Page 12 - GALIET WHIM WILL AND WOE: The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche IV

Galiet & Galiet
His notion of tragedy, in this sense, is completely nineteenth century: it is shrouded in an optimism masked in creative pessimism. It is true that it is necessary to unmask superficial optimism and see existence in its natural, tragic horror, but a German Spirit turned Dionysian-Art is equally repelling. In Nazism, the re-birth of tragedy manifests itself in both the Apollonian and Dionysian. Hitler’s grand theatrics of horror and terror uses art as Nazi Propaganda to indoctrinate and serve the state, as Plato once dreamed in his utopian Republic. It awakens the German Spirit to lofty Apollonian aesthetic ideals before it succumbs to Dionysian revelry and catastrophe: the Holocaust. Indeed, the Dionysian will, never distant from Circe’s cup, metamorphoses humans into grovelling swine. Once it is kidnapped (as some Tuscan pirates did), it transforms humanity’s ship into an arbour of tangled vines, rendering Apollo powerless to tame nature’s exuberant burst.
In this sense, Nietzsche seems too idealistic in wishing for an Apollonian- Dionysian synthesis as the highest goal of tragedy. Can Apollo truly speak the language of Dionysus and vice-versa? It is true they speak one common language, yet they converse in far more differing ones. Their language in common is destruction and revenge. Apollo exterminates by reason and argument13 and Dionysus by passion and madness. Apollo’s fluvial arrows can bring plague and death just as Dionysus’ midnight-howl stirs an orgiastic Agave to behead son Pentheus. Both Gods, like many others of the Grecian pantheon, are known to avenge slights of honour. Yet, except for this language in common, these two radically different deities and half-brothers14 3⁄4 Apollo as healer, just, measured, perfect, finite and prophetic, and Dionysus as diseased, unjust, frenzied,
13 Apollo slaughters primarily in the name of justice.
14 Apollo and Dionysus are half brothers by Zeus: the first by Zeus and Leto, and the second by Zeus and Semele. Apollo shares his rule with Dionysus at Delphi in the summer while Dionysus in the winter. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, 1995.
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