Page 13 - GALIET WHIM WILL AND WOE: The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche IV

Galiet & Galiet
imperfect and infinite15 3⁄4 cannot truly fraternize in these antagonistic linguistic realms without tensions and antagonisms. Though both form one whole, the different cannot be the same, at least to Plato.16 Indeed, it is their many differences, not their similitude or synthesis, that originate and support tragedy. At times, the Dionysian spirit might seem barbarous to the Apollonian and the Apollonian too temperate to the Dionysian, but neither, as Nietzsche says, can exist without the other. It is true that this Nietzschean symbiosis unites both deities in tension, as two differing aspects of the whole; however, in their linguistics and music17 they can never be truly, realistically reconciled. In fact, the perennial struggle between Apollonian and Dionysian language foments on- going tragic, historic tensions between classicism and romanticism, reason and passion, order and liberty, the ideal and the real, logos and muthos and nomos and phusis. As Hegel postulates, conflict and contradiction does exist between the idea of eternal justice and the particular, contingent actions of humans, however, this tension is resolved by establishing the universal Idea or Mind in the particular.18 Though Hegel’s linear tensions are overcome into a synthesis only to give way to new ones, Apollonian and Dionysian tensions are not: they are circular, eternally ongoing and returning.19 Were Apollo and Dionysus to synthesize in their capacity to speak each other’s language, that is, each speaking the other, tragic conflict would continue in this inversion of attributes. If each speaks the language of the other, then there is no difference in outcome: they cannot agree since they still differ. Both can only be reconciled in violence, their mutual language.
15 Ancient Greeks were terrified of the concept of infinity because it was incomprehensible. Thus, certain philosophers (Xenophanes, Parmenides, Milessus, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, to name a few) postulated a first, self-caused mover to avoid infinite regressions.
16 Plato. Complete Works. Theatetus. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
17 Let’s remember that Satyr Marsias challenges Apollo to a musical contest between pipe and lyre. When Apollo triumphs, he flays Marsyas alive.
18 Hegel. Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. by J. B. Baillie. Rev. 2d ed. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949. See Introduction.
19 This follows from Nietzsche’s notion of history as eternal return.
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