Rocco D’Ambrosca: 09/17/2009
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 of the human spirit best and relieves suffering. In Nietzsche’s first philosophical work, “The Birth of Tragedy”, he undertakes an investigation of the Greek art form of Tragedy. He concludes that Tragedy is the highest of all art forms and the reason Greek culture, society, and above all art, was so superior to his modern day German society equivalents. The following will analyze and discuss Nietzsche’s return to the Greeks, the reason for this return, and the fate of the subject in Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy”.
Nietzsche begins his return to the Greeks 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.
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.
Nietzsche undertook this return to the Greeks and Greek Tragedy in the hope of bringing back wisdom and understanding; that could be injected into German culture and society to bring about a type of renaissance and rebirth of Tragedy. Nietzsche felt that Greek Tragedy had been killed by Euripides and Socrates overly Apollonian view of logic, reason, symbols, appearance, and details. Nietzsche is extremely frustrated and maddened by this inability to see the big picture and the truth of primal unity that lies beneath the Apollonian veil of appearance or illusion. He blames Euripides for what he believes to be a negative portrayal of Dionysus and his so called attempt to drive Dionysus from Greek Tragedy. “The Bacchae acknowledges the failure of Euripidies’ dramatic intentions when, in fact, these had already succeeded: Dionysus had already been driven from the tragic stage by a daemonic power speaking through Euripides. For in a certain sense Euripides was but a mask, while the divinity which spoke through him was neither Dionysus nor Apollo but a brand new daemon called Socrates” (Nietzsche 77). Nietzsche blames Socrates even more directly than Euripides in that Socrates saw no value in Tragedy as it was unsuitable for philosophy since it did not tell the truth, but was only agreeable and not useful; thus banning its patronage by his students. Nietzsche goes farther to say that since Socrates believed all sin to come from man’s ignorance, it would be impossible to have a tragic hero under this model. How could the audience feel sorry for a character that should have known better?
Nietzsche makes his connection to Greek and German society through music. He believes music to be the ultimate form of art and analogous to Greek Tragedy; which relied so heavily on music. Nietzsche saw music as taping directly into the force of will and ultimate primal unity of Dionysus. Music is the only art that transcends the forms of appearance. Music is a universal language all its own without the use of the Apollonian form of words. Music is not a copy of phenomenon, but a direct translation of the will itself. Nietzsche saw the Socratic view as a dilution of experience and of true reality; with its obsession with understanding and the creation of concepts in a vain attempt to explain everything in the universe, but ending up with an inadequate imitation of the truth and reality.
Nietzsche believed that the Socratic obsession with the Apollonian concepts of words and logic killed Tragedy and therefore any meaningful art. He believed when the logical limits of science were reached, it would cause the fall of science from its extremely high pedestal, and create a rebirth of Tragedy. Nietzsche credits Kant and Schopenhauer with the criticism of Socratic thought, to reveal the limits of scientific inquiry. This leads him to his conclusion that now that the novelties of science and Socratic thought have begun to falter, the time is ripe for the rebirth of Tragedy. Dionysus will rise again, uniting with the already present Apollo in German society, to create a new golden age, which will rejuvenate the German collective spirit, and in turn alleviate the suffering of all individuals, through the reconnection of everyone with the primal unity and collective consciousness; all will be saved from suffering.
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