loves from thievish Egoism, and her vital force is icy coldness.” [488W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 112-113]
[489W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 154-155]
[P. 154] {FEUER} “Just as the human form is to him the most comprehensible, so also will the essence of natural phenomena – which he does not yet know in their reality – become comprehensible only through condensation to a human form. Thus in Mythos all the shaping impulse of the Folk makes toward realising to its senses a broadest grouping of the most manifold phenomena, and in the most succinct of shapes. At first a mere image formed by Phantasy, this shape behaves itself the more entirely according to human attributes, the plainer it is to become, notwithstanding that its Content is in truth a suprahuman and supranatural one: to wit, that joint operation of multi-human or omni-natural force and faculty which, conceived as merely the concordant action of human and natural forces in general, is certainly both natural and human, but appears superhuman and supernatural by the very fact that it is ascribed to one imagined individual, represented in the shape of Man. By its faculty of thus using its force of [P. 155] imagination to bring before itself every thinkable reality and actuality, in widest reach but plain, succinct and plastic shaping, the Folk therefore becomes in Mythos the creator of Art … Art, by the very meaning of the term, is nothing but the fulfilment of a longing to know oneself in the likeness of an object of one’s love or adoration, to find oneself again in the things of the outer world, thus conquered by their representment.” [489W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 154-155]
[490W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 157]
[P. 157] {FEUER} [re the Romance:] “So soon as the reflective Understanding looked aside from the image, to inquire into the actuality of the things summed-up in it, the first thing it saw was an ever waxing multitude of units, where the poetic view had seen a whole. Anatomical Science began her work, and followed a diametrically opposite path to that of the Folk’s-poem. Where the latter instinctively united, she separated purposely; where it fain would represent the grouping, she made for an exactest knowledge of the Parts: and thus must every intuition of the Folk be exterminated step by step, be overcome as heresy, be laughed away as childish. The nature-view of the Folk had dissolved into physics and chemistry, its religion into theology and philosophy, its commonwealth into politics and diplomacy, its art into science and aesthetics, -- and its Myth into the historic Chronicle.
(…)
{FEUER} In the Christian Mythos we find that that to which the Greek referred all outer things, what he had therefore made the sure-shaped meeting-place of all his views of Nature and the World, -- the Human being, -- had become the a priori incomprehensible, become a stranger to itself.“ [490W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 157]
[491W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 158]
[P. 158] {FEUER} {anti-FEUER} “Nature, from whom the Greek had reached a plain conception of the Human being, the Christian had to altogether overlook: as he took for her highest pinnacle redemption-needing Man at discord with himself, she could but seem to him the more discordant and accurst. Science, which dissected Nature into fragments, without ever finding the real bond
