Thursday, November 21, 2013

Music, Words, Commonality

In #810 of the Will to Power collection, Nietzsche asserts that "Compared with music all communication by words is shameless . . . words depersonalize, words make the uncommon common".  Now, it is unclear how this formulation applies to the relation between Finnegan's Wake and catchy pop jingles, but, regardless, it seems inconsistent with his earlier rhapsodizing, in section 2 of Birth of Tragedy, over the democratizing capacity of Dionysian music.  Nor can the later passage be easily interpreted as a mature supplanting of youthful naivete.  For, in the contemporaneous #809, his "The aesthetic state possesses a superabundance of means of communication . . . it constitutes the high point of communication and transmission between living creatures--it is the source of language", echoes his analysis, from that section of BT, that the Dithyrambic chorus inspires the "collective release of all the symbolic powers."  Furthermore, if it is that 'superabundant' condition that is what he, with more justification, is trying to indicate as being 'uncommon', he still misses that the function of that state is the production of Language, and, hence, of Commonality.  So, in the absence of a better elucidation, #810 is one of those passages in his oeuvre the provocativeness of which is merely superficial.

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