Apollo & Dionysus: Music, Art, and the Birth of Tragedy
"We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics," Nietzsche writes at the outset of his debut work, “when we have come to realise…that art owes its continuous development to the Apollonian and the Dionysian."
Recorded back in January, this short video finds me doing what I apparently can't stop doing – which is attempting to locate the ontological coordinates of my own thinking by triangulating from sources considerably cleverer than myself. The text in question is the opening fusillade of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, his first major published work and, by some distance, his most intoxicating – written with the barely-contained exuberance of a man who believes he has identified something everyone else has been looking directly at without seeing, and all the while keeping his disciple eye towards his then-beloved Schopenhauer and Wagner. This is pre-Zarathustra Nietzsche at his finest.
The argument Nietzsche advances here is deceptively simple in its initial formulation. Art, music, and poetry (and by extension, all vital human culture) are not the product of a single unified impulse but of two fundamentally opposed ones, named for the Greek gods who most purely embody them. Apollo: the Shiva-like principle of form, individuation, luminous rational clarity, the dream made visible and bounded. Dionysus: the Shakti-esque embodiment of dissolution, ecstatic self-abandonment, and the intoxicating collapse of the individual back into the churning, undifferentiated ground of existence from which he briefly emerged. Neither principle alone produces anything of lasting significance. Apollo without Dionysus ossifies into mere decorative order – indeed beautiful, but entirely aloof. Dionysus without Apollo dissolves into an ecstatic, formless roar that cannot be transmitted or received. Thus, what generates genuine art is the perennial tension between them; the perpetual, generative antagonism of two forces that cannot absorb one another and cannot, finally, exist properly without one another either.
For additional context, I wrote about this in a tad more depth in an article featuring Greek soundscape artist Aetherfall in my Public Pressure column. I'll link the details below. Worth taking a gander (and a listen).
Now, what this has to do with transcendental vitalism – my own perhaps imprudently named philosophical framing – is something I'll perhaps expound upon in greater detail as my writing develops. The succinct version is that the Apollonian-Dionysian duality maps, with uncomfortable precision, onto a set of tensions I keep encountering in my own thinking in relation to consciousness, creative practice, and the question of how a writer is supposed to live with any degree of genuine, self-generative sovereignty without either rigidifying into pure essayistic turgidity or dispersing into surface-level, pop-journalist sensationalism. Nietzsche, quite aptly, didn't resolve the tension either. He celebrated it with fervent Protestant anti-Protestant gusto. Hence my continued preoccupation with this fascinatingly complicated man’s work in particular, for I too have spent the past however-many years coming to terms with the undue disturbance of my Anglican faith. But this doesn’t need to be spoken about here; nor indeed at any time, for that matter.
Regardless, one could just as zestfully write articles and produce video narratives citing the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, of Jünger, of Hobbes and Carlyle and McCarthy (perhaps even Wagner should persuasion take me), yet I've consistently found the Nietzschean apparatus to be the most versatile and resonant when discussing artistic and metapolitical viewpoints, and I will likely continue this into the foreseeable future. Which strikes me, all things considered, as the more intellectually honest position.
The text is taken from Walter Kaufmann's translation, 1967.
The Birth of Tragedy
“We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics, once we perceive not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of vision, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality—just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations. The terms Dionysian and Apollonian we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the discerning mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not, to be sure, in concepts, but in the intensely clear figures of their gods. Through Apollo and Dionysus, the two art deities of the Greeks, we come to recognise that in the Greek world there existed a tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollonian art of sculpture, and the non-imagistic, Dionysian art of music. These two different tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance; and they continually incite each other to new and more powerful births, which perpetuate an antagonism only superficially reconciled by the common term “art”; till eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic “will,” they appear coupled with each other, and through this coupling ultimately generate an equally Dionysian and Apollonian form of art—Attic tragedy.”
References:
Nietzsche's Basic Writings, taken from the Kaufmann translation, Everyman Books, 2000.
Synthesizing the Art of the Struggle, Public Pressure [Aetherfall]: https://www.publicpressure.io/articles/synthesizing-the-art-of-the-struggle
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Article written by Jack Dolan