Nietzsche says that Apollonian is the “image world of dreams” while Dionysian is the “intoxicated reality” (S. 2, Pg. 38). What he molds out of this is a state in which the human artist would fall into; he calls it “oneness with the inmost ground of the world… revealed to him in a symbolical dream image” (S. 2, Pg. 38)
What Nietzsche is trying to do, here, is make the point that one cannot exist without another. In philosophy, we always come back to that age old comparison of “pleasure cannot be fathomed without the experience of pain”; Nietzsche is essentially saying the same thing, but about art, emotions, and to an extent, existence.
In the Translator’s Introduction, Kaufmann states that “Nietzsche himself celebrates Greek Tragedy as a superior alternative to Schopenhauer’s ‘Buddhistic negation of the will’” (Page 11). I interpreted this as pretty much saying that while Schopenhauer is asking us to reject the will of this world because the domination of pain over pleasure is unbearable, Nietzsche is asking us to embrace it because the complementariness of happy/sad (i.e. Apollonian/Dionysian) is what defines the world.
That's exactly right - N's view here is just like Schop's, only N is affirming life, not negating it.
ReplyDelete