In 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche, a brilliant young Classicist only 25 years old, published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. In it, he asserted that Greek tragedy was the result of a union of opposites personified in Greek mythology as the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo represented form, order, control, and rationality. Apollo was the god of the sun, and the Apollonian values are those of “enlightenment.” The Apollonian is associated with the visual and spatial, for light reveals a world of defined objects, and also with beauty: all those Greek sculptures are a triumph of the Apollonian. But Greek tragedy emerged out of the festival of a very different god, Dionysus. Dionysus was the opposite of Apollo: instead of form, he symbolized energy, process, metamorphosis. Instead of order and control, he embodied chaos and release. Instead of rationality, he symbolized unrestrained emotion and the kinds of irrational thinking characteristic of the unconscious, such as intuition, dreaming, and fantasy. He was the darkness of everything inward, the womb and the tomb, and he was the spirit of music, which moves in time rather than space. But Greek tragedy is not merely Dionysian: it is a union of Apollonian and Dionysian opposites, what
August 26, 2022
August 26, 2022
August 26, 2022
In 1872, Friedrich Nietzsche, a brilliant young Classicist only 25 years old, published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. In it, he asserted that Greek tragedy was the result of a union of opposites personified in Greek mythology as the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo represented form, order, control, and rationality. Apollo was the god of the sun, and the Apollonian values are those of “enlightenment.” The Apollonian is associated with the visual and spatial, for light reveals a world of defined objects, and also with beauty: all those Greek sculptures are a triumph of the Apollonian. But Greek tragedy emerged out of the festival of a very different god, Dionysus. Dionysus was the opposite of Apollo: instead of form, he symbolized energy, process, metamorphosis. Instead of order and control, he embodied chaos and release. Instead of rationality, he symbolized unrestrained emotion and the kinds of irrational thinking characteristic of the unconscious, such as intuition, dreaming, and fantasy. He was the darkness of everything inward, the womb and the tomb, and he was the spirit of music, which moves in time rather than space. But Greek tragedy is not merely Dionysian: it is a union of Apollonian and Dionysian opposites, what