Sunday, July 3 – Tuesday, July 19:
Beethoven and the German Nation
Relationship? — to German spirit only? How latter relates to ‘beauty’? — Concept of beauty — peculiar to Greek spirit; as concept, borrowed from latter. — To visual art uniquely too peculiar. To poetry — in so far as it feeds on conceptions which devolve upon visual art: the most essential ingredients of poetry come, however, from music. — In what way is music beautiful? —
More detailed examination. Starting point: Schopenhauer: “World as Will and Conception’, II p. 415.Vague background in consciousness for idea. — On this: p. 418. Distinction in inwardly and in outwardly directed consciousness.
This second is what music creates from. Great diversity, dream theory. (Day-side — Goethe. Night-side — Beethoven.) Interpretation of dreams. Music the direct dream image. The innermost power on which our poets unconsciously fed, whose presence they divined and sought to explain. In Beethoven directly creative. In accordance with what laws? Own cry — external sound. Indiv: — nature. — Plastic art only as direct life act in dance. Folk song. — Further — ideal reality. — (French — Italians.)
Confusion in conceiving of music. Lack of clarity and of taste. Unwareness of self. Sculptors and poets give nation what it would like to seem, — the musician — what it really is. — Terror of inner world basis of sublime. Sublimity. Effect of music always that of sublime: form, however, that of beauty, i.e., in first instance, liberation of individual from conception of any causality. — Musical beauty form in which musician plays with sublime. Beeth.=Schopenhauer: his music, translated into concepts, would produce that philosophy. Similarity — to both, German nation. —
Life of musician. Production of genius — delight: meaning of this delight. Life itself pain throughout: physiognomy. — Banality of world, wishing without sacrifice to enjoy what delighted him whenever he extracted himself from life. — Saintliness. Church.
The objectively beautiful? — Effect of what is beautiful only condition for onset of true effect of work of art, that is to say, the sublime one. In music first effect immediately and universally achieved through its form precisely because it is pure form. — If it does not lead to sublime effect, then that which is beautiful is mere play. Hence aequivoca of word which can be used in any frivolous sense, which not conceivable with sublime.
Not through Helen is Faust redeemed but through Gretchen. —
But what is to be thought of a nation in which he who blathers such miserable stuff, is, having been suitably admonished, immediately, as consolation for this mortification, promoted to a higher academic degree. Does Beethoven belong to these?