Nietzsche’s Philosophy: Dionysian, Nihilism, and Transmutation of Values
1. Dionysian
Nietzsche, on the Greek mind, identified two opposing trends:
– Apollonian, of Apollo, favoring light and reason. The Apollonian view attributes order and sense to the world.
– Dionysian, of the god Dionysus, is associated with darkness, instincts, and ecstasy. When the Dionysian dominates, the world appears as chaos and chance. For Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, art was more than entertainment; it was a way to decipher reality. Nietzsche admired Greek tragedy (especially Aeschylus) for balancing Apollonian and Dionysian trends. Based on the universe’s Dionysian chaos, where fate is random, the Greeks created beauty and harmony through tragedy. The decline of Greek thought began when Plato denied the sensible world (the Dionysian, shadows in a cave) and invented an intelligible world of perfection and order (the Apollonian ideal). Nietzsche saw this as weakness and cowardice, leading to the invention of a world where immortal souls exist in perfection. This trend is called nihilism, influencing Christianity, Descartes’s innate ideas, and Kant’s noumenon.
2. Innocence of Becoming
The innocence of becoming is a worldview opposing moral interpretations, Christian or otherwise, beyond good and evil. Both the Greeks and Christianity judged existence as guilty. For the Greeks, responsibility belonged to the gods; for Christianity, it belongs to men. Homer shows gods taking responsibility for men’s madness, while the New Testament places the responsibility for God’s foolishness on the cross. Both are nihilistic, presupposing a life sentence, but the Greek solution is more beautiful. The real problem is not who is responsible for chaos but whether it is guilty or innocent. Dionysus represents the innocence of plurality, the innocence of becoming.
3. Nihilism
In nihil, nothing. A philosophical attitude that denies any value to existence or posits the existence of something non-existent. Nietzsche’s idea of nihilism is complex:
Nihilism as vital decay: Western culture is nihilistic because it places hope in something nonexistent (the Christian God, Ideal World), neglecting reality. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche represents the spirit as a camel, accepting burdens.
Active Nihilism: Philosophy that exposes dominant values as inventions. Nietzsche’s philosophy is nihilistic in this sense, proposing the destruction of existing values and their replacement through the transmutation of values. This is necessary for a new cultural moment, a new morality, and a new man, the superman. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this is represented by the lion (aggressive, destructive).
Passive Nihilism: Disbelief in any value, leading to despair, inaction, and suicide, stemming from the idea that if God does not exist, everything is permitted. This is the last man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
4. Apparent World
Nietzsche called any theory dividing reality into two worlds Platonism: a real world (reason-given, immutable, objective) and an apparent world (sensory, changing, subjective). Plato’s real world corresponds to eternity, the right, and the soul; the apparent world to source, death, and evil. Platonism stems from the harmful influence of language, seeking substance in becoming. Only those with low vitality believe in a transcendent world. Western culture invents a real world (objectified in God through Christianity) for comfort against the Dionysian world. The artist loves appearance, saying yes to life’s horror (Dionysian). In art, life is transfigured. The artist seeks new possibilities, making life a work of art. Nietzsche states that once we lose the real world, we have the apparent world. We must start from scratch.
5. Transmutation of Values
In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche critiques Christian morality by studying the origin of values using the genealogical method (etymological and historical research on moral concepts like good and evil):
In Homer’s Greece, the heroic good was the strong, passionate, powerful warrior. From Socrates and Plato, nihilistic pessimism began. The good became those who renounce life for a world of Ideas. Judaism and Christianity, supported by Platonism, created a morality of resentment, a life sentence for the impotent. They reversed Greek values: the good are now the obedient, meek, weak, and sick. The strong and powerful become evil. Christian morality is a slave morality. Nietzsche proposes a transmutation of values. Christian resentment would be replaced by a healthy morality saying yes to life. The champion of this new morality is the superman, accepting the death of God, eternal recurrence, and spiritualizing passions.
6. Unnatural Moral
Traditional (Christian) morality is unnatural because it opposes life’s main trends, a morality of resentment against instincts and the natural world. This is evident in the obsession with limiting the body and sexuality (Socratic-Platonic philosophy and Christianity). It invented sin and freedom. Sin is unhealthy: the subject suffers from a fiction; there is no God to judge us. Christians feel guilty before a non-existent God, expecting punishment. Christianity needs the notion of freedom to hold people accountable and punish them. A healthy morality says yes to life, passions, and instincts, opposing Platonic and Christian morals that war on passions. Healthy morality seeks not the annihilation but the spiritualization of passions. Opposing the unnatural moral ideal of the castrato, the healthy moral ideal is the affirmation of life.