Nietzsche’s Philosophy: God, Apollo, and Dionysus
Nietzsche’s Key Concepts: God, Apollo, and Dionysus
God: When Nietzsche refers to God, he means the god of religion, particularly Christianity, but also anything that can replace him. In reality, God is not an entity but rather a place, a possible figure of thought, representing the Absolute. God is a metaphor to express absolute reality. Reality is presented as the Truth and bios, as the presumed target area that can serve as a basis for existence because they were beyond it and make sense. Anything that serves men to give meaning to life, but nevertheless gets out of life is similar to God. Nature, Progress, Revolution, and Science, taken as absolute realities, are similar to God.
For Nietzsche, the belief in God is a consequence of declining life, of life unable to accept the world as a tragic dimension. The idea of God is a refuge for those who cannot accept life. When Nietzsche declared that God is dead, he indicated that men live disoriented, no longer served by the ultimate horizon in which they have always lived, that there is a light that can guide us so fully.
Egipticismo: Nietzsche used this term to refer to the attitude of dogmatic philosophers who use concepts (instead of using metaphors) to describe reality as static, unambiguous, and definite, convinced that everything that changes or becomes is imperfect or second class.
“Death of God”: This historical event of the highest magnitude is not understood as the death of the divine but that the belief in the Christian God has fallen into disrepute, revealing a human fiction. Rather than the announcement that God is indeed dead, it symbolizes the end of the Platonic-Christian tradition and its negative values for life.
Apollo and Dionysus
Apollo: Apollo was one of the gods worshiped by the Greeks. They erected many temples to him, and his oracle was consulted when they wanted to know the future or the darker aspects of their existence. The Greeks regarded him as the god of youth, beauty, poetry, and art in general. But, according to Nietzsche, expressing to them more, a way of being before the world was the god of light, clarity, and harmony to the world of the primary forces and instinctive. He also represented individuation, balance, size and shape, rationality. For the traditional interpretation, all the Apollonian Greek culture, and the Greek people the first to present a vision bright, beautiful and rational reality.
Nietzsche opposed this interpretation, stating that it was true for the Greek world from Socrates onward, but not for the earlier Greek world, which our philosopher regarded as the most characteristic moment of the Greek spirit. Apollonian versus Dionysian Greeks objected, represented by the figure of the god Dionysus, god of wine and crops, the bacchanalian festivities presided over by the excess, drunkenness, music and passion, but according to Nietzsche, this God also represented the world of confusion, deformity, chaos, night, the world instinctively, the dissolution of individuality and, ultimately, irrational.
The true grandeur of the archaic Greek world lay in not hiding this dimension of reality, to harmonize the two principles, to consider even the Dionysian was the real truth. Only with the onset of Western decadence, and with Socrates and Plato, the Greeks are trying to hide this aspect making up a world of legality and rationality (a purely Apollonian world, such as encouraging Platonism). Socrates opens the scorn the world of the body and faith in reason, identifying the Dionysian to be no, with unreality.