Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s Return to the Greeks

Rocco D’Ambrosca: 10/08/2009

Many can argue what is most important about a people. The most typical answer would be their culture. But, this would be far too general of an answer. What does culture mean? Would you focus on their language, their food, their customs, etc? Friedrich Nietzsche would say it is their art that is most important, as it allows the expression and revelation of truth and the will of nature. Martin Heidegger took Nietzsche’s view of art farther, to say that art does not only express truth, but creates it and produces a society’s shared understanding. In Nietzsche’s philosophical work, “The Birth of Tragedy” and Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”, they both undertake a return to the Greeks. They both in turn, use Greek culture, society, and above all art, as foundations to give themselves the authority to critique wisdom and understanding. The following will analyze and discuss Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s return to the Greeks, their de-objectification of artwork to reveal truth, and how this de-objectification of artwork brings a people into their authentic historical destiny.

Nietzsche’s return to the Greeks is grounded in his analysis and interpretation of Greek Tragedy. He begins with the founding of their religion. Religion is one of the first things every culture or society creates to deal with the tremendous suffering of their world. “The Greeks were keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to be able to live at all they had to place before them the shining fantasy of the Olympians” (Nietzsche 29-30). Religion was invented initially to explain the unexplainable or unknowable; giving comfort in a dangerous, chaotic, and uncertain world. “How else could life have borne by a race so hypersensitive, so emotionally intense, so equipped for suffering? The same drive which called art into being as a completion and consummation of existence, and as a guarantee of further existence, gave rise also to that Olympian realm which acted as a transfiguring mirror to the Hellenic will. The gods justified human life by living it themselves – the only satisfactory theodicy ever invented” (Nietzsche 30). Out of the entire Olympian Pantheon of gods and goddesses, Nietzsche focuses on the gods Apollo and Dionysus in his return to the Greeks; which we will later see, in detail, how he uses them in his de-objectification of artwork to reveal truth and the will of nature.

While Nietzsche’s work focuses almost completely upon the Greeks and specifically Greek Tragedy, Heidegger uses Greek terms and concepts as a template and foundation to assess his own model for the creation of artworks. Heidegger makes regular references to Greek terms to help him along and gain authority, “In the work of art something is brought together with the thing that is made. To bring together is, in Greek, symballein. The work is a symbol.” (Heidegger 146). When speaking of the essence of some-“thing” he says, “A thing, as everyone thinks he knows, is that around which the properties have assembled. We speak in this connection of the core of things. The Greeks are supposed to have called it to hypokeimenon. For them, this core of the thing was something lying at the ground of the thing, something always already there. The characteristics, however, are called ta symbebekota, that which has always turned up already along with the given core and occurs along with it.” (Heidegger 148-149). Heidegger continues, “The thing is the aistheton, that which is perceptible by sensations in the senses belonging to sensibility. Hence the concept later becomes a commonplace according to which a thing is nothing but the unity of a manifold of what is given in the senses.” (Heidegger 151). Heidegger also uses the Greek terms for matter (hyle), form (morphe), and appearance (eidos); saying “The distinction of matter and form is the conceptual schema which is used, in the greatest variety of ways, quite generally for all art theory and aesthetics.” (Hiedegger 152-153). “Truth means the essence of the true. We think this essence in recollecting the Greek word aletheia, the unconcealment of beings.” (Heidegger 176). All of these terms, (along with the Greek Temple, which will be discussed later) retrieved from Hiedegger’s return to Greece, contribute in various ways to his de-objectification of artwork; to be seen later.

Nietzsche uses the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus in his attempt to create a model for the creation of artworks, and to serve in his de-objectification of artwork. Historically speaking, Apollo is the god of light, the sun, and by that connotation truth and prophecy. Dionysus on the other hand is regarded historically as the god of wine and revelry. Nietzsche takes these two gods and their definitions to suit his analysis of Greek Tragedy and art in general. To Nietzsche Dionysus is not merely the god of wine. Wine is seen here to be a divine gift that relieves the everyday suffering of man and allows him to forget this misery for a short time. So, to Nietzsche Dionysus is a god of salvation.

“While the transport of the Dionysiac state, with its suspension of all the ordinary barriers of existence, lasts, it carries with it a Lethean element in which everything that has been experienced by the individual is drowned. This chasm of oblivion separates the quotidian reality from the Dionysiac. But as soon as that quotidian reality enters consciousness once more it is viewed with loathing, and the consequence is an ascetic, abulic state of mind. In this sense Dionysiac man might be said to resemble Hamlet: both have looked deeply into the true nature of things, they have understood and are not loath to act. They realize that no action of theirs can work any change in the eternal condition of things, and they regard the imputation as ludicrous or debasing that they should set right the time which is out of joint, Understanding kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion; such is Hamlet’s doctrine, not to be confounded with the cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams, who through too much reflection, as it were a surplus of possibilities, never arrives at action. What, both in the case of Hamlet and of the Dionysiac man, overbalances any motive leading to action, is not reflection but understanding, the apprehension of truth and its terror” (Nietzsche 51).

Dionysus is a double edged sword of immense power, who will remove your suffering by drowning away all of your individual experience but in turn replaces it with the eternal infinite void of the collective universe. In this way, Dionysus is far too potent to be experienced individually as he so overwhelmingly allows understanding of the terrifying truth of ultimate reality or primal unity.

Nietzsche then takes Apollo’s definition as the god of light, the sun, and truth, and uses it to shed light upon the darkness and infinity of Dionysus to give him form through the Apollonian veil of illusion and appearance. Apollo gives focus and symbolic appearance to the madness and ecstasy of Dionysus. Experiencing Dionysus directly could be compared to hearing the voice of the Christian God directly. The power of his voice would shatter the ears and skull of mortal man and therefore all of God’s messages must be transmitted via the Christian Holy Spirit or one of the Christian Angels. Apollo acts in this same way for the Greeks and Greek Tragedy. Apollo is a filter that allows the extremely important and viable substance of Dionysus to pass through but in an understandable and manageable way. The tragic hero in Greek tragedy is the Apollonian appearance of Dionysus. Through the Apollonian veil we witness Dionysus as the tragic hero and allow him to take on all of our suffering.

“It is an unimpeachable tradition that in its earliest form Greek tragedy records only the sufferings of Dionysus, and that he was the only actor. But it may be claimed with equal justice that, up to Euripides, Dionysus remains the sole dramatic protagonist and that all the famous characters of the Greek stage, Prometheus, Oedipus, etc., are only masks of that original hero. The fact that a god hides behind all these masks accounts for the much-admired “ideal” character of those celebrated figures. Someone, I can’t recall who, has claimed that all individuals, as individuals, are comic, and therefore untragic; which seems to suggest that the Greeks did not tolerate individuals at all on the tragic stage” (Nietzsche 65-66).

Therefore, all tragic heroes are pure manifestations of Dionysus and in turn the collection of consciousness of all individual experience and the primal unity.

Heidegger, instead of using the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, as the forces behind the creation of art, uses the terms Earth and World to serve in his de-objectification. “That into which the work sets itself back and which it causes to come forth in this setting back of itself we called the earth. Earth is that which comes forth and shelters.” (Heidegger 171). “The world is the self-opening openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated.” (Heidegger 174). In Heidegger’s model and de-objectification of artwork, Apollo is analogous to World and Dionysus analogous to Earth. In both cases, the intelligible and unintelligible are represented. Dionysus is the raw force and will of nature that is two powerful to comprehend without the filtering lens of Apollo. “The opposition of world and earth is strife. But we would surely all too easily falsify its essence if we were to confound strife with discord and dispute, and thus see it only as disorder and distruction. In essential strife, rather, the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of their natures.” (Heidegger 174). The Earth, in turn, is the raw material and matter (hyle), which when combined in its strife with World giving birth to the form (morphe), and appearance (eidos) of the artwork and by result, truth expressed in the artwork. “Setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work is the instigation of the strife in which the unconcealment of beings as a whole, or truth, is won.” (Heidegger 180).

Nietzsche and Heidegger undertook their return to the Greeks in the hope of bringing back an authoritative model, through the de-objectification of art, which could be injected into German culture and society to bring about a type of renaissance, rebirth or rejuvenation to reclaim an authentic historical destiny. Nietzsche saying, “We can’t help feeling that the dawn of a new tragic age is for the German spirit only a return to itself, a blessed recovery of its true identity” (Nietzsche 121) and “Let no one believe that the German spirit has irrevocably lost its Dionysiac home so long as those bird voices can clearly be heard telling of that home.” (Nietzsche 144). Heidegger saying, “Whenever art happens –that is, whenever there is a beginning- a thrust enters history; either begins or starts over again. History here means not a sequence in time of events… History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entry into that people’s endowment.” (Heidegger 202).

Heidegger best represents the authentic historical destiny with his commentary on the Greek Temple. “A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the holy portico… It is the temple-work that… gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which… endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human beings. The… world of this historical people.” (Heidegger 167). The evolution of the culture will lead to the inactivity of this temple and will transform from an artwork to an art object; proving the interconnectivity of art and the society it belongs to. When a new work of art is born, it changes the meaning of existence for the entire culture that gives birth to it; and through this process leads a people to their authentic historical destiny.