Apollo, Dionysus and The Birth of Tragedy
‘The difficult relations between the two elements in tragedy may be symbolised by a fraternal union between the two deities: Dionysius speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo, finally, the language of Dionysius; thereby the highest goal of tragedy and of art in general is reached.’
In Greek mythology Apollo is the god of light, a pastoral
god and a god of prophecy. He is also, curiously, a musician god, the god of
song and the lyre. Dionysus, on the other hand, is the god of wine, vegetation,
of pleasures, and of civilisation in general. The deities may not receive their
exact due in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’; what matters is not how scholarly
Nietzsche’s representations of the gods’ respective characters are, but how he
uses their names to account for the confrontation and reconciliation of
different elements in the art of tragedy.
Nietzsche conceives art as expressing the spirit of a
nation; it is not unfair, therefore, that he relates the origin of tragedy, which
he considers a Greek affair, to Greek mythology, and to the balance in their
thought between orgiastic and political instincts.
‘Placed between India and Rome, and tempted to choose one
solution of the other, the Greeks managed a classically pure third mode of
existence.’
Whether this makes any sense culturally or chronologically, India,
and the Buddhist desire for Nirvana, are seen as representing the ecstatic
resignation to the negation of space, time and individuality. Rome, at the
other end of Nietzsche’s comparison, is used to designate rational, patriotic,
military strength and ambition. The combination of these two elements in Greece
is seen as a prophylactic, avoiding the dangers of the two extremes, whilst
offering their benefits. A similar combination of disparate properties is used
to describe the paradoxical nature of tragedy.
‘Myth shields us from music while at the same time giving
music its maximum freedom.’
Universal, orgiastic, destructive music, as Nietzsche
describes it, engages in a mutually advantageous relationship with the visual modelling
of myth and the hero figure, who shields the spectator from what would
otherwise have been an intolerable metaphysical burden. Nietzsche’s view of
tragedy stems from the role of spectator, being inspired by his experience of
the third act of Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’, and he uses this experience of
duality to relate ‘the birth of tragedy.’
Apollo, Nietzsche identifies with the concept of dream
reality as the inspiration for the verbal and plastic arts: poetry and writing,
sculpture and the visual arts. The sculptor Phidias is said to have beheld
ideal bodies in a dream, and he quotes Hans Sachs’ Die Meistersinger;
‘All poetry we ever
read
Is but true dreams
interpreted.’
The artist states the reality of illusion in the same way
that a philosopher might treat the illusion of reality. Schopenhauer defined
the mark of philosophic talent as the ability to view mankind and the world as
being in essence nothing but a dream. Apollo is the Greek figure for this
pre-Freudian, pre-Surrealist, ambiguity of the intertwining of dream and myth
in life and art.
‘the god of light reigns also over the fair illusion of our
inner world of fantasy.’
Sleep and dream serve a necessary function for the body in
the same way that art and the imagination serve a need of the mind and of life
in general, without necessarily claiming to be “life”, “truth” or “reality”
itself. It may be “a reality”, but it does not claim to be the only reality,
that would destroy the charm of “illusion”.
‘Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvellous divine
image of the principium individuationis, whose looks and gestures radiate the
full delight, wisdom, and beauty of “illusion”.’
Apollo presents the tranquil illusion that somehow the
individual is not ephemeral, insignificant, pathetically doomed. Nietzsche
quotes Schopenhauer’s The World As Will And Idea to provide himself with the
phrase ‘principium individuationis’, the principle which sustains the
individual in the face of reality. This in tragedy the most horrific events are
transformed by beauty, ‘redemption through illusion’.
Schopenhauer has also described the shattering of the
principium individuationis by the aw which seizes man when he is intoxicated by
a sense of the unknown and unknowable. The individual forgets himself and his
past through, for example, the use of narcotics or by the symbolic approach of
spring with all its possibilities of growth and new experience. Dionysus
represents the orgiastic and ecstatic reconciliation of man with man, and man
with nature. All is united, or reunited, in universal harmony and ‘mystical
Oneness’.
‘as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there
remained only shreds floating before the
vision of mystical Oneness.’
According to Hindu philosophy Maya is illusion, not in the
Apollonian sense, but in the philosophers’ sense that the material world can be
regarded as unreal. However Nietzsche’s view of primordial spirituality also
incorporates physicality. It is closer to the lecherous satyr than the Hindu
ascetic. The satyr is man’s Dionysiac prototype: an enthusiastic reveller, a
symbol of nature and sexual potency, also a prophet of wisdom and one who has
knowledge of Dionysiac suffering. Dionysus as a child was dismembered by the
Titans. There is some confusion or merging with the Cretan god, Zagreus, which one
story ingeniously solves when it appears that the Titans were jealous of
Dionysus/Zagreus, tore him to pieces and placed the remains in a cauldron. Zeus
managed to rescue his still beating heart and recreate Dionysus, while Zagreus,
as the remains, became an underworld divinity.
Dionysiac suffering, then, is the pains of individuation.
Dionysus is destroyed and yet he is eternal and triumphs by being reborn in a
new form.
‘We have here an indication that dismemberment – the truly
Dionysiac suffering – was like a separation into air, water, earth, and fire,
and that individuation should be regarded as the source of all suffering and
rejected.’
The rebirth of Dionysus is a reuniting of the elements, and
end to individuation; Dionysian art, beyond the particular visual sense,
expresses itself fully in the most abstract of the arts, music. Whereas Apollonian
art relies on existing forms and verbalisations of individual experiences,
music is primordial, non-rational and metaphysical.
‘The cosmic symbolism of music resists any adequate
treatment by language, for the simple reason that music, in referring to
primordial contradiction and pain, symbolises a sphere which is both earlier
than appearance and beyond it.’
Music is the art of Dionysus, but this is not to say, as
Nietzsche seems to be saying above, that Dionysian tendencies do not find
expression in, or relate to, the Apollonian arts.
Nietzsche regards folk song as one of the earliest of the
arts, and that the music inspired the poetry to form folk song.
‘we must regard folk song as a musical mirror of the cosmos,
as primordial melody casting about for an analogue and finding that analogue
eventually in poetry.’
Melody is conceived as giving birth to poetry, that music
generates images and words constructed on the emotions and rhythms it contains.
However folk poetry was an inadequate vehicle for the power of music, and so a
grander form, lyric poetry, superseded it. Lyric poetry is a manifestation of
the will of music in images and ideas. It is dependent on the spirit of music
in the same way that music is dependent on the universal world-will. Likewise
tragedy arose out of the choric tradition, which was not a projection of the
audience, or a dramatic body of people, but a dramatic illusion of the chthonic
realm.
‘The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality
sanctioned by myth and ritual.’
The Dionysiac state suspends the everyday experience of the
individual, in effect, annihilates the individual; but on the brink of
destruction art reclaims him. This fundamental experience of good tragedy is
absent from the work of Euripedes. The spirit of Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ work
has been replaced with the Socratic maxim, ‘Whatever is beautiful must also be
sensible.’ The balance between Dionysiac and Apollonian elements is upset, and
the result is inartistic naturalism containing none of the universality of the
non-phenomenal world.
Schopenhauer, in The World As Will And Idea, defines the
relation between music and image and concept in terms of universalia ante rem
and universalia in re. In other words that music expresses the primordial
things-in-themselves, as will without embodiment, while image and concept
derive from perceptible phenomena of the real world. In accordance with
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche interprets music as the immediate language of the will,
but adds that it is music, therefore, that stimulates and gives heightened
significance to the Apollonian spheres of image and concept.
‘Dionysiac art, then, affects the Apollonian talent in a
twofold manner: first, music incites us to a symbolic intuition of the
Dionysiac universality: second, it endows that symbolic image with supreme
significance.’
Dionysiac art, in music, adds the non-rational experience of
the universalia ante rem and elevates the plastic Apollonian art to the same
level. Music gave birth to the tragic myth as the only sufficient expression of
the original Oneness and the pains of individuation. Tragedy captures the Dionysiac
spirit of destruction in a way that the accepted origins of art, Apollonian
illusion and beauty, are not capable of accommodating. It is only through the
infusion of the Dionysiac spirit that the images are able to transcend the
particular and the phenomenal. The hero, being an ephemeral manifestation of
the will, dies, while the will of life, as a whole, lives on.
‘Each single instance of such annihilation will clarify for
us the abiding phenomenon of Dionysiac art, which expresses the omnipotent will
behind individuation, eternal life continuing beyond all appearance and in
spite of destruction.’
The plastic Apollonian arts are, unlike Dionysiac art,
sympathetic to individual suffering; they deal in appearances, though they can,
through idealisation, express what is eternal in natural beauty. But,
essentially, nature is like Dionysiac art – there is an unchanging will behind
constant superficial change. Nietzsche appears primarily as a disciple of
Dionysus – In the Expeditions of an Untimely Man in the Twilight Of The Idols
he describes the psychology of the artist as intoxicated with cruelty and
destruction, as if influenced by the feeling of Spring or narcotics, with an
overloaded and distended will. However it transpires that he thinks of both
Dionysus and Apollo as intoxication, not as intoxication and dream, as in The
Birth of Tragedy. In Section 10 he promises to deal with the two aspects of art
but spends only two short sentences on Apollonian art and he devotes the rest
of the section to Dionysian art. In the Twilight Of The Idols he seems only to
pay lip service to the idea of Apollo, it is really Dionysus that interests
him. But in The Birth of Tragedy this is less so; we are not left in any doubt
as to which is the superior partner but they are partners and one relies upon
the other. A purely Dionysian tragedy could not exist; its destructive
consummation would cast the spectator into oblivion, never to return.
The art of tragedy relies on the continuous evolution of the
Apollonian-Dionysiac duality, in the same way that they propagation of the
human species depends on the duality of the sexes. Nietzsche may have his own distorted
views on the inferiority of women, but he cannot deny their, nor Apollo’s, critical
importance. He emphasises the split, both in origins and objectives, between the
plastic Apollonian arts and the music of Dionysus. They can be in fierce
opposition, but the highest goal of tragedy and art in general is achieved by
their marriage. The primordial, universal Oneness and the suffering of
individuation is expressed in beauty, and artistic illusion and concern for
individual forms saves us from being subsumed.
‘let us sacrifice in the temple of both gods.’
Both gods are indispensable, yet they are conflicting,
contradictory characters, tending to induce the follower to neglect the other
god. Nietzsche betrays his own preference but however difficult it is to fuse
the two, great art, in his view, can only be reached by their reconciliation
and balanced union, be it symbolised by husband and wife, as at the beginning
of The Birth Of Tragedy, or by brothers and partners. The tensions and
frictions of difficult relations are ultimately harnessed to spark off tragedy,
to overwhelm and rescue the spectator simultaneously.
