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In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche presents his concept of the Apollonian, Dionysian Dichotomy as the driving force behind Greek art. Discussing how this can be used to revive the western modern culture. This essay will provide an overview of his key ideas and problems with them with reference to interact with the philosophical discourse of aesthetics.
In The Birth of Tragedy begins Nietzsche presents an analysis of the Greek tragedy introducing the concept of the Apollonian Dionysian Dichotomy. He then goes on to examine the perceived decadence of modern society and uses the Greek model to understand it and provide a possible rebirth.
Nietzsche believed that the people of ancient Greece were more sensitive than other cultures in their perception of the suffering of the world. Due to this they more seriously strove to combat suffering and so they devised, in Nietzsche’s belief, two modes of art “Apollonian” and “Dionysian.”
First, they developed the Apollonian arts Apollo was the god of light, reason, harmony, and balance, and Nietzsche identifies the Apollonian as a form giving force, characterized by measured restraint and detachment, which reinforces a strong sense of self. Apollonian art embodied analytic distinctions focusing on form or structure. The sculpture was the most Apollonian of the arts since it relies entirely on form for its effect. which he believed could be seen in Doric facades of Greek architecture by geometric and facades. Rational thought is also Apollonian since it is structured and makes distinctions. Nietzsche believed before the influence of Dionysus, Apollonian art was superficial, designed to shield the viewer from the terror and meaninglessness of their existence. The viewer could never be fully engaged with art, as they remained always in quiet contemplation with it, never immersing with.
On the other hand, Dionysus was the Greek god of wine, music, and ecstatic emotion. For Nietzsche Dionysian art involved a frenzy of self-forgetting revelry in which the individual gives way to a primal unity where individuals are at one with others and with nature. The primal unity refers to a place where under the influence of Dionysus we can access to the undercurrent of universal will that flows beneath all appearances where people forget the differences between themselves and act as a community transcending individual suffering for a short time. The influence of Schopenhauer’s world as will and representation is clearly evident here. The Dionysian embodied an unwillingness to make distinctions of form or structure; directly opposed to the Apollonian and Nietzsche uses the duality of Apollo or Dionysus to portray the artistic process.
Apollo and Dionysus can be further symbolized with the terms of intoxication and dreams.” For Nietzsche, dreams represent the realm of beautiful forms and symbols, an orderly place but one of facades or appearances constructed by the human mind. On the other hand, intoxication is a natural state of wild passions where individual perspectives of suffering dissolve into a unified mindset. Here Nietzsche makes the assumption that when experiencing a dream you remain conscious of the fact that you are dreaming and as such are still able to identify appearance from the truth.
It is important to understand that Nietzsche is bending the Greek consciousness to his aesthetic philosophy. Though much of what he says about the ancient beliefs of Apollo and Dionysus are true, he exaggerates their rivalry and impact on artistic practices of the time simplifying the Greek religion and art to suit his philosophical aims. Nietzsche all but ignores the ancient Greek belief in the influences of the Muses. While Dionysus was the patron god of Attic tragedy and Apollo was associated with the music and the lyre the deities first and foremost on any artist’s mind were the Muses. The Greek word mousa was a type of goddess as well as a noun, which directly translates to ‘art.’ The Muses were both the embodiments and sponsors of the arts. this displays how The birth of tragedy is Nietzsche’s own interpretation of Greek beliefs, which focuses on the importance of Apollo and Dionysus.
Nietzsche considers the Greek tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus to be the greatest examples of art by perfectly balancing the Dionysian truths with the Apollonian appearances. The Greek tragedy evolved from, in Nietzsche’s belief Dionysian, religious rituals, featuring a chorus of singers and dancers, by adding two or more tragic actors who stood apart from the group.
A Greek tragedy involved a repetition between two contrasting different elements firstly where the tragic actors would talk then leave and the chorus would perform a stasimon or choral ode until the tragic actors returned. For Nietzsche, the actors symbolized the Apollonian appearances and the individual and the chorus a Dionysian revelry. This is what Nietzsche believed was so great about the Greek tragedy its ability to balance the two sides so perfectly and when one or more of these tragic actors would “fall” and join the chorus for the rest of the performance he believed this signifies only the death of the Apollonian appearances, and as the actor joined the chorus his will was reconnected with the primal unity through the music.
Nietzsche saw Music as the highest form of art with its ability to act as a universal language. He argued that it surpassed all other art forms with its power to impact a group emotionally through accessing our will directly. He believes music is not a medium but the embodiment of Dionysus himself. He explains that in Greek tragedy we can experience joy in the annihilation of the individual through the spirit of music as we are carried beyond our individual concerns. The tragic hero, whose annihilation we witness, is an Apollonian phenomenon. His death signifies only the death of the Apollonian appearances, not of the will itself.
Nietzsche disagrees with Schlegel’s idea of the chorus being the “ideal spectator,” arguing that a true spectator must be aware that he is viewing a work of art, whereas the Greek chorus acted from within the world of the tragedy as if they were viewing real events
was brought to an end by the influence of Euripides and Socrates through the crushing of the primal unity induced by the Dionysian and the dreamlike state induced by the Apollonian by morality and rationality in the plays.
A man may not comprehend this truth logically, but he can feel it in the music.
Having established that music is the soul of the tragic myth, Nietzsche then demonstrates how modern German music has the potential to affect a rebirth of tragedy. Music is a central theme in this work, as it is one of the few constants that is able to connect Greek and German cultures. Nietzsche sees music as the key to the soul of a people. Because the German character is still connected to the vital primitive power that precedes civilized life, German music is of necessity a new incarnation of the Dionysian in art.
As a trained philologist, Nietzsche knew the Greek and Roman classics and his ideas in The Birth of Tragedy stem from an analysis of Greek philosophy and aesthetics. Nietzsche rejected the teachings of Aristotle, and Plato and regarded Socrates in a more complex but mostly negative attitude. He favored the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, namely his ideas on the world’s constant state of flux, such that we cannot make any fixed claims about any aspect of reality. Nietzsche first became fascinated by philosophy when he read Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation. And he resonated with Schopenhauer’s belief in the will’s role to fight against the meaningless truth behind the world of representation.
While Nietzsche drew some influence from thinkers, such as Heraclitus and Schopenhauer, and drew much negative influence from many other thinkers, most notably Plato, Kant, and the Christian tradition, he does not belong to any tradition. Nietzsche is as much of an oddball as can be found among the great philosophers.
The modern world has inherited Socrates’ rationalistic stance at the expense of losing the artistic impulses related to the Apollonian and the Dionysian. We now see knowledge as worth pursuing for its own sake and believe that all truths can be discovered and explained with enough insight. In essence, the modern, Socratic, rational, scientific worldview treats the world as something under the command of reason rather than something greater than what our rational powers can comprehend. We inhabit a world dominated by words and logic, which can only see the surfaces of things while shunning the tragic world of music and drama, which cuts to the heart of things. Nietzsche distinguishes three kinds of culture: the Alexandrian, or Socratic; the Hellenic, or artistic; and the Buddhist, or tragic. We belong to an Alexandrian culture that’s bound for self-destruction.
The only way to rescue modern culture from self-destruction is to resuscitate the spirit of tragedy.
By attacking Socrates, Nietzsche effectively attacks the entire tradition of Western philosophy. While a significant group of Greek philosophers predates Socrates, philosophy generally identifies its start as a distinctive discipline in Socrates’ method of doubt, dialogue, and rational inquiry. While Nietzsche acknowledges that Socrates gave birth to a new and distinctive tradition, he is more interested in the tradition that Socrates managed to replace. Greek tragedy as Nietzsche understands it cannot coexist in a world of Socratic rationality. Tragedy gains its strength from exposing the depths that lie beneath our rational surface, whereas Socrates insists that we become fully human only by becoming fully rational. From Socrates onward, philosophy has been the pursuit of wisdom by rational methods. In suggesting that rational methods cannot reach to the depths of human experience, Nietzsche suggests that philosophy is a shallow pursuit. True wisdom is not the kind that can be processed by the thinking mind, according to Nietzsche. We find true wisdom in the Dionysian dissolution of the self that we find in tragedy, myth, and music.
Bibliography
- Brennan, Katie. ‘The Wisdom of Silenus: Suffering in The Birth of Tragedy.’ Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49, no. 2 (2018)
- Calvert Watkins, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, no. 3
- Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Ian. C. Johnston http:// http://www.russoeconomics.altervista.org/Nietzsche.pdf (accessed june 11, 2019)
- Strabo, Geography Translated by H.C. Hamilton http://www.perseus.tufts.edu(accessed june 5, 2019)
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