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Nietzsche: Apollo & Dionysus

The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche argues that the ancient Greek deities Apollo and Dionysus are complements of each other in the conception of tragic art as well as the human experience. To the classical Greeks Apollo had numerous connotations – he was the sun god, or the god of light, as well as the god of all image-making energies and of prophecy. He was also associated with mental and moral illumination, or the functions that distinguish and clarify. Apollo sponsors similar artistic fields such as epic poetry and statuaries. Dionysus was the god of wine and vegetation and he taught humans how to cultivate grapevines and produce wine. As a result he is also connected with vitality and cycles and sponsors music and lyric poetry. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy the terms Apollinian and Dionysian are used to designate the two central principles in Greek culture whose figurative marriage resulted in the metaphorical birth of tragedy. The presence of these deities were called into being as a result of the early Greek’s becoming cognizant of the suffering that characterizes human life.

In early Greece they “knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to live at all they had to place in front of th

ese things the resplendent, dream-born figures of the Olympians”(Nietzsche 23). Because their function is, of course,

characters. The anguish of the characters mirrors the agony in ourselves and the world. It is indicative of the destruction that eventually all things except the primordial unity will become. The Dionysian dimension allows the spectator to decenter the suffering that is his being. He is able to identify it with the people who are suffering with him, his race, and it urges him to grow beyond this suffering.

Music is the universal form of art for Nietzsche, “above all else we regard folk music as a musical mirror of the world” (Nietzsche 33). Music, originally known to the Greeks through an Apollinian sense, eventually developed another, a Dionysian, counterpart. “The very element which defines the character of Dionysiac music (and thus of music generally): the power of its sound to shake us to our very foundations, the unified stream of melody… the destruction of maya” (Nietzsche 21). In the following passage, Nietzsche relates the origin of tragedy: “It is admittedly an ‘ideal’ ground on which, as Schiller rightly saw… something which surprises us just as much as the fact that tragedy originated in the chorus” (Nietzsche 39). The original theater introduced the chorus in order to set itself off from a naturalistic idea of art; and the first choruses were sung by satyrs. Through the blend of poetry and dramatic scenes with the chorus, the audience, and music, the tragedy composes the image-making and mastering of form of Apollo, who tries to make meaning out of experience, with the instinctual, savage, and sensual nature of Dionysus, who tends to collapse systems through intoxication. Dionysus

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