Nietzsche's Philosophy: Apollonian, Dionysian, and Truth

Nietzsche's Philosophical Stages

The Apollonian and Dionysian: First Stage

Friedrich Nietzsche's 1872 work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, delves into the reality of aesthetic categories. It offers a profound analysis of Greek tragedy, which he viewed as encompassing all of Western culture. Nietzsche distinguishes between a scientific understanding of reality and a tragic knowledge, which, according to him, represents the very best of human life, as it manifests the irrational aspect neglected by science.

In tragedies predating Euripides, two contrasting elements are always present, expressing the essence of human life: namely, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. These concepts are defined as follows:

• Apollo represents the ideal of beauty, the well-finished, light, harmony, and measure. He also embodies the trend towards individualization, which closes itself off and individualizes. Artistically, this is manifested in the more static and spatial arts: architecture and sculpture.
• Dionysus represents excess, the unfinished, the dark, the opaque, and the threatening. He is the god of wine (Bacchus to the Romans), the god of music and dance, true to life on earth, expressed through the will to power (influenced by Schopenhauer). Dionysus, the god of music and poetry, manifests in arts that are transient, existing only as they are heard. He also represents the desire for fusion with the universe (a feeling produced by music and poetry).

Second Stage: Positivist or Enlightenment Period

In this period, Nietzsche shows an interest in science (physics, biology, anthropology, astronomy, paleontology), but he battles against its alliance with metaphysics and absolute truth. He criticizes science for its inability to provide a complete view of reality, arguing it cannot understand life with its static concepts that simplify reality. Abstract concepts, he contends, only capture a moment and ossify reality, unable to explain passion, feeling, or art.

This stage marks his departure from Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner (whose Parsifal he considered a return to Christian values). The most representative works of this period include:

• Human, All Too Human (1878)
• Daybreak (1881)
• The Gay Science (1882)

Furthermore, in his work published posthumously in 1973, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche asserts that all truth is an interpretation. There is no objective truth, and the will to truth is, in fact, a desire to flatter deception. Language itself, he argues, is merely a set of conventions agreed upon by society, formed to contain the wild instinct for self-preservation that makes peaceful coexistence impossible. With these conventional (unnatural) concepts, we construct reality, forgetting their arbitrariness and lack of inherent truth.