The Apollonian and the Dionysian
아폴론적인 것과 디오니소스적인 것
The two artistic drives Nietzsche introduced in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to explain Greek art. The Apollonian is the power of clear, dreamlike images, measure and the boundaries of the individual; the Dionysian is the power by which, in intoxication, those boundaries collapse and the individual becomes one with nature. Nietzsche saw Greek tragedy as the union of the two, and later made Dionysus the symbol of his own philosophy's affirmation of life as a whole.
In depth
What did The Birth of Tragedy argue?
Nietzsche became professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at twenty-four and in 1872 published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. It begins: aesthetics would gain much if we came to see, not only by logical insight but with the immediate certainty of intuition, "that the continuous development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian", just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, with continual strife and only periodic reconciliation.
daß die Fortentwickelung der Kunst an die Duplizität des Apollinischen und des Dionysischen gebunden ist: in ähnlicher Weise, wie die Generation von der Zweiheit der Geschlechter, bei fortwährendem Kampfe und nur periodisch eintretender Versöhnung, abhängt.
Nietzsche proposed to think of the two drives first as "the separate art worlds of dream and intoxication". Apollo, god of light, rules the beautiful images that appear in dreams and the clearly outlined arts of sculpture and epic. Borrowing Schopenhauer's terms, Nietzsche called Apollo the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis: the power that lets each individual keep its own boundaries and exist serenely in beautiful appearance. Dionysus, god of wine and festival, rules the terror and rapture that come when those boundaries collapse. In spring festivals or under narcotic drink the individual forgets himself and becomes one with others and with nature as a whole; music and dance are his arts.
Why is Greek tragedy the union of the two?
Nietzsche held that Athenian tragedy was born from the chorus of the Dionysian festival. The music of the chorus drew the audience into Dionysian intoxication, letting them feel the suffering and contradiction at the bottom of life, while the hero and the dialogue on stage presented that experience in Apollonian images. The Greeks knew more deeply than anyone how terrible and fleeting life is, and they bore it through an art that joined the two forces. In Nietzsche's famous sentence, "only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world eternally justified."
Tragedy, Nietzsche argued, died with Euripides and Socrates: Socratic optimism, which seeks to reason everything out and explain it, drove the Dionysian from the stage. Nietzsche hoped for the rebirth of tragedy in Richard Wagner's music drama and dedicated the book to him. The philologists received it harshly; the young classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff published a polemic accusing Nietzsche of abandoning scholarly method.
How did Nietzsche revise the concept?
Fourteen years later, in 1886, Nietzsche added an "Attempt at a Self-Criticism" to a new edition. He confessed that he had "laboriously tried to express, with Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas, strange and new valuations that ran fundamentally counter to the spirit and taste of Kant and Schopenhauer". Schopenhauer saw resignation in tragedy, whereas what Nietzsche saw in Dionysus was not resignation but the affirmation of life as a whole, suffering included. He also regretted that he had "attached hopes where there was nothing to hope for", pinning his expectations on German music and Wagner, with whom he had meanwhile broken.
daß ich mühselig mit Schopenhauerischen und Kantischen Formeln fremde und neue Wertschätzungen auszudrücken suchte
For the late Nietzsche, Dionysus became not one artistic drive but the name of his whole philosophy. The pairing of Apollo and Dionysus gave way to the opposition of Dionysus and the Crucified. Ecce Homo (1888) ends with the line: "Have I been understood? Dionysus against the Crucified." It sets Dionysus, who affirms suffering as part of life, against Christianity, which denies life because of suffering.
The pairing itself was not Nietzsche's invention. Johann Joachim Winckelmann in art history and Friedrich Schlegel in literary history used similar contrasts, and in philosophy Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling first set it up. Up to Schelling, however, the clear Apollonian spirit was ranked higher; it was Nietzsche who put the Dionysian first. In the twentieth century the contrast became a stock phrase in literary and art criticism and in anthropology for order and intoxication, form and vitality.
How did Marxist aesthetics view the question?
A few years before Nietzsche asked about the secret of Greek tragedy, Marx faced the same question. In the "Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", written in 1857 and published only in 1903, Marx wrote that it is not hard to understand that Greek art and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development, and went on: "The difficulty is that they still give us artistic pleasure and in a certain respect count as a norm and an unattainable model." Marx sought the answer in the unrepeatable charm of humanity's childhood.
Die Schwierigkeit ist, daß sie für uns noch Kunstgenuß gewähren und in gewisser Beziehung als Norm und unerreichbare Muster gelten.
Here the two part ways. Marx tried to explain Greek art starting from the social conditions that produced it; Nietzsche explained it by a metaphysics of drives rooted in life itself rather than in social conditions. Marxist aestheticians, György Lukács among them, mostly criticised Nietzsche's cult of Dionysus as an irrationalism that put intoxication and myth in place of reason. Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School, on the other hand, took Nietzsche's aesthetics seriously out of his concern with art's power to resist order and rationalisation.