It is a dream, dream on! Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy Chapters One and Two

(This is an experiment in poetic interpretation of Nietzsche which intends to be philosohical in a somewhat deeper way than is conventional.  If you want a more conventional explanation of Nietzsche on art in The Birth of Tragedy, see this earlier post)

It is a dream, dream on.  The deep difference between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer was that the former had a zest for life, one that would not go for resignation or be attracted to the Buddhistic version of negation of the self.  This is a world of illusion, for sure, but do dream on, maybe even dream the same dream for several nights.  And dream like a Greek.  There is an interesting relationship between the experience of the poet in looking at his dreams and the philosopher in looking at the world of ordinary everyday experience.  It is not an exact parallel.  The philosopher sees things differently when seeing life as a dream, or as like a dream.  The poet sees things differently when seeing dreams as life, treating them as life.  Dream on in both cases.   For dreams, and, more importantly, art, make life worth living.  Apollo is a dreamer himself.  He is like the human on that frail bark in the stormy sea, protected by an illusion.  He is calm, he looks over the seas, he brings light, he is an enlightenment thinker, and yet his conviction that everything is what it is and not something else, the principium individuationis, will fall to an exception, a violation that amounts to confusion of categories, as also will the principle that everything has an explanation, i.e. a scientific explanation.  Some things seem not to have an explanation.  It is in recognition of this that the Dionysian arises, i.e. as response to a need based on anxiety in face of the absurd.  But the Dionysian, as with the Apollonian, comes out of the anxiety of "the primordial one" itself.  The primordial one is the deepest common root of experience.  In Nietzsche's early system the primal one replaces not only God, but also the striving irrational Will of Schopenhauer.  Unlike both, it needs redemption.  It is divided from itself through the eruption of the world of experience.  Its redemption comes with wrenching away the veil of Maya, which is destruction of the separation between world of representation and underlying reality,  This destruction comes with a sense of oneness that comes with ecstatic experience.  But it also comes, in part, from the creation of another world of illusion, the world of dreams, which is like a worm hole in a black hole:  you enter into the Apollonian to come out on the Dionysian.  When Nietzsche tells us to dream on he is calling for us to move further into the cave, further away from the Platonic illusion of a world of enlightenment, the world of Forms, into the unconscious.  Life is justified by the dream and by the work of art. 

The key moment in the history of “the Greek cult,” i.e. the creation of truly great art, tragic art, is the result of a process.  First, the Greek poet creates in his dream images of the gods.  Second, he engages in the Dionysian rites, is intoxicated, is redeemed by ecstatic experience.  Third he falls onto the ground and has a vision of the dreamed gods as on the theater stage.  But wait, this must happen by way of music and, perhaps more importantly, a combination of music and dance.  It is a dance in which all of the powers of symbolism are involved.  It is a polymorphic dance that uses every part of the body.  It is here that the artist becomes a work of art, something shaped by the primordial one as artist god.  He is one not just in his soul or in his head but in his entire body.  He has been imitating not action or character, as Aristotle or Plato would suggest, but the twin art deities, Apollo and Dionysus.  Now he is one with them.  He becomes a god by becoming an exception to the principle of sufficient reason.  The world becomes enchanted around him as it does in Plato’s Ion to the poet.  Its streams are transformed into milk and honey.  The dream images are now something else, not just incredibly vivid and immediate, but symbolic.  If the dreaming Greek is a dreaming Homer, dreaming in bright colors and clear patterns, then the seeing Greek, to our shame, sees yet more sharply.  (How sharply do we see today?)  To imagine really seeing we need to imagine seeing like a Greek poet or a Greek artist.   

But if we are called on to dream on both in the Apollonian and in the Dionysian modes, and if we evoke mass experiences of the multitude as well as cries of horror, the problem of sado-masochism, the "witches' brew," raises its ugly head.  This is an extreme version of what Burke had referred to as the sublime, of a pleasure (or rather, delight) that comes with terror, with pain, although only when there is some distance.  Here, however, it is not simply that a certain delight is associated with pain or fear:  the distance Burke required is overcome, and the horror of existence becomes more prominent, and yet at the same time there is an ecstatic form of pleasure, a form that could just be called "delight."  The primitive pre-Greek Dionysian, at first held back by the Apollo wielding the Gorgon’s head, and then later by the Doric order of columns, now is incorporated into the Apollonian, now is synthesized with it in a way that makes it safer but still worrisome.  The Greek hero as sunk into the depths, has gone through the dream world to the disturbing side of it (the Inferno), has found that the principles of science and the Doric order cannot protect him, has found redemption in these dreams, has called out to "dream on," has imagined gods on his own stage set, has imitated the Dionysian and the Apollonian, has opened up the essence of nature, has overcome alienation of the primordial one, has experienced ecstasy, has created medicine out of poison, joy out of pain, has created music with emotional power, has awoken and exhausted all of his symbolic faculties, has forced all members of the body into rhythmic movement, overcoming the Apollonian world of illusion in favor of the Dionysian vision.  That is the first two chapters of The Birth of Tragedy.

Freud, Daydreaming, Art and Everyday Aesthetics

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   Freud's 1908 essay "Der Dichter und das Phantasieren" or, in English, "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming,” has long been anthologized in textbooks of aesthetics and philosophy of art.  In it he asks how the poet comes by his material and how he arouses emotion in us.  Can we find an activity in ourselves which is similar?  If so, we could gain insight into the creative powers of imaginative writers.  Freud, not surprisingly, looks to the child, and notes that the child's best-loved activity is play.  In play, like an imaginative writer, the child creates a world of his own, or rather, rearranges things to create a world that pleases himself.  He takes all of this very seriously, expanding much emotion on the activity.  Play mainly involves wish-fulfillment, i.e. fulfilling the wish to be grown-up...so most play involves imitation of adult life.

 What strikes me about this analysis is that, as with Dewey and the pragmatists, continuity is found between processes of art and processes of everyday life.  Freud argues that the child's experience is continued into adulthood but there transformed into daydreams and art.  Daydreams involve wish-fulfillment as well, but now, in adulthood, mainly either erotic or ambitious.  These wishes, however, are considered shameful and so are generally kept hidden.  The poet, in turn, is able to transform these daydreams from what would normally be considered shameful into something pleasing and vicariously satisfying.  This, again, is much like Dewey insofar as he speaks of continuity between processes of everyday life and processes of art.  For Freud, the writer creates a world of fantasy, which he takes seriously and invests with feeling.  

Assume that Freud is right that day-dreaming is an extension of play, and closely related, in turn. to art.  It would seem then that there would be an aesthetics of play, an aesthetics of day-dreams, and even an aesthetics of dreams, and that all are intimately related to the aesthetics of art.  We need to distinguish and define our terms however, since Freud has his own use of "aesthetic" (which he associates with the purely formal).  He thinks of aesthetic pleasure as a fore-pleasure provided to seduce us into the artist's fantasy world.   Only there do we find deeper more intense pleasures related to wish-fulfillment.  "The writer softens the egotistical character of the day-dream by changes and disguises, and he bribes us by the offer of a purely formal, that is, aesthetic, pleasure in the presentation of his fantasies." I would want to say that both pleasures are aesthetic, but would retain the distinction between more shallow and deeper for intense forms of pleasure.

  Another way in which Freud is similar to Dewey (and to James as well) is the attention he pays to the temporal relation in experience between past, present and future.  Dewey seldom speaks of childhood.  However I am sure he would be happy with, or at least fascinated by, Freud's temporal-related formulation of his main point:  “Some actual experience which made a strong impression on the writer had stirred up a memory of an earlier experience, generally belonging to childhood, which then arouses a wish that finds a fulfillment in the work in question, and in which elements of the recent event and the old memory should be discernible.”

One thing that puzzles is whether it is the play of childhood that is found repeated in the daydream and in art or is it some other pleasure of childhood, as for example the experience of close family life.  Sometimes Freud talks as though it is the first, and sometimes the second.  That is, the current impression, on Freud's account, leads us back to an event in infancy during which the wish (or one like it?) was fulfilled.  Freud of course believed that infants have erotic wishes that are in fact fulfilled.  But note that the play of children is not associated with erotic wishes but with the wish to be an adult.  

It is noteworthy of course that the comparison is made to work mainly by relating the experience of popular art, for instance the popular romance or adventure fiction, although Freud makes a more indirect connection to what would be considered "fine art" by way of his claim that some art involves mythology, legends and fairy-tales which might well be seen as wish-fulfillment fantasies of the culture in question.  Another strategy he uses is to speak of "an uninterrupted series of transitions" between the naive daydream and the sophisticated novel.  In response, one could say that the overemphasis on popular art, e.g. the hero who always gets the girl, makes the case too easy.  Yes, popular fiction is like daydreaming, but perhaps fine art fiction is significantly different.