“This is the new opposition: the Dionysian versus the Socratic, and the work of art that once was Greek tragedy was destroyed by it.”

  --Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Having surveyed Aristotle’s Poetics wherein art, and tragedy in particular, is conceived as cognition; Kant’s Critique of Judgment wherein art is conceived as communicable pleasure, and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, wherein art is conceived as revelation; let us now move on to a brief examination of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy with its conception of art as redemption.

The perceptive reader will undoubtedly see that even the title of Nietzsche’s work reveals a nexus with Aristotle’s views on Greek Tragedy. As a great philosopher that he was, Nietzsche was aware that to build any kind of valid modern aesthetic theory one cannot simply ignore the ancients, that in fact it is imperative that origins be remembered and examined, something of which both Vico and Heidegger were also very much aware. Heidegger called it “originative thinking.”

Nietzsche is less concerned with the question “What is art?” than with the question “Why art?” That is to say, rather than trying to understand what distinguishes art from other aspects of human culture, such as science, Nietzsche is primarily interested in why there is such a thing as art in the first place. Art seems to begin with the very origins of human history. He was concerned with its function in human life. Hence the importance of going back to origins and to the ancient Greeks in particular.

Nietzsche’s answer to “Why art?” is based on his view, which he derives from Schopenhauer, that life is awful and tragic. It would be fatal to confront this truth directly. Thus, Nietzsche argues, art is a way to make life bearable, to go on despite the insight that it is not worth living, especially when it is examined in depth. In other words, art is the human response to the horrors of existence.

Next Nietzsche makes a fundamental distinction between two types of art: the Apollonian and the Dyonisian. This echoes the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime elaborated in Kant and Schopenhauer. In Nietzsche’s view, Apollonian art creates a dream world, a sort of idealized realm that keeps at by the terrors of existence. He uses as an example Greek sculpture, which he sees as idealization of human life as another giant of philosophy, Hegel, also claims albeit with a very different assessment; but that’s material for another reflection.

Nietzsche connects the Apollonian with the individuated world of appearances described by Kant and Schopenauer in which the individual is very much at home and in control. In contrast to that, Dyonisian art is art that intoxicates and dissolves individuality. Here too one is reminded of Schopenhauer’s ecstatic description of the effects of sublime art in The World as Will and Representation. Closer to our times, just think of the Woodstock concert in the sixties, where people were taken over by the music. What Nietzsche is saying is that art redeems life by getting us to reject our individuality so that we can become one with the forces governing the universe as a whole.

But it gets a bit more complicated, for although Nietzsche distinguishes those two artistic tendencies toward the Apollonian and the Dyonisian, he also argues that they are intimately related to each other and that they exist in dynamic tension with each other. In his The Birth of Tragedy he contents that the achievements of Apollonian art can only be understood as a conscious attempt to hold the Dyonisian at bay, and vice versa. So, Nietzsche’s distinction ultimately transcends its origins in Greek tragedy. They come to denote larger cultural forces.

Which are those cultural forces? Basically they are the forces that deny life and those that affirm it. Behind the Apollonian he uncovers life-denying forces; behind the Dyonisian he uncovers life-affirming forces that unflinchingly contemplate life in all its terror. He sees Socrates himself as the icon of a tendency toward an extreme life-denying rationality in Western philosophy which cavalierly dispenses with the intuitional, the imaginative, the world of emotions and feelings, or what Pascal aptly describes as “the heart [which] has reasons which reason knows not. It is the world of the Nazis idealogues, men with a Ph.D. after their names, who rationally plan the Holocaust in less than two hours and then efficiently carry it out in three short years at the tune of eleven million innocent victims.

It is by way of this dichotomy that Nietzsche is able to move a sweeping critique of the European Enlightenment, and not only its art, but in all its aspects, from science to morality. In other words, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, the Enlightenment has to still enlighten itself and the only hope for the West is a rebirth of the Dyonisian. The question here arises: is that what the sixty’s generation was groping for? One has to wonder. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that after being ignored for a while, even dismissed as a protofascist (for which the views of his antisemitic sister who edited his work are largely responsible), Nietzsche is now considered one of the seminal thinkers of the 19th century; a philosopher who has considerably expanded our understanding of the complexities of the nature of art.