Nietzsche’s Critique of Reason and the Two Worlds
The Error Lies in Reason, Not the Senses
For Nietzsche, the error is not in the senses, but in reason. Reason forces us to develop supreme concepts to regulate, organize, and make sense of infinite existence, to survive, to become, to change. Be aware that the error occurs there; we can prevent it from occurring. This makes us see ourselves caught in error, the need for error.
While we know by concepts of reason such as unity, identity, substance, and thing, we know that reality is not so. However, our language needs these concepts to be meaningful. The first steps of rudimentary psychology occur when human beings become aware of their language and wonder what lies behind the words, what the reason is. From then on, they idolize it (rude fetishism). The operation of reason develops identities such as the will, substance, etc. The first concept built and the first language habit is attributing an action to an agent. For Nietzsche, this is not real but a postulate or logical-metaphysical belief. The subject is who performs the action and, therefore, is attributed an independent existence of reason, therefore, a substance. Nietzsche speaks here of pre-philosophical time, but this habit also remains in philosophical time, such as in Descartes.
The attribution of causality to the “I” model is also used to assign other cause-effect relationships, i.e., to organize the world according to the principle of causality. Nietzsche begins to refer to the first philosophers who attributed the origin of the categories to reason since, given its characteristics, it could not come from the sensible.
Plato’s Theory of the Preexistence of the Soul
Nietzsche also alludes to the Platonic theory of the preexistence of the soul, reincarnation, and the innateness of ideas, pointing to the Eastern origin of this theory or belief. Finally, although we can prove the validity of reason and its categories, we cannot stop talking, and when talking, we have to use grammatical structures. We cannot say something to that extent; it will continue to affirm the existence of a substance and, ultimately, of God, the cause and explanatory principle of all substances.
The Two Worlds and the Decline of Life
The distinction of two worlds present in traditional philosophy is a symptom of declining life, of moral decay. The lack of value for the human being cancels itself and life, creating an ideal but fictitious world. Nietzsche says that the approximation to reality cannot be done through the categories of reason. The concepts do not refer to anything real but are fictions produced by our suspicion of life. Aesthetics (art) is the only avenue of approach to evolution. The metaphor of art against the concept of reason opens multiple perspectives that reality has to be in constant change.
The Confrontation Between Apollo and Dionysus
The confrontation between Apollo and Dionysus symbolizes the Nietzschean conception of life in which there is an intractable and tragic tension between reason and instinct. Therefore, the tragic vision of life captures the essence of human life and expresses it as it is. It is not a pessimistic view; it is real. However, the Dionysian, chaotic, and instinctive is the priority and must end the Apollonian. When the Apollonian dominates and the Dionysian is committed, there is a falsification of life, what Nietzsche calls slave morality, a morality that calls everything antiviral good (submission, austerity, control, etc.).