Page 28 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

individual’s consciousness, posits Nietzsche, is that he can recognize the horrible character of things and existence.
It would be an error to suppose, as many of Nietzsche’s hermeneutists have, that he is content in juxtaposing war to peace, cruelty to goodness, suffering to joy. In fact, Nietzsche does not predicate Dionysus as the highest aim of tragedy, but his reconciliation with Apollo: a Dionysus capable of speaking the language of Apollo and an Apollo capable of speaking the language of Dionysus.41 That is, a Comus speaking the language of Lady Chastity, which he does, at first, and Lady Chastity the language of Comus, which she denies. Unable to communicate, Lady Virtue still experiences the tragic, not in the Aristotelian but Kierkegaardean sense. She, tragic heroine, renounces herself for the universal while Comus, Knight of Faith, renounces the universal for the individual and particular.42
Lady Virtue’s universal Platonism enlances, too, with Stoic and Christian notions of temperance as self-control (egkrateia) and frugality (euteleia). Yet, temperance must not be equated with asceticism. Temperance, for Hume, is not a monkish virtue,
41 Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Chapter 21.
42 Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.
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