Apollo
and Dionysus:
From Warfare to
Assimilation in
The Birth of Tragedy
and Beyond Good and Evil
Original
Article
B.B.
Duquesne
University
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summary:
'Accepting and
transforming Apollo's essential weapon, Dionysus
is able to say through the philosopher - and
which mask he wears, we cannot say - : "with so
tense a bow we can now shoot for the most
distant goals."
Between N.'s
first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and one
of his last, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), his
thinking - that is, his orientation, his very
presence - changes significantly. In the latter
book, he criticizes the traditional
philosophical emphasis on truth as well as its
unreflective embrace of 'opposite values', such
as appearance and reality. This same
metaphysical truth and appearance-reality
dualism, however, are essential aspects of his
earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy, in which
Apollo and Dionysus were conceived as
natural-artistic life forces arising out of that
"mysterious ground of our being"1, the 'primal
unity'. Sixteen years later, N. has abandoned
this primal unity and the metaphysical comforts
associated with it, a fact that is not
surprising to anyone familiar with the later
N.'s enthusiasm for what is difficult and
earthly. Nevertheless, when finishing Beyond
Good and Evil, he reserved his highest praise at
the end of the book for the same god who had
earlier provided our access to this primal
unity: Dionysus.
What then
could the Dionysian be after Dionysus has lost
his claim to metaphysical dominion? And what
would happen if we tried to employ Dionysian and
Apollonian categories in order to understand
N.'s later - more developed - philosophy? This
latter question depends of course on what we
mean by Apollonian and Dionysian. Thus, one
question is: how is the new Dionysus (and
Apollo) differently conceived in Beyond Good and
Evil? A second and overlapping question is:
using his earliest conceptions of the Apollonian
and Dionysian, how does N.'s conception of the
healthy, life-promoting human person become
altered? In other words, do N.'s own values
become more 'Dionysian', more 'Apollonian', or
something else?
Only after
tracing the interplay between Apollonian and
Dionysian artistic energies as N. presents them
in The Birth of Tragedy, will we be able to
understand and feel how they, as well as N.
himself, have changed by the time of Beyond Good
and Evil. To get a sense of the world that lies
beyond good and evil, we must go back to an
earlier time, even before a time when the world
could be taken up as tragic. We must go back
before the tragic poet and before his
predecessor, the lyric poet, and attend to the
two forces which made possible these forms of
poetry, these forms of human existence. We must
attend to the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses
well before there was tragedy, back when any
spiritual justification for human existence,
tragic or otherwise, was less of an issue than
was sheer survival itself.
The Apollonian
might be best understood in contrast to those
violent Titanic forces of nature which
prevailed, according to N., in pre-H.ic times.
Even the character of H.'s world, not seen
through the sublime Apollonian lens of his
Iliad, shows itself to be a terrifying world of
brutality and barbarism. Were it not for the
beauty and clarity of the images H. was able to
precipitate out of this bloody world, these
fighting and suffering Greeks, N. suggests,
might not have endured their existence.2 The
Olympian gods as well, that beautiful collective
illusion which transformed, justified and
ennobled human existence, was inspired by the
same Apollonian impulse which then inspired H..
Both creations gave the Greeks a more glorious,
relatively dream-like vision of themselves.3
Thanks to Apollo, such beautiful dreaming
provided a refuge of images for the individual
Greek who could now rest in deceptive
tranquillity above the violent Titanic storm of
his own earthly passions, as well as that of the
unjust and terrifying world which surrounded
him. As such, this dreaming of visual images was
a "necessity", albeit a "joyous necessity".4
Without the Apollonian impulse to beauty to pull
us creatively out of Titanic darkness, their
painful suffering could only have led the Greeks
to despair. Without Apollo, N. says, life would
not have been worth living, or even
possible.5
And yet,
however necessary, the images inspired in us by
Apollo remain only images, mere appearances.
Through Apollo, we lift ourselves out of
darkness by the illuminating power of what are
ultimately illusions. Such illusions, it is
clear, are not illusory only because they are
unachievable idealizations like Socratic
"justice" or "truth". Apollonian appearances are
not of the same order as reality. In fact, N.
stresses that it is "pathological" to overstep
the "delicate boundary" between such dream
images and "crude reality".6 However delicate he
makes this boundary, N. asserts here an
unambiguous distinction between what is false
and true, unreal and real, insane and sane.
Since two references to S. soon follow, N.
presumably has the duality of will and
representation in mind more than that of K.'s
noumena and phenomena. But in any case, it is
through the Dionysian, rather than the
Apollonian, that appearances may be shed for the
sake of a deeper experience of primordial
reality.
As Apollo
gives way to Dionysus, the self is gradually
lost in a more profound merger with others and
the natural world. This loss is first felt as
terrifying and then joyfully liberating as the
power of visual images gives way to the deeper
power of music, and the illusion of individual
autonomy gives way to the reality of a
mysterious natural union. Terror and ecstasy are
two poles of the Dionysian 'intoxication'. As if
caught up in a passionate whirlwind himself, N.
describes with enthusiasm how obtuse and
lifeless the Apollonian individual seems to the
earthy and energized Dionysian reveler: glowing
and lusting with life, the reveler looks upon
the tranquil dreamer of clear images as upon an
empty corpse.7
In The Birth
of Tragedy, N. first introduces Dionysus as
being in natural contrast, even conflict, with
Apollo. Intoxication and dreaming are
oppositional forces of nature. Apollo and
Dionysus are manifested most directly and
immediately as creative tendencies and
"art-states" of nature herself. Only
secondarily, or more mediately, do they become
expressed through the creative efforts of the
human subject.8 It is true that, at the personal
level, N. describes an individual under the sway
of Apollo as a "poor wretch" whose "obtuseness"
or "lack of experience" leads to bewilderment in
the presence of the deeper reality offered by
the enchanted Dionysian. But N. does not simply
praise the Dionysian as expressive of true
reality and the Apollonian as expressive of mere
appearance, and leave it at that. As we noted
above, the Apollonian
impulse
to beauty was necessary for humankind to
overcome meaningless suffering and despair amid
the barbarous Titanic world of
nature. At
the level of the human subject, this Apollonian
artistic impulse involved a kind of overcoming
of nature itself. But even with this human
achievement, nature itself was not mocked. At
the deepest metaphysical level of the cosmos,
the so-called 'primal unity' also craves and
requires its own satisfaction in the images of
mere appearance. With regard to the primal
unity, "that mysterious ground of our being of
which we are the phenomena"9, N.
writes:
For the more
clearly I perceive in nature those omnipotent
art impulses, and in them an ardent longing for
illusion, for redemption through illusion, the
more I feel myself impelled to the metaphysical
assumption that the truly existent primal unity,
eternally suffering and contradictory, also
needs the rapturous vision, the pleasurable
illusion, for its continuous
redemption.10
From this
metaphysical perspective, the dreaming human
being is already one remove from dreaming
nature, such that a human dream, says N., is "a
still higher appeasement of the primordial
desire for mere appearance." Here the word
"higher" seems to suggest 'more elevated' or
'pure', implying that
Apollonian
dreams, although illusory, manifest a necessary
achievement of nature at both the level of the
personal human subject, and the deepest primal
unity out of which all reality and illusion
originate.
In The Birth
of Tragedy, it is easier to note N.'s enthusiasm
for the Dionysian - that creative force which
connects us with reality - than it is to
understand the equally necessary role he gives
to the Apollonian. After he first describes each
artistic force in relief against the other, N.
then, secondly, foreshadows a major point of his
book by briefly diverting from the actual
mytho-historical progression to portray how
the
intoxicated Dionysian reveler and the Apollonian
dreaming individual can become merged within a
single human artist in such a way that "his
oneness with the inmost ground of the world, is
revealed to him in a symbolical dream
image."11
But the development of this all-important
conjoining is what N. is intent on
demonstrating, since he believes it alone
accounts for the Greeks' tragic view of life,
and the human development of tragedy as a form
of artistic creation. Prior to any true coupling
of the Dionysian and Apollonian within the human
person, these
two contrary and conflicting natural-artistic
forces achieved a sort of détente which
was expressed mythically as the seasonal sharing
of the Delphic
Oracle.
Prior to this treaty of peace, the ever-measured
and restrained Apollonian was a perpetual threat
to the unmeasured reckless abandon brought about
by worship of Dionysus. Only after this peace
was established, with a strict boundary line
drawn between them, was the cult of Dionysus
able to fully develop and flourish as the
otherwise unbounded creative force N.
describes.12
This, then, is
the third kind of relationship between Dionysus
and Apollo that one encounters as one reads
through The Birth of Tragedy. Such a
"reconciled" relationship, N. says, has profound
and extensive consequences: "wherever we turn",
he says, "we note the revolutions resulting from
this event."13 And the first consequence N.
mentions is a sort of religious rehabilitation
of those especially gruesome practices first
adopted by barbaric non-Greek peoples, but which
the Greeks themselves also took up in the spirit
of Dionysus as soon as there was peace with
Apollo. N. seems particularly distressed at this
point and, in an abruptly personal-sounding
statement, he even abandons his use of the royal
'we' to refer to "that horrible mixture of
sensuality and cruelty which has always seemed
to me to be the real 'witches' brew.'"14 More
than once he asserts the inferiority of
non-Greek festivals and orgies, an inferiority
which today we might similarly attribute to the
religious rituals of satanic cultists. Non-Greek
festivals, N. says, bear "at best" the same
relation to Dionysian festivals as the goat-like
satyr does to the god Dionysus himself.15
Further, insofar as the power of Dionysus
incites within us a gut-level awareness of the
intimate link between pain and joy, ecstasy and
agony, no longer can the merely savage festivals
of the Babylonian Sacaea accomplish the same
self-transcendent awareness. "The horrible
'witches' brew' of sensuality and cruelty", N.
says, "is rendered ineffective".16 With
Dionysus, orgies which pull us toward our deeper
roots with each other and with nature, are now
"artistic" phenomena, and savage behavior by
itself is now only spiritually impotent savage
behavior. To be caught up in an intoxicating
Dionysian celebration is to feel an (ek)stasy, a
'standing out' that brings terror at the loss of
our individual existence, as well as joy at the
liberation from illusion in a truer (com)union.
By contrast, the cruel and sensual rituals of
the Babylonian Sacaea, no matter how gruesome,
can no longer effect this same
transcendence.
Whether or not
one is satisfied with N.'s account of how a
lusty savagery is rendered powerless by the
Dionysian, what are we to make of his apparent
eagerness to defeat this "witches' brew" that so
distresses him? Might we not connect it with his
readiness - as quoted above - to find himself
"impelled to the metaphysical assumption that
the truly existent primal unity...also
needs...the pleasurable illusion for its
continuous redemption." What "impels" N. to this
metaphysical assumption? What impels him to his
faith in the existence of a "primal unity" in
the first place? Who
is it here, the primal unity or N. himself who
"needs...the pleasurable illusion"?
But let us not
make use of the later N. and a hundred years of
psychoanalysis to attempt to smugly unmask the
master of unmasking. That philosophical systems
are confessions of the philosopher was his
insight in the first place. And anyway, there is
not enough material here to make a strong
psychological argument for N.'s possible
defensive motivations for believing what he
does. In this context, it is enough to raise the
question and move on.
A
more obvious consequence of the peace between
Apollo and Dionysus is the lyric poet, in whom
these two artistic forces, rather than merely
respecting each other from a distance, first
worked together.
N.'s understanding of exactly how they worked
together in (and out of) the lyric poet's
psyche, involves metaphysics, myth and history
no less than psychology and aesthetics. Focusing
primarily on the metaphysical and psychological
dimensions, let us continue to trace the
interplay between the
Dionysian
and Apollonian as these two divine creative
impulses "continue to incite each other to new
and more powerful
births,"17
especially since, for the first time, they now
work together through the single human
being.
Whereas the
Apollonian epic poet and the Dionysian reveler
each had their respective gods, the lyric poet
feels the influence of both of them. Insofar as
he creates and contemplates symbolic images by
forming and reforming language, he works and
lives among beautiful appearances not unlike the
Apollonian epic poet. But insofar as he is
moved, not by his own personal passions and
perceptions, but by the earth itself and the joy
and suffering he shares with nature and other
beings, to this extent he is like the
intoxicated Dionysian reveler who knows terror
and ecstatic joy from his contact with the
deeper ground of his own being. Thus, the images
captured by the language of the lyric poet are
no longer mere appearances, but rather images of
the awesome, shared reality which underlies all
illusions of individuality and serene clarity of
vision. What
makes the lyric poet a true artist, and not just
a self-indulgent blatherer, is that through the
Dionysian his language is able to express, not
the passions of his own ego, but the universal
worldly basis of all differentiated things: what
N. calls the 'primal
one'.
It might be
fair to say that the dualism between reality and
appearance is overcome in the being of the lyric
poet. N. does not speak this way, and is
obviously committed to a dualistic metaphysic.
But the lyric artist, he says, is a "union of
the Apollonian and the Dionysian",18 and N.
stresses the act of the artist over his knowing.
It
is in the act of creation that the artist is "at
once subject and object, at once poet, actor,
and spectator."19
In fact, N. criticizes S. for making too much of
a simple distinction between subject and object
in his assessment of the lyric artist.20 As we
have seen, for N. it is not the 'willing'
ego-subject who is the lyric poet, but rather
the subject who has already abandoned his
individual subjectivity so as to express himself
as a world-artist. On the side of 'reality'
then, the act of the artist overlaps and
"coalesces" with the primal one. But the
artistic expression itself similarly overlaps
with the 'mere appearance' side of things. In
both metaphysical directions, then, the lyric
poet extends himself beyond his merely empirical
self. Said differently, in the creative act, the
artist has become "the medium through which the
one truly existent subject celebrates his
release in appearance."21
Dionysus,
it could be said, pulls the lyric artist in one
direction, and Apollo in another: the one toward
a disturbing contact with reality, the other
toward the contemplation of beautiful
images.
The character
of these divine 'pulls', however, is quite
different. The Apollonian impulse to beautiful
images allows, even requires, the integrity of
the poet's ego. If we say H. was 'pulled beyond'
himself in his inspired composing of the Iliad,
we do not mean that he lost himself during his
skillful formulating of language in the same way
that Archilochus, the lyric poet, lost himself
in a more primal world-being. The differences
here have everything to do with the differences
between music and image. Although the Apollonian
has its own kind of music, measured and
suggestive, Dionysian music is that truly
powerful music which, prior to any image, grips
us from below with its "rhythmics, dynamics and
harmony",22 moving our whole body to dance in an
inarticulate symbolizing of the currents of
primordial being. Through music, Dionysus moves
us more primordially, more primally and
directly, than Apollo can with his beautiful
images. In a contemplative gaze, we are
disturbed or aroused by something safely
separated from us, as if by an inner distance.
Even our ego, our self-image, the individualized
identity we misguidedly take ourselves to be,
can only falter and fail us in powerful, perhaps
traumatic, circumstances which music is better
able to express. Music defies our clear and
comprehensible images, creeping up from within
us, as from a dark interior where Apollo's
illuminating light cannot shine. We contemplate
images, but surrender to music.
It is the
genius of the lyric poet - as a union of the
Apollonian and Dionysian - to convey this
mysterious, musical ground of our being in
linguistic images. To do so, his verses must be
dynamic and melodic, which is to say they must
be lyrical. Since music cannot appear directly
as image, through
the existence of the lyric poet language must
now imitate and symbolize music, thereby
connecting the different domains of phenomenal
appearance and noumenal
reality.
N. speaks of this event, this creative act, as a
"discharge of music in images",23 a discharge
which he views as a kind of celebration. After
abandoning his merely empirical self in a
Dionysian flood of connectedness with primal
being, the lyric poet now, with the pronoun "I",
refers to something much more essential than his
own private field of experience. This equally
terrifying and joyous liberation from the
confines of the phenomenal world is then
celebrated by a bursting forth of new images
which now mirror back, in phenomenal guise, the
more primordial reality that has been accessed
through the Dionysian. It is the mirroring back
of this more essential reality which depends,
not on music itself - since music cannot be
directly conveyed by linguistic images - but on
the ability of language to capture the power of
music. Music is a more direct imitation of the
world than are images. Thus, the musical power
of lyric poetry symbolizes primordial reality in
the first place, and the images of that same
poetry provide a second order symbolizing of
that same reality. As N. says,
The inchoate,
intangible reflection of the primordial pain in
music, with its redemption in mere appearance,
now produces a second mirroring as a specific
symbol or example.24
The Apollonian
is what, mytho-historically speaking, lifted us
out of despairing Titanic darkness in the first
place. Now this same artistic power mirrors back
to us images from that very same inhuman realm
that it had once helped to protect and distract
us from. Have we thus regressed? Does the lyric
artist simply return us to the horrors of
existence we had already found so unendurable?
Yes and no. As we have seen, after the
Apollonian images had secured for us an illusory
but glorious tranquillity with H.'s epic and the
ennobling figures of the Olympian gods, the
primordial and barbaric forces of nature
returned in the form of Dionysus. Mythically
speaking, Apollo
fought Dionysus until a treaty of peace was
obtained
that allowed the Dionysian to develop its own
transformative artistic power. This power, this
transformative intoxication rendered
"ineffective" the mere savagery - N.'s "witches'
brew" - which had formerly been able to provoke
such an agonizing experience of the primordial
roots of our existence. With the advent of the
Dionysian, this agonizing experience, while
still accompanied by anguish and horror, is
taken up in ecstatic celebration. The anguish
and horror which Apollo allowed us to disguise,
returned with Dionysus,
but in a re-appropriated
form. The
Titanic forces of nature became accessible, if
not always welcomed,
through
music and dance.
With Dionysus, it became possible to say that to
die soon was worst, rather than best.25 Thus
far, Apollo had only allowed us to avoid
addressing this question authentically. But now,
with the lyric poet, not only does Apollo no
longer avert our gaze from our suffering, but he
reflects back to us a Dionysian perspective of
the barbaric reality upon which our existence is
based. Through music, Dionysus gives us access
to existential reality. Through imagery, Apollo
redeems and elevates this reality while
protecting us from a wholesale fusion with it.
With lyric poetry, we are able for the first
time to perceive our lives in their full
compass. The lyric poet, setting the stage for
the tragic poet, has "his oneness with the
inmost ground of the world...revealed to him in
a symbolical dream image."26
It is
important to note that for N., on a metaphysical
level, the goal of the primal unity - that it
achieve redemption through mere appearance27 -
does not depend on the existence of the lyric
poet. While on a personal level the lyric poet
ushers in a new capacity for individual
awareness of being, the primal one was already
perpetually achieving its goal without human
kind having any explicit awareness of that goal.
Nature, too, often achieves its ends through
illusion, N. says. "The true goal is veiled by a
phantasm: and while we stretch out our hands for
the latter, nature attains the former by means
of our illusion."28 Thus, even prior to the
advent of the lyric poet, when we are struggling
with H.'s help to spiritually endure our
barbaric world, primordial nature is satisfied.
No, not satisfied, since nature too - and
through us - is ever-impelled by creative urges.
But nature, as directed from its origin in the
primal unity, is not dis-satisfied prior to the
arrival of the lyric poet. While we might feel
particularly attached to the lyric poet's newly
obtained expanded vision of human existence, the
primal unity was still achieving its own
redemption back with the epic poet when its
contradictory, eternally suffering essence
obtained expression in Apollonian
appearances.
That this
metaphysical goal was achieved while we human
subjects, prior to Dionysus, reached out for
those same illusory images trusting they were
real and true, is not distressing for N.. Even
here, in his earliest work, there is comedy, a
light-heartedness with respect to human
aspirations and the limitations of knowing.
Although he praises the tragic wisdom of
Dionysus and the lyric and tragic poets who
allow us to simultaneously experience and see
this wisdom, in The Birth of Tragedy this praise
is supported by a metaphysical faith which can
seem altogether too sanguine in light of the
later, more courageous, N.. A superficial
reading of The Birth of Tragedy can give the
impression that N.'s glowing enthusiasm for the
Dionysian spirit does a disservice to the
Apollonian, upon which N. is just as reliant.
Perhaps more warranted is the view that he
shrinks back from the Dionysian to the degree
that his horror at facing the roots of his own
existence is mitigated by a faith in the
presence of an underlying unity that is
meaningful and transcendent.
.....The
metaphysical comfort - with which, I am
suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves
us - that life is at the bottom of things,
despite all the changes of appearances,
indestructibly powerful and
pleasurable.....29
And yet, it is
largely on the basis of N.'s own later work that
we are at all able to hear this talk of
metaphysical comfort as Apollonian illusion
rather than as Dionysian openness to the
unknown.
Now let us
look at how, after the advent of the lyric poet,
Dionysian and Apollonian forces are said by N.
to have worked together in the birth of Greek
tragedy. Then we will survey through Beyond Good
and Evil, attending to some of the themes which
relate most obviously to N.'s less
metaphysically weighted conception of human
existence, and to what kind of role Apollo and
Dionysus could be said to play in it.
First of all,
however strange it is,30 no one seems to doubt
that tragedy arose from the Greek chorus of
satyrs, where these bearded satyrs are
understood to be "fictitious natural beings"31
who "borrowed [their] name and
attributes from the goat".32 For the Greeks,
these satyrs were "sublime and divine" beings
who manifest "the archetype of man, the
embodiment of his highest and most intense
emotions, the ecstatic reveler enraptured by the
proximity of his god" -
Dionysus.33
Exactly how tragedy evolved from this chorus,
and what purpose the chorus served in the first
place, is not agreed upon,
however.
N. says he agrees with S. that the chorus
functioned "as a living wall...in order to close
itself off from the world of reality".34 In the
presence of this satyric chorus, N. says,
"the
Greek man of culture felt himself
nullified...and
this is the most immediate effect of the
Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society
and, quite generally, the gulfs between man and
man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity
leading back to the very heart of nature."35
Well before tragedy had any action, plot, or
dialogue to it - before these enraptured
cultists were separated into spectators and
enchanted participants36 - this proto-tragic
chorus by itself enabled its votaries, its
dancing revelers, to leave the everyday world
behind for the experience of a truer, more
religious reality.
But when the
rapture faded, when the chorist stopped living
as a "bearded satyr jubilating to his god"37,
two feelings threatened to overwhelm him: horror
and nausea. "Conscious of the truth he has once
seen," N. says, "man now sees everywhere only
the horror or absurdity of existence."38
To
be Dionysian is to share in the sufferings of
the god Dionysus who himself sees and expresses
this horror and
absurdity.39
But it is also to share in his transforming
wisdom, the wisdom obtained from having looked
into the terrifying heart of nature; a Dionysian
wisdom that manifests itself as an artistic
antidote to the horror and nausea that would
otherwise destroy the despairing person. Only
Dionysus "knows how to turn these nauseous
thoughts about the horror or absurdity of
existence into notions with which one can
live".40 The Dionysian is thus a necessary
mediating force that, on one hand, allows man to
come into enchanted contact with his painful
existential reality, and that allows him on the
other hand to endure his awareness of that
reality after the enchantment has gone. It is
the sublime and the comic, respectively, these
two artistic-existential Dionysian responses,
that allow us first to spiritually prevail in an
awareness of the horrifying roots of our
existence, and then to overcome the nausea we
can feel at its absurdity.
Only
through Dionysus as intermediary can man leave
behind "the lie of culture"41 to stare
enraptured and terrified into the natural ground
of his existence, and only the Dionysian allows
him a way back from contact with this
reality.
Tragedy
as an art form depended first and foremost on
the power of the chorus of satyrs to invoke for
its participants this religious contact with
reality.
For "originally", N. says, "tragedy was only
'chorus' and not yet 'drama'."42 With the advent
of drama per se, this same transfiguring power
enthralled those who - not quite full
participants themselves - looked upon the
dancing chorus as relative 'spectators'. With
the further development of individual characters
and something like 'plot', the role of the
chorus was to excite "the mood of the listeners
to such a Dionysian degree that, when the tragic
hero appeared on the stage, they did not see the
awkwardly masked human being but rather a
visionary figure, born as it were from their own
rapture."43 Given this Dionysian rapture,
various 'awkwardly masked human beings' thus
took on an imaginary life quite displaced from
the everyday world of mundane reality. In a
dreamlike fashion, real characters emerged
against the musical background of the
dithyrambic lyrics chanted and danced by the
chorus of satyrs, followers of Dionysus. But the
new presence of these living characters, with
their different mode of expression and
appearance, ushered in a relatively objectified
form of the - now dramatic - Dionysian spell. As
such,
there began an Apollonian dimension to the
tragic chorus, and tragedy as we know it was
born.
Regarding this
specifically Apollonian dimension of dramatic
tragedy, N. says, "Everything
that comes to the surface in the Apollonian part
of Greek tragedy, in the dialogue, looks simple,
transparent, and
beautiful."44
Relative to the Dionysian, this is what we
expect from Apollo: clear and transparent
beautiful images. In tragedy, as in lyric
poetry, these Apollonian images mirror back, not
just any mere appearances, but images of a
deeper Dionysian reality. Perhaps, then, these
images are not mere images at all. In any case,
the genuine religious contact with the natural
roots of our human being which the dancing and
chanting satyrs enable us to feel, we then
project - under the sway of Apollonian impulse -
onto the now visible figure of Orestes or
Oedipus standing there before us on the
stage.
Felt reality
and dream-like appearances are thus again in
tension with each other, now in a form even more
powerful than that manifested by the lyric poet.
Reality and appearance, music and image, poetry,
dancing, and staging, all work together to
produce, not just a new artistic form, but a new
way of being, a more profound existence. But
music cannot be fully captured by words, and my
sight of Orestes remains distinguishable - not
only reflectively, but in my actual experience -
from how I hear him speak and the pain I feel
for his and all humankind's condition, and so
on. In short, the unity of my experiencing - as
tragic spectator/participant - is nevertheless a
differentiated experience. What I see, hear,
feel and think is all caught up together in my
own being, but in a mutually augmenting and
never totally arbitrary or amorphous manner. The
experience of tragedy owes its power to the
spiritually efficacious interaction between
distinguishable but never totally independent
modes of experience.
From
this perspective, N.'s use of Apollonian and
Dionysian as natural-artistic-existential-
metaphysical categories is the most general
possible grouping of the modes of our experience
- the most
general grouping, that is, which still permits
the presence of a tension, since any tension
requires at least two antagonistic
forces.
Sixteen years
after writing The Birth of Tragedy, N. again
speaks of a tension, "a magnificent tension of
the spirit the like of which had never yet
existed on earth".45 This time he is questioning
philosophy and the philosopher, criticizing
dogmatism and the priority attributed to
philosophical 'truth'. In this very different
context, N. asserts that P. was wrong to invent
"the
pure spirit and the good as such".46 This
dangerous invention stood truth "on her head"
and denied "perspective, the basic condition of
life." But what has been so very valuable, says
N., has been the fight against P.. It is this
fight, N. says in his preface to Beyond Good and
Evil, which has generated such a "magnificent
tension of the
spirit"
over the past two-thousand years, a tension
which can still be felt by the "free spirits"
among us, even though the fight itself has been
won!
How
far we seem to be from the manifold tension
between the Apollonian and Dionysian. Now the
tension he speaks of sounds less mythological,
less metaphysical and above all, more personal.
N. himself is raging - though sometimes with
great subtlety and delicacy - against P.,
against Christians, against philosophers,
Germans, women, and others, even as he is also
laughing - cheerfully, or so he claims. In
short, Beyond Good and Evil is a very different
book. Yet, at the end of this different book, N.
says that since the time of his own last
offering, his previous "sacrifice" for Dionysus
- whereby he means his book, The Birth of
Tragedy itself - he has "learned much, all too
much, more about the philosophy of this god...I,
the last disciple and initiate of the god
Dionysus..."47 But what can he mean that
Dionysus has a philosophy? Dionysus
philosophizing? Among the questions raised above
at the beginning, let us wonder whether it is
possible that this new divine character is
worthy of the same name as that terrifying and
enrapturing god so crucial for the development
of tragedy. How might Dionysus the divine
artistic impulse be related to Dionysus the
philosopher god?
If truth is a
woman, N. says playfully, at the beginning of
Beyond Good and Evil, then one thing is certain:
"she has not allowed herself to be won."48 But
why, he asks, should we want truth rather than
untruth, and what is the value of this supposed
will-to-truth which we take such pride in?49 N.
asserts that it is actually the "falsest
judgments [which] are the most
indispensable for us". "Untruth" is a condition
of life, and without "fictions" and "false
judgments" we could not live.50 Insofar as
philosophers claim to reach true opinions
"through the self-development of a cold, pure,
divinely unconcerned dialectic", N. laughs. Such
philosophers, he thinks, are only blind to the
personal selfishness, lust, and 'reasons of the
heart' that more deeply inspire and motivate
these claims to philosophical truth.51 The
complicated philosophical systems they generate
are only "personal confessions", "involuntary
and unconscious memoirs."52 If truth is a woman,
then, not only do these philosophers fail to win
her over, they are like a pathetic man who
haughtily denies having any sexual feelings for
a beautiful woman, even though he believes he
has thoroughly charmed her. (Oh, how pure and
selfless is his affection for her!) But these
fumbling, disingenuous philosophers remain
unaware that their love object - their truth -
mocks and derides, or simply ignores, them,
always eluding their falsely 'P.nic'
grasp!
Where does
this leave us in terms of Apollonian and
Dionysian artistic impulses? There is no mention
here of metaphysical solace, or of a primal
unity out of which divine forces emerge. Even if
the indispensability of illusion and untruth
does suggest the life-saving Apollonian impulse
to beautiful images, now these mere images are
not contrasted with any Dionysian reality. False
judgments are necessary for life, N. says, but
he adds nothing about a standard against which
truth and falsity may be assessed. Without that
mysterious and absolute ground of our being we
knew as das Ur-Eine, truth and falsity take on a
relatively, even relativistic, blurriness as the
true and false now swim around each other
without ultimate foundation. No longer
interested in the dubious attempt to establish
an absolute foundation for truth, N. now
encourages a new and different kind of standard
which could be called 'life'. Rather than
deceiving ourselves and others with talk about
how true a judgment is - as if we had use of
some divine metaphysical reference - we must
now, with refreshing honesty, assess our
judgments in terms of the degree to which they
promote life. For behind our pretentious logical
reasoning is always the implicit demand for one
sort of life or another.53 Why not acknowledge
this more openly and directly, instead of
pretending that what we value - humility over
pride, the definite over the indefinite, etc. -
is also somehow true?
But if the
Dionysian no longer leads us toward the truth of
our essential oneness with each other and
nature, does it at least permit us to go on
valuing this essential oneness? It might, except
that, independent of whatever 'Dionysian' may
now mean for N. sixteen years after The Birth of
Tragedy, he now values what is life-promoting
more than he values any tragic wisdom that is
metaphysically comforting. Anything merely
'comfortable' is rarely life-promoting. In the
first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, "On the
Prejudices of Philosophers", N. mentions neither
Apollo nor Dionysus, although he does describe
human physiological "drives" as "inspiring
spirits...or demons".54 In the psyche of the
philosopher, underlying his philosophical
clamoring about metaphysical truth, are more
primitive spirits and demons, all of whom fight
to be the master inspirational force in the
philosopher's philosophizing and "to represent
just itself as the ultimate purpose of
existence."55 In great philosophers, these
'physiological spirits' motivate and genuinely
characterize their human subject. Scholars, by
contrast, particularly those who are
scientifically inclined, may manifest a merely
mechanical 'will to knowledge' that involves
them in mundane and arbitrary searches for
knowledge that do not at all characterize them
as a particular person, a particular
(re-)searcher. In the true philosopher, nothing
is arbitrary, and no suspiciously value-neutral
'will to knowledge' is ever at work. "In the
philosopher", N. says, "there is nothing
whatever that is impersonal."56 And philosophy,
he adds, is "the most spiritual will to
power".57
Having
abandoned his own dualistic metaphysic -
criticizing, as he does, all metaphysicians who
maintain a prejudicial faith in "opposite
values" such as appearance and reality58 - N. no
longer speaks of any pair of artistic drives as
being capable of explicating art, human nature,
and nature itself. And yet spirits and demons
still inspire us, assuming N. is not speaking of
them only metaphorically - although it is not
clear what speaking "only metaphorically" would
mean now that truth has lost its absolute
foundation. In any case, it remains to be seen
how 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' these
inspiriting physiological forces are for the
later N.. Speaking less mythologically than he
does in The Birth of Tragedy, N. includes among
the prejudices of the philosophers a superficial
and prejudicial regard for the "world", the "I",
the "I think" and the "will".59 Too quickly, he
thinks, have philosophers glossed over these
rich phenomena by reifying them into
taken-for-granted entities, as if they must be
obvious to everyone. For example, "Willing",
says N., "seems to me to be above all something
complicated, something that is a unit only as a
word - and it is precisely in this one word that
the popular prejudice lurks, which has defeated
the always inadequate caution of
philosophers."60 N. goes on to explicate three
dimensions of willing: sensation, thinking, and
affect. In a single act of willing, we sense
both that which we will ourselves toward and
that which we will ourselves away from, not to
mention the muscular tension in our arms and
legs, and many other sensations. There is also
the thinking, apart from which no willing would
be possible. And third, there is affect, which,
in the case of willing, necessarily involves the
affect of a command. As N. says,
"I am free,
'he' must obey" - this consciousness is inherent
in every will..."61
But how might
Apollo and Dionysus fit in with this willing
person? In this commanding individual, is there
any room left for inspiration? Can the willing,
commanding person still be moved by an artistic
impulse, an internal mytho-psychic spirit or
demon, or even another person? We seem to move
toward Apollonian illusion with this conception
of the willing individual. How beautiful and
illusory it is to believe we are in control,
dictating and directing our destinies,
commanding people, controlling objects around
us..... But this is our illusion, not N.'s! For
commanding is only the affect of willing. While
this affect is a necessary and essential quality
of the will, according to N., it is inseparable
from sensation and thought, those other
dimensions of willing. To exaggerate the
commanding aspect of the will would contradict
N.'s own understanding of it, whether this
exaggeration is made by adolescent boys eager to
hide their awkwardness behind bigger muscles, or
by Nazi's eager to justify their
brutality.62
Further, N. is
quick to dismiss those who believe either in a
total freedom or a total unfreedom of the will.
He considers it absurd to totally "absolve God,
the world, ancestors, chance, and society"63 or
"the affinity of languages"64 from their
influence upon us, and equally absurd on the
other hand, to side with determinists who
conceive human existence in terms of the natural
scientific myths of cause and effect.65 To thus
acknowledge these various limitations to our
individual power to will something seems
relatively non-Apollonian, since it is Apollo
who, with the aid of illusory appearances, helps
us to feel more beautiful and secure than we
really are. Presumably, the Apollonian principle
of individuation would readily permit a person
to believe in a completely free or unfree will,
whichever seemed more beautiful and protective.
But N. denies us - or at least himself - these
two extreme illusory views of
freedom.
On the other
hand, N. describes our tendency to erroneously
equate willing with the active result of such
willing. The strangest thing about the will, N.
says - as if a single word could be sufficient
for it! - is that "we are at the same time the
commanding and the obeying parties".66 When we
overlook the obeying dimension of our willing -
the resisting pressure we feel, for example,
after attempting to lift something that turns
out to be far heavier than we expected - we come
to expect that simply willing a thing to happen
will necessarily lead to its actually happening.
Most of the time objects that appear liftable
are liftable. Thus, "he who wills", N. says,
comes to believe "sincerely that willing
suffices for action" and that "will and action
are somehow one".67 To the degree that N. wants
to awaken us to the obeying dimension of the
will and to the deceptively "synthetic concept
'I'" which enables this blindness, he is working
against an Apollonian impulse which would allow
us any such illusions for the sake of beauty and
safety. But despite the fact that he describes
our common views of the 'I' and the 'will' as
blatantly "erroneous", he also points out - with
appreciation - the "increase of the sensation of
power" which accompanies such an error. N. goes
on to describe the additional error of
identifying oneself as commander and one's
'will' as a subordinate executive or
"under-soul". This has the effect, he says, of
further increasing the delight of the willing
person who now overcomes obstacles as a
commander of even greater rank and
distinction.
In short, it
is not truth and falsity by which N. assesses
the ultimate value of willing - that is to say,
the ultimate value he attributes to it - even
though his criticisms of the common
understandings of the will - and S.'s - include
phrases like "erroneous conclusions" and "false
evaluations"68. It is as if N. still believes it
is possible to be right or wrong, even though
correctness can no longer be measured against
some absolute standard. Thus, he can
simultaneously claim that an understanding of
the will that overlooks its obeying dimension is
false, even while he greatly values that very
perspective of the will insofar as it augments
the experience of power for the individual who
employs it. Here, N. seems to admire an
enthusiastic spirit more than that person who is
phenomenologically accurate. But what then is
the value of his criticisms of other thinkers?
How can we take him seriously when on one hand
he criticizes S. for drawing "erroneous
conclusions" about the will, when N. himself
then writes appreciatively of the typical
person's tacit understanding of the will
precisely because of its erroneous
self-deceptiveness? The answer is that his real
criticism of S.'s view of the will is not that
it is inaccurate, but that it is weak and not
life-promoting.
The fact that
N. can bring out an experiential aspect of the
will that he believes S. overlooked is
ultimately not what he uses to argue against S..
That S. was blind to the obeying dimension of
the will allows N. to assert that S.'s
understanding of the will is to that extent
'false'. But even assuming a phenomenological
rather than a metaphysical standard of truth or
evidence, N. would not condemn such falsity if
only it were in the service of life. To split
oneself off from one's 'will' in order to regard
it as a subordinate executive might be just as
false as overlooking the fact that willing
involves intrapsychic obeying as much as
commanding. But N. will cheer the former falsity
and condemn the latter on the basis of what is
life-promoting. And should someone say, "But N.,
you prioritize life and power over truth in just
as interpretive a fashion as you accuse me of
doing when I prioritize truth!", N. would say,
"Exactly!", and be delighted to battle one
interpretation against another without dealing
with the presumptive presupposition that "truth"
refers to anything more than a reification of a
kind of life that we value above
others.
Insofar as the
Apollonian is regarded as an impulse to beauty
in mere appearances, we would now have to
thoroughly eliminate the adjectival "mere" in
light of N.'s later philosophy. It is now
irrelevant whether the Apollonian impulse is
toward a beauty that is illusory and deceptive,
or grounded in what is believed to be absolutely
real and true. That this divine force is also
said to engender a clarity that is "dreamlike",
requires that another modification be made.
The
Apollonian can remain dreamlike in the sense of
creating a meaningful coherence that is
primarily objective and
visual,
but
not dreamlike in the sense of
'unreal'.
In the N. of Beyond Good and Evil, nighttime
dreams as well as day-dreams and psychological
projections of all kinds can ultimately be
(e)valuated only on the life-serving power they
permit the willing subject. Thus, we must ask if
the principle
of individuation promotes or discourages life
before deciding if this typically Apollonian
characteristic can remain without
contradicting
N.'s valuation of power and life. If we were to
read N. like the adolescent jock or the Nazi, we
might quickly assume that all individualism, all
tough-guy, up-by-the-bootstraps sorts of people
with clear interpersonal boundaries and strong
work ethics are obviously life-promoting
persons. But toughness and a strong work ethic
can be life-limiting defenses, and clear
interpersonal boundaries can sometimes be only
rigid constraints to a greater relatedness with
others - without any life-serving gain. Images
of self, whether illusory or not, whether
psychologically defensive or not, might either
augment or stifle the flow of life.
Individuation, then, - no less than an impulse
to beauty and visual clarity generally - must be
judged on a case by case basis before we could
consider it to be an Apollonian quality that is
consistent with the later N..
As such, we
are left with an
'Apollonian' artistic drive to beauty that
involves unambiguously bright and clear
appearances which remain safely
distant,
comprehensible
and meaningful for
us. But it
is not the Apollonian, in any sense, which
returns explicitly in Beyond Good and Evil, but
the Dionysian. At the risk of reading N.
superficially and thus not perceiving him in his
(dare we say) true spirit, let us briefly
reflect on some passages in the rest of his book
to see if we might appreciate what or who he has
in mind when he finally invokes Dionysus as the
philosopher-god he says he has always been
following as a devoted disciple.69
It was
Dionysus who the dancing Greeks invoked with
their goat-like satyr masks as they chanted
their dithyrambic odes, transporting themselves
from their everyday world to an ecstatic,
religious, and collective contact with the more
primordial reality that underlay it. Such were
the Dionysian roots that led to tragedy as a new
form of expression in art and human existence,
simultaneously. One could say that tragic wisdom
- a shared awareness of primordial suffering -
is the greatest gift of Dionysus, and that in
The Birth of Tragedy it is tragic wisdom which
N. embraces as the highest form of human knowing
and being. Apollo too is crucial in all this,
but Dionysus is understood to provide the more
primordial spiritual ingredient.
For,
as described in The Birth of Tragedy, except in
lyric and tragic poetry in which the Apollonian
mirrors back the Dionysian, it is Dionysus and
not Apollo who leads us towards Truth. Also, it
is to the intoxicating Dionysian that N.'s
enthusiasm seems more committed.
In Beyond Good
and Evil, however, it is no longer tragic wisdom
which N. holds as the highest goal of the
spirit. "There are heights of the soul", he
says, "from which even tragedy ceases to look
tragic; and rolling together all the woe of the
world - who could dare to decide whether its
sight would necessarily seduce us and compel us
to feel pity and thus double this woe?"70 This
inquiring statement alone directly implies that
human experience can achieve something more
than, something higher than, tragic wisdom and
the feeling of pity. But what roles do
'decision' and 'necessity' play here? Loosely
speaking, the words "decide" and "necessarily"
suggest that N. now has a more philosophical
than artistic orientation. Reflective and
relatively objective consideration of tragic
images is an essential Apollonian component of
the powerful - and relatively Dionysian -
experience of tragedy. But trying to "decide"
something about how the hypothetical appearance
of all the tragic woe of the world would strike
us - this degree of reflection seems to
transcend the bounds of the wisdom that tragedy
offers us. We needn't struggle with whether or
not N. is being more Socratic than Apollonian
here to be able to observe that with this single
quoted sentence, he is up to something quite
different than he was in The Birth of
Tragedy.
A little
further on, N. says,
Indeed, it
might be a basic characteristic of existence
that those who would know it completely would
perish, in which case the strength of a spirit
should be measured according to how much of the
"truth" one could still barely endure - or to
put it more clearly, to what degree one would
require it to be thinned down, shrouded,
sweetened, blunted, falsified.71
Right! But
surely the Dionysian does not falsify
existential truth?! Can N. mean what he says? He
does not here, nor anywhere else in Beyond Good
and Evil until the very end, mention Dionysus by
name. But if, as we have already learned, N. now
has something "higher" in mind than tragic
wisdom, and if Dionysus is still to be praised
at the end of the book as the always implicit
guiding spiritual force, then this passage
suggests that the Dionysian must be involved in
"the strength of a spirit" to endure the truth
of existence. This follows since in this passage
the strength to endure and the sweetening and
falsity required are in opposition. It is not
the sweetening and falsifying of truth alone
that allows one to endure it, but some kind of
spiritual strength. And given the other factors
mentioned, it seems that N. must believe that
this strength - whatever it is - must be on the
side of the Dionysian and not, as he said
sixteen years earlier, that the Dionysian
mediates the truth so we can endure it. Now here
is a strength we have, a strength by which we
may be spiritually measured or judged. It is as
if the old Dionysus of The Birth of Tragedy can
now be seen as - like N. himself - too
metaphysical, too mediating, alleviating,
mitigating, short-sighted and - in short, too
weak!
Dionysus too
"weak"? Too "short-sighted"? Already our new
characterization of this god - for he seems to
require a characterization in the context of
Beyond Good and Evil's powerfully personal
language - is relatively philosophical, as if
we, and not only those chanting Greeks, expect
him to live and breathe and be able to see more
than us, beyond even tragic wisdom this time.
Now we have a seeing, philosophizing god whose
personal thinking we value, rather than a god
who remains a hazy natural power and fuses us
with our absurdity and terror, letting us share
in his rapture and suffering. Now we have a god
who, while fully grounded in himself, can
nonetheless aim beyond himself - in reflection
and action, reflection as action -
and
see more. We have, it seems, a more Apollonian
Dionysus.
In The Birth
of Tragedy, N. describes the Dionysian influence
of tragedy as occurring when "the state and
society and, quite generally, the gulfs between
man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling
of unity leading back to the very heart of
nature".72 In a surrender to music, man 'gives
way' to his deeper bond with nature and other
men. In contrast to Apollo, who wants to "grant
repose to individual beings precisely by drawing
boundaries between them",73 the tragic Dionysus
could be said to precipitate a kind of
spiritual- psychological 'letting go' within us.
But it is precisely such a 'letting go', a
laisser aller, which N. then attacks in Beyond
Good and Evil.
Every artist
knows how far from any feeling of letting
himself go his "most natural" state is - the
free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form
in the moment of "inspiration" - and how
strictly and subtly he obeys thousandfold laws
precisely then, laws that precisely on account
of their hardness and determination defy all
formulation through concepts..."74
If these laws
did not "defy all formulation through concepts",
we might think N. was claiming that in his most
natural state the artist depends on laws which
manifest a kind of Socratean intelligibility.
But these form-giving laws at work in the
inspired artist have rather an Apollonian
"hardness and determination". No doubt the
artist must 'let himself go' in some relatively
trivial sense, say, in order to overcome
'writer's block', or more significantly, as with
the lyric poet who must 'let go' of his mundane
ego-subjectivity. But for the artist as
understood by the later N., there is no
wholesale abandonment of reasoned thinking and
intense contemplation. In accordance with the
new Dionysus, there is no 'letting go', but
rather an adherence to discipline, constraint
and struggle. The inspired artist orders,
disposes and gives form in obedience to
"thousandfold laws".
"What is
essential 'in heaven and on earth'," N. says,
"seems to be...that there should be obedience
over a long period of time and in a single
direction..."75 As such, we can again perceive
this new Dionysus as having what we would have
called Apollonian characteristics in The Birth
of Tragedy. But now we must understand Dionysus
in a new light, so to speak - as a god who has
appropriated Apollo's light. Whereas in The
Birth of Tragedy it seemed as if Apollo served
Dionysus to some extent in lyric and tragic
poetry by reflecting images of Dionysian reality
rather than merely beautiful appearances, now it
seems as if Dionysus himself, far from 'letting
go', is 'reflective' and obedient - even
commanding.
The commanding
spirit, the commanding will which N. speaks much
of in Beyond Good and Evil, could be mistaken by
the reader as an impulse that is Apollonian in
character. After all, is it not Apollo who
objectifies, clarifies and orders our experience
into coherence? But while N. does describe the
commanding will or "the spirit" as wanting "to
be master in and around its own house" and as "a
will that ties up, tames, and is domineering and
truly masterful", he also likens its needs and
capacities to those of life itself.
Its needs and
capacities are...the same as those which
physiologists posit for everything that lives,
grows, and multiplies. The spirit's power to
appropriate the foreign stands revealed in its
inclination to assimilate the new to the old, to
simplify the manifold, and to overlook or
repulse whatever is totally contradictory - just
as it involuntarily emphasizes certain
features...retouching and falsifying the whole
to suit itself. Its intent in all this is to
incorporate new "experiences," to file new
things in old files - growth, in a word - or,
more precisely, the feeling of growth, the
feeling of increased power.76
Insofar as the
human will is like life itself in its
'will-to-power', and thus grounded in and akin
to all of nature and the earth, it may be argued
that this impulse of the will is relatively
Dionysian, even though in The Birth of Tragedy
we did not hear the Dionysian as also being
"domineering" and wanting to be "master". In the
same Beyond Good and Evil passage, N.
immediately goes on to say:
An apparently
opposite drive serves this same will: a suddenly
erupting decision in favor of ignorance, of
deliberate exclusion, a shutting of one's
windows, an internal No to this or that thing, a
refusal to let things approach, a kind of state
of defense against much that is knowable, a
satisfaction with the dark, with the limiting
horizon, a Yea and Amen to ignorance - all of
which is necessary in proportion to a spirit's
power to appropriate...Here belongs also the
occasional will of the spirit to let itself be
deceived...77
This second,
"opposite drive" of the will might remind us of
the Apollonian impulse with its "state of
defense against much that is knowable" and that
aspect of the spirit which "let[s]
itself be deceived". But we would not expect the
ever-measured Apollonian impulse to be
associated with "a suddenly erupting decision",
any more than would expect the Dionysian to be
involved in "falsifying the whole to suit
itself" (as was quoted above). Nor do we think
of the Apollonian as having "a satisfaction with
the dark", but rather a satisfaction with
falsity in bright light. Perhaps "darkness" now
refers to weakness of spirit, rather than an
absence of clarity. In this case Dionysus could
be said to have taken over and transformed
Apollo's light, forcing it into the service of
will rather than perspicuous
illusion.
Section 230 of
Beyond Good and Evil deserves much closer
attention than it will get in this paper. Parts
of it have been quoted here mainly to suggest
that at least the psychological character of the
Apollonian and Dionysian are still involved, if
not explicitly, in the willing, philosophical
free spirit N. describes in his later work. With
some modifications, these
natural-artistic-existential-metaphysical
impulses are now taken up more psychologically,
more personally and philosophically:
This will to
mere appearance, to simplification, to masks, to
cloaks, in short, to the surface - for every
surface is a cloak - is countered by that
sublime inclination of the seeker after
knowledge who insists on profundity,
multiplicity, and thoroughness, with a will
which is a kind of cruelty of the intellectual
conscience and taste.78
Perhaps N.
uses italics to emphasize that
"This
will to mere appearance" must be distinguished
from the old will to mere appearance, that is,
from the old Apollo. For this will to mere
appearance, we are suggesting, is no longer
"countered" by the old Dionysus, but
appropriated by a new Dionysus.
If the
Apollo of The Birth of Tragedy used to serve
Dionysus in lyric and tragic poetry, perhaps he
does so now within the soul of the new
philosopher. But if so, he is relatively
taken-for-granted in this new, more controlled
and reflective Dionysian spirit.
For N. ignores
Apollo by name, if not psychologically, and
gives full praise to Dionysus - "that great
ambiguous one",79 where we can imagine that his
new ambiguity stems from a kind of instantiation
of the appearance-reality duality into the
existence of a single godlike being. A godlike
being who serves, of course, as a model for the
highest human being. "[O]ne must follow
the instincts", N. says, "but persuade reason to
assist them with good reasons".80 In the spirit
of the new Dionysus, the highest human being can
look down on tragedy with a cheerful spirit. Now
translated back into nature, man can stand
"before the rest of nature, with intrepid
Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to
the siren songs of old metaphysical bird
catchers who have been piping at him too long,
'you are more, you are higher, you are of a
different origin!' "81
With
the new Dionysus, man is simultaneously a
grounded and reflective being, whose
reflections, rather than protecting him with
deceptions, now further ground, enrich and
expand him.
At the end of
Beyond Good and Evil, N. and Dionysus himself
have the following exchange. Speaking of
mankind, Dionysus begins:
"I often
reflect how I might yet advance him and make him
stronger, more evil, and more profound than he
is."
"Stronger,
more evil, and more profound?" I asked,
startled.
"Yes," he said
once more; "stronger, more evil and more
profound; also more beautiful" - and at that the
tempter god smiled with his halcyon smile as
though he had just paid an enchanting
compliment.82
If it is his
power to make us more beautiful, then surely
Dionysus has taken over the last vestige of
Apollo. Never should we think that this triumph
simply leads to a more relaxed or ignorantly
impulsive spirit, however. No pathetic
peacefulness or total synthesis can have
resulted from such an overcoming. N. would never
embrace a slackening of the "tension of the
spirit".83 Such spiritual tension became
"magnificent", N. says, in the battle of the
earthly against P.nism. With that fight behind
us, we may now strive and aspire as truly freer
spirits.
Accepting and
transforming Apollo's essential weapon, Dionysus
is able to say through N. - and which mask he
wears, we cannot say - : "with so tense a bow we
can now shoot for the most distant
goals."84
Top of
Page
Footnotes
1 The Birth of
Tragedy, p. 44
2 The Birth of
Tragedy and The Case of W., Vintage Books, 1967,
translated by W. K., p. 42,43
3 Ibid., p.
43,44
4 Ibid., p.
35
5 Ibid., p.
35
6 Ibid., p.
35
7 Ibid., p.
37
8 Ibid., p.
33-38
9 Ibid., p.
44
10 Ibid., p.
45
11 Ibid., p.
38
12 Ibid., p.
39
13 Ibid., p.
39
14 Ibid., p.
39
15 Ibid., p.
39
16 Ibid., p.
40
17 Ibid., p.
33
18 Ibid., p.
53
19 Ibid., p.
52
20 Ibid., p.
52
21 Ibid., p.
52
22 Ibid., p.
40
23 Ibid., p.
54
24 Ibid., p.
49
25 Ibid., p.
43
26 Ibid., p.
38
27 Ibid., p.
45
28 Ibid., p.
44
29 Ibid., p.
59
30 Ibid., p.
59
31 Ibid., p.
59
32 Ibid., p.
39
33 Ibid., p.
61
34 Ibid., p.
58
35 Ibid., p.
59
36 Ibid., p.
62
37 Ibid., p.
61
38 Ibid,. p.
60
39 Ibid., p.
65
40 Ibid., p.
60
41 Ibid., p.
61
42 Ibid., p.
66
43 Ibid., p.
66
44 Ibid., p.
67
45 Beyond Good
and Evil, p. 2
46 Ibid., p.
2
47 Ibid., p.
235
48 Ibid., p.
1
49 Ibid., p.
9
50 Ibid., p.
12
51 Ibid., p.
12
52 Ibid., p.
13
53 Ibid., p.
11
54 Ibid., p.
13
55 Ibid., p.
13, 14
56 Ibid., p.
14
57 Ibid., p.
16
58 Ibid., p.
10
59 Ibid.,
Sections 15, 16, 17, 19.
60 Ibid., p.
25
61 Ibid., p.
25
62 Ibid., p.
51. As K. notes, see N.'s discussion of the
necessity for every profound person to have
masks, which leads to the consequent requirement
that one must read beyond N.'s own masks -
including, perhaps, some of his rhetorical
bravado.
63 Ibid., p.
28
64 Ibid., p.
27
65 Ibid., p.
28
66 Ibid., p.
26
67 Ibid., p.
26
68 Ibid., p.
26
69 Ibid., p.
235
70 Ibid., p.
42
71 Ibid., p.
49
72 The Birth
of Tragedy, p. 59
73 Ibid., p.
72
74 Beyond Good
and Evil, p. 100
75 Ibid., p.
101
76 Ibid., p.
159, 160
77 Ibid., p.
160
78 Ibid., p.
161
79 Ibid., p.
234
80 Ibid., p.
104
81 Ibid., p.
161
82 Ibid., p.
236
83 Ibid.,
"Preface", p. 2
84 Ibid., p.
2
