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Uncanny insight at war with a language that is outrageous, that overreaches and thus caricatures its subject, and that achieves the singular feat of being at once acrobatic and stilted. Nietzsche’s prose, for all its signal distinction, never numbered sobriety among its virtues…The alternate fire and ice of his diction, the obsessive punning, the rapid successive flashes of brilliance degenerating, all too often, into mere flashiness — every reader of our author is familiar with these traits and finds himself by turns appalled and delighted.

Francis Golffing

Philosophy That Sings and Dances

The most problematic and fascinating aspect of studying Nietzsche (1844-1900) is that it is virtually impossible to separate form and function, mode and message, sophistry and penetration. We have to make the attempt, of course, because Nietzsche’s influence on modern culture has been astonishingly powerful. His analysis of classical literature was the starting point for the study of myth and ritual. His discussion of repression, compensation and sublimation made him a Freudian before Freud. His critique of science provided the foundation for social constructivism. His interpretation of the limitations of western rationalism affirms Nietzsche the undisputed father of existentialism. His uncompromising assault on Christian values eclipsed all other atheistic and agnostic critiques; it still retains all of its original shock value after 114 years.

If parenting existential philosophy and postmodernism, cultural anthropology, and social psychology are not sufficient, consider Nietzsche’s invention of the of the superman – the ideal type of creative genius who combines the openness of a child, the psyche of mystic, and the will of a classical warrior. His portrayal of Zarathustra, a mystical superman in the making, is possibly the most unique and transcendent character in Western literature. Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman and Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf lifted their language and insights directly from Nietzsche.

Even at its most fragmented, contentious and dangerous, the force of Nietzschean philosophy is undeniable. With the exception of Pareto and Simmel, he was the first Western philosopher to appreciate the significance of power in human relations. The Will to power, articulated but not fully realized by Nietzsche’s persona, Zarathustra, marked a watershed in western thought that reached its apotheosis in the writings of Michel Foucault. It’s effect on literature was even more profound, since Nietzsche made it possible to conceive in imagination, and perhaps even to execute in reality, a domination that affirmed both our symbolic and passionate nature. The dialectic between Apollo and Dionysus represented an alternative and antidote to the empirical, mechanistic, and coldly scientific character of Western society.

What makes Nietzsche’s paradigm so totally different from either the western or the oriental Weltanschauung (paradigms) is its extreme energy and urgency. The most obvious comparison is the invocation of crisis is discovered in some evangelical religious writings, which advocate the rebirthing of the individual. The kind of rebirth that Nietzsche promoted, however, went far beyond the godly individual or the religious community. It spirit trammeled and transcended the limits of individualism and breathed new life into secularism. Nietzsche’s desire for social rebirth could sometimes lead in terrifying directions and, in fact, provided a powerful and emotive apology for the racist nation state. While his inflated rhetoric may have encouraged Nietzsche and his admirers to make such connections, neither Nietzsche’s superman nor his metaphysics of the Will (as opposed to revelation or reason) could be confined within the world of objects “in space and time held together by relations of cause and effect.” The relentless throb of passion was best discovered momentarily in music and artistic expression. It also has a strong affinity to the big empty of the Zen Buddhist. In other words, it lends itself as much to connection and compassion as it does to domination and tyranny.

Nietzsche set himself the task of making western philosophy sing and dance. If he occasionally went beyond the bounds of philosophical decorum, it was precisely because he believed that rationalist philosophy and western logical positivism had transformed humanity and its gods into machines and mechanics. Nietzschean philosophy at its core was neither individualistic nor nationalistic; it was the reconnecting of art and thought. Nietzsche’s agenda was to reassess western thought through the prism of the artist and reaffirming the art of living in an increasingly morbid and declining civilization.

Western Icons and Idols at Sunset

For all his stunning originality, Nietzsche most clearly represented the crisis of conscience and consciousness that characterized late nineteenth-century intellectual life. The cultural malaise that beset European philosophy and society had its foundation in the painful reappraisal of science and progress that took place across the intellectual spectrum. Whereas the propagandists of the European Enlightenment naively viewed reason and science as the optimal tools for building the human city, their late nineteenth-century successors were struck by the negative characteristics of the rationalistic paradigm. Thinkers of various kinds began to pay attention to the fact that scientific knowledge was linked to war and destruction. Artists and poets began to draw an equation between the scientific agenda and the hegemony of mechanistic and utilitarian thinking. A few pioneers went so far as to lament the loss of connection between humans and the natural world. The desire to reestablish connection is the most enduring result of the intellectual crisis that took place at the end of the nineteenth-century.

Nietzsche was arguably the most foundational writer in the new tradition because his writings were so integrative, so concerned with the totality of the human condition, and so infused with insights that lesser scholars could pursue. Nailing down Nietzsche is an impossible and highly artificial task, but there are some touchstones that are worth exploring. Nietzsche’s starting point, for example, was his critique of western science. One of his most inspired metaphors for science was that of the snake or the tiger devouring its own tail. The image is particularly instructive because it conveys the ultimately self-destructive nature of reason unbound. It is important to note that Nietzsche did not object to the existence or identity of the snake (his symbol for earthly knowledge) just as long as it remained true to its essential nature. It was only when the snake become self-destructive, when learning came into conflict with vital existence, that the trend must be reversed, and the sooner the better.

Western science was responsible for the dehumanization and diminishing of man. “Ever since Copernicus,” argued Nietzsche, “man has been rolling down an incline, faster and faster, away from the centre — whither? Into the void? Into the “piercing sense of his emptiness?” There was no doubt in Nietzsche’s mind, that scientific scholarship had contributed as much to the fatigue and decline of civilization as those other decaying forces that Nietzsche detested: democracy, sentimentalism, and whining or vengeful Christians. Science is the ultimate self-negating disease of the West; all other negativities are merely symptoms of this rationalistic disease.

Western science, according to Nietzsche, was thought divorced from art and reason without any checks. The historical legacy of western science was the slow wasting away of the human city. Nietzsche’s virulent attack on scientific progress, therefore, needs to be understood in context. Nietzsche was not by nature a nihilist. Rather, he diagnosed nihilism or self-destructiveness in the society to which he belonged and envisioned the superman as the solution to its loss of meaningfulness. The two related philosophical questions that guided western rationalism and scientific exploration for more than two millennia were “what is unique about human life” and “is that life worth living”? The scientific answers were profoundly unambiguous — Nothing and No. Discovering ourselves to be carbon based life forms with an organic tendency towards self-destruction was neither personally satisfying nor socially optimistic. Nietzsche’s fundamental diagnostic of modern society, therefore, is that it is very sick indeed. Our Socratic culture, the impulse to continually question until we find truthful answers, leaves humans and humanity sterile and empty. The human condition resembles a still life painting; look closely and you will see the relentless forces of corruption eating away at defenseless bowls of fruits and vegetables.

Romanticism versus Classical Elitism

The western malaise was the subject of numerous fin de siecle diagnostics. Two very different cures were advanced by the thinkers of the time. The most common and familiar approach was romanticism. The romantics proceeded along three distinct trajectories simultaneously. First, they pioneered a new definition of culture, and the cultivation of receptive or sensitive individuals, as antidotes to the corruption initiated by Industrialization and reinforced by its mechanistic and utilitarian character. Second, they mined the seams of the European Middle Ages and feudal society for models of more holistic and integrated human communities. Third, they married its chivalric and troubadour traditions to the modern self in ways that encouraged the development of romantic individualism and love. While the romantic tradition of the nineteenth-century was broadly based, its lasting legacy for us moderns is love freely given and returned between unencumbered individuals. Tragically (a concept that had particular significance for Nietzsche), modern men and women seek what was has been lost to wider humanity in the eyes of one another.

The critical approach chosen by Nietzsche and some others took them along a quite different path. Instead of looking to medieval society for alternatives, they “gave their allegiance to an idealized antiquity” in particular the Athenian city state of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Their conceptual focus was not organized in terms of a harmonious but closed and mystical society, but the open, aggressive and patriotic imperialism of the ancient Greeks. Their emotional focus was not the volatile and polarized compass of romantic love, which they dismissed as effeminate and transitory, but the manly suffering and stoic balance epitomized by Attic (Greek) tragedy.

Despite their agreement on the nature and extent of the disease, the differences between the romantics and the new elitist classicists were profound and insurmountable. Nowhere was the conceptual conflict more obvious than in their distinctive approaches to politics and society. The classicists engaged the tradition of the patriot and the radical political activist (either on the right or the left) with the clear intention of effecting and directing change. While romantics like Shelley and Keats could occasionally be political activists as well, the entire tenor of romantic thought was to retreat from stark reality into the world of the imagination and the literature of fantasy.

Since the Attic tradition was more activist than the romantic tradition, it also tended to be less mystical and more historical. Historical information gathering in the Attic tradition was geared to action, and inclined towards the exploration of creative tensions and social conflicts. The German historical tradition, which owed an enormous debt to the Attic paradigm, examined history as the tragic battleground for the supremacy of competing visions of human liberation and excellence (arêté in the Greek). The historical approaches of Hegel and Marx, for example, reflect the essentially Attic nature of the German ideology. Contrast this with the very different British historical approach. While historical analysis also achieved intellectual pre-eminence among the British upper classes, and dominated their education, the British approach was entirely different. The British historical tradition did not encourage the exploration of dialectical power relationships; it was highly empirical (factual) and served a traditional and highly conservative function. . Until relatively recently, British history was socially significant, but totally lacking in dynamism. Conversely, British romanticism was extremely dynamic and penetrating when it came to mapping the road interior; but it was socially impotent.

The Attic and romantic traditions contributed to radically different perspectives on the role of art and the artist. For the romantics, an artist is defined primarily as the critic of an increasingly scientific and mechanical society. In the Attic tradition, on the other hand, art needs to be realized as a vibrant and essential component of all aspects of lived life. Whereas the romantic artist seeks to remove himself/herself from contamination by a diseased society, the characteristic response of the Attic tradition is to continually looks for ways to integrate art and action. Thus, the romantic artist might appreciate the visionary ideals of the medieval or renaissance craftsman, but would not expect these ideals to be socially pervasive. The artist with Attic ideals, on the other hand, would be inclined not to “cite statistics or scientific theories” but to apply the insights of “Homer, Simonides or Pindar” to social problems.

Whereas the romantics freely borrowed images from a largely imaginary medieval world, the classical elitists were highly selective about their influences. In particular, they: 1) focused analysis on the period when the Athenian empire was at the height of its influence; 2) defined and defended tragedy as the most highly developed of all the literary genres; 3) invariably preferred the patriotic and tenacious, albeit occasionally pained and pessimistic, citizen of the Age of Pericles (who regularly attended Greek tragic performances) to the alienated and self-obsessed romantic artist.

We will explore Nietzsche’s debt to classical antiquity more deeply when we read The Birth of Tragedy. Scholars once considered this work to be the essential key that explained the Nietzschean intellectual revolution. Nowadays, there is a tendency to view The Birth of Tragedy as a highly moralistic treatise or intellectual theodicy that Nietzsche later transcended in the superman whose Will was unchained by conventions of good and evil. While both of these perspectives have certain merits, it is our contention that Nietzsche’s ideas form a synthetic while that cannot be understood without an appreciation of classical art. In other words, The Birth of Tragedy, informs all aspects of Nietzsche’s though and must remains a foundational work in Nietzschean scholarship.

In particular, we will never be able to contextualize Nietzsche or appreciate his intellectual world unless we appreciate that: 1) his view of human life was fundamentally tragic, in the Greek sense; 2) his ethical and aesthetic perspective was fundamentally Attic; 3) all of his later writings, regardless of how irreverent or deconstructive, continued to evidence an enormous debt to the Greek Socratic (not Platonic!) tradition of curiosity and self-critical inquiry; 4) and his devastating attack on the Hebrew and Christian traditions is essentially an affirmation of Greco-Roman culture. This last point, in particular, deserves our close attention because Nietzsche’s attack on religion is so-often misinterpreted or misunderstood.

Vengeful Jews and Whining Christians

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche ostensibly engaged in a philological and anthropological study of the rise of religion. His ultimate purpose, however, was not to construct a scientifically accurate genealogy of religious values and symbols, but to debunk the Judeo-Christian, and by implication medieval, approach to life and the human condition. It needs to be stressed that Nietzsche’s goal was neither historical accuracy nor methodological integrity, but the appraisal of different value systems. The more successful that Nietzsche was in negatively stereotyping Judeo-Christianity, the more room he had to espouse his preference classical elitism.

There is no doubt that much of the Judeo-Christian tradition disgusted Nietzsche, but his analysis was self-consciously partisan. For example, he informed his readers that there could be no doubt that the “Romans were the strongest and most noble people who ever lived. Every vestige of them, every least inscription is a sheer delight, provided we are able to read the spirit behind the writing.” Clearly, this was a no-win situation for any Jew or Christian fisherman or “rug weaver” who had the temerity to criticize those noble Greeks or Romans. Terms like “Christian vermin”, “repressed and pathetic Jews”, ” rabid Chinese Christians”, “inventors of bad conscience” and “nihilistic death worshipers” tell us that Nietzsche was much more interested in curing the insanity and illness that he found in fin de siecle Europe than diagnosing and documenting it impartially. Only towards the conclusion of The Genealogy of Morals does Nietzsche limit the stereotyping in order to make the case for a more vital, energetic and purposeful European community.

The essential components of his argument are easily summarized. In their resentment and vengefulness against the Roman inheritors of Attic wisdom, the Jews and Christians crafted cultural weapons designed to negate the accomplishments of the great and powerful. In their attack on Attic ideals of virtu and excellence, Judeo-Christian writers trumpeted the meek and mediocre as the inheritors of both heaven and earth. These whining moralists advocated loving one’s neighbour and one’s enemy, not as an affirmation of our joint humanity, but as a way of leveling everyone to the lowest common denominator. In place of the affirmation of human values and the creation of human-like gods, the priestly Jewish and Christian castes proclaimed and worshipped death as the doorway to tribal revenge and personal elevation.

In place of the Attic values of patriotism, balance, and continually striving for excellence, the Jews and Christians were all about pricking the conscience of those in authority and making them question and feel guilty about their actions. In place of an essentially civic and social religion, the Jews and Christians constructed a negative theodicy based on sacrifice, suffering, self-mutilation, and, ultimately, self-hate. Whereas the imperial elites of classical Greece and Rome were proud, creative and aggressive, the Jews and their Christian successors were backbiting and spiteful creatures.

The true nature of Judeo-Christian society emerged as it usurped the Roman Empire and extended its “moral universe of guilt.” The practice of feudalism for Nietzsche does not reveal a wholesome community but a mock-civilization that “reeked of blood, torture and cruelty.” Inquisition, assassination, betrayal and internecine warfare were the essential characteristics of one of “mankind’s evilest eras.” All that was truly human in the civilization, including the desire to procreate biologically and to create personal value, were bound within a symbolic domain that categorized normal human functions as vulgar and animalistic. The vital human instinct to create biologically and symbolically was interiorized and contorted to fit the chains of an artificial soul. Consequently, people no longer only had to worry about threats from outside, but also they now faced the internal torture chamber of a religious conscience. The external word was transformed from an arena for exercising arêté into a morbid vale of tears, a loathsome passageway reeking of urine and feces (Nietzsche’s language), to a better home hereafter.

The communal virtues of Greco-Roman civilization gradually were replaced by essentially private and individualistic values. The only social relationships that hit the medieval radar screen were those characterized by the “spirit of rancour’ — civil and criminal court cases. Medieval court documents reveal all the supposed kindness and meekness of these charitable Christian communities as a sham. The raison d’être of medieval society was punishment; medieval authorities systematically and relentlessly increased the number of available tortures and punishments to fit every conceivable case. Classical society was based on patriotism; Christian societies were founded on vengeance. Classical societies espoused achievement and creativity; Christian societies were intensely cruel, and their cruelty was extended from without to within the individual psyche. The medieval world, exterior and interior, was one big lunatic asylum. Moreover, the lunatics were in charge of the asylum.

This is Nietzsche’s medieval world of “sick dogs” constantly devouring those who are “well”. Reason and logical inquiry in this word were used to negate, rather than affirm, the human condition. Even the “halls of science”, argued Nietzsche, echoed with the “barking of sick dogs.” The lunacy worsened as Judeo-Christian societies progressively institutionalized their values. Once in ascendancy, for example, the Christians became far worse and more vengeful than the Jews had ever been. Scratch most modern Christian societies, said Nietzsche, and you will discover a new breed of “Anti-Semites” who take out all their frustration on the Jewish community. Often branded as an anti-Semite himself, Nietzsche consistently argued that, for all its faults, Jewish communities healthier than their Christian counterparts. The Jews, at least, looked for a Messiah to lead them to victory over the Romans. They were willing to fight for their beliefs, to die in battle with their Roman foes, in order to affirm their place in history. The Jewish Old Testament reflected “a heroic landscape, and one of the rarest things on earth, the naïveté of a strong heart. What is more, I find a people. In the New Testament, on the other hand, I find nothing but petty sectarianism, a rococo of the spirit, abounding in curious scrollwork and intricate geometries and breathing the air of …bucolic mawkishness.” Christian anti-Semites were the very worst of the breed — the most “dominating, oppressing and tyrannical” of all historical persons.

Christian communities suppressed or negated genuine human history, argued Nietzsche. Consequently, the Christian god was the longest of all historical lies. Christian aesthetics amount to all for nothing; the word Nietzsche used was “nada”. Christians, rather than anarchists or disenchanted philosophers were the real nihilists of modern society. Nietzsche maintained that he would much rather “ram with the historical nihilists through their cold, gloom fogs” than associate with the real deniers of a meaningful human universe — Christian contemplatives. However, Nietzsche always denied that he himself was a nihilist.

Nietzsche’s preferred spiritual home involved a very different “paradigm of excellence”. He longed to reside at the :

“very heart of Graeco-Roman splendor, which was also a splendor of books, in the heart of a literature not yet atrophied and dispersed, when it was still possible to read a few books for which we would now trade half of all that is printed.”

Nietzsche deeply regretted that Rome had ever capitulated to Christianity. He deplored the fact that the “classical awakening” during the Renaissance was negated by the “plebeian rancor of the German and English Reformation…which meant the restoration of ancient Rome to the quiet of the tomb.” Christianity and its empowerment of the meek (i.e. democracy) had severely sullied the “noble ideal.” Under the detritus of a sick European society, however, the classical ideal occasionally appeared “incarnate and in unprecedented splendour before the eyes and conscience of mankind.” This Attic ideal represented all that was noble in human civilization.

Nietzsche’s analysis of the Attic ideal infused all of his writing, from his attack on western science to his analysis of Judeo-Christian values. It is, therefore, worth looking at his most explicit passages on this subject before leaving The Genealogy of Morals. All science and philosophy, he says, “requires a normative value outside itself in order to operate securely.” Truth needs to be subjected to constant criticism and inevitably withers unless renewed by artistic ideals. The ascetic ideals of the Greeks and Romans could have prevented western thought from losing its vitality in a vain “overestimation of truth.” In what are perhaps the most intriguing passages in The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche suggests that Homer embodied the Greek ascetic ideal. Homer was the great communicator who infused life with art.

Not all Greeks were equal, and some Greeks actually were the enemies of art, and by implication life. Plato, according to Nietzsche, was the great corrupter and detractor of life — “the greatest enemy of art Europe has thus far produced.” Neo-Platonism, the Christian assimilation of Platonic ideas, acted as a relentless corrosive element the science and religion of the West, replacing artistic instinct and passion with a cold, dialectical and mechanical form of thinking. As a result, the machine of western society became overwhelmingly negative and serious, “which always bespeaks a system working under great physiological strain.”

Intellect, when deprived of emotion and appetite, became not only vapid but also dehumanizing. By attempting to make his philosophy sing and dance, therefore, Nietzsche was assuming the ethical mantle of Homer and revitalizing the Attic ideals of virtu and arêté for modern times. Nietzsche was always a comparative ethicist, even when he appeared to be advocating supra human values or going beyond the conventions of good and evil. He detested those romantics who posited a simplistic equation between truth and beauty (Keats and Shelley) or art for art’s sake (Carlyle and Newman). Art must always engage, inform and reform real life.

The Birth of Tragedy

In his introduction to the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche addressed the problem of authorial intent and voice. Because this work was not only an attempt to infuse academic scholarship with art but also to discover the artistic ideal in lived reality, Nietzsche admitted that he faced significant problems maintaining logical flow and consistent imagery. He also expressed some embarrassment at his work’s lack of a clear authorial persona (such as the one that he later found in Zarathustra) and for the “arrogance and wild enthusiasm” that turned off many academic and non-academic readers. Finally, he confessed that the thing that he was searching for in this work was ultimately unknowable. Trying to capture the illusive Dionysiac impluse in Greek literature was the analytical equivalent of herding cats. Nietzsche referred to the process as stammering in a strange tongue.

We should beware accepting all of these caveats at their face value. Nietzsche had already convinced himself that artistic engagement rather than scholarly analysis was the most fundamental metaphysical activity of man. Moreover, his interpretation of infusing analysis with art, or art with analysis, implied paradox and self-criticism. In other words, an absence of artistic self-indulgence and stammering would have signified Nietzsche capitulation to the Western logical positivist trap that he disavowed.

But several of Nietzsche’s self-professed confusions are probably accurate and revealing, not only about Nietzsche’s intent but also the characteristic consciousness of the time and place in which he wrote. For instance, Nietzsche suggested that he began his study of Greek tragedy in order to order to transcend a hostility to contemporary life that often left him weary and digested. This hatred of the world, that was endemic in European fin de siecle consciousness, was reinforced by a religious ethic that appeared divorced from life and art and that always led to the word No. Nietzsche’s first intuition, therefore, was to reject traditional positivist and religious values by seeking liberty, choice and affirmation in the world of the Greeks.

More precisely, Nietzsche focused his analytical and comparative attention on Greek tragedy, which strived for balance between unbridled human emotion and civilized humanist forms. The “Olympian magic mountain” presented in Greek tragedy balanced the Apolline search for beauty with the Titanic forces of nature that were embodied in the god Dionysus. The latter was the most enigmatic figure in the Greek Parthenon. His vitality was completely foreign to the Romans who crudely transformed him into Bacchus or the god of wine. The Attic god must also be differentiated from the deity of the Dionysiac Barbarians, who caricatured his divinity as sexual license, wanton destruction and vengeful cruelty. His being was strictly anathema to the medieval world, which reconstituted the horned god as either the devil or the Antichrist.

Nietzsche clearly imbued this rather mysterious Greek god with many of the vital qualities that he found missing in Christian and Kantian ethics. Although Dionysus was obviously a symbolic alternative to the sterility and coldness of Christianity, however, there was a sense in which he remained a distinctly Greek deity. Nietzsche was careful to affirm as much of the Attic character of Dionysus as possible, precisely because he did not want to aid and abet the transformation of Dionysus into a romantic figure. We have already suggested that Nietzsche strenuously disapproved of the entire romantic agenda. For him, romanticism was earthly transcendence rather than affirmation. Romanticism only had power as a critique; it was impotent when it came to changing the conditions of existence. Dionysus, on the other hand, symbolized the Attic ideal of engaging life and suffering, one’s own terms whenever possible. Dionysus taught men not only to accept the pain of existence, but also to rise above it through laughter. In contrast to the romantic warrior, Dionysus was not at war with the world. He was comfortable with life without necessarily being complacent about the human condition. This “blissfully frivolous” spirit, simultaneously divine and human, was the first superman. Nietzsche may not have fully realized the superman in his characterization of Dionysus when The Birth of Tragedy was first published in 1872, but he clearly identified Dionysus and Zarathustra in the new introduction that he wrote for the 1886 reprint. “To put it in the words of that Dionysical monster who bears the name of Zarathustra…:

This crown of the laughing one, this rosary-crown: I myself set this crown on my head, I myself have sanctified my laughter. I could find no one else today strong enough to do so.

This image of Dionysus clearly was indispensable to a world-weary fin de siecle scholar with a propensity towards morbid preoccupations. But he was not the only, or even the most important of the Greek gods of tragedy. Apollo held equal footing with Dionysus in the mental map of the Greek tragedians. This plastic god of form gave shape and significance to art. All that was disciplined and structured in art owed something to Apollo and truly great Greek art was described as Apolline. And since great art requires not only logic and proportion, but also creativity, imagination, dreaming, prophesying, and fantasising, Apollo came to symbolize all these qualities and more.

Disciplined Apollo, however, was usually found in the company of his counterpart Dionysus, an undisciplined deity characterized by a dangerous intoxication with life and nature. This imageless and virtually uncontrollable god exerted his power in music and the dance, in the lust for life, and the complete submergence of self in the moment. Dionysus operated on the most primitive, animalistic and visceral level of experience. Whereas even in dreams Apollo gave meaning to images and symbols, Dionysus operated directly on men, women and nature as works of art.

In order for an artist to create inspired art, he or she needs to simultaneously control and be controlled by life. Without inspiration, great art is impossible. But intuition and a propensity for self-abandonment are not, in and of themselves, sufficient for producing civilized art. During the high point of classical Athenian life, Apollo was always there to give Dionysian exuberance a shape and a structure. The Hellenic character was superbly adept at reconciling these two natural opponents in order to arrive at complete artistic balance. The tempestuous dissrythms, dynamics and trance like harmonies of musical Dionysus, for examples, were harnessed in the Greek dance and epic poetry. But their Olympic magic mountain was crystallized in Greek tragedy, particularly in and in the singing of the Greek chorus. In Attic tragedy, Apollo “gave birth to the entire Olympian world.”

It is one thing to recognize the existence of “all powerful artistic drives in nature.” It is quite another to redeem and release them in a “semblance” as majestic as Doric art. In order for this birthing process to occur, Apollo and Dionysus need to overcome their natural conflict and to recognize that their different drives have a common goal. Objectivity and subjectivity need to be reconciled to one another. The divided self needs to be transcended. “I ness” and “It ness”, creator and spectator, must dissolve into one another. Genuine art, says Nietzsche, resembles a “fairy-tale that can turn its eyes around and look at itself.” The true artist “is at one and the same time subject and object, simultaneously poet, actor and spectator.”

Nowhere is the blending of Dionysus and Apollo more evident than in the craft of music making. In order to understand the mystery of music, Nietzsche maintains that our starting point must be the folk song. In the poetry of the folk song, words are totally subservient to music. The use of music to create images or to deliver a lyric is aesthetically offensive precisely because the melody takes precedence over the images and the words. Images, such as the ones invoked in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, are entirely artificial word games because these kinds of symbolic representations are “quite incapable of informing us about the Dionysiac content of music” which can give rise to any number of possible images. Thus, folk melodies are capable of a sustaining any amount of linguistic content. What are critical are the changes in the melody “which in their variety, their sudden changes, their mad, head-over-heels, forward rush, reveal an energy utterly alien to the placid plow of epic semblance.” The words in a folk melody could be unintelligible gibberish and that would not change the brilliance of the music one iota. Whenever language “attempts to imitate music it only touches the outer surface of music, whereas the deepest meaning of music, for all the eloquence of lyric poetry, can never be brought even one step closer to us.”

Nietzsche needs to have his readers understand the Dionysiac content of music because he wants to make an intricate argument about the genesis of Greek tragedy. This argument can be summarized as follows: 1) Greek drama evolved from an essentially musical domain, i.e. the Greek chorus; 2) while the Greek chorus comments on behaviour of the protagonists, they cannot be defined as either a popular assembly or the civilized voice of the state of nature; 3) their origin is much more fundamentally naturalistic and Dionysiac since they evolved from the Greek chorus of satyrs; 4) the Hellenic voice of the Greek chorus is simultaneously profound and exquisite, capable of incorporating the “most severe suffering” while comforting the spectator through the melody of the song; 5) what separates the stirrings and longings contained in the universal chorus from the nothing of the Buddhist is an extraordinary strength of will; 6) the ability to suffer all the cruelties of human existence and maintain the will to survive through it all is supported by art. “Art saves him, and through art life saves him — for itself.”

Acquired knowledge cannot sustain the human will to act. Shakespeare, a genuine inheritor of the tragic insights of the Greek, recognized this very well. The lesson of Hamlet no amount of knowledge, and no amount of reflection on that knowledge, can propel human beings into action. Indeed, too much knowledge renders action repulsive because no amount of industry can change the fundamentals of the human condition or remedy the essential meaningless of the human condition. Only art can heal human pain and sustain the human will to survive. The wisdom of the Greeks was the deeper wisdom of Dionysus who reveals the enormous gulp between true nature and the cultural lie. Man is not the centre of the universe; man’s original connection to the universe is primal; its symbol is the satyr — part man, part nature. The satyr continues to plays a critical role as the connector and a symbol of identification with the universal in the Greek chorus — the Dionysiac mass.

If the entire world is a stage, Nietzsche observes, then the origins of Greek theatre provide us with a profound insight into human cultural development. Even the architectural layout of Greek theatres and the masks worn by the members of the chorus remind us that human life is mystical and magical at its core. The Greek theatre is “reminiscent of a lonely mountain valley with the chorus, a “self-mirroring of Dionysiac man”, as its most simple and sublime focus. Whenever a culture moves too far from this Dionysiac identification, whenever aesthetic phenomenon become too abstract, it begins to lose its way. Shakespeare’s Hamlet represents a soul or a spirit that has become too complex, abstract and artificial. He can no longer see life for what it is, but gets caught up in the kind of analysis that makes his life increasingly repulsive.

Nietzsche clearly believed that the primal character of the Greek chorus reflected a profound truth. Human beings continually need to reconnect with their primal reality in order to: 1) rekindle Dionysiac excitement; 2) share and thereby transcend our suffering; and 3) lose our partial selves in an “eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life.” But the hero or protagonist of Greek drama, imagined rather than realistically portrayed, was not expected to reside forever in this mystical domain. Greek drama was decidedly Apollonian in its emphasis on release and redemption. Identification with primal being was the prelude to re-energizing our original and childlike enchantment with, and acceptance of the world. The literary genres of epic poetry, the dithyrambic chorus of Greek tragedy, and Buddhist chants make us forget for a few moments that we are designed more for action than abstract reflection. A catharsis, and transformation, occurs when the spectator dramatically views the action from inside the chorus and outside himself. It is at precisely this moment that he is capable of the “Apolline perfection of his state.” When the primal world of being reunites with the Apolline world of images, human understanding is complete. The path of the dramatic hero, and the understanding of the spectator, is crystal clear. Thought and language become in Nietzsche’s words “simple, transparent, beautiful.” Our surface world of symbols, speech and action reflect the freshness of a sunny morning after a dark and stormy night.

Thus far, Nietzsche has focused more on the significance of Dionysus than Apollo, on passivity rather than activity, on connection rather than individuation. The Dionysiac tide appears to swell and then to “lift the separate little waves of individuals on to its back.” But Greek tragedy can move from this state quickly and dramatically into image making, transformation, and urgency of action. The Greeks were experts Apollonians when it came to the dramatic presentation of the “titanically striving individual.” Aeschylus’ Prometheus is just such a figure. He embodies a strong sense of justice; he faces the wrath of the Gods in bringing knowledge to men; and he is able to endure immense suffering in order to carry we fragile human beings on his Atlas-like shoulders. In the very earliest days of Greek drama, paradoxically, Dionysus also represented the all-suffering God. But Dionysus was soon given a more cosmic and ideal role as the Greek tragedians began to realize the deeper significance of the Dionysiac condition and chorus.

The Apollonian dreamer and creator, like the heroic protagonist of Greek theatre, can only succeed, however, if he accepts the legitimacy and legacy of Dionysus. This is what is symbolized in Euripides’ Bacchae, when Demeter is stuck in continual mourning until she is allowed to give birth to Dionysus — not for the first, but for the second time. Without this fundamental and primal unity, there is no hope of comfort in tragic drama or a tragic world. The heroic individual, who goes it completely alone, is doomed to unhappiness. The successful Apollonian, and the Olympic magic mountain, must embrace Dionysus.

Apollonian culture, and with it Greek tragedy, rose and fell during the Attic period. When it fell, it was largely by its own hands as a new generation of playwrights not only killed off Dionysus with persistent regularity, but also lampooned the entire mythical tradition that gave rise to the Apollonian-Dionysiac synthesis. The new Greek comedy was not only far to frivolous and mocking to sustain the kind of serious excitement and catharsis of classic tragedy, but it elevated the mocking and sly individual over the patriotic hero. Greek tragedy was maintained and even praised as the representative literature of the youth of Greece, but this was at the price of fossilization and increasing impotence. Public virtue was usurped by public pandemonium, which is all right I suppose if you prefer The Three Stooges to The Seven Samurai. Euripides, in particular, paraded and lampooned the Greek divinities alongside Athenian politicians. Ironically, it was only Euripides immense respect and understanding of traditional Greek drama that allowed him to mock it so effectively.

For Nietzsche, Euripides expelled “the original and all-powerful Dionysiac element from tragedy to re-build tragedy in a new an pure form on the foundations of a non Dionysiac art, morality, and view of the world.” In later life, Euripides regretted the hubris that allowed him to destroy the Attic vision, but it was too late. The temple lay in ruins. According to Nietzsche, the radical cultural tendency that Euripides was reflecting was Socratic thought. Socrates and his student Plato insisted on the value of the constantly examined life. The ultimate product of all this critical reflection, of course, is knowledge. But this is not just any kind of knowledge; it is knowledge that passes the test of reason. It is not the mysterious knowledge of the Dionysiac, nor is it the truth of the artist. In fact, Plato banned poets, presumably even epic poets, from his ideal Republic on the grounds that they did not deal with reality and were therefore fundamentally dishonest. Socratic knowledge can involve emotional knowledge, but the emotions it catalogues are either filtered through reason and logic or are limited those individual feelings of pleasure and pain, that the classical Greeks wanted to transform and balance through primal dramatic therapy.

Socrates did not understand or appreciate classical Greek tragedy. Euripides certainly did, but he prided himself on being the literary midwife to a brave new world that elevated the individual and his reason. The new enlightenment that “atrophied” the old classical sense of balance affirmed the virtue of “knowing nothing” that was not absolutely certain to reason. Instinct, intuition and insight — the tools of the artist — were deemed useless and therefore laid at the door at the workshop of logical Socratism. Those public figures who recognized the dangerous tendencies in Socratic rationalism did nothing to help their cause by bringing Socrates to trial and allowing him to adopt the mantle of martyr for a calm and collected rationalism. Plato was typical of many young Hellenes; he “threw himself down before this image with all the passionate devotion of his enthusiastic soul.

The Platonic academy, so cynical of anything smacking of mysticism or mystery, now became the symbol of mental alertness and the all-powerful guide to religious organization and scientific analysis in the West. Its characteristics were: 1) the cold and calculating assessment that Socrates himself exemplified on his deathbed; 2) extreme neutrality, impartiality and objectivity in the search for truth that could be justified logically and empirically; 3) a decoupling of art, ethics and science into separate domains; 4) the relentless search for truth even at the risk of driving us into a cultural and environmental abyss; 5) and extreme hostility to all other ways of knowing.

Nietzsche’s distaste for Plato and Socrates, and for the entire Western scientific tradition, is palpable. He believes that they are responsible for leading us to the “restlessly barbaric turmoil known as ‘the present’.” He accuses them of “theoretical optimism” that results in “practical pessimism”, a pessimism that today negates human Will and contributes to morbid civilizations. He calls Socrates a mystagogue of science and accuses him of contributing to a society in which such pestilences as migrations, wars of extinction and even “suicide have become habitual.” Eventually, the mentally deformed but busy scientist discovers that the search for truth is chimeral:

To his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medicine.

At this point in time (1872), his friendship with Richard Wagner, Nietzsche held out some hope that the tragic vision could be restored through the power of music. He held out German music as the artistic reconnection and rebirth of the Dionysiac spirit. He also described the new configuration as a music-making Socrates. Such hopes were all in vain and, in any case, Nietzsche moved on to a new intellectual agenda in the form of the superman and the triumph of this same superman’s prophetic will.

The Camel, the Lion and the Child

A great deal of nonsense has been written about Nietzsche’s superman. Our choice is to go deeply into the literature and sort out fact from impression, which would take us on too long a journey. Alternately, we can briefly summarize the concept of the superman and show how it rounds out Nietzsche’s program for social rebirth. Let’s go with the latter, on the understanding that we can explore this fascinating concept more fully in the optional class or online.

In his most famous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche describes the superman as a combination of intelligence, artistic insight and indomitable will. The superman is one who: 1) understands the crisis facing western civilization; 2) sees the need for a cultural rebirth that reintegrates art and understanding, and that discovers the art in life; 3) is able to endure the pain of living in a society where art and thought are disconnected; and 4) has the will to power that will allow him to create new values for others. The often overlooked dilemma of the superman is that his (Nietzsche’s superman is invariably male) his acute understanding of the disease affecting civilization requires him to endure and rise above a morbid and meaningless society that sees more clearly and painfully than others. Unlike the citizen of Attic Greece, the superman has to take this path alone and without support. Invariably, he will be misunderstood and maligned by the modern flies of the marketplace who are only contented because they are so shallow. Consider, for example, that The Birth of Tragedy met with devastating reviews when it was first published in 1772.

Nietzsche never claimed to be a superman. There are only glimmerings of the superman in the first edition of The Birth of Tragedy. His new introduction to the revised edition of 1886 suggests that Nietzsche felt that he had finally squared the circle by creating a literary persona that, at least, was a genuine prototype for the superman — the sage-like prophet Zarathustra. Nietzsche’s creation has learned to laugh at life and to rise above the ‘present’ without possessing the romantic desire for rejection. It really does sounds as though Nietzsche finally found a degree of comfort in the world. Three short years later, however, he experienced a severe mental breakdown from which he never recovered. The last eleven years of his life were spent as an invalid, living consecutively with his mother and his sister. Friedrich Nietzsche did in Weimar on the 25^th of August, 1900.

Nietzsche’s superman superficially resembles the charismatic intellectual cum hero of Thomas Carlyle. One clearly needed to have the knowledge and wisdom of a sage in order to act as the midwife to a cultural rebirth. But Nietzsche’s superman is much more complex, fascinating, fully conceived and touching than any clever or charismatic hero is.

Camel

The superman begins his journey as a camel. A camel is built for endurance; this beast of burden can survive suffering that would break the back of most creatures. By his own design, the camel goes deeply into the desert in order to escape the influence of a sick civilization. There the camel stays until he is ready to transform.

Lion

Once the camel is ready, he sheds his skin and evolves into a lion. The lion is fierce and unafraid. The lion confronts a morbid civilization and tears it limb from limb, totally destroying its meaningless values. The lion destroys everything that is weak and diseased in order to create the environment for a new society.

Child

The lion is a powerful destructive force, but the lion can only destroy and not create. In order to create the new law tables, the aggressive lion must be transformed into an innocent child. The child is open to life and experience. The child is energetic, excited and easily enchanted. The child embraces life and life embraces the child in a mutual act of creation.

Whereas the child comes to his openness naturally, not so the superman. Overcoming pessimism, morbidity and rejection involves a tremendous capacity for rising above suffering and learning to laugh at the vagaries of life. In Steppenwolf, that great admirer of Nietzsche, Herman Hesse, describes what is involved in learning how to be a superman who laughs at life. The journey is personal voyage that leaves the candidate on the razors edge of suicide or madness. No one ever said it was going to be easy to endure and cure a sick society. Least of all Fred Nietzsche.