Apollo and Dionysus (Attempt at a Self-Criticism, Preface to Richard Wagner, Sections 1–10)

Attempt at a Self-Criticism (1886)

1. Whatever may lie at the bottom of this questionable book, it must have been a question of the first rank and attraction, and a deeply personal one besides: witness the time in which it arose, in spite of which it arose — the exciting time of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71. While the thunder of the battle of Wörth was rolling over Europe, the brooder and lover of riddles who fathered this book sat somewhere in a corner of the Alps, very preoccupied and puzzled, and at the same time very much at ease, and wrote down his thoughts about the Greeks. The question was this: what is the meaning of pessimism among the Greeks — among the best, strongest, bravest of men? Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, of decay, of failed and weakened instincts? Or is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual preference for the hard, the gruesome, the evil, the problematic in existence, which comes from well-being, from overflowing health, from the fullness of existence?

2. What I then got hold of was something terrible and dangerous, a problem with horns: the problem of science itself — science grasped for the first time as problematic, as questionable. But the book in which my youthful courage and suspicion poured themselves out was an impossible book. Built of nothing but premature, green self-experiences, all of them pressed hard against the threshold of the communicable; and set on the ground of art — for the problem of science cannot be recognised on the ground of science. To see science under the lens of the artist, but art under the lens of life.

3. Today I find it a badly written book, heavy, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, here and there sugared to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdaining proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof; a book for initiates. And yet: here spoke a strange voice, the disciple of a still "unknown god," who for the time being hid himself under the hood of the scholar. It should have sung, this "new soul" — and not spoken!

4. Yes, what is Dionysian? This book contains an answer to that. A "knower" speaks in it, the initiate and disciple of his god. Perhaps I would now speak more cautiously and less eloquently about so difficult a psychological question as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. The basic question is the relation of the Greeks to pain, their degree of sensitivity. Was it their very abundance, their health, that made them need tragedy? And then, conversely: what is the meaning of the Dionysian madness? Is madness perhaps not necessarily a symptom of degeneration?

5. Already in the preface to Richard Wagner, art, and not morality, is presented as the truly metaphysical activity of man; in the book itself the suggestive sentence recurs several times, that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the whole book knows only an artistic meaning behind all events — a "god," if you like, but an entirely unscrupulous and amoral artist-god, who wants to experience his delight and his sovereignty equally in building and in destroying. Against morality, then, my instinct turned with this questionable book. I called it the Dionysian. Christianity was the most extravagant set of variations on the moral theme that humanity has ever heard; and in the book I passed over it in careful and hostile silence.

6. How I regret now that I did not have the courage, or the immodesty, to permit myself a language of my own for such views; that I tried laboriously to express strange and new valuations in formulas of Schopenhauer and Kant. How differently Dionysus spoke to me! And worse: I spoiled the grandiose Greek problem by mixing it up with the most modern things — I set hopes upon the German spirit and German music, where nothing was to hope for.

7. "But, my dear sir, if your book is not Romanticism, what in the world is?" Should not the tragedian's pessimism end in a longing for metaphysical comfort — in a "Christian" ending? No! You ought to learn first the art of this-worldly comfort; you ought to learn to laugh, my young friends, if you are determined to remain pessimists. Then, perhaps, as laughers, you may some day send all metaphysical comforts to the devil — metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of that Dionysian monster who bears the name of Zarathustra: "Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads!"

Preface to Richard Wagner (1872)

To keep at a distance all the possible scruples, excitements and misunderstandings which the thoughts gathered in this essay will occasion, given the peculiar character of our aesthetic public, and to be able to write these introductory words with the same contemplative delight of which it bears the mark, I picture to myself the moment when you, my highly honoured friend, will receive this essay: how you, perhaps after an evening walk in the winter snow, will look at the unbound Prometheus on the title page, read my name, and be at once convinced that, whatever this work may contain, its author has something serious and urgent to say. You will recall that I was collecting myself for these thoughts at the same time as your glorious commemorative essay on Beethoven came into being, amid the terrors and sublimities of the war that had just broken out.

Those who think that this collection of thoughts sets aesthetics against patriotic excitement are mistaken. We are dealing here with a seriously German problem, which is placed, as a vortex and turning point, in the very midst of German hopes. Perhaps it will seem frivolous to some, who see in art no more than a merry diversion; but I am convinced that art is the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life, in the sense of that man, to whom, as my sublime predecessor on this path, I wish to dedicate this essay.

Basel, end of the year 1871.

1

We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics when we have come to see, not merely by logical inference but with the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian — just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodic reconciliations. We take these names from the Greeks, who make known to the discerning mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not in concepts, but in the intensely clear figures of their gods. Through Apollo and Dionysus, their two art-deities, we come to recognise that in the Greek world there existed an enormous opposition, in origin and in aims, between the art of the image-maker, the Apollonian art of sculpture, and the imageless art of music, which is that of Dionysus. These two different drives run side by side, mostly in open conflict, continually provoking each other to new and more powerful births — until at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic "will," they appear paired with each other, and in this pairing they finally beget the equally Dionysian and Apollonian work of art, Attic tragedy.

Let us think of them first as the separate art-worlds of dream and intoxication. In dreams, as Lucretius says, the glorious divine figures first appeared to the souls of men. The beautiful illusion of the dream worlds, in the creation of which every man is a perfect artist, is the precondition of all the plastic arts, and also of an important half of poetry. And even when the dream is most alive, we still have a shining sense that it is an illusion. The philosophical man even has a presentiment that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another, quite different reality lies hidden, so that this one too is an illusion. Apollo, as the god of all image-making powers, is at the same time the god of prophecy, the "shining one," the deity of light, who also rules over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy. But the image of Apollo must also contain that delicate line which the dream image must not overstep: that measured limitation, that freedom from wilder emotions, that wise calm of the sculptor-god. His eye must be "sunlike," as befits his origin; even when it is angry and looks displeased, the consecration of beautiful appearance lies upon it. We might call Apollo the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis, the principle of individuation, from whose gestures and looks all the joy and wisdom of "illusion," together with its beauty, speak to us.

Schopenhauer has described the tremendous terror that seizes man when he is suddenly at a loss in the forms of appearance — when the principle of individuation seems to break down. If we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that rises from the innermost ground of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse, we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication. Either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which all primitive men and peoples speak in their hymns, or with the mighty approach of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity, everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. Even in the German Middle Ages, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian power: the dancers of St. John and St. Vitus.

Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the bond between man and man renewed: nature which has become alienated, hostile or subjugated celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Freely the earth offers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of prey of the rocks and desert approach. The chariot of Dionysus is covered with flowers and garlands; panthers and tigers walk under its yoke. Transform Beethoven's "Hymn to Joy" into a painting; let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruck — then you will approach the Dionysian. Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice or "impudent convention" have fixed between man and man are broken. Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled and fused with his neighbour, but as one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity. In song and dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak, and is on the way to flying up into the air, dancing. He is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art.

2

Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and its opposite, the Dionysian, as artistic energies which burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist. With reference to these immediate art-states of nature, every artist is an "imitator": either an Apollonian artist in dreams, or a Dionysian artist in ecstasies, or finally — as in Greek tragedy — at once an artist in both.

From all quarters of the ancient world, from Rome to Babylon, there is evidence of Dionysian festivals, whose centre was an extravagant sexual licence, whose waves overwhelmed all family life and its venerable traditions; the most savage beasts of nature were let loose, including that horrible mixture of lust and cruelty that has always seemed to me the true "witches' brew." For some time the Greeks were apparently perfectly protected against the feverish excitement of these festivals by the figure of Apollo, who could not oppose the Gorgon's head to any power more dangerous than this grotesquely uncouth Dionysian. But when similar drives finally broke out from the deepest roots of the Hellenic nature itself, resistance became impossible; and then the Delphic god, by a seasonably effected reconciliation, contented himself with taking the destructive weapons from the hands of his powerful opponent. This reconciliation is the most important moment in the history of the Greek cult.

In the Greek festivals, the Dionysian orgies became festivals of world-redemption and days of transfiguration. Here, for the first time, nature attains her artistic jubilee; here, for the first time, the destruction of the principle of individuation becomes an artistic phenomenon. In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties: the essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a new world of symbols, the whole symbolism of the body, not only of the lips, face and speech, but of the whole pantomime of dance, rhythmically moving every limb. And the Apollonian Greek must have looked upon him with astonishment, mingled with horror: that all this was not so very alien to him after all; that his Apollonian consciousness was only a veil hiding from him this Dionysian world.

3

To understand this, we must take down the elaborate edifice of Apollonian culture stone by stone, until we see the foundations on which it rests. Here we see first the glorious Olympian figures of the gods. Whoever approaches these Olympians with another religion in his heart, searching among them for moral elevation, even for sanctity, for disincarnate spirituality, for charity and benevolence, will soon be forced to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed. For nothing here suggests asceticism, spirituality or duty. We hear nothing but the accents of an exuberant, triumphant life, in which all things, whether good or evil, are deified.

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word; till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon."

How is the Olympian world of the gods related to this folk wisdom? Even as the rapturous vision of the tortured martyr to his torments. Now it is as if the Olympian magic mountain opened before us and showed us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. That he might endure this terror at all, he had to interpose between himself and life the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians. The tremendous distrust of the titanic powers of nature, the Moira enthroned inexorably over all knowledge, the vulture of the great lover of mankind, Prometheus, the terrible fate of the wise Oedipus — all this was again and again overcome by the Greeks with the aid of the Olympian middle world of art. It was in order to be able to live that the Greeks had to create these gods from a most profound need. Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it — the only satisfactory theodicy! Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is regarded as desirable in itself, and the real pain of Homeric men is caused by parting from it, especially by early parting. So now we may reverse the wisdom of Silenus and say of the Greeks: "To die soon is worst of all for them, the next worst — to die at all."

4–6

The Apollonian dream, then, is a redemption through illusion. Its Greek name is naïve art, and its highest example is Homer. But the Apollonian could not live without the Dionysian. The individual, with all his restraint and proportion, succumbed to the self-oblivion of the Dionysian states, forgetting the precepts of Apollo: "Know thyself" and "Nothing in excess." Excess revealed itself as truth. And so, wherever the Dionysian broke through, the Apollonian was checked and destroyed; but in Doric art and in the Doric state the Apollonian held its ground in defiant and majestic opposition.

Then came the lyric poet, Archilochus, the first warlike, passionate, loving, hating singer beside Homer. The lyric poet is first of all a Dionysian artist, who has become entirely one with the primal unity, its pain and contradiction; he produces a copy of this primal unity as music; and then, under the Apollonian dream influence, the music becomes visible to him as in a symbolic dream image. His "I" is not his own, but the voice of the world's heart sounding through him. The folk song is the musical mirror of the world, the original melody, which seeks a parallel dream image and expresses it in poetry. Language strains to imitate music. Music cannot be the mere expression of images and concepts; it is the will itself.

7

We must now call upon all the principles of art considered so far, in order to find our way through the labyrinth that is the origin of Greek tragedy. Tradition tells us quite unequivocally that tragedy arose from the tragic chorus, and was originally only chorus and nothing but chorus.

What is this chorus? Not the "ideal spectator," as A. W. Schlegel said, nor the people as against the princely region of the scene. Schiller came closer: the chorus is a living wall that tragedy draws round itself, to close itself off from the real world and preserve its ideal ground and poetic freedom. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art. The Greek man of culture felt himself annihilated in the presence of the satyric chorus; and the most immediate effect of Dionysian tragedy is that the state and society, indeed all the gulfs between man and man, give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort — with which every true tragedy leaves us — that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable, this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs, the chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilisation and remain eternally the same.

With this chorus the deep-minded Greek consoles himself — he who has looked boldly into the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature, and is in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will. Art saves him, and through art — life. In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion. Here, when the danger to the will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity.

8–10

The satyr, like the idyllic shepherd of our more recent times, is the offspring of a longing for the primitive and the natural; but how firmly and fearlessly the Greek embraced the man of the woods, and how timidly and mawkishly modern man dallied with the flattering image of a tender, flute-playing shepherd! The satyr was the archetype of man, the embodiment of his highest and most intense emotions, the ecstatic reveller enraptured by the proximity of his god.

The Dionysian reveller sees himself as a satyr, and as a satyr, in turn, he sees the god; that is, in his transformation he sees a new vision outside himself, as the Apollonian completion of his own state. With this new vision the drama is complete. Greek tragedy is the Dionysian chorus which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. The scene, with its action, was originally only a vision; the only reality is the chorus, which produces the vision out of itself. Dionysus, the real stage hero and centre of the vision, was at first not actually present, but only imagined as present; later he was shown on the stage.

It is an indisputable tradition that Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for its sole theme the sufferings of Dionysus, and that for a long time the only stage hero was Dionysus himself. Until Euripides, Dionysus never ceased to be the tragic hero; all the celebrated figures of the Greek stage — Prometheus, Oedipus, and the rest — are mere masks of this original hero, Dionysus. Behind them the god is hidden. He is the god who, as a child, was torn to pieces by the Titans, and in this condition is worshipped as Zagreus: the suffering of individuation itself. From his smile arose the Olympian gods, from his tears men. The hope of the epopts is for a rebirth of Dionysus, which we must now dimly conceive as the end of individuation.

Under the Apollonian appearances of the tragic hero, then, the Dionysian truth is hidden. Sophocles understood the most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the unfortunate Oedipus, as the noble human being who, in spite of his wisdom, is destined to error and misery, but who through his tremendous suffering ultimately exerts a magical, beneficent influence upon his surroundings, which continues to be felt even after his death. And Aeschylus's Prometheus: the titanic artist, who believes he can create men and at least destroy the Olympian gods, and who must pay for it with eternal suffering. "Whatever exists is just and unjust, and is equally justified in both." That is your world! That is what is called a world!