Philosophical Confessions

It seems fitting to give special attention to the impact Nietzsche has had following his death—after his early and initial acknowledgment, he soon fell into disrepute academically and was little read during his lifetime—especially given the opposing views that seemed to claim Nietzsche as their own. ‘Anarchists, feminists, Nazis, religious cultists, Socialists, Marxists, vegetarians, avant-garde artists,’ have all claimed to have been inspired by Nietzsche. Even the famous, or perhaps infamous, Jim Morrison of The Doors, was deeply affected by the life-affirming man who called himself a disciple of the philosopher Dionysos. (See Ecce Homo, “Why I am So Wise,” Foreword, p. 3-4) In his autobiographical book, Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison, John Densmore, the drummer for The Doors, had this to say:

“Nietzsche killed Jim Morrison, I had once said rather melodramatically to some startled friends in Berkeley. Morrison the Superman, the Dionysian madman, the Birth of Tragedy himself. But who knows who or what killed him? God knows, a million people have come to me hoping I had the answer.”

Nietzsche killed Jim Morrison?! How could a philosopher (a philosopher!) be linked to someone’s death? It would seem to involve a certain understanding on how to live a full or life-affirming existence! In the case of Jim Morrison there was a no holds bar; he drank excessively, indulged his sexual appetite extra-ordinarily, enjoyed extravagances of all kinds, fancied himself a social provocateur, delved into the depths of his psyche experimenting with psychedelic drugs (the relevance of Aldous Huxley and his The Doors of Perception (1954) is noteworthy, not least for the inspiration for the band’s name, and his experimentation with mescaline as a form of mind expansiveness which he chronicles in this book) and craved the opportunity for creative expression. Excess on all fronts in a world too small, too tempered, too contained, too disillusioned, too pseudo, too dull, too inhibited …too finite would be faulted for his demise. Before then, before his untimely death, however, he would have lived fully. Still, the “live hard, die young,” motif is not quite what Nietzsche would have recommended, or rather he would not have recommended any particular adopted style of being. This perspective (dare I say) attributed to Nietzsche may be on account of Nietzsche’s reference to himself as “the disciple of Dionysos,” but this, it must be remembered, is only one half of the tale. Indeed, the Dionysian-Apollonian narrative plays a central role in Nietzsche’s writing, but it is also a polemical relationship, though this seemed to change in the course or evolution of his writing. As such, artists akin to Morrison, would seem to have taken the self-referential claim quite literally, forgetting altogether that the rational, more prudent, aspect of the human condition, is as much integral to his philosophy, as its counterpart. Paying tribute to the ultra-chaotic Dionysian side where one is left to her uninhibited indulgences is ultimately catastrophic, and self-destructive. Hardly life-affirming.

Indeed, it might be prudent to remember that Nietzsche, our self-proclaimed Dionysus, lived a rather uneventful life. It was quite ordinary really, and he himself was not one of extravagance, nor as he later says, was he a moral monster, nor did he side with the Nazis, or any demonic forms of imposed suffering or harm of whatever kind upon others. He was born 1844 in a small town in Germany. His father died when he was four and soon after his brother too passed away. He grew up in a household of women – his mother, aunt, and sister with whom it is said he was very close. His intellectual gift was recognised early on, later realised in the unprecedented receipt of a full professorship at the age of 24 (1869) at the University of Basel, which he would have to give up in 1879 due to his ill health. He makes no secret of or excuses for his ill health, indeed, he brings it front and central in his Ecce Homo, remarking on the exacerbating suffering brought on by incessant migraines and his poor vision. Sadly, the last 11 years of his life (1889-1900) were spent idly and paradoxically in a state of mental delusion, some say on account of having contracted syphilis from a prostitute he’d visited at a brothel.

A. Ecce Homo

What of the Dionysus? What of Nietzsche’s proclamation to being his disciple in his last great work? Nietzsche seemed a la Kierkegaard to be preoccupied at the end of his literary career with setting things straight regarding his authorship, and in 1888, a year before losing his sanity, he wrote Ecce Homo (though it was published 10 years later and posthumously), which translates “Behold the Man,” or as it appears in the New Testament “ἰδοὺ ὁ ἄνθρωπος, “echoing the words of Pontius Pilate as narrated in the Gospel of John (John 19:5) which read “Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man!” This describes the scene just before Christ’s crucifixion, and as such, Nietzsche would seem to be saying, “Behold the man!” referencing himself! Of course, his meaning requires a little thought since not only did Nietzsche declare the death of God, but he also wrote a book entitled The AntiChrist, and though the image of Christ wearing a crown of thorns may conjure humility, Nietzsche is anything but humble…as the titles of the essays herewith suggest: Why I am So Wise, Why I Am So Clever, Why I Write Such Good Books, and Why I am A Destiny. His tone? One of irony? One of self-aggrandization? Maybe he thinks he is just as important, or the world will be forced to acknowledge or reckon with the tantamount importance he holds for humanity as did Jesus! Or is he simply speaking to his impeding crucifixion?

Nietzsche begins Ecce Homo saying,

I am, for example, absolutely not a bogey-man, not a moral-monster—I am even an antithetical nature to the species of man hitherto honoured as virtuous. Between ourselves, it seems to me that precisely this constitutes part of my pride. I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus. …The last thing I would promise would be to ‘improve’ mankind. I erect no new idols; let the old ones learn what it means to have legs of clay. To overthrow idols (my word for ‘ideals’)—that rather is my business. Reality has been deprived of its value, its meaning, its veracity to the same degree as an ideal world has been fabricated …The ‘real world’ and the ‘apparent world’—in plain terms: the fabricated world and reality…The lie of the ideal has hitherto been the curse on reality, through it mankind has become mendacious and false down to its deepest instincts—t the point of worshipping the inverse values to those which alone could guarantee it prosperity, future, the exalted right to a future. (Ecce Home, Why I Am So Wise, Foreword, p. 2-3)

In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche will take down all those false idols, those ideals as he calls them, which have gripped humankind since the time of Socrates, and contaminated our mind, feeding on our cowardice and fear.

Immediately following, he says:

He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings is conscious that it is the air of the heights, a bracing air. A man must be built for it otherwise there is a real chance that one will catch a chill. The ice is near, the solitude is terrible—but how peacefully all things lie in the light. How freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath one!

As if to warn us. It is not for everyone; it will require a certain psychic resilience to avoid “catching cold,” or finding oneself in “ill-health” as a consequence. Carrying on, he says:

Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains—a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality. From the lengthy experience afforded by such a wandering in the forbidden I learned to view the origin of moralizing and idealizing very differently from what might be desirable: the hidden history of the philosophers, the psychology of their great names came to light for me.—How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? That become for me more and more the real measure of value. Error (–belief in the ideal–) is not blindness, error is cowardice…Every acquisition, every step forward in knowledge is the result of courage, of severity towards oneself, of cleanliness with respect to oneself. (Ecce Homo, pp. 4-5)

He then goes on to speak of his ill health – his near blindness, stomach problems, and debilitating migraines! All of this, his own experience with his own décadence, his decline, is what allowed for his genius, he says. Suffering then, psychic suffering, is the condition from which he has been allotted the vantage point from which to draw insights into the human condition. A “happy life,” devoid of accosting, accusing despair, is reap with the banal, and inconsequential, the fluidity of uninterrupted living. He says, in fact,

To look from a morbid perspective towards healthier concepts and values, and again conversely to look down from the abundance and certainty of rich life into the secret labour of the instincts of décadence—that is what I have practised most, it has been my own particular field of experience, in this if in anything I am a master. I now have the skill and knowledge to invert perspectives: first reason why ‘revaluation of values’ is perhaps possible at all to me alone. (Ecce Homo, pp. 11)

Of course, his décadence, his decline, alone could not avail him without his will (he does not call it this here) to health. Meaning, that he instinctively always chose the right means to combat his ill health, whereas the decadent always chooses the most harmful means. The best means are those that do not make a “patient” of oneself, such that one is doctored and cared for as one sick. For as he says,

…it was in the years of his lowest vitality that I ceased to be a pessimist: the instinct for self-recovery forbade to me a philosophy of indigence and discouragement”…such a person …has a taste only for what is beneficial to him; his pleasures, his joy ceases where the measure of what is beneficial is overstepped. He divines cures for injuries, he employs ill chances to his own advantage; what does not kill him makes him stronger. (Ecce Homo, p. 12)

This monetized phrase, “what won’t kill you will only make you stronger,” is also found in Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols, in the section “Maxims and Arrows,” where the full quote reads, “From the military school of life—what does not kill you makes me stronger.” Bear in mind that this is an agonistic and diagnostic work that aims to identify all the false Idols, ideals, which are responsible for the state of decay, decline or decadence we (he) now find ourselves inhabiting. Specifically, this section speaks to commonplace sayings or beliefs which he, like an arrow, sought to pierce through, exposing thusly their utter fallaciousness, but at the same time providing the impetus for re-interpretative moments whereby these sayings could be true in unusual ways. He does not literally mean that ceaseless adversity could or should make any man stronger. Indeed, a little thought might suggest that one is far more likely to end up depressed, unproductive, maybe even suicidal! Still, he is not a la Englishmen, the Utilitarians, in pursuit of happiness (Maxims and Arrows, 12), since that would make happiness the end and all that calculatively regulates the flow of our activities efficiently measured for its attainment. Nietzsche, as aforementioned, acknowledges that the lowliest time of his life was also his most “optimistic,” a theme which we encounter in the Dionysian-Apollonian polemic. But more on this when we delve into Twilight of the Idols.

It is noteworthy that Schopenhauer whom he in earlier writings exalted, he later rejected (as we shall see further down in his 2^nd Preface to Birth of Tragedy), in part, for his pessimist stance. Indeed, Nietzsche seems to invert the commonplace, even Schopenhauerian, perspective on pessimism. More specifically, he objected to Schopenhauer’s depiction of human existence as essentially futile. He arrives at this position premised on the development of his concept of Will, of the Will of life or existence, which is described as a blind incessant impulse that prods us forward instinctually, but which ultimately leads to a life of insatiable striving. This is so on account of his – Schopenhauer’s – view that satisfaction, or otherwise, human happiness, is always negative, that is, it is always preceded by a desire or a wanting which once gratified comes as a relief; i.e., release from the pain of striving, of seeking satisfaction. This is always only temporary since the feeling of satisfaction is short-lived and as such is inevitably replaced or followed up with yet another yearning desire, which again is only temporarily satiated. The endless series itself can turn to boredom, leaving us moving between pain (as that which incites desire) and boredom as the essential constituents of life. The inescapable truth of human existence is thusly revealed to us, namely that we are not meant to be happy. It is this pessimism which leads to the futility of life which Nietzsche rejects. This is, indeed, what he’d call weak pessimism.

Nietzsche juxtaposes Socratic optimism with Dionysian pessimism, and as such challenges our associative assumptions. Pessimism is associated with all that is negative, to be avoided, unattractive, unfortunate and the like –the “glass-half-empty perspective.” Optimism, conversely, is associated with all that is good, hopeful, worthy, and the like—the “glass-half-full” perspective. Socratic optimism is anything but worthy, for not only does it rest in illusion, but erects a moral system with the promise of happiness, simultaneously, Nietzsche would contend, confiscating life. Dionysian pessimism, on the other hand, embraces the tragic aspect of human life, and instead of taking refuge in moralizations of human life, and the promise of happiness, looks to wield a life built on the “pessimism of strength.” That is, a life that finds a sense of liberation from the blatant realization that there is no promise of happiness given to anyone, that life will involve struggle and suffering, but that in that suffering, joy too can be found, for here one may not find comfort, security, and stability, but instead she will find the opportunity to surpass herself, that which occasions the transfiguration of herself into one ever wiser, ever stronger. Note that this is doubly reflective in Nietzsche. First, he acknowledges the inherent suffering of human life, which comes in all varieties and forms, as it can be physical or psychological, and it comes in varying degrees, and for some the frequency and intensity of their physical and psychological suffering is far greater than others. That’s just how things are. There are various ways one might respond to this, producing narratives of compensation, escapism, justification and so on. Socrates offered one type, and the Dionysian offers another, as does the Apollonian. But the secret is in embracing the suffering that accompanies this realization, and not hide away into any of these rationalized, moralized, nay-sayer type of concoctions as a response to it. This second reflective moment is what essentially speaks to the “pessimism of strength,” and the seeds for life-affirming forms of engagement in the world.

B. Birth of tragedy: Dionysian – Apollonian Polemic

Nietzsche’s esteem in academic circles and his public presence suffered significantly following the publication of his The Birth of Tragedy (1870), wherein the Dionysian-Apollonian first makes its appearance. Nietzsche, of course, studied the ancient Greeks profusely and was especially taken with the tragic works that predated the stronghold that Socrates and Plato had on the literate community. It was unsurprising, therefore, to find their imprint deeply rooted in the mind of the young (even the older) Nietzsche. In this work, Dionysus is juxtaposed with Apollo who are both sons of Zeus in Greek mythology. Apollo is the god of the sun, of rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence, and purity, whereas, Dionysus is the god of wine and dance, of irrationality and chaos, and appeals to emotions and instincts. For the record the original work began with an original Preface to Wagner, followed by a rhapsodic account of the Dionysian – Apollonian affair which found Aeschylus and Sophocles the epitome of this marriage (there are scholars that have argued for the alignment of these latter playwriters to the Dionysian variety, but it seems that what Nietzsche is saying is that there was once this marriage of these two narratives that found expression in Sophocles’ Oedipus and Asclepius’ Prometheus, though the contention found amongst scholars is not unsurprising given Nietzsche’s repeated association of the Dionysian with the spirit of art and tragedy), whilst Euripides, was presented as the epitome of the latter (many scholars have crucified the scholarship of this work then and now. Martha Nussbaum, who you may be acquainted with, argued that he got the latter particularly wrong—See her “The Transfigurations of Intoxication: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysus,” 1991), which, for Nietzsche, marked the decline of Greek culture, given to his conviction that ‘Euripides became the poet of aesthetic Socraticism.’ It was also his contention, at the time, that a rebirth of Greek culture was to be found in the operatic work of Wagner, something which he later regretted (which he spells out in the Preface to this work 16 years later).

The special, yet alluring, difficulty of this work lies with Nietzsche’s own rather fierce criticism of it 16 years later in his 1886 Preface “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” which begins “Whatever might have been the basis for this dubious book, it must have been a question of the utmost importance and charm, as well as a deeply personal one.” He refers here to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 (he was a military medic in the war) that led to the unification of Germany, which filled him with foreboding and reflective contemplation for he did not see (as he makes clear in his follow up text Untimely Meditations) this as a victory for the German culture of art and morals, but rather a hodgepodge of distinct voices, styles, and ideas. Interestingly, we find a Nietzsche openly self-critical, embracing the dynamic constellation of his ideas, modes of expression and relevance, as if to suggest, contra-Kierkegaard, that he did not have a plan strategized from the outset to which the totality of his works together when properly interpreted would unfold for the attentive, subjectively appropriated, reader. Indeed, it lays tribute to acknowledging and integrating (the inevitable) perspectival limitations into challenging and nuanced perspectives, regretting not what now from proximal distance is unsustainable, but incorporating it into the manifestation of one’s perspective, making it thereby “better,” “enriched.”

Following his reference to the dubious nature of the book, he says in Section Two:

Let me say again: today for me it is an impossible book. I call it something poorly written, ponderous, painful, with fantastic and confused imagery, here and there so saccharine it is effeminate, uneven in tempo, without any impulse for logical clarity, extremely self−confident and thus dispensing with evidence, even distrustful of the relevance of evidence, like a book for the initiated, like “Music” for those baptised in music, those who are bound together from the start in secret and esoteric aesthetic experiences, a secret sign recognised among artistic blood relations, an arrogant and rhapsodic book, which right from the start hermetically sealed itself off from the profane vulgarity of the “intelligentsia” even more than from the “people,” but a book which, as its effect proved and continues to prove, must also understand enough of this issue to search out its fellow rhapsodists and tempt them to new secret paths and dancing grounds. (Birth of Tragedy, 2^nd Preface)

Though he was, as one might say or hope to say of any matured, open-minded, and evolving intellectual, admonishing of his younger self for his naïveté, and lack of credible scholarship, the issues and themes of the original work had not waned. What are the themes? The affirmation of life through Dionysus, the god of vitality and exuberance, if you will, an ongoing critique and concern for the decline of culture, what later is referred to as decadence, and hammering out the false idols from Socrates onwards. It is not until Section Four that he tackles the central narrative of the text, the Dionysian,

Indeed, what is the Dionysian? This book offers an answer to that question: a “knowledgeable person” speaks there, the initiate and disciple of his own god. Perhaps I would now speak with more care and less eloquently about such a difficult psychological question as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. A basic issue is the relationship of the Greeks to pain, the degree of their sensitivity. Did this relationship remain constant? Or did it turn itself around? That question whether their constantly strong desire for beauty, feasts, festivities, and new cults arose out of some lack, deprivation, melancholy, or pain. If we assume that this desire for the beautiful and the good might be quite true—and Pericles, or, rather, Thucydides, in the great Funeral Oration gives us to understand that it is—where must that contradictory desire stem from, which appears earlier than the desire for beauty, namely, the desire for the ugly or the good strong willing of the ancient Hellenes for pessimism, for tragic myth, for pictures of everything fearful, angry, enigmatic, destructive, and fateful as the basis of existence? Where must tragedy come from? Perhaps out of desire, out of power, out of overflowing health, out of overwhelming fullness of life?

And psychologically speaking, what then is the meaning of that madness out of which tragic as well as comic art grew, the Dionysian madness? What? Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degradation, collapse, cultural decadence? Is there perhaps (a question for doctors who treat madness) a neurosis associated with health, with the youth of a people, and with youthfulness? What is revealed in that synthesis of god and goat in the satyr? Out of what personal experience, what impulse, did the Greeks have to imagine the Dionysian enthusiast and original man as a satyr? And what about the origin of the tragic chorus?

In those centuries when the Greek body flourished and the Greek soul bubbled over with life, perhaps there were endemic raptures, visions, and hallucinations which entire communities, entire cultural bodies, shared. What if it were the case that the Greeks, right in the midst of their rich youth, had the desire for tragedy and were pessimists? What if it was clearly lunacy, to use a saying from Plato, which brought the greatest blessings throughout Hellas?

And, on the other hand, what if, to turn the issue around, it was clearly during the time of their dissolution and weakness that the Greeks became constantly more optimistic, more superficial, more hypocritical, with a lust for logic and rational understanding of the world, as well as “more cheerful” and “more scientific”? What’s this? In spite of all “modern ideas” and the judgments of democratic taste, could the victory of optimism, the developing hegemony of reasonableness, practical and theoretical utilitarianism, as well as democracy itself (which occurs in the same period) perhaps be a symptom of failing power, approaching old age, physiological exhaustion, all these factors rather than pessimism? Was Epicurus an optimist for the very reason that he was suffering? We see that this book was burdened with an entire bundle of difficult questions. Let us add its most difficult question: What, from the point of view of living, does morality mean?

In the work itself, Nietzsche is clear that he is offering both a diagnostic account of present-day German culture, which he took to be in decline, as well as an investigation into what the Greek Dionysian-Apollonian couplet had to offer as the means of its revival, originally, he thought, as previously noted, through the operatic works of Wagner. Note then that this couplet seeks to provide insight into a “healthier,” (more) “authentic,” “truer,” response to the world or reality, as it were. The Dionysian-Apollonian, it has already been said, is a couplet, a joint narrative, but one which is polemical. They are intertwined, and yet at odds. This is described early on in the following way:

With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we link our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in origins and purposes, between visual (plastic) arts, the Apollonian, and the non−visual art of music, the Dionysian. Both very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate for themselves the contest of opposites which the common word “Art” only seems to bridge, until they finally, through a marvelous metaphysical act, seem to pair up with each other and, as this pair, produce Attic tragedy, just as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art.

In order to get closer to these two instinctual drives, let us think of them next as the separate artistic worlds of dreams and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

As opposing forces one can certainly pick up on a list of contrasting traits:

DIONYSIAN	APOLLONIAN
INTOXICATION	DREAMS-IMAGINATION-APPEARANCE
CHAOS	ORDER/UNITY/HARMONY
ANIMALISM/INSTINCTS	STRUCTURE
IRRATIONAL/EMOTIONAL	RATIONAL
EXTRAVAGANT	PRUDENT
MUSIC	SCULPTURE (PLASTIC – VISUAL ARTS)
LUST/ABUNDANCE	BEAUTY

Recall that both the Dionysian and the Apollonian are narratival reactions or responses to our confrontation with life, and which also, appeal to primal or primordial states constitutive of the human condition. You might not have expected to find rationality, order, structure, and harmony lining up with dreams, appearances, and the imagination. Indeed, if we are legit offspring of the Enlightenment, reason will immediately conjure associative ideas, like “justified,” “objectively appropriated,” “reliably, truthfully rendered,” “real or reality.” However, Nietzsche says,

The Greeks expressed this joyful necessity of the dream experience in their god Apollo, who, as god of all the plastic arts, is at the same time the god of prophecy. In accordance with the root meaning of his association with brightness, he is the god of light. He also rules over the beautiful appearance of the inner fantasy world. The higher truth, the perfection of this condition in contrast to the sketchy understanding of our daily reality, as well as the deep consciousness of a healing and helping nature in sleep and dreaming, is the symbolic analogy to the capacity to prophesy the truth, as well as to art in general, through which life is made possible and worth living. But also that delicate line which the dream image may not cross so as to work its effect pathologically (otherwise the illusion would deceive us as crude reality)—that line must not be absent from the image of Apollo, that boundary of moderation, that freedom from more ecstatic excitement, that fully calm wisdom of the god of images. His eye must be sun−like, in keeping with his origin. Even when he is angry and gazes with displeasure, the consecration of the beautiful illusion rests on him.

And so one may verify (in an eccentric way) what Schopenhauer says of the man trapped in the veil of Maja: “As on the stormy sea which extends without limit on all sides, howling mountainous waves rise up and sink and a sailor sits in a row boat, trusting the weak craft, so, in the midst of a world of torments, the solitary man sits peacefully, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis [the principle of individuality]” (World as Will and Idea, Vol. I, p. 416). Yes, we could say of Apollo that the imperturbable trust in that principle and the calm sitting still of the man conscious of it attained its loftiest expression in him, and we may even designate Apollo himself as the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis, from whose gestures and gaze all the joy and wisdom of illusion, together with its beauty, speak to us.

In the same place Schopenhauer also described for us the monstrous horror which seizes a man when he suddenly doubts his ways of comprehending illusion, when the sense of a foundation, in any one of its forms, appears to suffer a breakdown. If we add to this horror the ecstatic rapture, which rises up out of the same collapse of the principium individuationis from the innermost depths of human beings, yes, from the innermost depths of nature, then we have a glimpse into the essence of the Dionysian, which is presented to us most closely through the analogy to intoxication.

Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring, which drives joyfully through all of nature, that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. … There are men who, from a lack of experience or out of apathy, turn mockingly away from such phenomena as from a “sickness of the people,” with a sense of their own health and filled with pity. These poor people naturally do not have any sense of how deathly and ghost−like this very “Health” of theirs sounds, when the glowing life of the Dionysian throng roars past them. Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the bond between man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, no matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth freely offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and the desert approach in peace. (Birth of Tragedy, chapter 1)

Apollo “rules over the beautiful appearance of the inner fantasy world,” for “The higher truth, the perfection of this condition in contrast to the sketchy understanding of our daily reality, as well as the deep consciousness of a healing and helping nature in sleep and dreaming, is the symbolic analogy to the capacity to prophesy the truth, as well as to art in general, through which life is made possible and worth living.” Moreover, “…in the midst of a world of torments, the solitary man sits peacefully, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis [the principle of individuality].” It is Apollo, therefore, that allows us to feel calm in a world that is manifestly not. This is, Nietzsche tells us, of the two ‘halves of our existence, the waking and dreaming states,’ the one – the dreaming state – that is infinitely preferred, for it is seemingly more beautiful, excellent, and worthy of being lived. The Apollonian represents these perfect images to our imagination, and as such is the creator of perfect illusions and prophetic vision and is thereby the catalytic inspiration for all art forms of ideality and perfection. Still, when thusly engaged, and inspired and shielded from the accosting disorder of the world, we still are aware that it is a dream. We are not, as it were, entirely deluded, or under some hypnotic force that obliterates or screens (pun intended! 😉) this awareness from us. Contrastingly, the Dionysian abides not to the principle of individuation. Quite literally the opposite. The Dionysian sits in waiting for that moment when the ‘monstrous horror seizes man as he suddenly doubts his ways of comprehending illusion,’ and in a state of ecstatic rapture rises up out of the collapse of all that separated each of us into our segregated, isolated selves, distinct and alienated from her surroundings, and out of the innermost depths of nature, the Dionysian erupts within us. Intoxication or drunkenness is that state of wild passions where the boundaries between “self” and “other” dissolve. One must submit to Dionysian madness in order to attain the state of primordial unity, a state beyond social barriers and narrow thinking. The Dionysian is therefore both pre-Apollonian and extra-Apollonian. For he says,

…every artist is an “Imitator,” and, in fact, an artist either of Apollonian dream or Dionysian intoxication or, finally, as in Greek tragedy, for example, simultaneously an artist of intoxication and dreams. As the last, it is possible for us to imagine how he sinks down in the Dionysian drunkenness and mystical obliteration of the self, alone and apart from the rapturous throng, and how through the Apollonian effects of dream his own state now reveals itself to him, that is, his unity with the innermost basis of the world, in a metaphorical dream picture. (Birth of Tragedy, chapter 2)