The Dionysian Vision of the World

The Dionysian Vision of the World

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ira J. Allen

Language: English

Pages: 83

ISBN: 193756102X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In this early work, Nietzsche explores the Dionysian ideal and worldview which would come to be central in The Birth of Tragedy.

Greek and Roman Sexualities: A Sourcebook (Bloomsbury Sources in Ancient History)

A Commentary on Lysias, Speeches 1-11

Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome

Medea and Other Plays

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

consonance, but also dissonance, serves as the source of the world's becoming. Nietzsche talks here about the simultaneity of coming into being and passing away, which, although they occur together, are not identical. This is a cosmological perspective, from which music appears as prior to phenomena, prior to appearance. B eyond conceptual language, there is a language of music that operates as an immediate or direct echo of a strictly ungraspable nature. Here, music is a matter of the primordial

between beauty and truth; here, a unification of Dionysus and Apollo is possible. This world reveals itself in play with intoxication, not in being wholly caught up in it. In the actor [Schauspieler] ,23 we apprehend once more the Dionysian man, the instinctive poet singer dancer, but now as a p 1 a y - a c t e d Dionysian man. He seeks to attain to his model in the convulsions of sublimity or else in the convulsions of laughter; he transcends beauty and yet he does not seek truth. He remains

Sophocles. The sublime appears [erscheint] to Aeschylus, as a thinker, most often in the most extraordinary justice. For him, Man and god share the tightest subj ective commonality: the divine just ethical25 and the h a p p y26 are uniformly entwined with one another. It is on these scales that the individual being, whether man or Titan, 46 is measured. The gods were reconstructed according to this norm of justice. So, for example, the folk belief in a demon who blinded and tempted people to

case, the emphasis and rhythm of its sound, the essence of the thing [ Wesen des Dinges] is symbolized; through the gesture of the mouth, the accompanying presentation, the image, the appearance of the essence [Erscheinung des Wesens] . Symbols can and must be multiple; they develop, however, instinctively and with great and wise regularity. An apprehended symbol is a c o n c e p t : since in being 55 detained in memory the tone fades entirely away, in the concept only the symbol of the

generates; and yet "existence" still does not denote 22 substance or grounding being. The primordial unity is not part of the Erscheinungswelt, and yet the phrase "truly existent" should not seduce us into believing that Nietzsche addresses a fullness behind all appearances. Rather, what is at stake here is a sort of subtraction from appearances, something that is no thing at all, but a pathos, a feeling.19 It is in this sense that Dionysian music can be the "symbolism ... of the worlcf' (58);

Download sample

Download