Cetaceus

There are two fundamental dangers with having standards. First, that you yourself won’t live up to them, and second that others won’t. While a kind of pedestrian way of moralizing — the going-rate individualism that informs too much anyway — would without blinking call the former the graver sin, I disagree. In fact, we are all always hypocrites already, but it is precisely because this is something worth working against that the visceral experience now and then of one’s own hypocrisy can actually be a good thing. That awareness is a potentially healthy realization, it has something to offer, it can produce something new and better. On the other hand, the experience of being let down by others is almost wholesale awful. Indeed, if someone has done something or strikes some one as worth being held to some set of higher standards, it is only all the worse when that person fails, drops the ball, shits the ethical bed you have, respectfully, laid for them.

One has command over the consequences of admitting, “I let myself down.” All you really get out of “you really let me down there,” is a bit more cynicism and the realization that someone wasn’t who you made them out to be. But, is this a good reason not to hold anyone to standards? Because they are expected never to meet them? Is it better to burn out or fade away? I guess this is the ultimate question.

In The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 6, page 36 of the Cambridge edition, he says the following:

For this reason it is impossible for language to exhaust the meaning of music’s world-symbolism, because music refers symbolically to the original contradiction and original pain at the heart of the primordial unity and thus symbolizes a sphere which lies above and beyond all appearance. In relation to that primal being every phenomenon is merely a likeness, which is why language, as the organ and symbol of phenomenon, can never, under any circumstances, externalize the innermost depths of music; whenever language attempts to imitate music it only touches the outer surface of music, whereas the deepest meaning of music, for all the eloquence of lyric poetry, can never be brought even one step closer to us.