[MD] Fritz & Bob

Michael R. Brown mrb at fuguewriter.com
Fri Jul 24 11:40:11 PDT 2015


Camille Paglia, Nietzsche's latter-day heir, would be interesting to map 
onto RMP and vice versa. I think they may converge.


MRB

On 7/24/2015 9:06 AM, david wrote:
> I've been thinking about the work Arlo did a few years back.
>
> Good stuff. Here are most the central quotes he'd used...
>
> "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)
>
> "... 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)
>
> 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."
>
> "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)
>
> 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)
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