Hi All,
Just some more thoughts on Nietzsche Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic,
these will get shorter as I'm not really laying out any sort of exact
mapping here. My working map begins something like Apollonian equates
with the static intellectual level and Dionysian with Pirsig's
"pre-intellectual awareness".
"We have considered the Apollonian and its antithesis, the Dionsysian,
as artistic energies which burst forth from nature herself, without the
mediation of the human artist..." (Nietzsche)
I note here that both the "tendency towards form" and the "tendency
towards dissolution" are both "artistic energies" in Nietzsche's
telling, and that, like the MOQ's levels emerge directly from Quality.
"... energies in which nature's art-impulses are satisfied in the most
immediate and direct way: first, on the one hand, in the pictorial world
of dreams, whose completeness is not dependent upon the intellectual
attitude or the artistic culture of any single being; and... as a
drunken reality, which likewise does not heed the single unit, but even
seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of
Oneness." (Nietzsche)
I will map from this point on (I think) Nietzsche's "nature" onto
Pirsig's Quality. Given that, I think Nietzsche is saying here that the
"tendency towards form" is not a unique tendency for any individual or
culture, and is not something that exists in Culture A (or Person A) but
not Culture B (or Person B). Likewise for the "tendency towards
dissolution". This ubiquitous dialectic derives from Quality, and is
part of the fabric of experience.
Here I think a strong argument could be made that while Nietzsche's
Apollonian often specifically refers to the tendency among humans to
seek form within unformed, that the Apollonian impulse generally is the
"tendency towards static quality". That is, Nietzsche lacks Pirsig's
categories of the MOQ, and isn't specifically interested in the way
atoms or dogs are also "form from unformed", but the general
"art-impulse of nature" towards "form" is certainly very similar with
the emergence of stable patterns within Pirsig's MOQ.
At this point Nietzsche goes back into Ancient Greek culture to
illuminate how these tendencies were evidenced, and in the case of
Dionysian to contrast the Greek Dionysian impulse from other barbaric
accounts of this art-energy.
In this telling, Nietzsche is, in effect, making the same caution as
Pirsig made regarding Hippies who confused "biological quality" with
"following DQ". For Nietzsche, the Greek Dionysian was not simply
biological "licentiousness, whose waves overwhelmed all family life and
its venerable traditions" (Nietzsche).
Earlier Greek culture, according to Nietzsche, was dominated by the
Apollonian impulse, and is evidenced best in the Homeric tradition.
Alongside this sat the Dionysian impulses, evidenced as folk-revelry and
festivals. As these impulses synthesized in Greek culture, the Tragedy
was born, and we saw for a moment in time what Pirsig saw in the early
Hippie movement.
"This reconciliation is the most important moment in the history of the
Greek cult: wherever we turn we note the revolutions resulting from this
event... If we observe how, under the pressure of this treaty of peace,
the Dionysian power revealed itself, we shall now recognize... the
significance of festivals of world-redemption and transfiguration."
(Nietzsche)
I'll nod again to Dionysian being equatable with pre-intellectual
awareness, expressed as the "tendency towards dissolution" in the
following, "In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest
exaltation of all his symbolic features; something never before
experienced struggles for utterance - the annihilation of the the veil
of Maya, Oneness as the soul of the race, and of nature itself." (Nietzsche)
If the Apollonian tendency can indeed be mapped onto the entirety of
"static quality" (with the recognition that Nietzsche is only
immediately concerned with what would directly correspond to
'intellectual quality'), it certainly seems here that the Dionysian is
perhaps equatable to Dynamic Quality itself. I've thought about this for
a while, and I think its better to think of these as Nietzsche does, as
"impulses" or tendencies, and to see one as the "tendency towards static
quality" and the other as the "tendency towards Dynamic Quality". So we
are not really talking directly about "static quality" but as the
impulse that pulls these patterns out of the unpatterned landscape, and
we are not talking directly about "Dynamic Quality", but about the
impulse that shatters these stable patterns and pulls us towards the
immediate moment of experience. This is perhaps a subtle, if not
marginal, distinction, but I think a valuable one in considering
Nietzsche's view that "the continuous development of art" emerges from
this duality, as it tries to look, at least peripherally, as to how
DQ/SQ interrelate or the point/s of contact between the two.
Thanks for reading.
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