Editor’s Note

This is an essay written by a college student about the book Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche. It’s outstanding, but it might be hard to understand unless you’ve read this book before. If you have ever been assigned Neitzsche in class, this is a truly brilliant analysis. 

Socrates’ Illusion

by Tahmeed Hossain

Dr. Willett

Philosophy 490R

1 – The Apollonian

“What is Dionysian?”– This is the central question of The Birth of Tragedy, around which the whole work orbits. Over the course of the book, Nietzsche approaches this question from every angle. He explicates the basic forms that the Dionysian takes in primitive human culture; describes the essence of tragedy as grounded in the Dionysian, along with its cousin the Apollonian; draws a grand historiography of human civilization based on the competition of the Dionysian with its peers; and delves into the core of his metaphysics with the Dionysian as the key. But Nietzsche’s first foray into the question of the Dionysian comes paired with the Apollonian, in an analogy. The Apollonian is akin to dream, and the Dionysian to intoxication. Nietzsche’s exposition of the Socratic will arrive later, but it is no less important – it is the predominant mode of modern culture, and a mode which any philosophical essay would find it exceedingly difficult to escape.

What is it to dream? It is the production of a “reality” by the dreamer themself. It is an illusion, and the illusion is so complete that, in most cases, the dreamer does not know that they are within an illusion. “In the creation of dreams,” says Nietzsche, “each man is a complete artist.” (Nietzsche 1) Illusions in waking life occur against a background of the whirling confusion of life. A dream-illusion, on the other hand, persists more independently than does its waking counterpart. The background experience of a dream is sleep – from a certain perspective, this is the lack of experience at all. Hence the source of the dreamer’s imagery is and can only be the dreamer’s own memory and imagination. The dream is the illusion par excellence.

The key of the Apollonian is not to be found simply in the tendency to dream; it is in the tendency to want to dream. “The dreamer,” says Nietzsche, “in the middle of his illusory dream world, calls out to himself, without destroying that world, ‘It is a dream. I want to continue dreaming it,’ … he has a deep inner delight at the contemplation of the dream.” (Nietzsche 4) To want to dream, to find joy in illusion for illusion’s sake; even if that illusion is known to be illusion, is the joy of Apollo. “We enjoy the form with an immediate understanding; every shape speaks to us; nothing is indifferent and unnecessary.” (Nietzsche 1). In a dream, there is no underlying reality for its objects; their existence is due to pure fantasy, pure creation.

But hidden in that last sentence is an assumption – one that is so fundamental as to be obvious, but which hints at the path which will lead into the Dionysian and into Nietzsche’s fundamental metaphysics. What is this “underlying reality” for the objects that we see in our waking life? Could it not be– “something of a paradox to all appearances,” Nietzsche asks: “that the true being and the primordial oneness, ever-suffering and entirely contradictory, constantly uses the delightful vision, the joyful illusion, to redeem itself; we are compelled to experience this illusion, totally caught up in it and constituted by it… we must now consider our dreams as the illusion of an illusion, as well as an even higher fulfillment of the original hunger for illusion.” (Nietzsche 4) This is the core of Nietzsche’s metaphysics in this work: that there is a “primordial oneness, ever-suffering, and entirely contradictory”; that illusion, unreality, individuation, falsity form the truth of our empirical reality. The response to the strife of this primordial oneness constitutes reality.

As part and parcel of this life of illusion, we human beings see it as real. The Apollonian is the response which apprehends this illusion and takes joy in it. The Apollonian strives to deceive itself, to live wholly in a perfect illusion; so much so that the illusory reality becomes real. It is the drive – not just a human emotional drive, but something more like a fundamental force of the universe – that pushes to the creation of ever more complex and ever more perfect layers of illusion. In the culture of the ancient Greeks, the Apollonian force manifests itself in the pantheon of Olympus. In them we find “no reminder of asceticism, spirituality, and duty: here speaks to us only a full, indeed a triumphant, existence, in which everything present is worshipped, no matter whether it is good or evil.” (Nietzsche 3) The Greek Pantheon was a group of deities who represented glory, victory, a fullness and richness of life; they “justify the lives of men, because they themselves live it.” (Nietzsche 3) The Greeks represented themselves in their gods, who were not better than humans – they were far from virtuous and perfect – but were greater and more glorious. Victory, of the gods over the titans, stands as the founding event of the Greek pantheon. Their theology was an affirmation of the victory of human civilization over the terrifying powers of nature; the victory of an illusion of greatness, so radiant that it banished the titans to the darkest depths. The Apollonian drive, fundamentally, is a response against that aforementioned “primordial oneness, ever-suffering, and entirely contradictory” – a drive to bury that pain and cover it over in glorious, shining worlds of illusion.

2 – The Dionysian

In the scheme of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, the Dionysian finds its place alongside the Apollonian and the Socratic as a fundamental universal force, responding to the same primordial oneness, but in a very different way. Returning to the beginning analogy: the Apollonian is like dream, in which the self builds a world of illusion up around itself; the Dionysian is like intoxication, in which the self tears down the walls between itself and its own repressed sectors; between itself and others; between itself and the world; between itself and the primordial oneness, so that nothing remains but the bewildering truth. “Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak in their hymns, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises; as it intensifies, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self.” (Nietzsche 1)

The normal rules and patterns of one’s internal life fall by the wayside. The cracks in the illusory world begin to come into focus. All its contradiction and strife, normally covered over just about well enough to maintain sober functioning, presents itself in its full ugliness. Emotion oscillates to all extremes, and ultimately the self can no longer hold itself apart, aloof, individual. The body and the mind become one, once again: the Dionysian excitement ends the illusion of their difference. “Under the magic of the Dionysian,” says Nietzsche, “not only does the bond between man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, no matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation with her prodigal son, man.” (Nietzsche 1) The Dionysian is at the heart of all of those great festivals that have always happened through all ages of human history, in which each person can joyfully reunite with their animal self, in which all people can come together and shed the pretenses which separate them.

The Dionysian is a force that responds to the “primordial oneness.” In a Dionysian experience, one communes directly with that oneness: “for a short time we really are the primordial essence itself and feel its unbridled lust for and joy in existence; the struggle, the torment, the destruction of appearances now seem to us necessary, on account of the excess of innumerable forms of existence pressing and punching themselves into life and of the exuberant fecundity of the world will.” (Nietzsche 17). Every one of the forms, structures, and institutions around which we build our life will disintegrate eventually, transformed into something else. Under the Apollonian, one tries to find a moment of infinity, of a beautiful illusion so perfect that the ravages of time fall away from relevance, and the dreamer can believe that the dream will last forever. One tries to escape from the inevitability of pain. But in the Dionysian, one dives headfirst into that inevitability, into the profoundest sorrow at the continual flux of the universe. And in that sorrow, one finds a “metaphysical consolation”: knowledge – though “knowledge” is not quite the right word – that we ourselves are “one with the immeasurable primordial delight in existence.” (Nietzsche 17)

3 – The Socratic

A source for the Dionysian and Apollonian is never given a name in The Birth of Tragedy. They are granted no logical, syllogistic, scientific basis. They are presented by Nietzsche as fundamental forces, which respond to the even more fundamental “primordial oneness.” Ultimately these concepts are meant to stand on their own, with a durability similar to that afforded by the theologian to faith, the logician to axioms, the patriot to country – and by the artist to beauty and by the reveler to unity. There does not need to be a justification, because the drive is in and of itself eternally justified – but only to the person who is caught up in it. Indeed, the scientific, academic desire for constant further justification, a desire shared by all philosophers, and by all inquisitive children who endlessly ask “why?”: this is itself a symptom of another of those fundamental drives, the Socratic.

Nietzsche introduces Socrates as the culmination of the fall of Attic tragedy. This art form represented the manifestation of a marriage between the Dionysian and Apollonian drives, and which exemplified the Greek spirit at its highest point. That fragile balance, epitomized by Aeschylus, began to be eroded by the new Socratic spirit, beginning with Sophocles, and especially Euripides, who was a contemporary of Socrates himself – whom Nietzsche refers to as “an entirely new-born daemon.” (Nietzsche 12) The meaning of the Socratic can be wrung from the old story of the Oracle’s declaration that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens – which Socrates surmised must be because he knew he knew nothing. As Nietzsche describes the scene:

“…in his critical wandering about in Athens conversing with the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, everywhere he ran into people who imagined they knew things. Astonished, he recognized that all these famous people themselves had no correct and clear insight into their careers and carried out their work only instinctually. ‘Only from instinct’ – with this expression we touch upon the heart and centre of the Socratic attitude… Given this, Socratism condemns prevailing art as well as prevailing ethics. Wherever he directs his searching gaze, he sees a lack of insight and the power of delusion, and from this lack he infers the inner falsity and worthlessness of present conditions. On the basis of this one point, Socrates believed he had to correct existence.” (Nietzsche 13)

Above all, Socrates valued logical insight. That is, of course, the guiding principle of the famous Socratic dialogues: an assumption is brought into question; terms are defined, considered, and redefined; other assumptions are brought to bear on the first, which are each examined in turn, cross-referenced against each other until all antinomies can be resolved; and, eventually, a full complement of acceptable beliefs are laid out, which all function harmoniously with the others, and the unacceptable ones, the conflicting ones, are discarded. Belief must be justified; instinct is not enough. Order, cold, logical order, must be achieved. Conflict is nonexistence – is that not a restatement of the law of noncontradiction? So it was that Socrates was the wisest in all of Athens, in the whole of a city that was, in a dark, primitive world, one of the great beacons of civilization. Socrates was the only one who knew that he knew nothing–because his idea of “knowing” was something entirely new.

All around the Apollonian society of ancient Greece, Socrates saw people who lived according to their own complexes of illusion. The bases of these illusions were unknown to his fellow Athenians, but that was immaterial to them: caught up in the thrall of the Apollonian, they took joy in the illusions themselves, in their ever-unfolding layers of complexity and beauty. To make art, representative art, was to make an illusion out of the illusions all around – and to them, this was good. But to Socrates, the noticing of an illusion brought no joy; only a scientific curiosity as to the basis of that illusion. To create art was to go in the opposite direction from the truth of the world, which surely lay buried below all these layers of illusion – and the way to reach it must surely be through logic and dialectics. Socrates so vilified art that he “made the demand that his disciples abstain and strictly stay away from such unphilosophical temptations, with so much success that the youthful poet of tragedy, Plato, immediately burned his poetical writing, so that he could become Socrates’ student.” (Nietzsche 14) And what a student he was! Plato’s most celebrated contribution, the theory of Forms, represents the Socratic perfectly. The real world we see is illusion; there is a true world underneath; and this world is accessible through thinking. That Socratic deification of objectivity would go on to inform much of our culture, in its evolution through Plato and Aristotle into modern science and philosophy.

It should be noted that the three drives so far mentioned do not exhaust the possibilities of the responses to the suffering of the primordial oneness.

“One man is fascinated by the Socratic desire for knowledge and the delusion that with it he will be able to heal the eternal wound of existence. Another is caught up by the seductive veil of artistic beauty fluttering before his eyes, still another by the metaphysical consolation that underneath the hurly-burly of appearances eternal life flows on indestructibly, to say nothing of the more common and almost even more powerful illusions which the will holds ready at all times. In general, these three stages of illusion are only for nobly endowed natures, those who especially feel with a more profound reluctance the weight and difficulty of existence and who have to be deceived out of this reluctance by those exquisite stimulants. Everything we call culture consists of those stimulants.” (Nietzsche 18)

Under this paradigm, of responses to the “weight and difficulty of existence,” it is not difficult to draw more examples from day-to-day life (though we can leave the value judgment of ‘noble’ to the inimitable Nietzsche). Religion; the love of family, or of country; the striving to excellence in some pursuit or other; or the accumulation of wealth might all rank next to the Apollonian, Dionysian, and Socratic as responses.

4 – Tragedy

In order to progress, we must examine with our full attention only those three. In particular, we turn now to the critical point in history at the confluence of the three: the period of Attic tragedy. Its beginning represents the most successful marriage of the Dionysian and Apollonian, those old rivals; its end represents the subjugation of both as the Socratic comes to predominance. Nietzsche’s first words on tragedy come in the book’s preamble, the “Attempt at Self-Criticism.” In it he describes Schopenhauer’s understanding of tragedy, in contrast to his own:

“Schopenhauer says, ‘What gives everything tragic its characteristic drive for elevation is the working out of the recognition that the world, that life, can provide no proper satisfaction, and thus our devotion to it is not worthwhile; the tragic spirit consists of that insight – it leads therefore to resignation” (The World as Will and Idea, II,3,37). O how differently Dionysus spoke to me! O how far from me then was precisely this whole doctrine of resignation!–” (Nietzsche , ASC 6)

Tragedy is, on the very first impression, something sad, negative, undesirable – precisely what makes the explanation of the human attraction to tragedy such an interesting one. In Schopenhauer, it functions to lead us to resignation – an attractive state of being, in his pessimistic philosophy. For all the influence that Schopenhauer had on Nietzsche’s thinking, the latter’s theory of tragedy squarely opposes that of the former. “Where then must tragedy have come from?” Nietzsche asks. “Perhaps out of joy, out of power, out of overflowing health, out of overwhelming fullness?” (Nietzsche , ASC 4)

By “tragedy” Nietzsche always denotes specifically the period of Attic tragedy, exemplified with Aeschylus, declining with Sophocles, and ending with Euripides. This historical context is paramount. The Greek culture of this period and prior was predominantly of the Apollonian persuasion. Nietzsche characterizes them as follows: “Given the incredibly clear and accurate plastic capability of their eyes, along with their intelligent and open love of colour… entitles us to describe the dreaming Greek man as Homer and Homer as a dreaming Greek man, in a deeper sense than when modern man, with respect to his dreams, has the temerity to compare himself with Shakespeare.” (Nietzsche 2). The Ancient Greeks, at their core, were an Apollonian people. To appreciate a beautiful illusion, to exalt it for its aesthetic value alone, came naturally to them. Surrounding these wide-eyed Greeks were hordes of “Dionysian barbarians”: people who would engage in festivals of overflowing joy, unity, lust, and cruelty. But the Greeks’ Apollonian nature, their love of art, poetry, illusion, their detached worldview protected them from these hordes: “Doric art has immortalized that majestic bearing of Apollo as he stands in opposition.” (Nietzsche 2) But even in this most Apollonian of cultures, the Dionysian feeling germinated.

The existence of the Apollonian Greek, “with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden underground of suffering and knowledge, which was exposed for him again through the Dionysian.” (Nietzsche 4) The knowledge of that truth, of the pain at the heart of existence, is the original impulse of the Apollonian, as it seeks to cover it over and finds joy in that endeavor. Yet it was not always successful, and the Dionysian would break out in spurts in the Greek spirit: “The individual, with all his limits and moderation, was destroyed in the self-oblivion of the Dionysian condition and forgot the Apollonian principles.” (Nietzsche 4). Nietzsche identifies four periods of Greek culture and art, which alternate between the Dionysian and Apollonian. Attic tragedy was not the first interaction of those two drives, but it was the most perfect and important of them all.

Based on the authority of Aristotle’s Poetics, Nietzsche makes the claim “that tragedy developed out of the tragic chorus and originally consisted only of a chorus and nothing else.” (Nietzsche 7) This chorus, present in all of the surviving works of Attic tragedy, is an intermediate element between the spectators and the action of the play – something in between those two extremes, something different. The chorus are certainly nothing like spectators, for they speak and sing about and to the characters. They also are not quite characters in the action themselves, as they do not individually have personalities, but rather speak as a unified whole. They are one of key Dionysian features of Attic tragedy. They are a “chorus of natural beings, who live, so to speak, indestructibly behind all civilization, and who, in spite of all the changes in generations and a people’s history, always remain the same.” (Nietzsche 7) They can be thought of, perhaps, like an array of ghosts, of people taken from the past, present, and future, all brought together to step halfway from the afterlife into the world of the story. These ghosts, brought together from the sum total of the civilization, half-spectate and half-participate in the action and characters.

The chorus “presents existence more genuinely, more truly, and more completely than does the civilized person, who generally considers himself the only reality.” (Nietzsche 8) When a spectator, who was themself part of the Greek civilization, views a work of Attic tragedy, they transport themselves into a sense of oneness with the chorus itself. The chorus incites a Dionysian down-going into the primordial oneness, a release from individuation. The spectator, under the tragic trance, becomes one with the chorus. The story is like a grand vision, experienced simultaneously and all together by all of the members of that ghostly chorus. Indeed, this idea of “half-spectating and half-participating” describes very closely the experience of dream. The chorus, through the magic of the Dionysian, includes not only the “natural beings who live behind all civilization,” but also the spectators of the play; through the Apollonian, they experience the events of the tragedy as a true illusion. Greek tragedy is a “Dionysian chorus which over and over discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images… in his transformed state, (Nietzsche the spectator) sees a new vision outside himself as an Apollonian fulfilment of his condition.” (Nietzsche 8)

Those images – the story of the drama – is not just some arbitrary fiction, some personal whimsy of the author, who wishes to weave a pleasing illusion from words. The heart of the story is something fundamentally Dionysian; it is myth. That is– the story is something shared among the civilization, as a founding document, as a metaphysical answer, as something truly significant. “It is an incontestable tradition,” claims Nietzsche, “that Greek tragedy in its oldest form had as its subject only the suffering of Dionysus and that for a long time later the individually present stage heroes were simply Dionysus. But with the same certainty we can assert that right up to the time of Euripides Dionysus never ceased being the tragic hero, that all the famous figures of the Greek theatre, like Prometheus, Oedipus, and so on, are only masks of that primordial hero, Dionysus.” (Nietzsche 10) The core of the tragic story is the Dionysian myth. The Apollonian drive of the dramaturge then builds up the story around the myth, so that the Apollonian spectator, unified with the Dionysian chorus, can take an Apollonian joy in the image of the Dionysian truth.

The appeal of tragedy, then, comes from the Dionysian drive at its heart. When Oedipus, despite all his efforts, was ground down by fate; when Prometheus, as punishment for his Titanic generosity for humanity, was chained to the rock: the Greek could take a profound satisfaction. Not out of a drive to resignation, nor out of a catharsis and purgation of negative emotions – but out of the recognition of the dissolution of illusion; out of the demonstration of the falsity of the imaginary world we call real; out of the return to that deepest primordial oneness. “The hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is destroyed, and we are happy at that, because, after all, he is only an illusion and the eternal life of the will is not disturbed his destruction… In Dionysian art and in its tragic symbolism nature speaks to us with its true, undisguised voice: ‘Be as I am! Under the incessant changes in phenomena, the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally forcing things into existence, eternally satisfied with the changing nature of appearances!” (Nietzsche 16)

5 – The Spirit of Music

The final element of tragedy to be considered is the subtitle of the book itself: the Spirit of Music. Before the heights of Attic tragedy, one of the earlier arts arising from the combination of Dionysian and Apollonian was that of lyric poetry, in which lyrics are applied to a melody. “The lyric poet has, first of all, as a Dionysian artist, become entirely unified with the primordial oneness, with its pain and contradiction, and produces the reflection of the primordial oneness as music, if music can with justice be called a re-working of the world and its second casting.” (Nietzsche 5) The first act of the lyric poet is the production of the melody, though the melody is not a creation of the artist themself; it is taken from the realm of the primordial oneness, through a Dionysian process. Therefore, the artist lacks a detached, contemplative consciousness of the exact moment that the melody came into worldly existence. Only afterwards, once they have returned from the self-forgetting creative process, can the artist apprehend the melody in an analytical or appreciative manner.

At this point that Nietzsche asks “the following question: ‘What does music look like in the mirror of imagery and ideas?’ It appears as the will, taking that word in Schopenhauer’s sense, that is, as the opposite to the aesthetic, purely contemplative, will-less state.” The listener themself is in the aesthetic state, but the music appears as the will. The will, in Nietzsche’s metaphysical scheme, is the general term for those drives, like the Apollonian, Dionysian, and Socratic, as they play out in the sphere of human life. To put it another way: the will, in whichever of the many forms it takes, constitutes the continual creation of each of our own realities. Music appears as the will: the listener “views” the music in terms of images, desires, fantasies, memories – not just their own, but those of willing in general. Therefore, when a listener speaks “in images about a composition, for example, when he describes a symphony as pastoral and one movement as ‘A Scene by the Brook,’ another as ‘A Frolicking Gathering of Peasants,’ these expressions are only metaphors, images born out of the music – and not some objective condition imitated by the music.” (Nietzsche 6)

The listener “sees” the music as a living, creative force, one which continually throws up facades of beauty, pain, poignancy, tension and release. The listener himself is “resting in the still tranquility of the sea of Apollonian observation… if he looks at himself through that same medium, his own image reveals itself to him in a state of emotional dissatisfaction: his own willing, yearning, groaning, cheering, are for him a metaphor with which he interprets the music for himself. This is the phenomenon of the lyric poet: as an Apollonian genius, he interprets the music through the image of the will.” (Nietzsche 6) This is the “spirit of music”: it appears as the will, which is what our illusory realities themselves are constituted by.

So it is that music is the founding element of tragedy:

“We understand music as the language of the unmediated will and feel our imaginations stirred to shape that spirit world which speaks to us invisibly and nonetheless with such vital movement and to embody it for ourselves in an analogous illustration. By contrast, image and idea, under the influence of a truly appropriate music, reach an elevated significance. Thus, Dionysian art customarily works in two ways on Apollonian artistic potential: music stimulates us to the metaphorical viewing of the Dionysian universality, and music then permits that metaphorical image to come forward with the highest significance… From this, I conclude that music is capable of generating myth, that is, the most meaningful example, and of giving birth in particular to the tragic myth, the myth which speaks in metaphors of the Dionysian insight.” (Nietzsche 16)

The birth of a melody, a wholly Dionysian experience, begins the process of tragedy. The right melody – and there are infinitely many to choose from – can grant the highest elevation and significance to the right lyrics and imagery. The melody is the essential connection between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Dionysian alone can grant us access to the primordial unity, but this access is unmediated, and when it happens, we cannot think nor reflect on the experience. The melody, meanwhile, drives our Apollonian sensibility to a surge of image-creation. If this Apollonian process is carried out with the proper seriousness, it engulfs the melody in myth. And myth itself has a dual appeal: first to our Apollonian nature, as a story, an illusion; but secondly to the Dionysian, through the process of coming-together and oneness – for in a myth, the entire civilization affirms it as one. Finally, the chorus provides the gateway for the everyday spectator to break down their own walls of individuality, and connect with the myth on a Dionysian level; at which point the melody, at the beginning and end of it all, throws open a window into the primordial unity.

6 – Melody and Fact

To close in further on the nature of melody, we come now to this significant formulation: “The melody,” Nietzsche says, “is the primary and universal fact.” (Nietzsche 6) A fact is a window to the truth; it is, generally speaking, a statement which can be held in mind, which has a meaning that aligns directly and harmoniously with the true reality of the world. Take the statement: “The cup is on the table.” Why is it a fact? First, the signifier ‘the cup’ must refer to this real cup and the signifier ‘the table’ to the real table. Second, the more abstract signifiers, ‘is’ and ‘on’, each correspond with a certain condition that can be “true” about the world. ‘Is’ – referring to a state of the world at the present, not the past nor future; and “on” – referring to a spatial arrangement by which one object exists above the other but in contact with it. Of course, all these terms – “real”, “state”, “world”, “present”, “past”, “future”, “spatial”, “object”, “above”, “in contact with” – can and should be questioned further. But let us leave Wittgenstein at the door, and let it suffice, for the moment, for us to pretend that we have achieved an understandable, agreeable metaphysics, one which is consonant with science and with communication, and that we can agree to agree on the “common-sense” understanding of those last definitions. So, we can say “The cup is on the table” and know it to be a fact because there is an analogy between the syntactical arrangement of the words in the statement and the physical arrangement of the meanings of the words in the world. ‘Cup’ precedes ‘on’ which precedes ‘table’: cup is above and in contact with table. This analogy, between a syntactical structure and a physical one, is the heart of “fact”. An analogy between syntax and physics – a marvelous thing!

We have arrived close to the starting point of Langer’s theory of music:

“The tonal ­­structures we call ‘music’ bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human feeling – forms of growth and of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses – not joy and sorrow perhaps, but the poignancy of either and both – the greatness and brevity and eternal passing of everything vitally felt. Such is the pattern, or logical form, of sentience; and the pattern of music is that same form worked out in pure, measured sound and silence. Music is a tonal analogue of emotive life… Our interest in music arises from its intimate relation to the all-important life of feeling, whatever that relation may be. The function of music is not stimulation of feeling, but expression of it; and furthermore, not the symptomatic expression of feelings that beset the composer but a symbolic expression of the forms of sentience as he understands them. It bespeaks his imagination of feelings rather than his own emotional state, and expresses what he knows about the so-called “inner life”; and this may exceed his personal case, because music is a symbolic form to him through which he may learn as well as utter ideas of human sensibility.” (Langer pp. 27-28)

We find here that, in music, there is an analogy between a tonal structure and an emotional structure. Not just a tone, but a tonal structure: a chord progression, a textural motif, a melody. And not just an emotion, but an emotional structure – “not joy and sorrow, but the poignancy of either and both.” Langer presumes an inner life, something in which each human participates, and whose depths no human can fully explore. All human beings draw from these forms of emotion, to varying degrees at different moments of their lives. The musician connects in some way to a particular thread within that inner life, and expresses that thread through a piece of music, which, as described, mimics that thread in some essential manner. But the inner life exists independently of the musician, and indeed of any of the humans who dip in and out of it; like a grand lake, it rests and flows and brews of its own accord, unaffected by the throngs of beachgoers or sailors, or even by the intrepid engineers who pipe its water into bottles and cups. Like such an engineer, the musician transports a piece of that inner life into the world of the sensible, and limits, molds, and transmutes it until its effect can be pleasing. Nevertheless, the essence of the water remains the same as it ever was. It flows through purifying machinery, labyrinthine pipes, and even through the human organism itself, but always eventually to the ground. Moved inexorably by gravity, and by the great wind and warmth of the world, it returns one day to the lake whence it came.

For Langer, the basic formal principle of a tonal structure is the very same as the basic formal structure of linguistic fact, as we described earlier. A tonal structure, like a linguistic fact, is a mode of expression immediately available to the senses. Both express something hidden in an opaque realm: the tonal structure expresses aspects of sentience, of feeling; the fact expresses aspects of the physical reality of the world. The expression itself is made coherent and “true” because there is an analogy – a structural correspondence – between the expressive medium and the opaque realm. A certain “speed, arrest, terrific excitement” might be present in a piece of music itself; those same conditions can be found in the region of the inner life which it expresses. A relation of subsequence, connection, and proximity is present in the phrase “The cup is on the table,” just as that relation is also to be found in the physical system of the real cup and the real table.

­The meaning of “fact”: analogy between a syntactical structure and a physical structure. The meaning of “music”: analogy between a tonal structure and a sentimental structure. The syntactical structure and tonal structure operate in a similar fashion on our immediate understanding: that is, they are immediately available to the senses. The melody, under Nietzsche’s conception of it, fulfills the same role as the Socratic fact and Langer’s music. It is immediately available to our perception, and opens a window into a less perceptible world. For the Socratic, that world is the “real, physical” one; for Langer, that world is the “inner, sentimental” one. Nietzsche’s conception of the primordial oneness corresponds very closely to Langer’s conception of the inner world, though the two philosophers do not use the same language for them, and do not place the same metaphysical weight upon them.

Langer’s inner world is a separate realm from the individual human experience, and it affects and informs our emotional states. Nietzsche’s primordial oneness, likewise, is a separate from the individual, but it affects and informs our entire reality – for our reality is made up solely of our responses to this primordial oneness. Music appears as the will for Nietzsche – that is, as the principle and essence of those responses. Similarly for Langer, music appears as the forms and structures of our emotional states. Ultimately, Langer talks of the inner world of emotion, and emotion itself, as though it is only one part of our reality – broader metaphysical concerns are not central to her project. But for Nietzsche, those “emotions” are a manifestation of the will – so we can quite fairly say that all reality is built out of those very “emotions”. So this “inner world” of Langer would appear to Nietzsche to be precisely his own idea of the primordial unity, just not taken far enough. When Nietzsche says that “the melody is the primary and universal fact”: first we can, through Langer, see how the melody is a window into the inner world. Second we can, under Nietzsche’s metaphysics, see that this “inner world” really indicates the primordial oneness itself, the ultimate and true reality. And so, we are left with exactly this: the melody is a thing, which is immediately available to our senses, and which offers a window, a connection, to some aspect of the true reality– the melody is the fact.

7 – Socrates’ Illusion

 The Socratic drive, from its beginnings in Socrates’ dialogues, to Plato’s theory of forms, to Aristotle’s cataloguing and categorizing of the world, all the way through to the rigor of the modern scientific method, which now claims universal validity, profoundly informs our culture today. Ultimately, everything begins and ends with the assumption that the physical, “objective” world is the ultimate and true reality. All of our apparent subjectivity is merely an affectation; explainable, eventually, as just one more tendency of our deterministic brains– bred into us by evolution, just as surely as eating and sleeping. The world, as science presents it, is matter and motion: a vortex of particles and waves and fields, positive and negative, spinning and attracting and repelling. Now a crystallization; positive and negative bound together in hydrogen, and oxygen, and water. Another abstraction, another calculation, and we reach our familiar world of grams and liters and objects, those lovely solid things.

Our proud theories, worked out step by step in the ever-improving process of hypothesis, experiment, and observation, grant us the tools to still the dizzying mystery of the world. We can set down a few principles and ideas, understandable to any who can afford to put aside the time, which accord nicely with every observation we can make. A physical law is a fact, in just the same as is our earlier example “The cup is on the table.” We, with Newton, declare the following a fact: “Force is the product of Mass and Acceleration”. And so we are required to define ‘force,’ ‘mass,’ and ‘acceleration’ in the real world, and to consistently measure that the proportions of those three friends, wherever we happen to find them, always match precisely with the mathematical, syntactical meaning of the word ‘product,’ as though behind the universe there lies an all-powerful calculator.

A fact is an analogy between a syntactical structure and a physical one. The syntactical structure is immediately apparent to our senses, but the reality of these physical structures is ultimately only a belief, an inductive inference. Out of the sum total of all our facts, most endure for only a short duration, and only for a few people. There is, as well, a small body of facts that we call “science”: these hold at many times, and for many speakers, without contradiction. That such a subset should exist at all appears to the Socratic nature to be a remarkable and wonderful coincidence. From the apparent unlikelihood of that state of affairs, we Socratic-minded people can reinforce our belief in the existence of an objective world, one in which all of us participate, but whose totality is well beyond the grasp of any one of us. The existence of an objective world, a calculated, calculable, enduring world, is what allows us to talk of a “physical structure.” It allows us to say that the real cup is on the real table.

The objective world is the basic assumption of Socrates. Because of its universality, he could demand of his partners in dialogue that they seek out a region of objective experience within which they could talk. Because of its intelligibility, he could demand that their assumptions and beliefs be brought to question against the iron principles of objective truth. A new idea for the Greeks, but one that is so obvious as to be unquestioned for us – so vast has been Socrates’ influence.

To posit the physical “objective world” is a Socratic affectation. The world of physics is a presumption, which we are impelled to by the Socratic current within us. Should some other current come to prominence, we could just as easily place some other “world” into the role of the true ground of all existence. As stated earlier, we can quite easily find many such examples of these currents: a person caught up deeply enough in patriotism, for example, might truly believe that the victory and prosperity of their country is the truth of the world – the thing that grants to them the ground of their life. The country, the people – these can be just as true as physics for a person of a certain nature!

On the whole, even the most Socratic person among us really spends most of their life in their own subjective world. Personal considerations inform their experience and decisions far more often and deeply than do considerations based on the abstract physical reality of the scientific world. Most of their thinking is spent in the company of subjective facts: “I must make coffee,” “my back hurts,” “today is Sunday,” and the like. In the everyday Socratic pattern of thinking, such statements function as facts in exactly the same way as a “true, objective fact” would; though they are not “proper” facts. Occasionally the Socratic person may happen to question – “Must I make coffee? Is this ‘fact’ really a true, objective statement – like my beloved Newtonian laws – or is it only a phantasm, an affectation, an illusion?” Under such duress, they realize, with great relief: “My ‘need’ to make coffee is really not a ‘need’ at all; only, I tend to think of it as one, because of my own human weakness, a trap laid for me by my own biology and neurology! Which is, of course, merely a curious bit of chemistry. For all this there is a reason, and for those reasons there are reasons. And ultimately these reasons all reduce to the lovely austerity of the laws of physics. So of course, through my life, though it might have seemed that I really must make coffee, in truth that thought, and the coffee, and my own self are nothing besides a whirling matrix of particles.”

For what reason does a physical law lay such claim on the hearts and minds of people? Why does “Force is the product of mass and acceleration” appear to be satisfactory to the Socratic mind? It has predictive power in a certain limited realm– but the same can be said of many statements in other sciences and arts, none of which come close to the fundamentality of physics. No – the appeal of the physical worldview lies in the following: first, its universality– the faith that the rules of physics apply everywhere and to all things; second, its intelligibility– the optimism that these rules are and will always be amenable to our minds. Universality and intelligibility each command a tremendous psychological attraction for the scientific mind. To think that the whole of the universe abides by principles that can be grasped in a single human mind is a sweet and seductive idea.

But we have never actually reached the full scientific theory of the universe! No one has ever actually been able to say that they can hold the true principles of the universe in mind. No – but the search has gone on, and on, because of the hope that those principles will one day be uncovered. Nietzsche quotes Lessing, who “ventured to state that for him the search for truth counted for more than truth itself. With that statement the fundamental secret of science, is unmasked, to the astonishment, indeed, the anger, of scientists.” (Nietzsche 15) The act of searching is meaningful and attractive because of the hope that the real, full truth is out there, somewhere – and the act of searching can help to bring that heaven slightly closer. Indeed, the situation is not unlike that of the devout person praying to their God in the hope that, one day, after death, that prayer will be justified: it will help tip the scales of judgment and send them to heaven. But in the moment of prayer, heaven itself is still far away – it is only through faith that prayer is justified; it is only through an illusion that the Socratic is of any worth to the human spirit.

8 – Postscript

“But now science, incited by its powerful delusion, speeds on inexorably to its limits, at which point the optimism hidden in the essence of logic breaks down.” (Nietzsche 15) 24 years after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, in August 1900, Nietzsche died. In October of that year, the physicist Max Planck published his new theory of black-body radiation. Planck’s theory, which would send a shockwave through the core of physics, was that radiation – light – could be emitted only as a multiple of a certain quantity. Light appeared now to have a discrete quality. Yet this flew directly in the face of the prevailing theory, developed from Newton to Maxwell, that light was a continuous wave. In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger showed that the electron, which up to now had been thought of as a discrete particle, really behaved much like a wave. A year later, Werner Heisenberg would place the final nail in the coffin of deterministic causality – he showed that it was physically impossible to know both the velocity and position of any particle. The more certain the value of one, the less certain the value of the other – and it must be noted this is not a technological limitation, but a physical one. The meaning of the new world of quantum mechanics was clear: there is no perfectly deterministic order to the universe.

The entire project of the Socratic sciences rested on the faith that the most fundamental of them, physics, would turn out universal and intelligible. Yet, in its ever-growing universality, physics peered deeper and deeper into the infinitesimal, into a world beyond the intelligible. At the very lowest level of the scientific universe, there are the fundamental particles – and their behavior can never be fully predicted. With greater numbers of particles, their quantum fluctuations will tend to average out, so the illusion of deterministic behavior prevails. But the damage was done; the terrifying Dionysian truth at the core of existence was revealed. Eight weeks after the death of Nietzsche, Max Planck finally threw open the doors to the heaven of Socratic objectivity – and found nothing.

Works Cited

Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. Scribner, 1953.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Ian Johnston. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Richer Resources Publications, 2009.

Zeidler, Eberhard. Quantum Field Theory I: Basics in Mathematics and Physics. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2006.