This
is an attempt to explicate the selection from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy found in Goldblatt and Brown’s Aesthetics:
A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts.
A full explication of Nietzsche’s book would have to go far beyond this
selection to take into account all of its aspects.
Unlike
Plato, Kant, and even Hegel, Nietzsche sees humans as essentially sensuous
beings, and is not critical of that aspect of ourselves. Like Hegel, he pays particular attention to
history and tends to see history in terms of dialectic, that is, in terms of
thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Like
Hegel, he is also interested in forwarding the science of aesthetics, although
it would be a stretch to think of his method as truly science-like. Unlike any previous philosopher, he defines
art in terms of a duality. Art is two
things interacting with each other and achieving its highest manifestation when
the two are fused into one. (However, his duality could
be seen as similar to that which we have seen between the beautiful and the
sublime in Burke and Kant.) Borrowing
from the ancient Greeks, whom he had studied extensively as a philologist (he
was Professor of Philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland), he named
the two basic elements in fine art after two Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysus
(also spelled Dionysos). He sees this
duality in terms of dialectic: the
Apollonian and the Dionysiac sides alternate between conflict and reconciliation,
somewhat like a typical marriage. He understands art in terms of these symbols rather than in terms of
concepts. Like Morris Weitz, he does not
think that art can be defined in terms of necessary and
sufficient conditions. Still, he does
think something valuable can be said about art’s essence and about what makes
great art great.
Nietzsche
speaks of Dionysus and Apollo as art-sponsoring deities. This is not exactly the way the ancient
Greeks saw them, but he realizes this, and I do not think that that matters
very much. He believes that Apollo
represents the plastic arts: i.e.
painting, sculpture, and perhaps architecture.
Dionysus, by contrast, represents the art of music. (We will see later
that this does not include the Apollonian musical art, which focuses on calming
music and the cithara, the ancient Greek guitar.) However, instead of seeing the Apollonian and
the Dionysian in terms of the Greek gods it might be better to see them as
creative tendencies or powers that are essentially physiological. The main theme of this selection is that,
although the two art tendencies were in dialectical conflict they eventually
came together in Greek tragedy, which Nietzsche believed was the
highest form of art in ancient times. He
also thought that the music of Wagner was the highest form of art in his own
time, and that it represented a rebirth of ancient Greek tragedy. Nietzsche was
a close friend of Wagner’s and was a leading figure in the Wagnerian cultural
movement that was sweeping the German-speaking world at that time.
Nietzsche
goes on to understand these art tendencies as associated with dream and
intoxication. That is, he understands
them in terms of something going on in our bodies. Men first saw the gods in their dreams, and
then great sculptors like Phidias, who created the sculpture of the goddess
Athena for the Parthenon, presented these images to men. Greek poets too were inspired by dreams, and
they would agree with the Wagnerian character who said that poets should
interpret dreams that have some truth in them.
Actually,
when you think about it, every individual is an artist in the sense that everyone
produces dreams every night. The
remarkable thing about dreams is that their forms speak to us directly, without
any mediation. [The idea that we do not
conceptualize in dreams seems contradicted by my own experience of giving
entire philosophical lectures in a dream.
But then I am not clear what Nietzsche means by “without mediation.”]
Still, we do tend to see them as illusions, despite their intensity. Parallel to this, philosophers tend to see
everyday reality as an illusion (as Plato did in “the Cave”) hiding true
reality. Schopenhauer, who was
Nietzsche’s favorite philosopher when he wrote this book, saw the ability to
see the material world as an illusion as the mark of a good philosopher. An artist or a person who loves art looks at
dream images (and at works of art) as ways to interpret life. He sees dream-life, with all its negative and
scary aspects included, as a kind of play in which he is an actor, but still
with a sense that it is illusion. He
enjoys it, and sometimes he will want the dream to continue for, after all, it
is only a dream. This seems to prove
that our innermost being (the underlying unconscious reality that all humans share)
enjoys dreams deeply.
Apollo
was also the god of making predictions and the god of light (the sun was said
to be Apollo riding his chariot across the sky). He is also a god who reigns over illusion and
fantasy. [There appears to be an inconsistency here: how can someone be a god of both clarity and
illusion?] He was also a god of
healing. Just as nature heals us during
sleep, and partly through our being able to dream, so too the arts heal us
through their illusions. Insofar as they
heal, they make life worth living. But,
remember, the dream image should not be seen as reality! Only if we keep this in mind can it give us a
feeling of peace. Apollo (the Apollonian
tendency) is like Schopenhauer’s man in a frail craft at sea. Such a man relies on the principium individuationis, the principle that each individual is
its own separate thing existing in its own place and time, to feel secure in the
stormy waters of life. Schopenhauer believed that this principle
only applies to the world or representation, not to the thing-in-itself or
Will.
Schopenhauer
also describes the awe men experience when the laws of science seem to be
suspended (as in a miracle). For
Schopenhauer, an ecstatic experience happens (or can happen) when the principium individuationis is
violated. Nietzsche finds this to be the
rapture obtained by followers of Dionysus during their special rituals and
celebrations. He says that this rapture
is like physical intoxication. When he
speaks of intoxication he means not only the kind induced by wine, but also
other forms of intoxication, as those produced by narcotics, the approach of
spring, and, most importantly, religious experience (and, of course, the experience of great art). All of these types of intoxication make you forget
yourself entirely. This power drove people to engage in ecstatic dances in the
Middle Ages as well as amongst the followers of Bacchus (another name for
Dionysus) in Greece. Nietzsche says that these might be thought by
some as diseases characteristic of certain cultures and that some people (especially Apollonians) may criticize Dionysian
ecstasy as such. And yet their so-called sanity
is really like that of a dead person:
they are “benighted” in the sense of being overcome by intellectual
darkness. The noisy
party of Dionysians will pass them by.
The Dionysiac was especially associated with certain religious rituals that involve death and rebirth. These rites bring man back together with man. For example, they reconcile slave and master, although only during that ritual…Nietzsche was no socialist. They also overcome the alienation of man from nature. This is why there are ancient images of Dionysus riding wild animals. The Dionysian religious experience poses a universal harmony in which all men become one, and obtain a vision of the One (i.e. of the primal and god-like underlying unity of all reality).
The Dionysiac was especially associated with certain religious rituals that involve death and rebirth. These rites bring man back together with man. For example, they reconcile slave and master, although only during that ritual…Nietzsche was no socialist. They also overcome the alienation of man from nature. This is why there are ancient images of Dionysus riding wild animals. The Dionysian religious experience poses a universal harmony in which all men become one, and obtain a vision of the One (i.e. of the primal and god-like underlying unity of all reality).
There
is a stage of the Apollonian/Dionysian duality in which artistic urges are
satisfied directly: this is the stage of
dreams and intoxication/ecstasy. This
stage does not require any artistic genius, and in fact takes no account of the
individual. It may even destroy him in
mystical experience. Nietzsche observes
that the artist must seem to be an imitator of this kind of experience. He then argues that the Greek tragic artist is
both a dream and ecstasy artist. He
imagines a scene in which the artist is in Dionysiac intoxication and then,
separated from the crowd, perceives his own condition of mystic oneness in a
dream (thus evoking Apollo, the dream-god). This could be the first example (in mythical
form) of an experience that was both Apollonian and Dionysian.
Nietzsche
then returns to the question of the relation between Greek art and the
proto-aesthetic phenomena of dreaming and intoxication, stressing the special
relationship the Greek artist had to Greek dreamers and intoxicants. Although it is difficult to determine what
the dreams of Greeks were like, Nietzsche believed you can make assumptions
based on looking at their colorful sculptures (Greek sculptures were painted
quite colorfully, although almost all examples that exist today have lost their
paint.). He concludes that the dreaming
Greek might even be seen as a Homer in the sense that the Greek were
genius-like and highly creative in their dreams. (This was wildly speculative on Nietzsche’s
part!)
There
was a big difference between the Greek and non-Greek followers of
Dionysus. The non-Greeks were more
primitive, more like the satyr (a half-goat half-man semi-deity who followed
Dionysus) than like Dionysus himself.
Their celebrations mainly involved sexual promiscuity, overcoming tribal
laws, and ultimately a witches’ cauldron of lust and cruelty (i.e. sadistic
pleasure). The Greeks were kept safe from these excesses through the image of
Apollo. This can be found for example in
the art of the Doric temple. (The Doric
order in architecture was simple and calming compared to the two other orders,
the Ionic and the Corinthian. It was the
order used in the Parthenon.) But when
such urges began to well up from the Greeks’ own unconscious minds all Apollo
could do was make a peaceful gesture, one that constituted the most important
event in the history of Greek religion and art.
The gesture involved a reconciliation of the two antagonists. The Dionysiac powers were transformed so that
the savagery of the non-Greek barbarian festival was replaced by rituals of
“universal redemption.” (The Christian
terminology, i.e. “redemption,” is probably intentional here. Nietzsche at this time must have seen the
religion of Dionysus as very much like the more enthusiastic forms of
Christianity.) This is when the overcoming
of the principle of individuality becomes something aesthetically
positive. Yet, although the combination
of lust and cruelty is overcome in the Greek version of the Dionysian, there is
still an ambiguity. Even in the Greek
Dionysian a certain terror or lament underlies the joy of ecstatic experience,
as though nature were sad about being divided into separate individuals. Nietzsche holds that Dionysiac music
especially expressed this underlying fear, although, as mentioned above, he
notes that there was actually an Apollonian music of the cithara (Greek guitar)
as well. This Apollonian form, he argues,
was replaced by Dionysiac music of the aolus (Greek flute), and this change was
permanent.
Nietzsche
is probably thinking of Wagner, and before him, Beethoven, when he speaks of
the “the heart-shaking power of tone, the uniform stream of melody, the
incomparable resources of harmony” of Dionysiac music. He then mentions the
Dionysiac dithyramb. Wikipedia describes the Dithyramb in this way: “The dithyramb
was originally an ancient Greek hymn (διθύραμβος - dithurambos)
sung to the god Dionysus and was also a term used as an epithet of the god. Its
wild and ecstatic character was contrasted by Plutarch with that of the paean. Dithyrambos
seems to have arisen out of this song: just as paean was both a hymn to
and a title of Apollo, Dithyrambos was an epithet of Dionysus as well as
a song in his honor. Greeks recognized in the epithet ‘he of the miraculous
birth’ and constructed an etymology to confirm this. According to Aristotle,
the dithyramb was the origin of the Ancient Greek theatre, and one may
recognize as a dithyramb the chorus invoking Dionysus in Euripides' The Bacchae….In Athens dithyrambs were
sung by a Greek chorus of up to fifty men or boys dancing in circular formation
(there is no certain evidence that they may have originally been dressed as
satyrs) and probably accompanied by the aulos [the Greek flute]. They would
normally relate some incident in the life of Dionysus. The leader of the chorus
later became the solo protagonist, with lyrical interchanges taking place
between him and the rest of the chorus. Competitions between groups singing
dithyrambs were an important part of festivals such as the Dionysia and
Lenaia.”[1] The dithyramb tries to symbolically express
the essence of nature. A new set of
symbols is needed for this. This set
includes symbols used by the actor in moving his body, symbols used in
language, symbols used in dance, and especially the various symbolic elements
of music. Nietzsche speaks of this as a
freeing of symbolic powers which expresses a freedom within the self, one that
could only be understood by other followers of Dionysus. All of this would have been surprising to the
Apollonian, except when he realized that the Apollonian perspective is just a
veil that covers the Dionysian aspect of reality. [Nietzsche is not clear here whether he
believes that the Dionysian aspect of reality is what he later calls the truth
of Silenus, or whether he believes it is the aspect of reality that is
experienced in Dionysian ecstasy. The
two are really very different!]
Although
Apollo is generally seen as only one of the Olympian gods (which were worshiped by the typical Greek of the time of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle), Nietzsche
believes he is actually their most complete representation. The same drive or need that generated him
generated their entire world. We should not think about this world in terms of
the religion of Christianity, which emphasizes moral elevation, kindness and
asceticism. Rather, the emphasis here is on triumphant existence. [This reminds one of Nietzsche’s later
emphasis on saying “yes” to life, and his attack on Christianity for saying
“no” to life.] Moreover, Nietzsche stressed, the Olympian religion does not
distinguish the good from the bad, or rather, as he puts it in his later
writings, between good and evil. The
ancient Greeks, he argues, seem to overflow with life-affirming zest: they see a laughing beauty everywhere. To the modern Christian viewer and to the
typical intellectuals of Nietzsche’s time, ancient Greek life seemed strangely
serene. But the reality, Nietzsche
argued (and this was quite an innovation on his part) was quite different. To make his point he tells a story about King
Midas and the minor deity and follower of Dionysus, Silenus. When captured and forced to answer the
question what is best for man, Silenus replies that greatest good is to never
to have been born, but, if born, to die soon.
Nietzsche’s point here is that Silenus is expressing a pessimistic side
of the Greek character. Nietzsche
thought that the Greeks invented the Olympian world (and later, Plato’s world
of Forms) to overcome this underlying pessimism. (This pessimism, Nietzsche thought,
paralleled the famous pessimism of Schopenhauer.) That is, their serene
optimism was a cover.
The
dreamer forgets the day with all its troubles.
Apollo, who is also an interpreter of dreams, may help us here. Nietzsche
proposes that the dreaming part of life is really more important than the
waking part it that it is more truly lived.
He was inclined to believe that the “original Oneness, the ground of
Being” (something like Schopenhauer’s Will, and yet more personal and thus more
like the Christian God) always suffers and is always full of
contradictions. This being needs the
vision and illusion of man in order to make sense out of its own existence, to
“redeem” itself. We ourselves are the illusions of such a being as we move
through space and time (i.e. in what Kant called the world of experience and
Schopenhauer, the world of representation.)
It we look at ourselves as His idea then our dreams (and also our works
of Apollonian art) are illusions of illusions.
(This is somewhat like Plato’s idea of the painted bed being three
removes from reality. However, in this case, Nietzsche thinks that illusion is a valuable thing!) Thus, this being
takes delight in the works of such “naïve” (Apollonian) artists as Raphael who
produce illusions of illusions.
Nietzsche
believed that Raphael himself illustrated this very idea of reduction of
illusion to greater illusion in his painting, Transfiguration. The lower
half, showing a boy possessed by some devil or illness surrounded by scared
disciples of Jesus, represents the pain of human existence, which is at the
very basis of being. This is the first
illusion because it covers over, or is a mere expression of, the underlying
“begetter of all things,” i.e. the irrational Will (or the primordial One). Then there is a secondary illusion portrayed
in the upper part of the painting. This
is the image of Christ being transfigured, and it is also the image of a world
of pure delight, much like that of the Olympians. The top world is that of Apollo and the
bottom is that of Silenus. And each
world needs the other to exist. [Problem:
if Raphael were truly a naïve artist who was simply Apollonian then
would he have conscious knowledge of the truth of Silenus?] Apollo is the principle
of individuality become god, and satisfies the need of the One to redeem itself
through illusion. In short, the world of
suffering is needed to produce the vision that saves us and allows us to exist
safely in that world [a somewhat paradoxical notion.]
This
Apollonian move involves the idea that there needs to be limits to the
individual. Aristotle named the virtue
that corresponds to these limits “sophrosyne.”
As Wikipedia puts it, “Sophrosyne
(σωφροσύνη) is a Greek philosophical term etymologically meaning moral sanity
and from there self control or moderation guided by true self-knowledge.”[2] Both Apollo (at Delphi)
and Socrates were associated with these two sayings: “know thyself” and
“nothing too much.” But Nietzsche does
not believe that Socrates has the whole story. He only captures the Apollonian
side of human experience. (Later in the book he explicitly attacks
Socrates. Like Socrates, Nietzsche
wanted to deeply question human assumptions about value. But unlike Socrates he did not believe in an
afterlife or in the idea that humans should try to escape their bodies.) In fact, the Apollonians attacked excess and
pride, which they associated with the earlier pre-Olympian gods, the
Titans. Yet for Nietzsche, one of the
Titans, Prometheus, the god who brought fire to humans, is truly a hero. Nietzsche even put an image of Prometheus at
the front of his book. Perhaps he
thought that he, too, was bringing something dangerous and useful to man, and
that he, too, would ultimately suffer horribly because of this.
In
the last part of our selection Nietzsche observes that the Greeks tended to
understand the Dionysian in terms of these earlier gods, and yet he believed
that the Greeks were really quite close to these gods in that their beautiful
existence (which he describes as under the eyes of the most beautiful woman of
ancient Greece, Helen of Troy) depended on a hidden base of knowledge of human
suffering, which was only uncovered again with the Dionysian. (Nietzsche’s rather snide reference to thin
harp music is also a reference to the picture of heaven which was traditional
for Christians. See end of our
selection, the preface for the book much later, in which he says that he was
hiding his true negative feelings about Christianity when he wrote the
book. He didn’t hide them all that
well.) As with Hegel, he believes that
the true Dionysian art tells the truth, although he ends our selection by
mentioning that another response by the Greeks to the Dionysian was the Spartan
approach to art, one that was severe and cruel.
Interested in learning about my own philosophical views? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
Interested in learning about my own philosophical views? See my book: Thomas Leddy The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Broadview Press, 2012. Available at Amazon in paperback, and an electronic version at google where you can also find most of the first 47 pages including the table of contents. You can also buy it fro Broadview.
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