Nietzsche’s Philosophy: Apollonian vs. Dionysian, Knowledge, and Nihilism
The Apollonian and Dionysian
Nietzsche believed that the forces originating in Greek culture had been two aesthetic forces that fight each other but cannot exist without the other: the Apollonian, which represents order, light, as the limit, the principle of individuation, and its opposite, the Dionysian, which is the symbol of the deep flow of the vita itself, which breaks all barriers and ignores all the constraints, which reflects the primary unity above all the principle of individuation. With Socratic rationalism arrives, according to Nietzsche, the decline of Greek culture and authentic philosophy and the beginning of the era of reason and man’s theory. The “Socratic” is opposed to the Dionysian phenomenon, by which means the predominance of intellectual rationality, unable to grasp the life that flows behind all figures. Nietzsche says it is necessary to recover the “tragic vision” of the world. He presents this image of the world as a reality in which life and death, birth and decay of the finite, are intertwined. But birth and decay are just aspects of one and the same wave of life, “the way up and the way down are one and the same,” said Heraclitus. In this seesaw of life is what Nietzsche called the “contrast between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.” And it succeeds in life itself the name of Dionysus, considering it as the background originating in the world.
For Nietzsche, philosophy is art, tragic wisdom, a penetrating look at the original struggle of competing principles that represent Dionysus and Apollo.
Relativity of Knowledge
The human intellect, knowledge, is for Nietzsche an action for “the most unhappy people” (humans). It serves to keep them in existence, but also makes them misrepresent the value of it. To live in society, and to avoid the war of all against all, it is fixed from then on what has to be truth. A designation is invented for things uniformly valid and binding (which is, therefore, conventional) and the contrast arises between truth and lie. The “truth” does not depend, therefore, on the things themselves but on the correct use of the conventions of language. The “lie” of the intellect is to make people believe that through the concepts of life is captured. These represent the greatest obstacle to understanding reality as becoming.
The Concepts Hide the Truth
Nietzsche asks what happens to the conventions of language and whether they agree with things. He responds that the words do not ever get to the truth. The truth is the most deceptive guise of reason.
The words express pure metaphors of things. Concepts become when applied to a plurality of individuals and do not conform to the unique experience. Every concept is formed by matching cases not the same, leaving individual differences, but nature knows no forms or concepts.
The concept is the residue of a metaphor. These are, in turn, reflections of man, for what it is in knowledge is to understand the world as a humane thing. Therefore, taking the human being as the measure of all things, falls into the trap of believing that you have these things before it as pure objects. I.e. man creates the concepts and then forgets (unconscious forgetting) that it is he who created them.
Decline and Nihilism
Nietzsche raises the question of the decadence of Western culture in its concern for the German cultural and political situation of the moment. Democratic systems, social and industrial culture are also forms of decadence to Nietzsche. An ideal German culture would be an end to all these phenomena of decadence: Judaism, Christianity, specialized science, Socialism, etc.
This decadence Nietzsche complains about does not affect only Germany, but is a phenomenon of global cultural degeneration of humanity. The decline of the real values of life, the loss of meaning of life, is what Nietzsche called nihilism. And he accuses religion, particularly Christianity, as responsible.
Also by way of knowledge may fall into nihilism, maintaining as “truth” which is the result of rationalization, and this is what has happened to Western science and philosophy from Socrates and Plato.
Values of the New Civilization
Having developed his criticism of Western culture, Nietzsche asserts the need to build on the ruins of the foundations of a new civilization. Before creating the new values, one must destroy existing ones.
This task is carried out in the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Through the development of the themes of “death of God,” “Superman,” “the will to power,” and “eternal return,” he raises the overcoming of nihilism.
The Death of God
The term “death of God” refers to the increasing abandonment of the Christian religious view of the world in European culture since the Renaissance, a phenomenon that has also been called “secularization of culture.” It involves the gradual replacement of the idea of God, as “sense” of the world, support for established authority, guarantor of the moral order, and so on., with other ideas such as reason, progress, humanity.
The Enlightenment left moral values intact but did contribute to its secularization. Nietzsche, more radical, says that “death of God” involves the death of the absolute values.
The “death of God” leaves two possibilities open to human beings: the impoverishment of man with a superficial atheism and moral debauchery, and this is what Nietzsche meant by the image of the “last man” or the other possibility, the projection aware of new ideals created by man: the “superman.”
The Advent of Superman
The theme of “superman” somehow figured in the early works of Nietzsche when he is the “genius” and “free spirit.”
“Superman” is the future hero, the philosopher to come, that will understand the great truths of the “death of God” and “the will to power”, the essence of life. We must prepare the world for the coming of this “superman”. This will create values and lifestyles that make them possible. The “Superman” is therefore a goal of man and is presented as a decision of the strongest, the most lucid, which are the need to prepare for coming.
The “superman” of Nietzsche is the free and creative individual who is willing to continually overcome, which is alien to conventions and bonds, moral, religious or ideological, that prevent the free development of their spontaneity and their instincts.
The Will to Power
Nietzsche meant by “will to power” the struggle of life that must continually surpass itself, which determines existence. It is the basic trend of mobility of all existing. It is the constant struggle and antagonism of all existing individuals against everything else. The way of asserting the power is the transmutation of all values.
The Eternal Return
“Eternal return” raises the relationship of the “will to power” in time, past, present and future. Nietzsche said the idea of the “return of the same” was his thought deeper. However, it is a topic that has drawn less from the theory.
When admitted the idea of God, it was considered that time flowed and was returning. Perishable and transitory things were given for the time and he only escaped the spiritual, who returned to his true eternal homeland. All that time could not escape should perish.
Instead Nietzsche aims to recover the eternity for this world, erasing the dichotomy of two worlds or perishable material and spiritual or eternal, and reclaiming the sense of the mundane. Try to deny the perishability of the real. What really is the “vanishing moment”, and this is what you have to love.
Thus conceived the “eternal return” as “a repetition of what is the same.” The same thing breaks down and decomposes into a continuum. For Nietzsche, the most important thing is that no repetition of the time but the subversion of time for eternity, which means that the character of repeatability is the hidden essence of the course of time. Time itself is repetition. Eternal return affects the mortality of things.