Nietzsche argues that tragedy originated in the chorus of satyrs, a “fictitious state of nature on to which they placed fictitious creatures of nature.” To him, because this fictitious chorus birthed tragedy, tragedy was not held to the expectation of true everyday life. However, he claimed that the world of tragic art was just as real to the devoted Greek as the gods of Olympus. Reason being, the fact that within this Dionysian chorus lives a being whose existence is bound in myth and religion, like the vital existence of the Greek gods. He goes on to argue that when in the presence of the chorus, the Greeks were able to feel the emotions being portrayed by it, eventually enabling them to feel “an overwhelming [sense] of unity which leads
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Had they stopped there, they would be stuck in a Nihilistic state of mind, similar to that of the modern generation, or it would manifest as it does in the Buddhists; they would feel an urge to deny the will completely. But instead, according to him, art redeems the Greeks in a way that has never come about again. Art does this by means of the chorus, radiating a Dionysian state of mind where all personal experiences are obscured for the duration of the production. Then, when all is said and done, and personal experiences are brought back into play, the wisdom revealed to the spectator through tragedy utterly repulses them. This is dangerous for the will, as the person is now able to understand the true gravity of Silenus’s wisdom, and finds themselves denying existence. The only way to redeem someone in this state, as the Greeks notoriously realized, is through art. Art has the capacity to take the realizations of the absurdity of nature and present them as representations through which man can understand. These representations are referred to as “the sublime” and “the …show more content…
If this is how it is, humans must simply be some kind of aesthetic phenomena, for nature craved an empirical explanation of its own existence, just as the Apollonian need for an image to make sense of reality paved way for empirical
Had they stopped there, they would be stuck in a Nihilistic state of mind, similar to that of the modern generation, or it would manifest as it does in the Buddhists; they would feel an urge to deny the will completely. But instead, according to him, art redeems the Greeks in a way that has never come about again. Art does this by means of the chorus, radiating a Dionysian state of mind where all personal experiences are obscured for the duration of the production. Then, when all is said and done, and personal experiences are brought back into play, the wisdom revealed to the spectator through tragedy utterly repulses them. This is dangerous for the will, as the person is now able to understand the true gravity of Silenus’s wisdom, and finds themselves denying existence. The only way to redeem someone in this state, as the Greeks notoriously realized, is through art. Art has the capacity to take the realizations of the absurdity of nature and present them as representations through which man can understand. These representations are referred to as “the sublime” and “the …show more content…
If this is how it is, humans must simply be some kind of aesthetic phenomena, for nature craved an empirical explanation of its own existence, just as the Apollonian need for an image to make sense of reality paved way for empirical