Abstract

My argument is about the centrality of the imageless in The Birth of Tragedy. I argue that the imageless is not just the absence of image, but that in The Birth of Tragedy the imageless is rather to be indentified with nothing. All images and meaning, which we do express in words, feelings, and imagination, have their basis in nothing. It is the process described in creating a work of art that is most suited for capturing the coming into being of images and meaning. My argument starts by centralizing the notion of semblance and imitation, with dreams as an example of semblance and imitation. Dreams are an illusion insofar as they are not made up of the same stuff as the reality we live. Dreams are an imitation of our real life; the arrangement of the reality might be different, but we do not encounter anything beyond our experiences in our dreams. With the relationship between dreams and reality in place, I arrive at what should be an uncontroversial conclusion: semblance expresses in familiar terms what is other than the real, but that semblance is not the real. The semblance that is dream, I hope to show, depends on the reality of our daily life. But what if, as the second part of my argument suggests, our reality is also a semblance. The conclusion I hope to get to, as unexciting as the first, is that we do intelligibly talk about imitations of imitations. If this point is made, then dream reality and our reality, that started by being at two levels of existence, are shown to be on one level and that the level of semblance. This should just mean we are mistaken about our reality, and not the levels of reality: semblance and reality are at two different levels. But having eliminated our reality from reality by properly placing it in the level of semblance, the relationship that held between it and dream reality must be re-examined. But, since we know no other reality, we examine the relationship between reality and semblance, qua reality and semblance. In examining this, we realize that all we have is just more semblance? There is, then, no distinction between reality and semblance. If so, what is considered real provides basis for what is unreal arbitrarily, and not by any distinction between them. Meaning, therefore, is base on semblance, and not on anything real, if the real is considered distinct from semblance. That, I argue, is the point The Birth of Tragedy, wants to bring home to us its readers.