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Callid Keefe-Perry Prof. Jason Peck Nietzsche and the Nietzscheans 20 March 2013 Nietzsche's Illusory Hegelian Odor: Die Kunsttriebe and Pseudo-Synthesis Overturned in The Birth of Tragedy Dissatisfied with contemporary society in general and contemporary art theory in particular, The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche's critique of what ails his peers as well as his explanation of what made art of the past so great. Specifically, Nietzsche was interested in championing the Classical Hellenistic plays prior to Euripides, who he said, destroyed the greatness of Greek tragedy. At the heart of Nietzsche's complaint is a typological claim that all human experience and artistic creation is a balance between two competing drives and desires: the artistic impulses ( Kunsttriebe) of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. This paper explores Nietzsche's categorizations of those two drives, and how he understands them to be in tension. Despite the initial appearance of a distinctly Hegelian synthesis which argues for Nietzsche articulation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound as the resolution and reconciliation of the tensions produced by the Apollonian and the Dionysian artistic impulses, this paper concludes with a rejection of the claim that Nietzsche was enacting a conclusive synthetic gesture. Instead, I argue that at the core of his aesthetic typology there is in spite of his later, general aversion to metaphysics an essentialist claim about the nature of aesthetics, human purposiveness, and reality.

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Derived from the names of two Greek gods, the Nietzschean categories to be considered are perhaps best understood by first recalling the nature and purview of their inspiring mythic figures. Apollo and Dionysus were brothers and both were patrons of artists. However, while Apollo was also the god of the sun and of reason, Dionysus oversaw wine, madness, and excess. Interestingly, whereas many sets of opposite siblings become foils for one another in myth, Apollo and Dionysus were not usually narratively paired as opponents. Given Nietzsche's affinity for classical Greek culture it is more than likely that he was aware of this dynamic when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy. Indeed, it may be precisely because they are in tension but not at war that he did choose them. In describing the two worldviews and artistic impulses, Nietzsche proceeds by means of analogy, equating the Apollonian with dreaming and the Dionysian with drunkenness. Though they are artistic impulses, they pre-exist the artist. That is, they are forces which break forth out of nature itself, without the mediation of the human artist (BoT 2). In experiencing the Dionysian and Apollonian, humanity especially artists essentially reflects the ultimate nature of reality, of the eternal primordial unity ( des ewigen Ur-einen) and our sense of separation from it. As Nietzsche writes, there is a unity of all existing things... individuation is the ultimate foundation of all evil [and] art the joyful hope that the spell of individuation is there for us to break, as a premonition of a re-established unity. That is, art is that which reminds us that we are part of something larger than ourselves, preparing us for the possibility of a re-established unity. Prior to this union however, the Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies appear regardless of their actual essence to us as in tension. That is, they present themselves to our experience as

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countervailing forces. As such, both will be taken up in turn, exploring how it is that Nietzsche categorizes each of them.

TENSION

The Dionysian is that which is One, a loss of any sense of individuated personal identity. Via Dionysius' godly purview, Nietzsche associates this with fertility, intoxication, and orgiastic revelry. Purely Dionysian art is music, contains no discrete images or forms, and kindles feelings of passion that encourage the listener to forget their own sense of self and be subsumed by that which is (primordially) greater. Exposed to the Dionysian through the channel of a piece crafted by an Artistic genius, for a short time we really are the primordial essence itself and feel its unbridled lust for and joy in existence... We are transfixed by the raging barbs of this torment in the very moment when we become, as it were, one with the immeasurable primordial delight in existence and when, in Dionysian rapture, we sense the indestructible and eternal nature of this joy (BoT 17). We do not experience the Dionysian as individuals, says Nietzsche, but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united" (BoT 17). When one is confronted with the experience of the Dionysian it strikes with a kind of terror and immensity: the reality of existence is that each of us is but achild of accident and toil, and the best that we can hope for is not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing, or, barring that (since we have already been born), at least to die soon (BoT 3). Nietzsche says that this is artistically speaking best epitomized in the dithyramb, a form of odic Greek poem honoring Dionysius himself. In hearing dithyramb, writes Nietzsche, there is a kind of transcendent or

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perhaps descendent break with one's self of individuality and reason. Man is aroused to the highest intensity of all his symbolic capabilities; something never felt forces itself into expression... the sense of oneness as the presiding genius of form, in fact, of nature itself... not just the symbolism of the mouth, of the face, and of the words, but the full gestures of the dance, all the limbs moving to the rhythm. And then the other symbolic powers grow, those of the music, in rhythm, dynamics, and harmony with sudden violence (BoT 3). The Dionysian is the fully-fleshed rhythmic pulse of a darkened dance club where the lights are kept so low that faces cannot be seen, but bodies can be felt, all moving together with sexual, pounding, power. Therefore the Dionysian artist produces work that induces or invites a state of intoxication which has both a dangerousness to it with inhibitions gone, something might happen that would be regretted in the morning and a sense of relief at least for tonight there is only this music and movement. That is, Nietzsche has a dual emphasis: the individual not only forgets about self-hood, but also celebrates such forgetting as the (temporary) defeat of anxiety and suffering. It is as if for the duration of the Dionysian exposure an individual's individuality ceases to exist and becomes nothing, which Nietzsche thought was the best we could hope for. The Apollonian impulse, in contrast, is about life and light, about discreteness and distancing. Or, to be more Nietzschean, it is about the illusion of those things, since primordial reality is undifferentiated. The Apollonian is marked by restraint, reason, and harmony. Whereas the Dionysian impulse is towards unification and the production of a sense of ease (and terror) from the lack of

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fragmentation, the Apollonian impulse is characterized by movement toward personal individuation and the production of the beautiful. The Apollonian artist produces work that highlights contrast and suggests a meaningfulness to life beyond the caprice claimed by the Dionysian assertion that we are all but children of accident and toil. Nietzsche refers to Apollo as the interpreter of dreams (BoT 4), suggesting that the Apollonian drive is towards that which explains the purpose or meaning to the chaotic reality claimed by Dionysianism. Apollo confronts us... as the divine manifestation of the principii individuationis, the only thing through which the eternally attained goal of the primordial oneness, its redemption through illusion, takes place: he shows us, with awe-inspiring gestures, how the entire world of torment is necessary, so that through it the individual is pushed to the creation of the redemptive vision and then, absorbed in contemplation of that vision, sits quietly in his rowboat, tossing around in the middle of the ocean (BoT 4). That is, Nietzsche's Apollo tells us to keep pressing on, over-encouragingly pushing us with the reminder No pain. No gain. The Apollonian illusion is that there is an all-encompassing, satisfactorily-explanatory, redemptive vision which we could each understand if we would just put in a couple more sets and reps at the gym of life. This Apollonian dream, then, is not an emphasis on an unconscious, vague, Freudian urge, but instead on a kind of focused, imagistic, fixed, series of explanations as to why how reality is the way it is. Nietzsche writes that the purest Apollonian form of expression are the plastic arts since sculpture is exactly fixed and solely about form and

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representation. Its effect, says Nietzsche, arises because of its image not any originary (that is, Dionysian) impulse. The plastic artist, as well as his relation, the epic poet, is absorbed in the pure contemplation of images. The Dionysian musician totally lacks every image and is in himself only and entirely the original pain and original reverberation of that image. The lyrical genius feels a world of images and metaphors grow up out of the mysterious state of unity and of renunciation of the self. These have a color, causality, and speed entirely different from that world of the plastic artist and of the writer of epics (BoT 5). The healing function of Apollonianism, then, is in its solely provisional nature. That is, the highest task of art, the one we should truly call serious... [is] saving the eye from a glimpse into the horror of the night and through the healing balm of illusion rescuing the subject from the spasms brought about by the stirring of the will (BoT 19). The illusory nature of Apollonian art, the fact that it is just a mimetic representation of the original pain and original reverberation of that image is precisely what is healing: it stops us from going over the edge. But!... we must be wary lest we come to believe that the illusions of the Apollonian images are complete and full, that they are actually a fully conveyed version of the world-as-it-is. When that happens as is the case with light German opera art has degenerated merely into a tendency to empty and scattered diversion, a metamorphosis of Aeschylean man into the Alexandrian cheerful man (BoT 19). This begets the question central to the next section: what about Aeschylus was so great?

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APPARENT SYNTHESIS

These two very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate in them the contest of that opposition, which the common word Art only seems to bridge, until at last, through a marvelous metaphysical act of the Greek will, they appear paired up with each other and, as this pair, finally produce Attic tragedy, as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art (BoT 1). At first glace, it appears that Nietzsche's argument is that Attic tragedies, as best exemplified by Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, are the ultimate culmination of art because they weave together both impulses. That is, while it is the case that the Aeschylean Prometheus is a Dionysian mask, it is also nevertheless the case that because of the deep desire for justice present in the play Aeschylus betrays, to the one who understands, [Prometheus'] paternal descent from Apollo, the god of individuation and just boundaries (BoT 9). Because, says this argument, Nietzsche describes at length how it is that the Attic chorus functions as a stand-in for cultic excess opposite, and tied, to the solitary, individuated hero, he believes that they are both the culmination and ideal model of artistry. This perspective is further supported by Nietzsche's claim that we must always remind ourselves that the public for Attic tragedy rediscovered itself in the chorus, and that everything is only a huge sublime chorus of dancing and singing satyrs or of those people who permit themselves to be represented by these satyrs (BoT 8). Put another way, it appears that the Aristotelian mark of poetic genius is also a mark of the artistic ideal: the familiar seen in the strange and vice versa, Dionysianism and Apollonianism mixed. Thus, Nietzsche writes that he can imagine that a man wandering under high Ionic colonnades, glancing upwards to a horizon marked off with pure and

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noble lines, with reflections of his transfigured form beside him in shining marble, around him people solemnly striding or moving delicately, with harmoniously resounding sounds and a speech of rhythmic gestures... [would have to] extend his hand to Apollo and cry out: 'Blessed Hellenic people! How great Dionysus must be among you, if the Delphic god thinks such magic necessary to heal your dithyrambic madness!'... and to this man's cry of Apollonian praise an old Athenian, looking at him with the noble eye of Aeschylus, might reply: 'But, you strange foreigner, say this as well: How much these people must have suffered in order to be able to become so beautiful! But now follow me to the tragedy and sacrifice with me in the temple of both divinities' (BoT 25). Contained in the closing section of The Birth of Tragedy, the passage above seems to highlight mutuality and give credence to the perspective that this is Nietzsche's sense of the pinnacle of human artistry. Indeed, given that the text closes with an invitation to sacrifice at the temple of both divinities, it is easy to understand the reading by which simultaneously dual, melded worship and sacrifice is lifted up as Nietzsche's ideal. In fact, at the end of his writing career, in Ecce Homo, even Nietzsche claims that The Birth of Tragedy smells offensively Hegelian (EH in BoT 1), that is, too full of a claims to synthesis and resolution. While I understand how it is that it can seem (even to later Nietzsche!) that Nietzsche is trying to put forth the Attic tragedies as a synthetic resolution to the tensions of our primary artistic impulses, I believe appropriating from Mikhail Bakhtin that all texts are dialogical enterprises. Put another way, even though there may actually be synthetic gestures in The Birth of Tragedy, I want to suggest that there are also other, non-Hegelian, conversations taking place. That is, what Nietzsche himself detected as an offensively Hegelian

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odor may itself just be the illusion of a Hegelian odor, brought to rise by Apollo himself, so as to distract from an exploration that might well plunge us back into the primordial.

TRANSVALUATION OF DIE KUNSTTRIEBE

Presumably, the normative value of understanding the essential artistic impulses of humanity would rest in their capacity to shed light on human nature and our place and function in the world. What I am suggesting is that in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche subverts this perspective, pointing the way towards an understanding of Die Kunsttriebe not as valuable for their capacity to shed light on human nature and our place and function in the world, but as human nature and our place and function in the world. That is, the aesthetic phenomena which appear as Dionysianism and Apollonianism are not merely regulative principles of artistic human being, but constitutive ones: the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon" (BoT 24 + 25). To demonstrate that this might be the case I will show that what at first appears to be Nietzsche's claim of synthesis is actually not a fully synthetic move at all, going on to suggest what, then, is happening that makes it seem that this is the case. There are at least two ways to show that what seems to be a synthesis is, in fact, not that. First would be to claim that rather than a synthesis, Nietzsche is positing a direct parallel to Kant's Ding-an-sich and the mere appearance of the thing-in-itself. Seen this way, The Birth of Tragedy is merely replicating a kind of Kantian dualistic split between the thing-in-itself which is essentially monadic and undifferentiated, and humanity's experience of that nature, which appears to us as only fragmented and individuated. That is, reality is actually, truly, just purely Dionysian and the

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Apollonian impulse is actually, truly, just purely an illusory appearance which rises as a selfpreservationist response to the capriciousness of the world-as-it-is. A number of passages in The Birth of Tragedy seem to suggest this: In the Dionysian dithyramb man is aroused to the highest intensity of all his symbolic capabilities; something never felt forces itself into expression, the destruction of the veil of Maja, the sense of oneness as the presiding genius of form, in fact, of nature itself (BoT 2). Only to the extent that the [Dionysian] genius in the act of artistic creation is fused with that primordial artist of the world does he know anything about the eternal nature of art (BoT 5). In Dionysian art and in its tragic symbolism this same nature speaks to us with its true, undisguised voice: Be as I am! Under the incessant changes in phenomena, the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally forcing things into existence, eternally satisfied with the changing nature of appearances!(BoT 16 ) These passages could indeed work to suggest that The Birth of Tragedy does not need to be read as a synthetic gesture, and is instead a kind of Kantian play of appearances over the face of the-world-asit-is, the eternally changing ground to all being. However, as tempting as this method is, I do not think that rebuking synthesis by asserting the dominance of the Dionysian is the way to proceed. There is a significant problem that stands in the way of this version of balking the synthetic argument: Dionysiansim also gets categorized as illusory and/or temporary!

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Throughout The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche refers to Dionysianism as a form of drunkenness, or as something with similar effects, and though we might think the night will continue forever at last call when we are still ordering drinks, come the morning (and the credit card statement for paying the tab) we harshly crash back into sobriety. Drunkenness is not our natural (or ground) state, and yet Nietzsche made this comparison regardless. It suggests that the primordial unity found in the Dionysian is not the truth of the-world-as-it-is, in any ultimate or eternal way. Furthermore, beyond the temporal problems with drunkenness, there is also the fact that the Dionysian is itself repeatedly referred to as a form of enchantment ( Verzauberung): The enchantment speaks out in his gestures... he himself now moves in as lofty and ecstatic a way as he saw the gods move in his dream. The man is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art: the artistic power of all of nature, to the highest rhapsodic satisfaction of the primordial unity, reveals itself here in the transports of intoxication. (BoT 1) In the dramatic process there is already a surrender of individuality by the entry into a strange nature. And, in fact, this phenomenon breaks out like an epidemic; an entire horde feels itself enchanted in this way (BoT 8). Now the dithyrambic chorus takes on the task of stimulating the mood of the listeners right up to the Dionysian level, so that when the tragic hero appears on the stage, they do not see something like an awkward masked person but a visionary shape born, as it were, out of their own enchantment (BoT 8).

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The most sensible opponentlike Pentheus in the Bacchaeis unexpectedly charmed by Dionysus and later runs in this enchanted state to his own destruction (BoT 12).

If The Birth of Tragedy neither posits that Dionysianism and Apollonianism are joined in synthesis via Aeschylean Attic tragedy (though it seems like it does occasionally posit this), nor argues for a Kantian distancing of Dionysian reality as Ding-an-sich and Apollonian reality as mere appearance (though it seems like it also occasionally posits this), there must be another explanation that rebukes the claim that Nietzsche was simply enacting a synthesis. Indeed. The issue is that when we start looking for the best type of art for representing reality, hunting and pecking among the categories of Apollonian, Dionysian, or Both-at-Once-ian for the one that gets it right, we have fallen into a trap. That is, it is not the Subject subsumed by the Object (Dionysianism), the Subject mastering the Object (Apollonianism), or some mix of the two (as found in Aeschylean Attic tragedy), that is ideal. In fact, the ideal it is not about categories at all, but about action!* Nietzsche overturns the apparent Kantian-esque duality between appearances and the-world-as-it-is, not with Aeschylean Attic tragedy functioning as a Hegelian synthesis of Dionysiusism and Apollonianism, but by positing something else entirely: humanity exists to create and to continue creating. In Nietzsche's own words, the metaphysical consolation with which, as I
* Nietzsche later returns to this theme in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life where he writes that We need [history] for life and for action, not for a comfortable turning away from life and from action or for merely glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act. We wish to serve history only insofar as it serves living. Here he seems to be making a similar claim for art: it is not worth pursuing if it does not serve life. It should be noted that I think that however you cut it, I do not believe later Nietzsche would have been pleased with The Birth of Tragedy. I am merely trying to suggest that there are traces of an argument in the text itself with lend themselves to an alternate (non-Hegelian) reading even though Nietzsche distanced himself from it.

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am immediately indicating here, every true tragedy leaves us, that, in spite of all the transformations in phenomena, at the bottom of everything life is indestructibly powerful and delightful... Art saves him, and through art, life saves him (BoT 7). In this conception both Apollonian and Dionysian drives, both of the Kunsttriebe, are either (a) real but ephemeral or (b) illusory. Or, perhaps better than another either A or B, it can be said that they are both real and illusory: Nietzsche understands language itself to be arbitrary, and anything said about any primal impulse cannot be ultimately true (in a positivist sense) because language itself does not have the capacity to communicate knowledge in a pure register. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments! How far this oversteps the canons of certainty!.. The different languages, set side by side, show that what matters with words is never the truth, never an adequate expression; else there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (for that is what pure truth, without consequences, would be) is quite incomprehensible to the creators of language and not at all worth aiming for (TaL 1). The Kunsttriebe are illusory in the sense that they are mythic and do not directly correspond to

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concrete, observable phenomenon. They are true in the sense that Nietzsche's grounds for truth are not epistemological but ethical and cultural. Nietzsche writes dissatisfied with contemporary society in general and contemporary art theory in particular, taking issue with the shallow operatic forms of theatre that were passing as art. In that context he wrote The Birth of Tragedy, claiming that the downfall of tragedy was at the same time the downfall of myth and that without myth every culture forfeits its healthy creative natural power: only a horizon surrounded with myth completes the unity of an entire cultural movement... (BoT 23). What Nietzsche wants is a strong, reality-addressing Germany, not a populace sated by gaudy and vain light opera. He believes that myth must return with power and truth for that kind of healthy creative natural power to return as well, and so he embodies the very kind of mythic reasoning he hopes to see: he tries to jumpstart a Germanic reclamation of mythic power by reconfiguring aesthetic theory.

CONCLUSION

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche is performing a kind of Ouroboros dance, an enactment of the myths he is discussing: just as the Greeks gave a clear voice to the profound secret teachings of their contemplative art, not in ideas, but in the powerfully clear forms of their divine world (BoT 1), Nietzsche invites a mythic reading of his work not by propositionally demanding a certain response, but by providing a polyphonic and varied discourse which itself contains dissonant perspectives as well as holistic harmonies. My reading suggests that the reason for Nietzcshe writing The Birth of

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Tragedy and detailing the nature(s) of the Kunsttriebe is because myth itself wants to be vividly felt as a single instance of universality and truth staring into the infinite (BoT 17). That is, in Nietzsche's text myth exerts itself through Nietzche to promulgate itself. Or, perhaps rather than myth, it is the Will which is to blame. Its an eternal phenomenon: the voracious Will always finds a way to keep its creatures alive and to force them on to further living by an illusion spread over things. One man is fascinated by the Socratic desire for knowledge and the delusion that with it he will be able to heal the eternal wound of existence. Another is caught up by the seductive veil of artistic beauty fluttering before his eyes, still another by the metaphysical consolation that underneath the hurly-burly of appearances eternal life flows on indestructibly, to say nothing of the more common and almost even more powerful illusions which the Will holds ready at all times (BoT 18). Myth, Will, or Nietzsche, whoever or whatever is to blame, has produced a text that plays with its own goals, undermining the possibility that it can accomplish the thing it claimed to set out to do: to bring those two drives closer to us(BoT 1) so that we might more fully understand them and ourselves. Under scrutiny, those two drives do not become clearer or closer to us at all! In fact, just the opposite seems to happen: what seemed relatively clear-cut and binary becomes murkier and less distinct upon closer examination and reflection. As might a dream... I think that The Birth of Tragedy shows an early Nietzsche exploring the relationship between language, myth, ontology, and metaphysics. In it, myth via the hugely detailed descriptions of the

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differences between Dionysianism and Apollonianism is championed as a necessary component to healthy culture, art, and life. Or rather, since art does not present itself for us in order to make us, for example, better or to educate us(BoT 5), perhaps it is not that myth leads to art, which leads to a healthy society and a strong man, but rather, that a healthy society is myth leading to art, and the strong man is he who is saved by art. Being healthy is merely to realize that only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world eternally justified, and that our greatest human task is not to identify with the Dionysian chorus or with the Apollonian hero; or with the Artist or the Spectator; but to accept that the very ground of possibility by which Art is possible is humanity's self-reflection. Only to the extent that the genius in the act of artistic creation is fused with that primordial artist of the world [that is, himself ] does he know anything about the eternal nature of art, for in that state he is, in a miraculous way, like the weird picture of fairy tales, which can turn its eyes and contemplate itself. Now he is simultaneously subject and object, simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator (BoT 5; edit and emphasis added). Art is life and the Will mythically revealing themselves in human action and interpretation, and we should accept that artistic action and interpretation are endless and sufficient. Being human is being an artistic actor and interpreter.

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Works Cited Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Ian Johnston (trans.) Nanaimo, BC: Vancouver Island Univ. 2012. Web. 18 March 2013 http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm