4. Ay, what is Dionysian?--In this book may be found an answer,--a "knowing one" speaks here, the votary and disciple of his god. Perhaps I should now speak more guardedly and less eloquently of a psychological question so difficult as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. A fundamental question is the relation of the Greek to pain, his degree of sensibility,--did this relation remain constant? or did it veer about?--the question, whether his ever-increasing _longing for beauty,_ for festivals, gaieties, new cults, did really grow out of want, privation, melancholy, pain? For suppose even this to be true--and Pericles (or Thucydides) intimates as much in the great Funeral Speech:--whence then the opposite longing, which appeared first in the order of time, the _longing for the ugly_, the good, resolute desire of the Old Hellene for pessimism, for tragic myth, for the picture of all that is terrible, evil, enigmatical, destructive, fatal at the basis of existence,--whence then must tragedy have sprung? Perhaps from _joy,_ from strength, from exuberant health, from over-fullness. And what then, physiologically speaking, is the meaning of that madness, out of which comic as well as tragic art has grown, the Dionysian madness? What? perhaps madness is not necessarily the symptom of degeneration, of decline, of belated culture? Perhaps there are--a question for alienists--neuroses of _health_? of folk-youth and youthfulness? What does that synthesis of god and goat in the Satyr point to? What self-experience what "stress," made the Greek think of the Dionysian reveller and primitive man as a satyr? And as regards the origin of the tragic chorus: perhaps there were endemic ecstasies in the eras when the Greek body bloomed and the Greek soul brimmed over with life? Visions and hallucinations, which took hold of entire communities, entire cult-assemblies? What if the Greeks in the very wealth of their youth had the will _to be_ tragic and were pessimists? What if it was madness itself, to use a word of Plato's, which brought the _greatest_ blessings upon Hellas? And what if, on the other hand and conversely, at the very time of their dissolution and weakness, the Greeks became always more optimistic, more superficial, more histrionic, also more ardent for logic and the logicising of the world,--consequently at the same time more "cheerful" and more "scientific"? Ay, despite all "modern ideas" and prejudices of the democratic taste, may not the triumph of _optimism,_ the _common sense_ that has gained the upper hand, the practical and theoretical _utilitarianism,_ like democracy itself, with which it is synchronous--be symptomatic of declining vigour, of approaching age, of physiological weariness? And _not_ at all--pessimism? Was Epicurus an optimist--because a _sufferer_?... We see it is a whole bundle of weighty questions which this book has taken upon itself,--let us not fail to add its weightiest question! Viewed through the optics of _life,_ what is the meaning of--morality?...
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