Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Richard Wagner in Bayreuthin direct action; the artist is never an educator or counsellor in thissense; the objectives for which the tragic hero strives are not withoutfurther ado the things worth striving for per se. Our evaluation ofthings so long as we are firmly under the spell of art is different, as itis in a dream: that which, while the spell lasts, we consider so muchworth striving for that we ally ourselves with the hero when he prefersto die rather than renounce it - in real life this is seldom of thesame value or worthy of the same degree of effort: that is preciselywhy art is the activity of man in repose. The struggles it depicts aresimplifications of the real struggles oflife; its problems are abbreviationsof the endlessly complex calculus of human action and desire.But the greatness and indispensability of art lie precisely in its beingable to produce the appearance of a simpler world, a shorter solutionof the riddle oflife. No one who suffers from life can do without thisappearance, just as no one can do without sleep. The harder itbecomes to know the laws of life, the more ardently do we long forthis appearance of simplification, even if only for moments, thegreater grows the tension between general knowledge of things andtht.! individual's spiritual-moral capacities. Art exists so that the bowshall not break.The individual must be consecrated to something higher thanhimself - that is the meaning of tragedy; he must be free of the terribleanxiety which death and time evoke in the individual: for at anymoment, in the briefest atom of his life's course, he may encountersomething holy that endlessly outweighs all his struggle and all hisdistress - this is what it means to have a sense for the tragic; all theennoblement of mankind is enclosed in this. supreme task; thedefinite rejection of this task would be the saddest picture imaginableto a friend of man. That is my view of things!' There is only onehope and one guarantee for the future of humanity: it consists in hisretention of the sense for the tragic. An unheard-of cry of distress wouldresound across the earth if mankind should ever lose it completely;and, conversely, there is no more rapturous joy than to know whatwe know - that the tragic idea has again been born into the world.For this joy is altogether universal and suprapersonal, the rejoicingof mankind at the guarantee of the unity and continuance of thehuman as such.5Wagner subjected the life of the present and the past to the illuminationof an insight strong enough to penetrate to uncommonly213