had power to order them. To get to the bottom of these ‘relations,’ whose coercive force compelled the strongest man to squander all his powers on objectless and never-compassed aims, I turned afresh to the soil of Greek antiquity, and here, again, was pointed at the last to Mythos, in which alone I cold touch the ground of even these relations: but in that Mythos, these social relations were drawn in lines as simple, plastic, and distinct as I had earlier recognised therein the human shape itself. From this side, also, did Mythos lead me to this Man alone, as to the involuntary creator of those relations, which in their documento-monumental perversion, as the excrescences of History (Geschictes-momente), as traditional fictions and established rights, have at last usurped dominion over Man and ground to dust his freedom.” [574W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 357-358]
[575W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 364]
[P. 364] {FEUER} “… that which is utterable in the speech of Music, is limited tofeelings and emotions: it expresses, in abundance, that which has been cast adrift from our Word-speech (Wortsprache) at its conversion into a mere organ of the Intellect, namely, the emotional contents of Purely-human speech. What thus remains unutterable in the absolute-musical tongue, is the exact definement of the object of the feeling, and emotion, whereby the latter reach themselves a surer definition. (…) A matter that is only seizable by the Understanding, can be conveyed alone by means of Word-speech; but the more it expands into a phase of Feeling, the more definitely does it also need a mode of expression that Tone-speech alone can, at the last, confer on it with answering fulness. Herewith is laid down, quite of itself, the Matter of what the Word-Tone poet has to utter: it is, the Purely-human, freed from every shackle of Convention.” [575W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 364]
[576W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 365]
[P. 365] “The poetic ‘stuffs’ which urged me to artistic fashioning, could only be of such a nature that, before all else, they usurped my emotional, and not my intellectual being: only the Purely-human (Reinmenschliche), loosed from all historical formality, could – once it came before my vision in its genuine natural shape, unruffled from outside – arouse my interest , and spur me on to impart what I beheld. What I beheld, I now looked at solely with the eyes of Music; though not of that music whose formal maxims might have held me still embarrassed for expression, but of the music which I had within my heart, and wherein I might express myself as in a mother-tongue. With this freedom of faculty, I now might address myself without a hindrance to that to be expressed; henceforth the object of expression was the sole matter for regard in all my workmanship. Thus, precisely by the acquirement of facility in musical expression, did I become a poet … . Yet, without deliberately setting about an enrichment of the means of musical expression, I was absolutely driven to expand them, by the very nature of the objects I was seeking to express.” [576W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 365]
