Nietzsche’s Philosophy: Apparent World, Innocence of Becoming, and the Dionysian
Apparent World
This concept refers to Nietzsche’s division of reality into two worlds established by metaphysics and religion. A true world, on top, is reached by reason, objective and immutable, eternal, and that relates to the good and spiritual. In Plato, this would be the world of ideas; in Christianity, God; and in Kant, reality itself. The lower world is the apparent world, that of the senses, subjective, changing, a world of corruption, change, and death, which accounts for the poor and the body. The sensible world in Plato, the underworld or valley of tears in Christianity, and the reality of phenomena in Kant. For Nietzsche, we must invert this division and consider the real world that has so far been considered misleading and false, and the nonexistent world that has hitherto been regarded as superior and true. The apparent world is the only world we have, and to deny and flee from it is typical of the weak and resentful. God’s death is the death of the “real world” to recover the only world we have, this, which is the world of becoming, of change and death, knowing that we face no law beyond those we put ourselves, no more truth than that which we, humans, invent. And we must live with it, accept and love it as it is, without denying or inventing perfect worlds to comfort our sorrows.
Innocence of Becoming
According to Nietzsche, traditional philosophy has always felt a rejection of evolution, the changing nature and flowing of things, chasing the illusion of an ideal reality that possessed characters contrary to this changing world in which we live. For these philosophers, the flowing nature of reality, the change, the becoming, has been something that did not produce the products to be quiet; for them, the true reality should be immutable, eternal, universal, etc. Nietzsche affirms the existence of a unique becoming, but of an existence without any regularity, the innocence of becoming and understanding of reality and of ourselves without order, without permanence, without any legality whatsoever that comes from outside; legal order is what man puts in a changing world to deny it. Evolution makes no sense, neither a real, unique, or set goal to be valued and appreciated. It is flowing and changing, multifaceted and immeasurable. We must accept that the world is as it appears to us and not how reason would like it to be. The innocence of becoming is a behavior that is beyond good and evil, concepts closed and deniers of the fluid, changing nature of existence. It is a way of understanding the world without the vanity that aims at finding human truths and absolute values.
The Dionysian
Concerning the god Dionysus, god of wine and crops, for Nietzsche, it is part of the typical conception of the Greek world before the appearance of philosophy, along with Apollo. It represents the “spirit of the land” and the values of life, against Apollo, who expresses all the world order, the values of reason. Nietzsche first introduced these concepts in The Birth of Tragedy, a work in which he explains how Western philosophy (from the hand of Socrates and Plato) has neglected the Dionysian dimension, which champions the values of reason as human beings themselves, the desirable, and undervalued land values and life, preferring the spirit and the rational and leaving aside the embodiment and the irrational. The Dionysian represents everything that Nietzsche claims as forgotten and undervalued in our culture, philosophy, religion, and morality: the world of the senses, the change of the apparent, festivals, music, dance, pleasure, corporeality, instinct, chaos, deformity. The greatness of the Greek world was to understand reality as composed of legality and rationality, but also by the horror, the instinct, and irrationality. Nietzsche does not deny that human beings are rational, but that is only part of who we are. We are also instinctive, creative, groundbreaking, special, different, and “bad.” So he claims the Dionysian as a fundamental category of the human being that has been buried by Western philosophy and that we must recover.