Monday, August 29, 2011

Thoughts on F.W. Nietzsche Part II (on Schein)

Apparently no one should survive Wagner's Tristan and Isolde if it were presented in it's purely Dionysiac format. Everyone on stage would die of intense pleasure and pain at the same time when the audience disappeared in a puff of unnecessity.

Well now I have to see this opera, obviously.

And the word 'Schein' translates on Google to "sham"... so interpret this:

"Socrates correctly diagnoses tragedy as a purveyor of Schein, but fails utterly to see the point of this Schein. Part of the reason for this, Nietzsche thinks, is that Socrates is a deeply abnormal, unhealthy man, (and Nietzsche is so different? I mean that lovingly and with a little intellectual crush.) a man of stunted and perverted instincts and a diseased intellect that has run wild. His abnormality take the form of a kind of hyperintellectualized simple-mindedness. When he looks at tragedy, he fails to see it as an instance of life, and thinks it is just a simple lie/illusion." (Ah yes, I assume he's probably an ENTP, but that doesn't make him unhealthy or diseased of intellect. I would also guess Nietzsche was an INTJ or an INFJ, though probably the former since he seems kind of detached from actual people [not the ideas of people he knows] in his life. Also just because I'm an INFJ, doesn't mean everyone whose opinions I like to listen to will be one too.)

However, from the current Cambridge translation by Raymond Geuss, schein means "semblance." I'm still not certain what is meant by this semblance which gets used an awful lot throughout Birth of a Tragedy, but it has something to do with reflecting the well-balanced Appoline dream-image in measure with some good old-fashioned Dionysiac chaos.


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