so tragic? Can't things work out, you know, work out for the characters in the end? You could have some bad stuff happen, but it has to. It would be nice if it wrapped up at the end, give the audience

1:29:33 Jon: what they want, the original impulse for this, or the ground from which the chorus develops and elaborates into, you know, a theatrical instrument is an instrument of originally. Of group delusion. Or let me make it less judgmental, group collective vision.

1:29:52 Mark: So everybody's kind of in the chorus. They're telling the same story. They're kind of getting high, whether off of actual substances or just on the enthusiasm of the moment. And then it's like the vision that the story conjures up. The story that is, of course, influenced by music. So it's ultimately the music that's conjuring up the vision.

1:30:09 Jon: It's a natural phenomenon. Several paragraphs into eight. The reveling throng, the votaries of Dionysus jubilate under the spell of such moods and insights, whose power transforms them before their own eyes. Till they imagine that they are beholding themselves as restored geniuses of nature. The later constitution of the chorus and tragedies. The artistic imitation of this natural phenomenon. Though, to be sure, at this point the separation of Dionysian spectators and magically enchanted Dionysians became necessary. We must always keep in mind that the public at an attic at tragedy found itself in the chorus of the orchestra.

And there was, at bottom, no opposition between public and chorus. Everything is merely a great sublime chorus of dancing and singing. Satire. I'm sorry, however you pronounce it. Or of those who permit themselves to be represented by so such. And then when he gets into the Schlegel's formulation, which is the next paragraph. The chorus is the ideal spectator. Not in the sense that a modern audience would provide an ideal spectator, but rather it is the beholder and the beholder of the visionary world of the scene. A public of spectators, as we know it, was unknown to the Greeks in their theaters.

The terra structure of concentric arcs made it possible for everybody to actually overlook the whole world of culture around them. To ignore the guy sitting next to you. And it's like a focusing. It's like a lens. The chorus.

1:31:31 Dylan: Yeah, A lens. In the principle of unity.

1:31:34 Jon: Yes. It's fundamentally not separate from that unity.

1:31:38 Dylan: It's the. The mode and instantiation of that unity.

1:31:41 Wes: Right.

1:31:42 Mark: So remember, the bringing up Schlegel is sort of part of a progression where he considers different theories of what the function of the chorus has been, which is, I think, how it's come up a lot in the literature. When other people in his time are writing about ancient Greek tragedy. They're like, well, the chorus is kind of weird. What is the function of that chorus? And so Schlegel was giving a popular version that, oh, it's the ideal spectator, which. So trying to make sense of that. And it seems Nietzsche mostly disagrees with that, or at least he has to give it a very different interpretation.

1:32:08 Jon: He dismisses it. But what he winds up saying is that there's a certain sense in which he's right, which is that you have to consider what he's a spectator of.

1:32:17 Wes: Well, this is the question of the audience is identifying with the chorus, right? So for Schlegel, it's identification as, oh, they're regular people, just like me, or they're an ideal version of that. Or the chorus is sort of fashioned on the model of the spectator. But actually the way it is, it's the other way around. It's the. The chorus is this Dionysian element. And then the spectator identifies with that. So that spectator is drawn into the orbit of the chorus, not the chorus into the orbit of the spectator, right?

1:32:45 Mark: So you'd think that an ideal spectator would be somebody who knows he's a spectator who would be like the Apollonian, contemplating the images of what the characters are doing and having an educated view of what they're doing to be an intelligent spectator, to listen quietly. But that's exactly the opposite of what the Dionysian chorus is doing. They're not seeing what's happening on stage as an illusion. They're taking it absolutely seriously. They're talking as if this is something that's actually happening in front of them in that way that's sort of giving us the ability to suspend disbelief ourselves by identifying with them because they believe it.

1:33:21 Seth: It's transubstantiation.

1:33:22 Jon: I think that this one. And I'll stop hammering at this, but when I was talking about vision before, I honestly, I had a really hostile reaction to this book in the beginning sections. And by the time I got here, I was like, he's kind of nailing it. It's pretty complete sort of aesthetic of theater, like he says in. Again, I can't count the paragraphs out, but there's a paragraph that begins in the light of this insight. We may call the chorus in its primitive form the mirror image in which Dionysian man contemplates himself.

1:33:49 Dylan: Okay?

1:33:50 Jon: A little bit later on in that paragraph, maybe another sentence in or so the satire chorus is first of all a vision of the Dionysian mass of spectators, just as the world of the stage is in turn a vision of the satyr chorus, right? It's like a telescope almost, right? The force of this vision is strong enough to make the eye insensitive and blind to the impression of quote, unquote, reality to the men of culture who occupy the rows of seats next to you. You all forget that you're these individuals sitting here taking this in.

1:34:21 Dylan: Right?

1:34:22 Wes: Right.

1:34:22 Jon: There's a unifying vision that stretches all the way back to nature. And it's sort of fruition is the thing that finally winds up on stage. And later on, he connects that, I think, quite movingly to the sort of craft that's required to have those opening scenes of a play make sense.

1:34:40 Mark: And your emphasis on the mirror part, this is bringing back the. What is the Apollonian ad Here? We've been saying how the chorus adds the Dionysian element, but saying that it is the image of the Dionysian. Well, that requires the craft. Like you were saying, that's the Apollonian rule based. Orderly. Takes a lot of discipline to create a play like that.

1:34:59 Jon: And I gotta say again, how impressed I am with the way he's writing. I feel like there's a real different mode of writing that starts to happen around section six through, like, nine. And then the beginning of nine is everything that comes to surface in the Apollonian part of Greek tragedy. In the dialogue looks simple, transparent and beautiful. In this sense, the dialogue is an image of the Hellene whose nature is revealed in the dance. Because in the dance, the greatest strength remains only potential, but betrays itself in the suppleness and wealth of movement.

That's the opening passage of section 9. In the section that you were just speaking of, Mark, he's talking about how to arrange for the play. It's something that Euripides doesn't do well, where Euripides just throws out a prologue. But the other guys, the better guys, Sophocles and Aeschylus, they arrange for a scene in which all of these things become revealed in sort of an organic fashion, which is Apollonian craftsmanship of the highest order.

1:35:59 Wes: Well, Euripides will completely do away with suspense. And he'll tell you everything that's going to happen beforehand.

1:36:05 Seth: Well, he doesn't think that Sophocles. There's no suspense in either of those guys either, too. Everybody knows the myths, but I don't

1:36:12 Jon: think it's the knowledge of the myth that he's quite talking about.

1:36:15 Seth: It's the recitation it's more about.

1:36:18 Jon: Again, this writing is so dense. There's a moment where he talks about how the energies are focused when you're dealing with a tragedy that everybody knows the subject matter of. It's about the actual experience of identifying with the energies that are flowing through that main character in the play.

1:36:37 Wes: That's the Euripidean model. Actually, that's what replaces suspense, that's jumping ahead. I don't know if we want to just wait on that.

1:36:45 Mark: Well, since we're in section nine, there's a quote about Oedipus. Finally.

1:36:49 Jon: Yeah, I know, I know, it's crazy.

1:36:52 Mark: The most painful figure of the Greek age, the ill fated Oedipus, is understood by Sophocles as the noble man who is destined for error and misery in spite of his wisdom, but who, through his immense suffering at the end, exerts a magically beneficial effect around him, which still has an effect beyond his death. Apparently we didn't notice that in Antigone, the nobleman does not sin. That's what the profound poet wishes to tell us. Through Oedipus actions, every law, every natural principle of order, indeed the moral world may collapse, but because of these very actions, a higher magical circle of consequences created, which founds a new world on the ruins of the old world which has been overthrown.

You know, this is almost like throwing in his beyond good and evil stuff right here. If you were doing a purely Apollonian piece of art, then you are playing on existing social mores. You would have to get their just desserts or something like that. What makes this Dionysian is not just that it shows the tragic reality of life and that bad things happen to good people or something, but that Oedipus that these heroes in being basically images of Dionysus are ubermenschen, are overmen. Antigone, just so it's not all men. Antigone is such a strong figure in her convictions, in everything, that even though she is doing things, maybe that are by ordinary standards, if you're gonna.

Why did she do that? Is stubborn, foolish. The chorus certainly doesn't get why she's sacrificing herself in this way, but she's a creator of values in her own hugeness.

1:38:22 Jon: And that hugeness. Another word you could use is transgressiveness. Right? And he goes on to make that point about. I don't think he says it this way, but the reason why they pick these characters to be the focal points of these tragedies is because they're transgressive. They have to commit incest. They have to murder their father. Orestes' case, murder their mother.

1:38:43 Wes: Yeah, I remember what you're talking. Where does he say that?

1:38:46 Seth: Section 9. Oedipus, murderer of his father, husband of his mother. Oedipus, the solver of the Sphinx riddle. What does this trinity of fateful deeds Tell us. There is an ancient popular belief, particularly in Persia, that a wise magician can only be born out of incest. How else could nature be forced to reveal its secrets other than by victorious resistance to her, that is, by some unnatural event? The same man who solves the riddle of nature, that of the double natured sphinx, must also destroy the most sacred orders of nature by murdering his father and becoming his mother's husband. Wisdom, the myth seems to whisper to us, and dionysiac wisdom in particular, is an unnatural abomination. Whoever plunges nature into the abyss of destruction by what he knows must in turn experience the dissolution of nature in his own person.

1:39:36 Wes: Did you skip over the part about individuation?

1:39:39 Seth: I did, which I actually.

1:39:42 Wes: Which I actually like. So we must immediately interpret this to mean that where prophetic and magical powers have broken the spell of present and future, the rigid law of individuation, and the real magic of nature, some enormously unnatural event, such as incest, must have occurred earlier. As a cause magician never reveals his

1:40:02 Mark: tricks,

1:40:07 Seth: Except if that trick is killing his father and marrying his mother.

1:40:10 Mark: I'd just like to see a interview with David Blaine. How did you do that? I fucked my mom.

1:40:20 Seth: I am the son of incest.

1:40:23 Wes: It's simple.

1:40:24 Dylan: It's a little different than going down to the crossroads making a deal with the devil.

1:40:27 Wes: Yeah, I was gonna say it's either that or sell my soul to the devil. A Chaz. Mom.

1:40:31 Mark: So does that wrap up why tragedy is awesome, or is there any other quotes you want to pull out before

1:40:37 Dylan: he moves on to Euripides, the death of tragedy and Socrates, and sort of laying the knife of the death of tragedy in Socrates hands in some respect. And then redeeming Socrates by having him dancing. He does talk about Dionysus as the centerpiece of Attic tragedy, and I think that that's important because of the emphasis he wants to put on the Dionysian. Even though, as we've been saying over and over again, the Apollenian and Dionysian go hand in hand, that you can't have the tragedy without the Apollinion. Like we said earlier with music, the juice comes from Dionysus. That's the source.

1:41:19 Jon: We may have been living in an era, or he thinks that we may have been living in an era that's more been cut off from that juice for so long that we're reaching the point where the scientific attitude or a frame of mind is reaching its own limits and reaching back for that or acknowledging the need for that juice and

1:41:39 Seth: that juice is in certain sense an affront to the order of things. When he says Dionysus is the protagonist of all tragedy, what he means to say is that something that is an offense against the established order is really what's at the heart of tragedy. And he talks about Prometheus, and Prometheus defies the gods, steals fire, gives it to human beings, which is what enables culture. Human culture starts with an offense against the gods. And for that, Prometheus has to be punished. And that's the trope that he says, that tragedy plays out over and over and over again. For something to be born, there has to be an offense against order, against nature, against some kind of law. And simultaneously that transgression has to be followed by punishment.

1:42:30 Wes: So if you look at the second paragraph of Section 10, the Mystery Doctrine of tragedy, the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and of art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of restored oneness. So part of the point of the Dionysian is that for aesthetic experience to redeem life, it has to have this element of restoring oneness. But the problem with the whole idea of oneness is the horror of lack of individuation, which I mentioned, but also that passage about individuation in the context of incest.

And I mentioned during the Antigone episode that the horror of not being individuated is not just about destruction and dying, although it is that, but it's also about going back to the womb, which is, again, why incest is relevant. It's not just, oh, we've picked a taboo. It's directly relevant to this whole idea of oneness and our ambivalence towards that and the way in which art can give us that in a sublimated way.

1:43:35 Mark: Well, I think we should follow in the path of the Apollonian in this Socratic eventual outgrowth of tragedy, and we should assert our separateness by kicking John off the call. The non philosopher, the non rationalist.

1:43:50 Jon: I really felt like I was getting closer to you guys. And now I'm going to have to get on my ship and sail through the stormy oceans of reality alone.

1:44:01 Wes: Thanks. Tell us how you felt about the whole. Because you mentioned some of this to me offline. That is just how you felt about the reading and all that.

1:44:08 Jon: I felt like reading this from section 1 through section 15. It was almost watching him emerge from some sort of cocoon or something. Like, the quality of the writing. It's almost like he's shedding an old way of talking about this stuff. And that when he escapes from all the historical speculation, which is what it feels like to me, or at least it's stuff that he's not willing to back up in any direct way, a lot of those, like, historical stages. And although maybe it's perfectly spot on and I don't know, but I would have liked to have heard him talk about that in a more grounded way.

It's almost like when he gets to that section about tragedy, he's, like, breaking free of that mode. And all of a sudden, the language and the writing becomes incredibly clear. Wes, when I spoke to you, I was just coming out of that moment where I found it very disappointing and sort of sophomoric in a way than not used to Nietzsche, because I've only really read the later stuff. Did anybody else notice that? I'm just curious. Like, there's, like, a change in the tempo of the whole thing.

1:45:14 Mark: I felt like this was as good as it was going to get out of the gate. But definitely there's some more poetic parts in the middle.

1:45:20 Wes: Did you just read it in two different sittings, John? And you were grumpy in one sitting?

1:45:25 Jon: You got it. Well, then I'll leave you with that. Thanks a lot, guys. And have a great look forward to hearing the rest of what you talk about, except for Wes.

1:45:36 Wes: Thanks, John.

1:45:37 Jon: Good night.

1:45:38 Wes: All right. Good night.

1:45:39 Seth: Good night.

1:45:39 Dylan: Good night.

1:45:40 Wes: Okay, so I had just given us something from 10, and section 11 is where we're going to start getting into Euripides and then Socrates.

1:45:49 Dylan: So we've said a little bit about Euripides already in that he marks a kind of downfall of Attic tragedy in particular by taking us further from the oneness that comes with the chorus.

1:46:04 Mark: So what's his most famous play? Can we just say we read Antigone, but I'm sure a lot of people listening have never heard any other Greek tragedy ever.

1:46:12 Wes: For each of these, there's only a few extant plays, so they're all famous. But, you know, you could say the Oresteia or the Bacchae.

1:46:18 Mark: Medea.

1:46:19 Dylan: Medea is Euripides.

1:46:21 Mark: I still wouldn't know the difference.

1:46:22 Seth: Who are you asking about? Who are you asking about? Euripides.

1:46:26 Wes: Yeah.

1:46:26 Mark: Yeah. He's making a big deal about why Euripides sucks compared to Sophocles. And to me, it's like it's all the same stuff. I probably read some Euripides at some point. But, like, I haven't looked into this stuff enough to be able to say,

1:46:38 Dylan: well, they feel completely different. If you read them back to back, they feel completely different.

1:46:42 Wes: And the whole point of section 11 is he's basically going to say Euripides is a naturalist. Right. That's what he's objecting to. And there's a weird combination, and this is part of Nietzsche's point in Euripides, of kind of a sentimentality, like you have very pitiable characters, but also this naturalism where you have characters who will defend themselves with long arguments and the language is more ordinary. I think it's paragraph four where he says civil mediocrity is sort of given a voice in Euripides. So instead of you forgetting about all the regular people sitting next to you in the audience and identifying with the Dionysian chorus, suddenly everyone is just a regular person on stage.

1:47:25 Seth: The other thing is, I think he's saying that part of the problem with Euripides is that Euripides actually introduces the notion of a character that you're supposed to be sympathetic to. The Euripidean characters are actually supposed to be tragic for their own personal action, not as archetypes, not as representations of fate. And I thought that was one of the things that he lamented about basically all theater from Euripides to his own present day, is that you were actually supposed to care about individual human beings and sympathize and empathize with them, which is not an action of unity. It's more an individuation.

1:47:58 Wes: I mean, he goes on to talk of this cheerfulness of a slave with nothing great to strive for, values, nothing that are focused on nothing higher than the present. So this is a version of Greek cheerfulness that Nietzsche doesn't like.

1:48:12 Mark: So the connection. And I notice on Wikipedia that Sophocles is only like 17 years older probably than Euripides. So we're talking about a pretty quick degeneration on Nietzsche's scale. It's not a matter of two generations. Later things start sucking.

1:48:26 Wes: It's no.

1:48:27 Dylan: And Aeschylus saw Sophocles plays made.

1:48:30 Wes: Yeah. They competed against each other. Sophocles started winning, and they're like a generation and a half apart. And then it's just another generation from Sophocles to Euripides.

1:48:39 Dylan: And my recollection is that Euripides was hugely popular.

1:48:44 Mark: So this is kind of like 60s rock was awesome, but by the 80s, man sucked. It's that kind of scale we're talking about.

1:48:53 Wes: Right.

1:48:54 Dylan: Well, from whose Point of view.

1:48:55 Wes: He's just talking about the scale, not the time scale.

1:48:58 Dylan: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

1:48:59 Seth: You know, the Fast and the Furious movies are very popular.

1:49:04 Wes: And I mean, you know, that's something that Nietzsche kind of alludes to. He says Euripides is basically pandering to the lowest common denominator.

1:49:11 Mark: Basically refers to the Fast and the Furious movies, basically.

1:49:15 Wes: Isn't that a Euripidean play?

1:49:17 Dylan: Well, Vin Diesel is mentioned in section 12. 13. Right. What about Vin Diesel I just mentioned in section 13? All right.

1:49:25 Wes: We were all trying to make the same joke at the same time.

1:49:28 Jon: Sorry.

1:49:29 Mark: So let's bring Socrates, who's pandering now. Did Socrates help Euripides write his plays? That's what Nietzsche implies.

1:49:39 Wes: I think it's important, though, just the last section of 10 where Euripides didn't feel superior to two spectators to himself as thinker. And then the other one, he doesn't mention them until later, but it will turn out to be Socrates.

1:49:51 Dylan: That's an 11, right?

1:49:52 Wes: It's in the last paragraph of section 11.

1:49:54 Dylan: Yes. The solution to the above puzzle is this. As a poet, Euripides may very well have felt himself superior to the mass, but not to two of his spectators.

1:50:03 Seth: Yep.

1:50:03 Mark: What does this mean? That he doesn't feel superior to himself as the thinking person.

1:50:08 Wes: It's like writing a play, but you're really more of a critic. And you think about it too much. Instead of letting yourself be inspired or connected to something that's more enigmatic and more gut level. You overthink all of it. And then it's reflected in the deus ex machina and the need for the happy ending and characters to be bailed out and the need for everything to make sense. And then naturalism, where everything has to be very realistic. That's the thinking impulse at work.

1:50:35 Dylan: Yeah. He says Euripides sat in the theater with this talent, with all the clarity and agility of his critical thinking. And he had strained every sinew to recognize feature after feature, line after line, in the masterpieces of his predecessors, as if studying paintings darkened by the passage of time. And here he encountered something which can come as no surprise to anyone who's ever been initiated into the deeper secrets of Aeschylean tragedy. He perceived something incommensurable in every feature, in every line. A certain deceiving definiteness and at the same time a puzzling depth, indeed infinity in the background.

1:51:13 Seth: Right.

1:51:13 Wes: And he didn't like it. He did not like that. Yeah.

1:51:16 Dylan: Yeah. And he didn't like it. I think I should have stopped earlier.

1:51:20 Mark: I think that having the depth thing in there is right on point. Yeah, it's infuriating about the whole trend that Nietzsche is representing here. To me say more. You know, if I'm going to judge a work of art, I would like the criteria to be understandable. I'd like them to be communicable. If I don't understand why somebody considers something great, it's just, oh, you just don't get it. You're just too much of a philistine to get it. I'm not happy about that. You know, there has to be some way for me to get my head around it for it not to just feel like arbitrary taste.

And I feel like a lot of people use their arbitrary taste. Just like John was referring to that he thought a lot of what Nietzsche was doing here was basically bullshitting, was basically like pulling his particular aesthetic judgments out and just, you know, universalizing them and writing them into his metaphysics and just all this sort of irresponsible stuff. And I'm not that critical about Nietzsche that way for some reason in the way that I was about Thoreau and Emerson and other folks we've talked about. Just because I like Nietzsche's systematic style even at this point, that he's really self critical in a way that I didn't see in those other figures.

But regardless, it's still in Nietzsche's own preface that he wrote later to this, that he wrote, you know, around the same time as Genealogy, Morals and some other of this later stuff. He says, yeah, this book did not go over because it pitched itself as esoteric, that you just, you're just not going to get this. You, you know, and specifically.

1:52:47 Wes: Well, it didn't go over because it wasn't a work of scholarship and it's speculative instead of bullshit. I prefer the word speculative but.

1:52:55 Seth: But wasn't it popularly a success?

1:52:58 Mark: It certainly did not get him a lot of more students. Not only did it piss off his academic colleagues because he wasn't playing their philological game, but it certainly did not help his like attendance rates at his classes and stuff. And I think that was already bad.

1:53:12 Wes: He had other professors though telling students not to attend his classes.

1:53:16 Mark: Yeah, it did get worse as a part of this, but certainly there was no popular uprising that Nietzsche is awesome at this point. He did not become famous until after he was basically insane, right until most of his work was out there. Even though he had cultivated relationships with people like Wagner and you know, so he had a cult following before that.

1:53:37 Seth: I'm not going to defend that position. But I think they mentioned something about it. I think they said it was more well received popularly than it was critically. Maybe that was what.

1:53:45 Mark: Sure. That wouldn't be too hard if it was savage critically.

1:53:50 Seth: So can I get back to this Socratic point or the Euripidean point? All right, so Dylan just read this section where it says one of these two spectators is Euripides himself. Euripides the thinker, not the poet. And if we go back and think Back to section 7, page 41. Where he talks about how the Apollonian knowledge that the tragic person gets is wisdom. It's the wisdom of Silenus. And you feel revulsion from it. The transfer is that we're still talking about knowledge. When you talk about Euripides and Euripides the thinker. But it's the knowledge that doesn't feel revulsion at an understanding of the tragic.

It's the knowledge it feels that it can overcome that. That knowledge itself is without limits. And can correct these things. In other words, that knowledge can overcome the natural state of human beings. Can overcome the tragic. So instead of becoming aware. And then feeling revulsion. And then feeling satisfied. Like, oh, you know what? My life is faded, and I can't do anything about it. Euripides is the Socratic knowledge of thinking, oh, I understand this. And now, because I understand it, I can overcome it.

1:55:05 Wes: Right. Which means knowledge is the basis of virtue, right?

1:55:09 Seth: Exactly. Exactly.

1:55:11 Wes: That's the optimism that Nietzsche accuses Euripides and Socrates of. So the optimism is that human beings are perfectible in some way or improvable. To the point where we can simply, entirely leave the orbit of all these tragic realities. If I just know enough, if I just have enough knowledge. I can become a virtuous human being. And virtuousness just is happiness. That's like a sort of denial of this darker, instinctual side. Including our murderous impulses. And our other terrible impulses. It's just a way of sweeping them under the rug. Which in section 12, he actually, I think he says that the tragic effect is basically done away with in Euripides.

So where the Apollonian. The epic Apollonian. Transforms the most terrible things. By the joy in mere appearance. And in redemption and mere appearance. The Euripidean play just does away with the terrible in a sense. Is that right? Maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, it naturalizes it. It's no longer this unmovable fact of life. That can be redeemed aesthetically. It's something we can improve ourselves out of.

1:56:15 Seth: That's exactly right. It's the optimistic denial. It's exactly the idea that the world can be justified through knowledge instead of through art. And the only way that that's possible is if you believe that knowledge can heal our ills, that knowledge is a guide to morality in that sense. And he says, I think it's roughly around page 82 of my translation.

1:56:43 Wes: So what?

1:56:43 Seth: Section 16, that's beyond where we are going to read. Oh, sorry, never mind. It's all right. Well, in this section I just. I'll tie this back to what we were just talking about. So if you believe that knowledge is limitless and is the basis of morality, that's what kills myth and the tragic. That's when tragedy dies. Euripides represents the socratization of a Greek tragedy. Nietzsche says only when the spirit of science or knowledge without limits is carried to its limit and it actually has to face the fact that its universal validity is negated by these very limits, is there a possibility for there to be a rebirth of tragedy. So that's just a way of tying the so called affirmative ladder section that we didn't read that I shouldn't really be mentioning back to this discussion.

1:57:38 Dylan: Just to point us to something in section 12 that is very similar. He's talking about the effects of Socrates. So this section, he's really developing this second part of problem with Euripides as his Socratic tendency, and that it becomes no longer Dionysian versus Apollonian, but becoming Dionysian versus Socratic. So the Socratic becomes, at least in this part of it, a kind of special embodiment of the Apollonian. And so he says, we have come to see that Euripides had no success at all in putting drama onto purely Apollonian foundations, and that his non Dionysian tendency got lost in a naturalistic and unartistic one. We can therefore now get closer to the nature of aesthetic Socratism, whose supreme law runs roughly like in order to be beautiful, everything must be reasonable. A sentence formed in parallel to Socrates dictum that only he who knows is virtuous.

1:58:38 Wes: So in Kaufman it's to be beautiful must be intelligible, which I kind of like. And then knowledge is virtue. It's like the truth is beauty kind of thing.

1:58:46 Dylan: Yeah, I like that too. And the next sentence is good. With this canon in his hand, Euripides measured every single element, language, characters, dramatic construction, choral music, and rectified it in accordance with this principle. What we criticize so frequently as a poetic flaw and a step Backward in Euripides work as compared to Sophoclean, tragedy is mostly the product of that penetrating critical process, that bold application of reason.

1:59:13 Seth: So I don't really care if he's being faithful to whatever the classical philological and whatever classicist interpretations of these things are. I have never liked Euripides as much as I have loved Aeschylus. And I am certainly, despite the fact that I'm involved with you clowns, and having done this for six years and gotten degrees in philosophy, don't consider myself Socratic in the truest sense of the word. That I believe that knowledge is virtue or that beauty is intelligibility, I don't agree with those things at all. And the Greek play that speaks to me, the Greek tragedy that speaks to me most clearly is Agamemnon.

And maybe I shouldn't wax poetic about this, but it is a Greek tragedy of the Attic sense, but it's tied to the Homeric myths in a way where there's. The word I guess I'm searching for is pathos or something like that, that there's a sense in which I felt a strong sense of empathy with the characters who were wronged or speaking particularly about Clytemnestra, but at the same time understand the role that Agamemnon plays and why he had to do the things that he did, why he sacrificed his daughter, why he sacrificed his daughter, and why he was gone for 10 years, and why, when he comes back, he has Cassandra as a captive.

And there's a sense in which he's completely oblivious, much like Creon. And when we read Antigone, Creon is completely oblivious to the fact that he's like, I'm the king. The king makes the rules, right? And Antigone saying, even if you're the king, there are these older, deeper rules he can't see. I don't want to say mistakes. It's not even the right word. He can't see the consequences of his actions until it's too late. And in Agamemnon, you don't even get the chance to experience Agamemnon as a character like Creon, who's completely blind.

He just simply is playing that role. He's been at war for 10 years. He comes back, he has his captive, you know, Cassandra with him, and his wife, who has been waiting and waiting and waiting for him for 10 years, has taken a lover, and she orchestrates this whole thing where she doesn't connive to have him murdered, she actually kills him herself. And then she comes out and defends her actions. And I guess in a weird way, it might be worth an analysis of this to see whether it conforms to Nietzsche's interpretation or definition of Attic tragedy.

But this is the one that has always spoken to me.

2:01:51 Dylan: You describe it in a way that makes it seem like it's appealing because it's more realistic in some funny way that you have characters that you can sympathize with that feel vivid and real, which is exactly the criticism of Euripides. And I confess that that's the aspect when I read Agamemnon that really resonated with me. But it's also true that there's just way more chorus in Aeschylus than there is in anybody else. And I myself, in Nietzsche's sort of criticism and encomium to the power of the chorus, I myself have never found the chorus. I've never been able to sort that out. I don't get how it's acting and I've always found it kind of a weird institution myself, you socratist

2:02:42 Mark: cretin. Just to bring it to more modern stuff without talking about particulars. I don't see an inherent conflict between having vividly drawn characters that you can identify with and having a strong mythic element that sort of shakes you to your core. And I think that is what any modern fantasy, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, whatever, or even sci fi or other, you know what they're basically trying to do. They're trying to give you human elements to hook onto so that even in Antigone, I think you're supposed to be able to sympathize with Antigone or certainly Ismene or some of the other characters.

They're not just these Dionysian gods up there that you can only contemplate with awe and be pulled into some non thinking weird state and affected unconsciously by. No, they relate to ordinary human beings. And. And I'm not familiar enough with Euripides to know whether I would agree with Nietzsche's particular take on him or your particular Seth apparent dislike of him. But it doesn't seem irrational to me at all to look, when you are starting to write in an art form, to look at the various aspects of it and say what in this makes sense to me?

What actually connects with audiences, what seems just freaking weird and I should get rid of it like that seems an entirely expected way to run.

2:04:07 Seth: Let me make a distinction between empathizing with an individual character because of how they feel and so having a feeling of empathy with the unworkable situation that they've been put into. That's the difference that Nietzsche wants to prioritize or lionize Aeschylus and Sophocles because he thinks their tragedies express unworkable, tragic situations. That these archetypes, they're not even individuals. Antigone is a name, but Antigone is just a placeholder. You're not supposed to empathize with Antigone, the character. You're supposed to empathize with the tragic situation that puts her in a position where she has to choose between two things which both have bad outcomes.

2:04:49 Wes: Can I put this in another way?

2:04:51 Seth: Yeah.

2:04:52 Wes: You don't get to know Antigone enough as well as you would need to as a character to empathize with her or identify with her in the way you would say, reading.

2:05:00 Mark: Well, Sophie's Choice.

2:05:02 Wes: Someone in a novel or even in a. Yeah, or even in a. Like a Tennessee Williams play. It's the chorus, in a way, that does a lot of the empathizing. If you look back over Antigone or look at Oedipus, all the emotional stuff is going on with the chorus and the chorus is trying to call these emotions out of you, regardless of how well developed the characters are. So to whatever extent you're empathizing with Antigone, I think you're responsive to the chorus and its pathos.

2:05:27 Dylan: The only one thing that I wanted to ask about this, about Socrates, is that at the beginning of his discussion of Socrates here, he really hangs the death of tragedy and is kind of weeping over it with respect to Socrates, that Socrates is a kind of philosophical villain until he gets to the end, or the end of what we read, where he brings us back to the phaedo, where Socrates is writing poetry just before he dies. You know, he points to the music making Socrates and the fact that the

2:06:07 Wes: Platonic dialogues are plain, full of myths,

2:06:09 Mark: and that Socrates has a daimon.

2:06:11 Wes: Yes, as daemon, one of the daemon parts. That's still being critical of Socrates, because that's where the instinct, instead of being the creative part, is the reining in part.

2:06:20 Mark: But just that the fact that he has instinct at all. There's something hypocritical about what Socrates is doing in that he relies on instinct, but also that because his instinct is merely negative, he's just a shrunken human being.

2:06:31 Dylan: So he says. In fact, this is at the very end of 15. Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist whose belief that the nature of things can be discovered leads him to attribute to knowledge and understanding the power of a panacea and who understands error to be inherently evil at the end. To anyone in this state of mind, Plato's Socrates seems to be the teacher of a quite new form of Greek serenity and bliss, existence. One which seeks to discharge itself in actions and mostly achieves this discharge by having a mimetic and educative effect on noble youths in the hope of eventually fathering a genius.

2:07:07 Wes: And then right after that. But science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly towards its limits, where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers. Shipwreck.

2:07:17 Dylan: Yeah, maybe what Nietzsche is doing is saying that the real terrible thing that's happened is the unchecked rise of Socratism in the form of natural science.

2:07:29 Mark: Let's just call it scientism. Not just natural science, but the fact that everything. That's the optimism that we see all problems as fodder for science and that science just plugging away will plumb the depths and make us, we can be scientifically program ourselves to be happy. We can conquer all the universe.

2:07:47 Wes: The way 15 is set up, though, like the first paragraph, makes it seem like Socratism is not a problem, it's an opportunity. So he says. The influence of Socrates is spread over posterity like a shadow that keeps growing in the evening sun. Again prompts a regeneration of art, of art in the metaphysical, broadest and profoundest sense, guarantees the infinity of art. This, in a way it makes it look like this scientific impulse which is overreaching, is actually a good thing and necessary because it sets up the next counter resistance in the next stage where you get another synthesis or the Dionysian rises again, you get this new higher level. You know, speaking of the Hegelianism, higher level synthesis, not in this case between the Dionysian and the Apollenian, but between the artistic and the scientistic.

2:08:38 Dylan: Well, the music making Socrates, right. And I guess at the end of 15 he just leaves us as a question and we knock with emotions stirred at the gates of the present and the future. Will that transformation lead to ever new configurations of genius and especially of the music making Socrates? Will the net of art, which is spread over existence, whether it goes under the name of science or of religion, be woven ever stronger and finer? Or is it destined to be torn to shreds in the relentlessly barbaric turmoil known as the present?

2:09:09 Mark: So you would think that, yeah, a self critical approach, which is basically what Socratism is, would eventually overcome its own over intellectualism that I'm trying to solve every problem. So one of the things he outlines in the later sections here is that he sees with Kant and Schopenhauer that they actually, through this critical method, through the Socratic method, you know, led to the tampering down of the optimism that they were trying to solve everything. But instead Kant ended up drawing a fine distinction like well, this is what you can know. But then there's all this other stuff, the thing in itself that we just can't know anything about. And that's humbling.

2:09:44 Wes: Yeah, there's new material for your tragedy. There are new disappointments because science initially seems promising, a promising solution to everything, not just to practical problems, but to the meaning of life, to making life significant and worthwhile. It's only until you've experienced that disappointment that it's not going to do that for you that you can get to this higher level synthesis. So Socratism, if I'm reading this right, is really necessary if you want to get to the music making Socrates or the gay science and Nietzsche's idealized version of a synthesis between artist and scientist

2:10:19 Mark: for someone like Ricoeur, who rediscovers, is emphasizing our need for myth and well, how can we, as good Gadamer influenced hermeneuticists, interpreters of texts, interpreters of artworks, interpreters of whatever, rediscover what we're missing by over intellectualizing, by trying to apply the scientific method to everything, by ruling out the role of intuition and being self critical enough to realize that there are gaps left in our lives from a purely thought based approach.

2:10:50 Dylan: You know, it's one of the interesting things that gets glossed over when talking about Plato's forms and stuff like that is all of the myth making and myth speaking that goes on in the Platonic dialogues, often out of the mouth of Socrates.

2:11:05 Seth: Yep.

2:11:06 Mark: Well, we can see this as a prelude. You know, I think if people listening to this then turn immediately to our On Truth and Lie episode where he talks more about this relationship between the scientific desire for truth and sort of what the human being actually needs and gives a neat little historical analysis of that. Or I think this adds a great extra dimension to our previous discussion on the master morality, slave morality thing. Because where's master morality here? Well, that sounds like the Homeric, but we describe that as not carefree, do whatever you want, but as raising this image of greatness to keep a damper in some ways on these nasty impulses that threaten to pull society apart.

So it's really that the Apollonian, the Dionysian are both aspects of the master morality, which was way more complicated, at least in this ancient Greek form, than he would let on when he's doing this different hermeneutic analysis of the situation for a different reason. And then of course, the artistic Socrates, we had our gay science episode. So that right there he goes more into the positive. What is it to do? Very difficult, strict rational thinking, but in a gay, a light musical way that, you know, acknowledges the importance of the unconscious and all the things that can't be so easily cognized the way he actually continues.

So apparently our translator here, Walter Kaufman, says that Section 15 was supposed to be the end of the book. I don't know the whole story of like why he continued it, but that he later regretted writing the rest of it. And Kaufman says that it reads like a parody of Richard Wagner's own writing. Not that I would know, but just that he really got down on his goal with the rest of this. Well, he's shown where ancient Greece sort of lost its mojo. Now for the rest of it he wants to apply. How can Germany gain back its mojo by not just going back, it has to of course, continue forward along the dialectical chain.

But he saw enough in his own culture, in Wagner himself, in that kind of music that he thought was pushing in the right direction. And we could have, you know, a more Dionysian influenced set of artworks, whereas the kind of opera that he was objecting to certainly had gotten all shallow.

2:13:23 Wes: And then he comes to regret that, I mean, as we see both in the gay science and his attempted self critique. So he sort of sees himself later on as being in the thralls of romanticism, which is an overcorrection and it's not properly the synthesis of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. It's sentimental bullshit and it's also dangerous. He's also thinking here and he more explicitly talks about it in gay science. But German nationalism and the rise of those sentiments out of this sort of simultaneously self glorifying and self pitting type of art.

2:13:57 Mark: Right, if you glorify your own instincts, then that's not being sufficiently self critical in many practical circumstances. So that you and your cohorts can then get caught up in some horrible bandwagon of an aesthetic or political or any other sort. Yeah, and this is exactly what I was trying to object to before, which reflects Nietzsche's own criticism in the later preface here of this work that he sees why it didn't go over, that it was very esoteric and Purposefully like this is only for the cool people. And I know that doesn't sound that different from Zarathustra and other things that he wrote later.

But it's the sort of arbitrariness of some of it that John was referring to that ends up, you know, the fact that he could be so in favor of this Wagner ultimately sentiment driven aesthetic slash life philosophy and then decide, wait a second, that's actually all life despising. There's something horrible about this, you know, that just shows that he wasn't at this point, at least according to his own analysis, operating with a critical enough mind on a firm enough basis. So I don't like this mode that if you sort of followed the line of critique in here that would maybe again I'm sort of putting myself in Euripides place because I'm unfamiliar with Euripides and how clod like maybe his plays in fact are, I don't know, but I can imagine like, wow, I'm really trying to do well at my art and I'm very self critical and try to improve in every way.

And then you just say, well, you know, ultimately you just don't get it. You're just uninspired. You wouldn't have to do all the self criticism if you just had the mojo in the first place. I find that as an artist enormously a frustrating.

2:15:41 Seth: So just for the record, I'd like to point out a couple things. First off, I read this book while I was on vacation in Mexico. So I'm at the beach, children running around, people enjoying cocktails. I was reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, Cambridge edition. Not that I'm asking for people to pity me, I'm just saying.

2:16:01 Wes: Oh, I thought you were saying that I was a badge of honor.

2:16:04 Dylan: No, no, he called it a slog.

2:16:07 Seth: I read the whole thing, slog parts at the end. Yeah, well, there's some fun stuff in the slog part. There's so much in here about that requires knowledge about Greek language and Greek history and Greek stuff that I thought I learned when I went to school@reed 20 some odd years ago, but obviously I didn't learn enough. I'm kind of sympathetic. I kind of like this. I like the idea that there's a sense of recognition and resignation about tragedy in life that no amount of reason or knowledge is going to overcome that. You have to ultimately just deal with the fact, you know what, some of us are smarter than others.

Some of us are, you know, some of us have soul or are cool or whatever. Which is not to say that there isn't the possibility for change or you can't go work on something. But I think this points to kind of a healthy acknowledgment of difference and of circumstance that I think is missing these days. I think there's an optimism. This is an American thing. So for our listeners who are in other countries where they don't experience this, I apologize. But there's this sort of relentless idea that technology is somehow limitless and it's going to ultimately be our salvation.

It's also going to radically change. So you have the naysayers like Bostrom. Not the naysayers, the prophets of doom. Right, that the AI is going to come and overtake us. But this idea that you hear people saying, you know, software can do anything and that technology is going to liberate us and all this, it's just a substitute. It's the latest incarnation of Socratic faith in knowledge that knowledge is limitless. We think of technology and science as being limitless. And the solution to this is not religion. So you talk about Dawkins and these guys where they're opposing science and religion or faith.

It's like ultimately the limit of science and knowledge is not faith, it's ignorance. And that, as you see, is exactly what's happening right now. There's this tidal wave of ignorance that's manifesting itself in politics and society. And it's exactly, I think, in a certain weird way that Nietzsche diagnosed the condition of this age. And that's me talking a couple beers in after having put enough time into this thing that I feel like I earned the right to wax, if not poetic, then at least. But I think there's something to this.

2:18:49 Wes: I mean, absolutely. Nietzsche, so applicable, his critique of culture. You know, you could write a book just simply applying to Nietzsche to American culture. And it's, you know, of course, it's been done a few times, including Alan Bloom's famous closing of the American Mind, although I want to revisit that and see if I think he got that right and the way he actually applies. Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a prophet. I mean, ironically, he's a prophet warning against some of the dangers of what we saw with German nationalism, the poisonous of it, and then what it led to during two world wars.

But he's also a prophet of the way in which the attempt to find something meaningful to hang on to in life can lead to the kind of forms of ignorance, to use Seth's word, that grip a society. And in this way, I think there's actually a lot more in common between Socrates and Nietzsche than Nietzsche's admitting. Because Socrates is also focused on exposing what he calls conceit of wisdom, including some of the opinions that society and especially moral and ethical opinions that society holds most dear. So you could use Nietzsche to attack popular ways, popular conceptions of what is ethical.

So for instance, even with a Dawkins, there's a tendency towards a kind of nihilism or quasi religious solutions toward nihilism that manifests itself even in atheism. So Nietzsche was also, even though he's an atheist, a critic of the kind of atheism that becomes cultish in and of itself, which I think arguably new atheism and people like Harris and Dawkins are. Because the important thing is not whether you're asserting the existence of God, but whether you think you have some totalizing solution to answer all of life's questions and so make it worth living.

And the atheism of a Dawkins or Harris is just a mask for scientism, a mask for the idea that you can extend inquiry into these domains and then wrap them up. So even though you don't get God, you still get a set of answers.

2:20:56 Mark: Dylan, any more comments? Probably an extended 10 minute Jag about philosophy of science would be perfect right now.

2:21:04 Dylan: Well, I was thinking about physics earlier and no, for me, the enduring images of the music making or the dancing Socrates, which Nietzsche turns to at the end and points to Socrates as having a transition, an epiphany of his life at the end, as told by Plato. But I think if you have any sensitivity at all, you'll see that spirit of Socrates all throughout most of the Platonic dialogues. I think that that spirit, live spirit of radical inquiry that is rooted a kind of dionysic, amorphous world that's richer than the reason that you can bring upon it lives there as well. And that kind of end of this book, as rich as it is that goes into the gay science and other things, is what I find most compelling and interesting.

2:22:09 Mark: Yep, my strategy for reading Nietzsche in general has been the one of the sage that alters his message depending on what he thinks the audience needs to hear, or he comes up with different doctrines for different purposes to make a different point. He's a rhetorician in many ways. And so I don't take and this is a topic for a different discussion, of course, you know, his talk of eternal recurrence or of the will to power as being literal metaphysical principles in the way that things like that are for Schopenhauer. And so I found it very interesting in here.

So I don't have any problem with him, like, dissing Socrates in one place and being all, yay, Socrates. But of course, Socrates was great for history and another, but, like, that's all. It's just how you read Nietzsche is. Is by sort of putting together all these different things he says in different places to get toward a general. Not a set of doctrines, but a way of approaching problems in a way of being. So to see him in this early work where he was more firmly under the spell of a specific couple of figures, in particular Schopenhauer, you know, when we had just read him, and how adamant he is about all of his opinions and that he does not rhetorically change his stance based on what point he's trying to prove.

He's just like, I told you what I meant here. Maybe I'll say more about it to apply it to a different thing, to elaborate a little bit. But he's a dogmatist in a very significant sense, in a way that Nietzsche definitely is not. So it was fun to unpack that and see in this transitional work how maybe it is like John was saying, that we sort of see him a prisoner of these particular ways of thinking, but then also emerging from it at the same time. I wouldn't say it's that he gets better in that sense from section 1 to section 15 of the work or something, but this is definitely a transitional thing, and it's exciting for that reason.

Hey, next time we're going to be talking to one of our old friends, Eva Brann, about her book Unwilling, that came out in 2014. And Dylan's gonna be there in person. It's gonna be a lot of fun. We are supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com to make a contribution. Folks should come to the after show for this episode. It'll be on Sunday, July 26th at 3pm Eastern Time, noon Pacific. Go sign up at partiallyexaminedlife.com youm have to be a citizen to attend, but anybody can watch. We've got a Facebook group, we've got a Twitter account.

We got all this stuff. All right, thanks, guys. Good night, everybody.

2:24:36 Dylan: Good night.

2:24:47 Mark: Now and again I feel okay I can barely recall that I've passed away I guess it's just something you get used to I'm here with alone and I still love you that was some act I should.

2:25:06 Jon: I feel weak But I don't want

2:25:07 Mark: to forget I can't speak to you. I'm not dead yet. I know. I told you I would never get over it. The last word is what you get? That was so Max? You. Asking?

2:25:45 Jon: The love that I control?

2:25:47 Mark: What I've got? I will carry this through my belonging to you? This is no one that I am?

2:26:20 Dylan: Still?

2:26:20 Mark: It's so pathetic to do your will? When I'm under? I see your face? And no one's come to take your place?

2:26:49 Jon: You never wanted to leave me like this?

2:26:51 Mark: I catch a But I don't know how? I want to totally hear? I know, yes, it's asking a lot? But I know what you've got? I try to let go? I just want. To. Sa.