Nietzsche’s Core Ideas: Apollonian, Dionysian, and the Death of God

Philosophical Context of Nietzsche’s Thought

Following Hegel’s philosophy, which seeks to subject all of reality to rational budgets, a new philosophy emerged in the works of several great thinkers, such as:

  • Kierkegaard (Existentialism): Highlights existence and human freedom.
  • Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (Vitalism): Stress the importance of life.
  • Marx (Marxism): Emphasizes material conditions.

Vitalism, generally speaking, resulted in the affirmation of life as the most important aspect of all reality; it is the supreme value. All the rest—not only rationalism and idealism but the whole philosophical tradition—had only obtained the cancellation of life in favor of rationality. From the first of Plato’s explanatory attempts, it had become a tool for the subjugation of the genuinely human: to live life with all its consequences. Rationality not only stifles life but is also not the appropriate instrument to explain reality. This leads to another philosophical “ism” known as irrationalism. Reason is not capable of knowing or explaining the world; it is therefore necessary to apply to other instances. In Nietzsche’s philosophy, vitalism and irrationalism join to form a philosophical system. In the 19th century, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche were called “masters of suspicion.” In a way, this denial of metaphysics was a return to the former positions of Heraclitus, who saw the world as becoming, against the statism of Parmenides, who is a precursor for posterity. Nietzsche, in his writings, does not hide his passion for the “everything flows” from the pre-Socratics. For Nietzsche, nothing stays the same. With the announcement of the death of God, he stripped existence of any possible supernatural element. Nietzsche received a great influence on his thinking from Schopenhauer’s vision of existence, encrypted in the will to live and whether it is tragic. Both the tragic vision of life and Nietzsche’s will to power are based on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, although Nietzsche’s vision is not pessimistic; he just describes life as it is and does not think it should be otherwise.

Cultural Context: Romanticism

Romanticism, as a cultural movement in the generic sense, typical of the first half of the 19th century, made a commitment to all creative manifestations of man’s passion, exalting itself against the ideal of the Enlightenment. Richard Wagner, the German composer, represented, to some extent, a return to the artistic creation of ancient Greece. His own initial friendship with Nietzsche also led to a clear influence on the thinking of our author. Wagner, especially the character of Siegfried in “The Ring of the Nibelung,” represents the figure of a hero, a prototype of a new ideal of man, a lover of life unrelated to any convention inherited from the culture of the time.

Historical Context of Nietzsche’s Life and Work

Nietzsche was born on October 15 in Prussia. He was educated in an environment of strict evangelical Protestantism by his mother, two aunts, and grandmother after his father, a Protestant pastor, died a few years after his birth. From childhood, Nietzsche showed brittle health and was prone to moods of sadness and isolation; however, he possessed an unwavering force of will. At 20, he entered the University of Bonn (Germany) to study theology to please his family. A year later, he decided to leave these studies and move to Leipzig, where he completed his studies in classical philology at the university. At 24, he occupied the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. During this season, he became friends with Wagner, whom he idolized, identifying him as the most genuine representation of the Greek artistic spirit. In 1879, as a result of his delicate health, he abandoned university teaching. This stage of his life coincided with his feud with Wagner because of the premiere of his opera “Parsifal,” in which the composer praised traditional Christian values. One of his works, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” contains the backbone of his essential lines of thought; the main ideas of this work were the death of God, nihilism, the superman, eternal recurrence, and the will to power. Another important work was “The Twilight of the Idols” (from 1888 to 1889), which contains his criticism of philosophy, nihilism, and the Apollonian and Dionysian. On January 3, 1889, he lost his sanity. The diagnosis was softening of the brain and progressive paralysis, which ended his life on August 25, 1900, in Weimar. The 19th century was the result of the Industrial Revolution, which led to a social crisis due to poor working conditions and the vast difference between two social classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This led to the so-called class struggle. Nietzsche did not share the optimistic vision of positivism, which maintained that scientific and technological development would do away with social evils (poverty). Marxism advocated the destruction of the bourgeoisie to liberate the proletariat. For Nietzsche, however, there is no eternal return (historical events are cyclical). The imperialism of the great European powers was justified by social Darwinism, which stated that better-suited and stronger states and societies imposed themselves on the most primitive societies. Nietzsche did not support this theory, as his idea of the Superman was not that of a group, race, or society but of a superior individual.

The Apollonian and the Dionysian in Nietzsche’s Philosophy

Nietzsche’s philosophy is a devastating criticism of all the philosophical tradition that runs from Socrates to Hegel. In his book “The Birth of Tragedy,” he describes the new era begun by Socrates and Plato as the maturity of the Apollonian over the Dionysian. Apollo, the great Olympic divinity, represented restraint, order, and the dependence of life on the dictates of reason. Dionysus, another divinity, embodied the cult of inebriation, the disproportionate, the connection to the land or nature, and the affirmation of the values of the sentiments. Philosophy is exclusively a triumph of the Apollonian and the annulment of any Dionysian demonstration. Socrates and Plato, along with the whole Western cultural tradition, are symbols of the weak and cowardly man, unable to cope with life in its fullness, preferring to mask it under concepts and immutable essences. Plato’s death sentence on any Dionysian vision of life as our only world contrasts with the ideal world as true reality, canceling and voiding human life. And so on to Hegel.

Critique of Philosophy: Socrates, Plato, and Parmenides

The figures of Socrates, Plato, and Parmenides will ultimately account for the transit from myth to logos and oblivion, the mythological narratives, and a new way of thinking focused on rationality. The history of philosophy and science is but the development of this task begun by Socrates and Plato. In Parmenides, aesthetic values are subdued by reason, and life is drowned under the parameters of what should be considered rationality. Apollo is the prototype of values such as restraint, order, and the primacy of the rational over existence. This dimension is represented by artistic expressions such as architecture, which bases its creation on the harmony of forms. The Dionysian emerges from the worship of the god Dionysus, the foundation of values such as excess, chaos, and the primacy of feelings over rationality. In art, the Apollonian is represented in architecture and culture. In art, the Dionysian is depicted in Greek tragedies, where the irrationality of reality inevitably occurs. In Greek tragedies, there is a sound, optimistic vision of life.

Critique of Plato: The Distinction Between Appearance and Reality

The Platonic distinction between the world of ideas (the real world) and the sensible world involves identifying the apparent world and knowing it with virtue and happiness. This occurs as what Nietzsche calls the first revaluation. For Nietzsche, happiness is synonymous with finding the instincts of life. Plato creates an ideal world that renders content to the world in which the lives of men actually unfold. Reality is none other than the apparent world, the world of the senses despised by Plato. In his work “The Twilight of the Idols,” Nietzsche continues his criticism of this ontological dualism in the philosophy of Kant.

Critique of Christianity: An Unnatural Moral Life

For Nietzsche, Christianity is Platonism for the people, involved in establishing an unnatural moral life that opposes and rejects, as sin, the whole body and instinctive manifestation of man. In the body, the soul is a new jail, so it must perish to save the soul. That true, immutable, and eternal world—where good, truth, and beauty reside—is the abode of God, a hostile and seemingly distant god from this world of change and decay, which should be referred to as a transit to the other world, heaven. In Christianity, we see the influence of ontological dualism. The Christian religion knew, like any other, how to take advantage of the fear that man feels for pain, suffering, and death. From these premises arises in man the concept of morality, God, death, the devil, the slave, etc.

Positive Philosophy: The Death of God and Nihilism

The death of God was the symbol of all that was necessary to tear down. They are the foundations of Western culture, which must be demolished. The presence of God in the world and his influence through the Christian religion have been losing weight since the Renaissance. The church gradually lost its earthly power. The state, with its network of laws and attached institutions, represents the new moral order that should be established. Nietzsche says that God died with the advent of modernity, but his shadow is very long. This means that the place of God is occupied first by the state and second by science. For Nietzsche, the death of God means the end of all dogmatism, the cancellation of all supernatural visions of existence, and the suppression of any external moral rule that dictates the meaning of life and the universal, to rule on the goodness or badness of human acts. God is the big lie that must be definitively unmasked.

Nihilism is the state in which culture is ordered after the death of God. The traditional values that have ensured the meaning of life have lost all credit, and hopes in a salvific beyond have been repealed. Nietzsche distinguishes between negative nihilism and positive nihilism.

  • Negative Nihilism: Disorientation, passivity, extreme relativism, etc.
  • Positive Nihilism: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” For Nietzsche, if God does not exist, there is no basis for any kind of value that is presented as absolute.

The ability to build a new life and create new values—not from outside yourself, but every free spirit will create them—is Nietzsche’s intellectual separation from the tenets held by Schopenhauer. The free spirit must not fear the face of realities that tend to neutralize all human beings. According to Nietzsche, these are the fear of pain and solitude. The greatness of man lies in coping with these situations, knowing not to fight but to love them and thus make them part of his life. Dionysus must overcome the Kantian “I must” with an “I want,” involving the self as the only authority. Finally, life must be accepted as it is presented—fatal love—without fear and without judging anything that happens under the moral parameters of good and evil. This is reflected in the work that Nietzsche wrote called “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” The camel, an animal that carries a heavy burden, represents the weak man imbued with a morality of slaves and takes the ultimate representation of God in their enslaving situation. The lion symbolizes the first step necessary to overcome all negative nihilism.

The fierce lion does not fear death or pain; it takes strength to assert its power. To become a boy, the lion, without fear and without duties, is the only one capable of that fatal love for life, and everything for him is a simple game.