Page 11 - GALIET DIONYSUS´RETURN: Good and Evil Dithyrambs IV

Although Camus is convinced that humanity’s fragmentation and sadism begins with Marquis de Sade’s lurking debauchery, he has underestimated its true origin: the ancient Dionysian power that dwells within the human psyche (The Bacchae6) which lurks in us with its tempting, wild and dangerous freedom. The Greeks, like the Romantics and the Surrealists, “felt the terror and horror of existence.”7 It is evident that although the Romantics nourish their insatiable passions fusing heaven and hell, good and evil, they are not the original creators of this union; they merely have re-welcomed, re-embraced its spirit, its incarnation in a new age of “Lucifer-Like” rebellion.
“Two centuries of metaphysical and historical rebellion for our consideration,” as Camus says, clearly becomes an understatement: the 5000-year- old teleological history of man projects its rebellious nature in what Hegel described a dialectical movement in history filled with thesis, antithesis reaching for synthesis. Consequently, the cyclical nature of history reminds us that whenever we dwell in epochs of extreme repression or freedom, reason or passion, these often succumb to their very opposite natures. Given that the Age of Reason systematically stifles individuality and subjectivity, it is understandable why Milton and subsequent romantic poets, such as Blake and Shelley, must rebel and react against the Age of Reason’s oppressive enlightenment ideals (truth as objectivity) and its excessive empiric, materialistic philosophy (progress as science).
6 Euripides. The Bacchae. Trans. Nicholas Rudall. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.
7 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995. 8
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