Apollo and Dionysus: Nietzsche’s View of Greek Gods
Apollo and Dionysus in Nietzsche’s Philosophy
Apollo: Apollo was one of the most revered gods by the ancient Greeks. They erected many temples in his honor, and his oracle was consulted when they sought to know the future or the darker aspects of their existence. The Greeks regarded him as the god of youth, beauty, poetry, and art in general. However, according to Nietzsche, Apollo represented more than that; he embodied a way of being in the world. He was the god of light, clarity, and harmony, in contrast to the world of primary and instinctive forces. Apollo also represented individuation, balance, measure, shape, and rationality.
The traditional interpretation held that Apollonian ideals defined all of Greek culture, and that the Greek people were the first to present a bright, beautiful, and rational vision of reality. Nietzsche challenged this interpretation, arguing that it was accurate for the Greek world from Socrates onward, but not for the earlier Greek world, which he considered the most characteristic moment of the Greek spirit.
Apollonian Versus Dionysian
The Greeks contrasted Apollo with Dionysus, the god of wine and crops. Dionysian festivities were characterized by excess, drunkenness, music, and passion. According to Nietzsche, Dionysus also represented the world of confusion, deformity, chaos, night, the instinctive realm, the dissolution of individuality, and ultimately, the irrational. The true grandeur of the archaic Greek world lay in not hiding this dimension of reality, but in harmonizing the two principles, even considering the Dionysian as the real truth.
Only with the onset of Western decadence, and with Socrates and Plato, did the Greeks try to hide this aspect of reality, inventing a world of rationality (a purely Apollonian world, as encouraged by Platonism). Socrates initiated the disdain for the world of the body and promoted faith in reason, identifying the Dionysian with non-being, with unreality.
Cause Sui and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought
Cause Sui: To understand what Nietzsche meant by this term, we need to know two things: the context in which it is used and the meaning of its opposite term: becoming (gignesthai), or that which is generated or becomes (gignómena).
Nietzsche uses the term “cause sui” in the context of what he calls “dogmatic philosophy,” which extends from Socrates to his own time. Dogmatic philosophers have a serious bias against becoming. They believe that everything that becomes, that has been begotten or has come into being, is less important than what is always identical to itself, without change or movement. That which does not become, that has not been generated, is not “cause sui.” For dogmatic philosophers, as Nietzsche tells us, “cause sui” represents the supreme values of the first rank, such as the “unconditioned,” the “existing,” the “good,” the “true,” and the “perfect.”
Concepts as “Conceptual Mummies”
Nietzsche understands concepts as the result of a process of abstraction that inevitably dispenses with the rich nuances and individual differences of the reality it seeks to name and understand. Concepts are the smoke of evaporating reality; they are conceptual mummies.
A concept may be useful initially because it expresses one of the possible perspectives on a certain reality. However, as it is used to describe reality in the same way repeatedly, it becomes petrified and distorts the reality, which is always in a state of becoming. Therefore, to understand and express reality without diminishing its deepest meaning, there is nothing better than metaphors, which act as a screen that extends reality without attempting to describe it definitively.