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Galiet & Galiet
instinctive or from a “social contract,”9 that is, social agreements voluntarily entered into by members of society.
Nietzsche, relentless philosopher, poet, musician and master of aphorisms, stresses in The Birth of Tragedy the contraposition and tension between nomos and phusis, the Apollonian and Dionysian will.10 To this contraposition, two series of oppositions are subordinated: light and darkness, dream and drunkenness, appearance and reality, resolution and irresolution, action and inaction. The second series is properly tragic. In fact, while the first one is manifested in the plastic arts in that it reveals the individual, beauty, the particular, the eternity of the phenomenon, reminiscent of Nomos, the second is manifested in music, in the universal, in nature (in the Greek sense of the word, φυσις), which is omnipotent, all-encompassing,11 oniric and mysterious.
We shall wander, then, ever slowly, meticulously, sometimes precisely, others not, through oniric landscapes, in light and in fog, through Eleusis and Olympus, Knossos and the Acropolis, its veiled etymologies and illuminated perceptions, definitions, some hidden, obscure, others as luminous as presence, some by Aristotle, others by Plato, some by the pre-Socratics, others by Heidegger, in both katabasis and anabasis, to determine if there is only one concept of Nature or many. We shall too journey through Plato’s eerie landscape of imagination and his crystallized verbs that deny a fugue to then, and only then, perhaps come to her. And then? Might we dance with her? She, whose immanent, ecstatic presence 3⁄4 breathless, numinous, perhaps 3⁄4 intuitive and instinctive, dwells in the greenest fuse, what furious energy, yet whose airy words endear, beyond the beyond of Ionia and of Elea and their distant past, remote, yesterdays hidden, lost in fragments, a mytho-poetic logos aspiring to say things of becoming and of being, not of opinion, argument or dialectic.
To clarify.
What?
9 The theory in which human society owes its origin or its possibility to live in society to a contract or agreement amongst individuals is usually called (according to Rousseau’s works) “The Theory of the Social Contract” and also “contractualism.” The defenders of these theory don’t usually sustain that society originated when men, or a group of men united with the purpose to agree to common aims and goals; they simply affirm that, whichever were the origins of society, its fundament and possibility as a society dwells in a pact or agreement.
10 Nietzsche affirms, based on Schopenhauer and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, that life and Grecian culture move between two artistic poles: the Apollonian (plastic arts) and Dionysian (music). In these arts, rupture and creative discord exists. Nietzsche. The Birth ofTragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, 1995.
11 This term signifies the Dionysian collective or community as oral and ecstatic in contrast to Apollo’s principium individuationis. Apollo’s individuation principle, in which the individual 3⁄4 as described in Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, remains calm in the midst of turmoil as if he were a fragile ship in a tempestuous sea 3⁄4 is destroyed and crushed by the Dionysian realm. Nietzsche. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Chapter 16.
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