[MD] The Birth of Tragedy/CH1 and the MOQ

[Arlo Bensinger]

All,

Accepting the risk of setting off some "nihilism frothing", I've been 
re-reading Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy recently, and thought I'd 
share some passages that struck me as resonating with the SQ/DQ division 
of the MOQ.

I'm not making any general claims about Nietzsche or that this (or any) 
analogous comparison is without nuance, or that I understand enough 
about Nietzsche to represent his claims adequately.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche outlines a "dichotomy", whose 
"tension" creates Art. I stumbled back into this while doing some 
reading on metaphor (Max Black, Carl Hausman, Susanna Langer, etc.) and 
the idea that metaphors "create" the relations, rather than being 
passive descriptors (not my topic here).

"We shall do a great deal for the science of esthetics, once we perceive 
not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of 
intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the 
Apollonian and Dionysian duality..." (Nietzsche)

I'd want to make the initial analogy that Nietzsche's "Apollonian" maps 
onto "static quality", especially "intellectual quality", and 
"Dionynsian" maps onto "Dynamic Quality", or more accurately the 
"pre-intellectual" in Pirsig's metaphysics. This isn't wholly accurate, 
but I'll move through some quotes to lay this out.

"... there existed a sharp opposition, in origin and aims, between the 
Apollonian art of sculpture, and the non-plastic, Dionysian, art of 
music.... they continually incite each other to new and more powerful 
births, which perpetuate an antagonism, only superficially reconciled by 
the common term 'Art'..." (Nietzsche)

In MOQ terms, this would say (more or less) that "Art" is the outcome of 
an interaction between "intellectual" and "pre-intellectual" forces. 
"Art", to be legible, has to borrow from the shared symbolic repertoire 
of those who would apprehend and understand the "Art", but at the same 
time has to add "something new", or point beyond the established 
repertoire into new directions.

Nietzsche may say its the Dionysian impulse, capture in Apollonian 
forms, that constitutes "Art".

Nietzsche illustrates these two impulses (which we'll see later has an 
'impulse towards differentiation' and an 'impulse towards 
undifferentiation', that which produces forms from the undifferentiated 
continuum, and that which dissolves forms back into the undifferentiated 
continuum), as "dreams" (Apollonian) and "drunkeness" (Dionsysian).

"... Let us conceive of them as the separate art-worlds of 'dreams' and 
'drunkenness'... In our dreams we delight in the immediate apprehension 
of form; all forms speak to us; none are unimportant, none are 
superfluous." (Nietzsche)

Although it appears here he is equating the immediate awareness of 
reality with Apollonian dream, note that its the apprehension of FORM 
from the undifferentiated continuum of experience that he points to with 
"dream". You can see some Platonic influence in this, as he goes on to 
posit a reality of form under the reality "in which we live". But I 
think if we hold back a bit and see that he's really pointing to the 
emergence of form from the unformed, I think we get a better sense of 
the direction he wants to go.

Indeed, he points to Schopenhauer in saying, "[he] actually indicates as 
the criterion of philosophic ability the occasional ability to view men 
and things as mere phantoms or dream-pictures." While this, still, plays 
on the Platonic Ideal, if it was simply "witnessing form" I think it 
would uninteresting to make any comparison to Pirsig. However, for 
Nietzsche, the solidification of form from the landscape is only half of 
a story, and dissolution is only possible if Forms are not held as 
Absolute and Real.

Why do we build form from non-form? Nietzsche answers that "pictures 
afford him an interpretation of life", but that more than being "mere 
shadows on the wall", they are the very scenes in which "he lives and 
suffers". Our pictures are not illusions, in other words, they are the 
real, lived scenes in which we love and lose, laugh and cry, dance and 
fall to our knees.

Pointing towards the undifferentiated continuum, Nietzsche writes, "The 
higher truth [Apollonian forms], the perfection of these states in 
contrast to the incompletely intelligible everyday world.. is at the 
same time the symbolical analogue of the soothsaying faculty and of the 
arts generally, which makes life possible and worth living. (Nietzsche)

Interesting here, Nietzsche is not describing the Apollonian impulse 
towards form as "bad" while setting up the Dionysian impulse towards 
dissolution as "good", but instead that without form, without the 
apprehension of pattern from the unpatterned landscape, life would not 
only be not worth living but impossible in the first place. Although 
"form" is an abstraction, it is an abstraction we cannot do without.

Nietzsche refers to the Apollonian as "the man wrapped in Maya" 
(Schopenhauer), "... so in the midst of a world of sorrows the 
individual sits quietly, supported by and trusting in his principium 
individuationis" (Schopenhauer quoted).

This principium is summed by Wikipedia as "...the name given to 
processes whereby the undifferentiated tends to become individual, or to 
those processes through which differentiated components become 
integrated into stable wholes."

In short, it is the perception of form within chaos, the apprehension of 
stability within flux, the sensing of coherence within the 
incomprehensible. "We might consider Apollo himself as the glorious 
divine image of the principium individuationis, whose gestures and 
expression tell us of all the joy and wisdom of 'appearance', together 
with its beauty." (Nietzsche)

But alongside the impulse towards differentiation, one has to also 
consider as equally important Dionysian impulse towards dissolution.

"Schopenhauer has depicted for us the terrible awe which seizes upon 
man, when he is suddenly unable to account for the cognitive forms of a 
phenomenon, when the principle of reason, in some one of its 
manifestations, seems to admit an exception... at this very collapse of 
the principium individuationis, we shall gain an insight into the nature 
of the Dionysian." (Nietzsche)

Thus for Nietzsche the structures of Apollonian form are at once and 
always incomplete. Through "the immediate certainty of intuition" we 
sense exceptions, and when we stop and gaze into that incompleteness, we 
find the song of Dionysus.

Nietzsche describes the Dionysian impulse as that which "cause[s] the 
subjective to vanish into complete self-forgetfulness".

In the following quote, I hear Pirsig's talk in ZMM about our 
estrangement from nature and being one with the world brought on by not 
only dominance of "rationality", but the abandonment of the romantic 
"groove". Nietzsche talks about the same phenomena, a world where 
Apollonian dominates and Dionysian impulses are denigrated.

"Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and 
man reaffirmed, but Nature which has become estranged, hostile or 
subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her prodigical 
son, man. ... Now the slave is free; now all the stubborn, hostile 
barriers, which necessity, caprice or 'shameless fashion' have erected 
between man and man, are broken down... he feels as if the veil of Maya 
had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the 
mysterious Primordial Unity." (Nietzsche)

Nietzsche continues, "He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of 
art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature 
reveals itself to the highest gratification of the Primordial Unity."

Art, then, for Nietzsche is the result of a two-way rotation, toward the 
forms of Apollo and towards the dissolution of all form into the Void of 
Dionysus. I see, if not strong then at least, interesting correlation 
between "intellectual/pre-intellectual" or even so far as 
"static/dynamic". Certainly, I think, this has a strong analogy to the 
"code of art" that Pirsig speculated may sit above the intellectual 
level, a Dionysian impulse sitting atop an Apollonian foundation, a 
force that pulls the world of form apart (Shiva) as a counter force 
(Vishnu) pulls form from the Primordial Unity (Brahma).

Anyway, thanks for reading, if you made it this far.