Apollonian and Dionysian in Nietzsche’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’
The Apollonian and the Dionysian and the Problem of Socrates
In his 1872 work *The Birth of Tragedy*, Friedrich Nietzsche tries to revolutionize the rationalist view that had the Greek world in his time.
Nietzsche says that it is not political philosophy or the height of Greek culture, but the tragedy is the ripest fruit of the Hellenic world. In the tragedy, the confluence of two forces that had inspired the entire Greek production: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Apollo, as god of sleep, light, and art, perfectly represents the Apollonian. This force that has guided much of ancient Greek art tries to capture the serene beauty of the world and keep the individual outside the chaotic flow of the universe and existence. It is a principle of Apollonian calm and quiet, and works under the influence of the Apollonian. We immerse ourselves in the quiet serenity of the beautiful appearance.
In other words, Apollo represents the mainstreaming principle by which we subtract the wild flow of our lives; it is the light of our souls’ rest. Nietzsche associates the dream, not the nightmare, where reality is vaguely vaporous and is presented as the fulfillment of our desires. Given this momentum and quieted dream of the Apollonian, the Dionysian German philosopher regarded it as a wild explosion of vitality, in which even the limits of individuality disappear. Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, celebrates the orgiastic dance of the Bacchae, in which the subject, carried away by the dancing and music, loses the notion of self and merges into the vital vortex that is the essence of the world. (This concept is closely related to the Schopenhauerian idea of “will”).
The Apollonian and Dionysian, then, are different ways of understanding life experience in conflict but complementary.
The tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles, not Euripides, these two impulses properly joined without destroying the power of any of them. It was with Socrates who arrived at the degeneration of the Hellenic ideal. With him died the tragedy and the spirit of classical Greece. The poet Euripides was the executor of the ideas of Socrates, and Plato his most effective diffuser. Socrates aims to make intelligible all reality, intellectualized the question of virtue, the meaning of life, and, ultimately, the question of life itself. The Socratic aesthetic, so well represented by Plato, states that “only what is beautiful can be understood.” The instinctive art dissociates and looks for a useful art, teaching, that is, with a moral.
Socrates, to Nietzsche, is a messenger of decay and opposed to the Dionysian. While Dionysus is life-affirming in its beauty and its radical cruelty, Socrates believes only in the intelligible life, denying everything else, denying, for Nietzsche, life itself. While struggling with the Apollonian Dionysian, Nietzsche admitted, and he assumed that beauty was a dora quiets ephemeral creation, apparently, a divine play of our imagination. However, the Socratic perverts the spirit of Apollo at the time to create the beautiful illusion. Apollonian order and stability is the real thing, denying the vital flow, hating reality and Dionysus, and therefore the essential life itself.