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A few weeks before going completely insane, and even in seeming premonition of that occurrence, Friedrich Nietzsche completed the final revisions to what would be his last original book1, Ecce Homo2, a brilliant retrospective of his life and work, completed in 1888 but not published for another ten years. He signed it, “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” thus affirming the centrality of the Dionysian to his life’s work, a notion that appeared in his first book and which would recur in some form in everything he ever wrote.
Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is an immature work from the man who would become one of history’s greatest writers and philosophers, and, though it has several remarkable redeeming qualities, is not well-regarded in general, not even by Nietzsche himself in his later years. The book, published originally in 1872 (three years after Nietzsche was made a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the remarkable age of 24), was reissued in 1886 with a preface that Nietzsche titled “Attempt at a Self-Criticism.” He criticizes the book further in Ecce Homo, but affirms this notion of the Dionysian as being one of its redeeming qualities. Dionysus is an ancient Greek god associated with wine, drunkenness, fertility, and the theater, who was adopted by Nietzsche as symbolic of certain cultural and artistic trends within ancient Greek culture. This symbolism took on broader meaning over the course of Nietzsche’s writings, but let us begin by examining how it appeared in The Birth of Tragedy.
Ancient Greek tragedy was one of Nietzsche’s great loves, and the question that he was seeking to answer in The Birth of Tragedy was, what was it that made it so great? By way of an answer, Nietzsche examined two opposing trends in ancient Greek culture and art: the Apollinian and the Dionysian. Apollo being the god of rationality and logic, the Apollinian is the logical and rational, the embodiment of the principium individuationis, the principle of individuation, a term Nietzsche borrowed from his once-mentor Schopenhauer which concerns the discernment and identification of things as being distinct. As to the Dionysian:
Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Freely, earth proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of prey of the rocks and desert approach. The chariot of Dionysus is covered with flowers and garlands; panthers and tigers walk under its yoke. Transform Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy” into a painting; let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruck — then you will approach the Dionysian.
The Birth of Tragedy, §1, all translations by Kaufmann unless otherwise noted
On its own, this passage is quite stirring; taken in context, it’s unnecessarily florid and reveals Nietzsche’s weaknesses as a writer in his early years. But it does give us a good sense of the subject matter. If, in the Apollinian, everything is distinguished and individuated through rationality, then in the Dionysian, everything comes together in an indistinguishable, intoxicated chaos.
Nietzsche was not advocating for one or the other. Rather, he said, it was the tension between the two that made Greek tragedy great:
…Let us pause here a moment to recall to our minds our previously described impression of the discordant and incommensurable elements in the nature of Aeschylean tragedy. Let us recall our surprise at the chorus and the tragic hero of that tragedy, neither of which we could reconcile with our own customs any more than with tradition — till we rediscovered this duality itself as the origin and essence of Greek tragedy, as the expression of two interwoven artistic impulses, the Apollinian and the Dionysian.
The Birth of Tragedy, §12
It was in Euripides and in his inclusion in his plays of a Socratic rationalist dialectic that tragedy started to go wrong for Nietzsche. This third principle, the Socratic, shattered the fragile balance between the Apollinian and the Dionysian. “This is the new opposition,” Nietzsche says, “the Dionysian and the Socratic, and the art of Greek tragedy was wrecked on this” (§12). And returning to Ecce Homo:
Socrates is recognized [in The Birth of Tragedy] for the first time as an instrument of Greek disintegration, as a typical decadent. “Rationality” against instinct. “Rationality” at any price as a dangerous force that undermines life.
Ecce Homo, “The Birth of Tragedy,” §1
Here we begin to see the ideas into which Nietzsche’s initial conception of the Apollinian would transform. Nietzsche is not opposed to rationality in general, but rather only when it interferes with one’s capacity to be a human, and that is certainly the case with Socrates. Socrates’ suicide was rationality at its most anti-human: he accepted the judgement of the court and ended his life when he could easily have fled, because he knew that to do otherwise would be to refute rationality itself (of which the court was, in Socrates’ view, the public instrument). Nietzsche’s views towards Socrates were complex, and Nietzsche’s faithful translator Walter Kaufmann even believes that there were many qualities of Socrates that Nietzsche wished to emulate: “Nietzsche is no more against (or for) Socrates than he is against (or for) Apollo or Dionysus,” Kaufmann says in his introduction to The Birth of Tragedy. “His whole way of thinking is far removed from such crudities.” Shortly after, he mentions Nietzsche’s call for an “artistic Socrates” and says “The ‘artistic Socrates’ is Nietzsche himself.” Nietzsche wrote more about his views on Socrates in another one of his books from 1888, which also bears the greatest title that has ever been given to a work of philosophy: Twilight of the Idols; or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer.
Nietzsche published sporadically over the next decade, primarily releasing works in an aphoristic style that would culminate in The Gay Science, published in 1882. In this book, we begin to get a sense of how the Dionysian was transforming for Nietzsche, and what it was transforming into. I would argue that the entire book revolves around this new understanding of the Dionysian, which Nietzsche references directly in §370:
The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future (my term for this, as is known, “Dionysian”); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all beings, outrages and provokes them.
1883 and 1886 would see Nietzsche publish two of his most famous works, Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals, which made little reference to the Dionysian but which nevertheless created the framework for that to which Nietzsche’s new understanding of the Dionysian would be opposed: the Christian.
On the Genealogy of Morals presented the following thesis, to which I am giving far too little space: the Jewish people, during their periods of enslavement, invented what we now know as Judeo-Christian morality as a way of reckoning with their miserable lot in life, as slaves of other civilizations. The ancient Hebrews invented evil, Nietzsche said, as representing the cruel tyranny of their masters, and they invented good, Nietzsche said, to represent themselves as being justified and subject to some future reward. To be clear, Nietzsche, who has sometimes been very wrongly accused of being an anti-Semite, did not resent the Jewish people in the slightest for this, and even admired them for it, as it was necessary for their survival as a people3, and, as already discussed, Nietzsche saw survival as superseding rationality. To further emphasize this point — because Nietzsche is a controversial figure and I want to be clear that both he and I are opposed to anti-Semitism in every imaginable form — I’ll note that Nietzsche saw the Old Testament as being on par with or even exceeding the Greek tragedies4, which for him were the absolute highest art of humanity. This means that he understood that there was a fragile balance between the Apollinian and the Dionysian in the Old Testament of the Bible, and this seems entirely sensible. God established a divine law (as in Leviticus) but also acted capriciously, sometimes almost even drunkenly (as in Job).
What Nietzsche saw as being really beyond the pale was the adoption of what he called the “slave morality” by the ruling aristocracy of ancient Rome, who did not in any way need that philosophy to effect their survival, thus turning something that the Jews had used to survive and affirm life into something that negated life. And that, for Nietzsche, is Christianity. Nietzsche did not blame Jesus for this moral reversal so much as he did Paul5, which is something that he and I have in common.
And thus became the new opposition: Nietzsche’s Dionysian affirmation of life, and the nihilism that Nietzsche saw in Christianity. This became so central to Nietzsche’s ethos that he included it in “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” by way of rectifying the “profound, hostile silence about Christianity6” in The Birth of Tragedy:
In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in [The Birth of Tragedy] than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art. Behind this mode of thought and valuation, which must be hostile to art if it is at all genuine, I have never failed to sense a hostility to life — a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error. Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life. Hatred of “the world,” condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for “the sabbath of sabbaths” — all this always struck me, no less than the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral values, as the most dangerous and uncanny form of all possible forms of a “will to decline” — at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life.
§5
The Dionysian ideal that Nietzsche constructed in response to this appears throughout his work and I would say is the essence of Nietzsche’s writing. Among its clearest and most direct formulations is the one found in Ecce Homo’s discussion of “The Birth of Tragedy,” §2:
…a formula for the highest affirmation, born of fullness, of overfullness, a Yes-saying without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence.
This ultimate, most joyous, most wantonly extravagant Yes to life represents not only the highest insight but also the deepest, that which is most strictly confirmed and born out by truth and science.
Nietzsche addressed his opposition to Christianity in depth in the scathing Antichrist, also from 1888. The Antichrist, whose title might also be translated as “the anti-Christian7,” was originally intended to be the first book of a four-book series which Nietzsche would call The Revaluation of All Values, but only the preface to the series and The Antichrist were ever completed. It’s a fantastic read, especially for Satanists, atheists, and anyone at all critical of Christianity (and, of course, for those Christians who would test their ideas against their strongest possible counterarguments), and was likely the most aggressive critique of Christianity that had been written up to that point in history. The Antichrist covers several topics relevant to Christianity, including the nature of God, the history of the religion, comparison to other religions (Buddhism and Islam in particular, toward both of which Nietzsche is much more favorable); I think Nietzsche attacked every aspect of Christianity that he could bring to mind. It’s difficult to even know what to cite to best make my point, so I’ll select a favorite passage, from §16:
What would be the point of a god who knew nothing of wrath, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, and violence? who had perhaps never experienced the delightful ardeurs of victory and annihilation? No one would understand such a god: why have him then?
It’s interesting to note that the Christian theologian Paul Tillich was influenced by Nietzsche. In the Editor’s Introduction to the excellent collection The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Peter Gay states that
Paul Tillich has frequently paid tribute to Nietzsche’s influence on his own thought, actually hailing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the greatest modern “Protestants.”
One unfamiliar with Tillich, the simultaneous Protestant theologian and fan of the explicitly anti-Christian Nietzsche8, might write him off as being fundamentally inconsistent, but Tillich has many of the same bones to pick about religion as Nietzsche does. Both Tillich and I clearly disagree with Nietzsche in our seeing Christianity as being a potentially viable religion for the intellectually honest, but the aptness of Nietzsche’s criticisms is undeniable, and at the core of those criticisms is Christian religious nihilism, the negation of this life and this world for some pending life and pending world. Nietzsche wrote on this extensively but I’ll return here to The Antichrist, from §18:
God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! God — the formula for every slander against “this world,” for every lie about the “beyond”! — God — the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy!
For me, the Dionysian is the core of Satanism, the deepest affirmation of life and the simultaneous rejection of the nihilistic Christian will to negate life. The Dionysian is the will to love and to love life fearlessly, to allow oneself to be maddened by one’s passions and to revel in the whole rabid mess of the world. And I’ll offer the last words on the matter of the Dionysian to Herr Nietzsche, from The Gay Science, §324:
In media vita. — No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year — ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge — and not a duty, not a calamity, not trickery. — And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others; for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure — for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. “Life as a means to knowledge” — with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily, too. And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?”
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- Nietzsche contra Wagner was written afterwards but is largely a revision of some of his prior works.
- “Behold the man,” as spoken by Pontius Pilate in John’s Gospel (19:5) when the flogged Jesus is presented to him.
- “The Jews are the strangest people in world history because, confronted with the question whether to be or not to be, they chose, with a perfectly uncanny deliberateness, to be at any price… Psychologically considered, the Jewish people are a people endowed with the toughest vital energy, who, placed in impossible circumstances, voluntarily and out of the most profound prudence of self-preservation, take sides with all the instincts of decadence — not as mastered by them, but because they divined a power in these instincts with which one could prevail against ‘the world.’” The Antichrist §24
- Beyond Good and Evil §52: “In the Jewish ‘Old Testament,’ the book of divine justice, there are human beings, things, and speeches in so grand a style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to compare with it,” and also in Kaufmann’s introduction to The Antichrist: “…The Old Testament was one of his great loves. ‘The dignity of death and a kind of consecration of passion have perhaps never yet been represented more beautifully… than by certain Jews of the Old Testament: to these even the Greek could have gone to school!’ he writes in a late note.”
- “On the heels of the ‘glad tidings’ came the very worst: those of Paul. In Paul was embodied the opposite type to that of the ‘bringer of glad tidings’: the genius in hatred, the vision of hatred, in the inexorable logic of hatred. How much this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Redeemer: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the doctrine, the death, the meaning and the right of the entire evangel — nothing remained once this hate-inspired counterfeiter realized what alone he could use. Not the reality, not the historical truth!… he invented his own history of earliest Christianity,” The Antichrist §42.
- Ecce Homo, “The Birth of Tragedy,” §1
- Kaufmann believes this may have been a play on the term anti-Semite. At the time, Germany was very Christian and also very anti-Semitic, and Nietzsche saw this as being completely backwards, so Kaufmann thinks that this may have been Nietzsche saying that people should be anti-Christian rather than anti-Semitic.
- …as well as an apparent fan of Marx, who saw religion as being the opium of the people, and Freud, who saw it as a manifestation of unconscious psychological drives.