Trajectory (plain list)
The Dionysian and Apollonian
Born as aesthetic polarity in The Birth of Tragedy, criticised in 1886, reworked against romanticism, and sealed as Dionysian affirmation in the late works.
1872 · Introduces
The Birth of Tragedy · §1
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Apollo and Dionysus introduced as the dual art-impulses of the Greek world.
We shall have gained much for the science of æsthetics, when once we have perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the duplexity of the _Apollonian_ and the _Dionysian:_ in like manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations. These names we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to …
Sources: gutenberg:51356
1872 · Develops
The Birth of Tragedy · §2
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Dream and intoxication: the Apollonian image-world and Dionysian self-forgetfulness.
Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and his antithesis, the Dionysian, as artistic powers, which burst forth from nature herself, _without the mediation of the human artist,_ and in which her art-impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way: first, as the pictorial world of dreams, the perfection of which has no connection whatever with the intellectual height or artistic culture of the unit man, and again, as drunken reality, which likewise does not hee…
Sources: gutenberg:51356
1872 · Develops
The Birth of Tragedy · §16
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Music and myth: tragedy as the union of Apollonian and Dionysian powers.
By this elaborate historical example we have endeavoured to make it clear that tragedy perishes as surely by evanescence of the spirit of music as it can be born only out of this spirit. In order to qualify the singularity of this assertion, and, on the other hand, to disclose the source of this insight of ours, we must now confront with clear vision the analogous phenomena of the present time; we must enter into the midst of these struggles, which, as I said just now, are be…
Sources: gutenberg:51356
1872 · Develops
The Birth of Tragedy · §17
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Dionysian art affirms eternal joy behind phenomena, not in them.
Dionysian art, too, seeks to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind phenomena. We are to perceive how all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are compelled to look into the terrors of individual existence--yet we are not to become torpid: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the transforming figures. We are really for brief moments Primordial Being itself, and fee…
Sources: gutenberg:51356
1886 · Repudiates
The Birth of Tragedy · Attempt at Self-Criticism
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
The 1886 self-criticism rejects the book’s early Wagnerian and Schopenhauerian scaffolding while keeping the question of the Dionysian.
Sources: gutenberg:51356
1886 · Develops
Beyond Good and Evil · §295
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Dionysus returns as philosopher-god — no longer paired in a simple aesthetic dualism.
The genius of the heart, as that great mysterious one possesses it, the tempter-god and born rat-catcher of consciences, whose voice can descend into the nether-world of every soul, who neither speaks a word nor casts a glance in which there may not be some motive or touch of allurement, to whose perfection it pertains that he knows how to appear,--not as he is, but in a guise which acts as an ADDITIONAL constraint on his followers to press ever closer to him, to follow him m…
Das Genie des Herzens, wie es jener grosse Verborgene hat, der Versucher-Gott und geborene Rattenfänger der Gewissen, dessen Stimme bis in die Unterwelt jeder Seele hinabzusteigen weiss, welcher nicht ein Wort sagt, nicht einen Blick blickt, in dem nicht eine Rücksicht und Falte der Lockung läge, zu dessen Meisterschaf…
Sources: gutenberg:4363 · gutenberg:7204
1887 · Revises
The Joyful Science · §370 · What is Romanticism?
The Joyful Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882/87)
Romanticism diagnosed; Dionysian plenitude distinguished from romantic hunger and decadence.
_What is Romanticism?_—It will be remembered perhaps, at least among my friends, that at first I assailed the modern world with some gross errors and exaggerations, but at any rate with _hope_ in my heart. I recognised—who knows from what personal experiences?—the philosophical pessimism of the nineteenth century as the symptom of a higher power of thought, a more daring courage and a more triumphant _plenitude_ of life than had been characteristic of the eighteenth century, …
Sources: gutenberg:52881
1888 · Comments on
Twilight of the Idols · What I Owe the Ancients §5
Twilight of the Idols (1888)
Final yea-saying: Dionysus against the Crucified, sealed at the end of the published corpus.
The psychology of orgiasm conceived as the feeling of a superabundance of vitality and strength, within the scope of which even pain _acts as a stimulus,_ gave me the key to the concept _tragic_ feeling, which has been misunderstood not only by Aristotle, but also even more by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from proving anything in regard to the pessimism of the Greeks, as Schopenhauer maintains, that it ought rather to be considered as the categorical repudiation and _con…
Sources: gutenberg:52263
1888 · Develops
Twilight of the Idols · Things I Owe to the Ancients §4
Twilight of the Idols (1888)
Dionysus as excess energy — orgiastic psychology before the final yea.
I was the first who, in order to understand the ancient, still rich and even superabundant Hellenic instinct, took that marvellous phenomenon, which bears the name of Dionysus, seriously: it can be explained only as a manifestation of excessive energy. Whoever had studied the Greeks, as that most profound of modern connoisseurs of their culture, Jakob Burckhardt of Bâle, had done, knew at once that something had been achieved by means of this interpretation. And in his “_Cult…
Sources: gutenberg:52263
1888 · Comments on
Ecce Homo · Why I Write Such Good Books · Birth of Tragedy §3 → The Birth of Tragedy · §1
Ecce Homo (1888)
Late gloss: Dionysian as bridge to the tragic poet’s psychology.
The extent to which I had by means of these doctrines discovered the idea of "tragedy," the ultimate explanation of what the psychology of tragedy is, I discussed finally in _The Twilight of the Idols_ (Aph. 5, part 10).... "The saying of yea to life, and even to its weirdest and most difficult problems: the will to life rejoicing at its own infinite vitality in the sacrifice of its highest types--that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I meant as the bridge to the psyc…
Sources: gutenberg:52190
1888 · Develops
Ecce Homo · EH-why-i-am-a-fatality-9
Ecce Homo (1888)
Final formula: Dionysus versus Christ.
Have you understood me? _Dionysus_ versus _Christ._ [Footnote 1: Needless to say this is Nietzsche, and no longer the Persian.--TR.]
Sources: gutenberg:52190
1888 · Develops
Ecce Homo · EH-why-i-am-a-fatality-2
Ecce Homo (1888)
Dionysian nature: negation inseparable from yea-saying.
If you should require a formula for a destiny of this kind that has taken human form, you will find it in my _Zarathustra_. "And he who would be a creator in good and evil--verily, he must first be a destroyer, and break values into pieces. "Thus the greatest evil belongeth unto the greatest good: but this is the creative good." I am by far the most terrible man that has ever existed; but this does not alter the fact that I shall become the most beneficent. I know the joy …
Sources: gutenberg:52190