MYTH AND DIALECTIC

IN FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE’S THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

The double essence of Aeschylus’s Prometheus, his simultaneously Apolline and and Dionysiac
nature, could therefore be expressed like this: ‘All that exists is just and unjust and is equally
justified in both respects.’

That is your world. That you call a world.1

I choose to begin with the above passage because I think it accurately summarizes

Nietzsche’s view of the moral effect achieved by the dialectic of the Apollonian and Dionysian

drives. Much more significant, however, is the line that follows this description and the

contempt it intimates. Why, when we are repeatedly told that both drives are necessary for tragic

drama (exemplified in this case by Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound), and that tragic drama (at

least in its purity) is high art, necessary in a healthy society, is there this dissatisfaction? Since it

is it obviously directed to the modern reader, I believe that the condemnation refers to the

unhealthy modern moment in this movement of the tragic form from its origins in music to its

purported ability to re-emerge in the myth and art of Nietzsche’s Germany. In order to support

my hypothesis, I would ask the reader to recall Nietzsche’s own words, written sixteen years

later, condemning his youthful style: “I find it an impossible book today. I declare that it is

badly written, clumsy, embarrassing, with a rage for imagery and confused in its imagery,

emotional, here and there sugary to the point of effeminacy, uneven in pace, lacking the will to

logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore too arrogant to prove its assertions, mistrustful

even of the propriety of proving things…” (6). While it would not be difficult to make the

argument that many of the accusations he levels against the text could prove applicable to his

idea of a re-emergence of the Dionysian in German music, I believe that the most fitting is the

1
The Birth of Tragedy, section 9, 51. The reference is to Goethe, Faust, I, 409.
 2

“[lack of] logical cleanliness.” I think that in this passage, we glimpse a different Nietzsche from

the one who will later assert the possibilities for a new German tragedy, one who has an intuition

of where the possibility for tragedy and true art stands in the modern world, based on his own

logic. In the course of the work, Nietzsche follows the transformation of the Apollonian

tendency through to its logical conclusion and shows the impossibility of a return to tragedy as it

was known to the Greeks, and asserts that there is instead, a reverse of the process and a return to

myth, yet the book as it stands does not cognize the failure of contemporary German music to

express this return, if, in fact, the movement has been fully undergone by Nietzsche’s German

society (which, the later Nietzsche tells us, is precisely not the case). In his “Attempt at Self-

Criticism,” Nietzsche himself explicates this problem, and tells us that despite his earlier failure

to recognize the true character of German Romanticism in the art of his contemporaries, the

question still remains: “what would music be like if it were no longer Romantic in its origins, as

German music is, but Dionysiac?” (11). Before we can answer this question, however, we must

retrace Nietzsche’s dialectic in order to understand why the art of Nietzsche’s Germany is not yet

fully the product of the transformation from enlightenment to myth, and is instead, Romantically

flawed.

It would be best to begin by asserting the fundamental constancy of the Dionysian

tendency, in order to show the real problem that the Socratic perversion of the Apollonian

presents for modern art (I will refer to this perversion also as “rationality,” “enlightenment,” and

the “transfigured Apollonian” in the course of this paper). Nietzsche tells us that “the continuous

evolution of art is bound up with the duality of the Apolline and the Dionysiac in much the same

way as reproduction depends on there being two sexes which co-exist in a state of perpetual

conflict interrupted only occasionally by periods of reconciliation” (14). It is this cyclical nature
 3

that is put in jeopardy by the evolution of the Apollonian drive. The Dionysian does not and

cannot, by its very definition, fundamentally alter its method of being or presentation: “If we add

to [the feeling of horror at a break in the ability to cognize the phenomenal world] the blissful

ecstasy which arises from the innermost ground of man, indeed of nature itself, whenever this

breakdown of the principum individuationis occurs, we catch a glimpse of the essence of the

Dionysiac, which is best conveyed by the analogy of intoxication” (17). The Dionysian is the

destruction of subjectivity and the reconciliation of nature with man—it is the unity that exists

behind the world of images, intelligible to us only when the Dionysian makes it so and the

Apollonian images of beauty are dispersed.

The Apollonian is the imposition of order and beauty on the chaos and sublimity of the

primal. The Greek gods are a manifestation of this, for their gods encompassed all that was, both

the just and unjust. The requirement of the Greeks for this semblance is a human one: “The

same drive which calls art into being to complete and perfect existence and thus to seduce us into

continuing to live, also gave rise to the world of the Olympians in which the Hellenic ‘Will’ held

up a transfiguring mirror to itself. Thus gods justify the life of men by living it themselves—the

only satisfactory theodicy!” (24). It is only by the imposition of the Apollonian on the Dionysian

that man can avoid the wisdom of Silenus, though it is by no means the case that the harmony of

the two drives seen in Attic tragedy occurs in every culture. This last gives us a powerful

intimation of the problem facing modern tragedy.

Nietzsche tells us that, historically, as we move away from the early Attic art, we can

glimpse the beginning of the complete triumph of the Apollonian in the application of words and

images to music, which, in the dramatic representation of tragedy, cannot exist purely in its

Dionysian form (where it has no need of images) and is transfigured into the chorus. It is
 4

worthwhile to note that the music itself is already a form of semblance and that “it is impossible

for language to exhaust the meaning of music’s world-symbolism, because music refers

symbolically to the original contradiction and original pain at the heart of the primordial unity,

and thus symbolizes a sphere which lies above and beyond all appearance” (36). Music,

transformed into the chorus in tragic drama, thus still refers back to the primal, even as the

chorus of satyrs is already at a remove from the natural. This remove is not inhibitive but rather

constitutive of true tragedy, as the satyrs are then the representation of a natural world that goes

on beyond the screen of the Apollonian, and thus their semblance is necessary and helpful for the

reconciliation of the two drives: “the symbolism of the chorus of satyrs is in itself a metaphorical

expression of that original relationship between the thing-in-itself and phenomenon” (42). Thus

the Dionysian chorus “discharges itself in the Apolline world of images,” and the reconciliation

of the two for tragedy is complete (44).

Fundamentally, then, the formal unification of the two drives is rather facile, but the

above-illustrated relationship cannot but fail to tell the entire tale. The complexity that arrives is

when the content of tragedy is added to this mixture, and tragic myth is established as the content

of the interaction of the drives, as well as the material within their particular artistic interplay.

Myth presents the drama with material for conflict, and the material of myth is always an

evaluation of humanity’s place in the world: “Wisdom, the myth seems to whisper to us, and

Dionysiac wisdom in particular, is an unnatural abomination: whoever plunges nature into the

abyss of destruction by what he knows must in turn experience the dissolution of nature in his

own person” (48). The concepts of Apollonian individuation and Dionysian striving give art a

moral telos, so to speak: “we have found the ethical foundation of pessimistic tragedy, its

justification of the evil in human life, both in the sense of human guilt and in the sense of the
 5

suffering brought about by it” (50). Of course, the content of myth does not originate in the

void, it is precisely the interplay of the Apollonian and Dionysian that creates this schism

between man and nature, by causing man to suffer individuation because of his striving. The

Dionysian striving and the Apollonian tendency toward individuation introduce the idea of sin

and the fall. In fact, the struggle created by the two drives is not merely instructive for art; it is

equally instructive for morality, since the Apollonian exists as the reminder of the unity that is

unavoidably lost to the individual in his humanity. The expression of this sacrifice is the content

of myth, and the move away from myth is in itself a form of sacrifice in the striving for

wholeness and unity. This account is what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer will later call

the move from “myth to enlightenment and back again.”

The content and the form of tragic drama, then, are similar in their relationship to striving

and sacrifice, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. I have now arrived at my central thesis, which

is that because of the very nature of the Apollonian and Dionysian and their dialectic of both art

and morality, we can better understand Nietzsche’s initially somewhat disconcerting discontent

in the conclusion of his passage on Prometheus Bound (and perhaps why he will later disavow

metaphysics in what might be seen as an attempt to break the dialectic of the drives, rather than

see it carried through to its conclusion—or perhaps he is alluding to the fact that the Dionysian,

if it should return, will negate metaphysics in the music that comes of the re-birth of myth). In

the first ten sections of The Birth of Tragedy, we learn of the dynamic relationship of the two

drives and the place of myth. Following this, we are introduced to Socrates and Euripides, where

Nietzsche explains the perversion of the Apollonian and we may begin to the historical

movement of the dialectic take shape. Upon their arrival, we have already been informed that

the lesson of tragedy is “the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is a unity; the
 6

view that individuation is the primal source of all evil; and art as the joyous hope that the spell of

individuation can be broken, a premonition of unity restored” and that it is “the fate of every

myth to creep gradually into the narrow confines of an allegedly historical reality and to be

treated by some later time as a unique fact with historical claims” (52-3). Interestingly, the

lesson of myth, namely that there is a dialectic of sacrifice and progress inherent in the world

(the “just and unjust” nature of our world), becomes internalized in the form of Socratic dialogue

as a denial of both semblance and irrationality—in order to embrace progress, both the

Dionysian and Apollonian in oneself must be combatted and ordered according to principles of

reason, which is itself an outgrowth of the Apollonian tendency.

This is expressed by Euripides in his tendency to “expel the original and all-powerful

Dionysiac element from tragedy and to re-build tragedy in a new and pure form on the

foundations on a non-Dionysiac art, morality, and view of the world” (59). This rationalism sets

up a new dialectic: “the Dionysiac verses the Socratic, and the work of art that once was Greek

tragedy was destroyed by it” (60). It is not, then, the Dionysian that needs to return for art’s

redemption—it is the Apollonian which has been lost. The dream character of art is abandoned

when the Apollonian tendency evolves into strict rationalism, since it, and art itself, relies on the

very images that Socrates, and scientific thought, will seek to eradicate. The Apollonian reacts

against itself, when, in its transfigured form as science, it reacts against myth and illusion, both

things of which it is a constituent. The Dionysian drive, it has been shown, cannot be destroyed.

At worst, it will lie dormant. But the Apollonian, in its inevitable evolution, has moved the

world away from the tragic myth of morality and the cognition of what has been destroyed by the

iron rule of reason. The Apollonian tendency, which was once able to unite with the Dionysian

at certain intervals, in its transfigured form, now drives the Dionysian entirely from the stage and
 7

effects the destruction of tragedy and myth by making the chorus expendable and rendering the

background of the action explicit: “the optimistic dialectic drives music out of tragedy under the

lash of its syllogisms; i.e. it destroys the essence of tragedy which can only be interpreted as a

manifestation and transformation into images of Dionysiac states, as the visible symbolization of

music, as the dream-world of Dionysiac intoxication” (70). In the sense of Nietzsche’s

appropriation of the Faust quote we began with, the world we inhabit requires semblance, and to

reject semblance is to reject the world. In order to experience the primordial unity, there must be

sacrifice and there must be semblance, in life and art.

Finally, then, we may consider the true ability of Socrates to sing a hymn, or the ability of

modernity to again experience tragic drama and music, and thereby, the Dionysian. Nietzsche

shows that it is in the very evolution of scientific thought that art and myth might be reborn—

that is, that the delusion that thought might understand and correct existence is in fact the

transformation into art. We are told that “this sublime metaphysical illusion is an instinct which

belongs inseparably to science, and leads it to its limits time after time, at which point it must

transform itself into art; which is actually, given this mechanism, what it has been aiming at all

along” (73). Nietzsche here conjoins art and myth, that latter of which he says a paragraph later

is “the necessary consequence, indeed intention, of science” (73). The rush of scientific thought

to comprehend and effect change in the world is the very rush for striving in the Dionysiac,

couched again in the Apollonian transfigured. And here again the rationalist sees the knowledge

of Silenus breaking through: “when, to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself at the

limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic

knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medicine” (75). The

question, then, in our pursuit of the failure of German music, is whether music can again break
 8

though the semblance of science and express the Dionysian when the Apollonian has been thus

transfigured in opposition to itself, and how we might recognize this feat when it happens.

Now that there can be no aid from the original dream state of the Apollonian, the best that

music, myth, and art may hope for is a break in the movement of theory and its hostility to the

Dionysian: “If ancient tragedy was thrown off course by the dialectical drive towards knowledge

and the optimism of science, one should conclude from this fact that there is an eternal struggle

between the theoretical and tragic views of the world. Only when the spirit of science has been

carried to its limits and its claim to universal validity negated by the demonstration of these

limits might one hope for a rebirth of tragedy” (82). If music is to again offer tragedy its

metaphysical solace, the principles of thought that require the deus ex machina must fail.

Fascinatingly, at this point Nietzsche again invokes Goethe’s Faust, this time considering the

title character as the true Alexandrian. Here he shows that the movement from myth to

enlightenment must be faced again, this time in its reverse—Faust is the consummate man of

theory, yet he is dissatisfied with his lot. This dissatisfaction has come about largely from the

insistence of philosophy: “great natures with a bent for general problems have applied the tools

of science itself, with incredible deliberation, to prove that all understanding, by its very nature,

is limited and conditional, thereby rejecting decisively the claim of science to universal validity

and universal goals” (87). These men, notably Kant and Schopenhauer, have shaken the

foundations of modern thought and have given the world, as we “call” it, a jolt in their

expression of the schism between what can be known and what cannot: “it is, after all, the mark

of that ‘fracture’ which everyone thinks is the original ill of modern culture, that theoretical man

should take fright at his own consequences, and, in his discontent, no longer dares to entrust

himself to the terrible, icy stream of existence” (88). This fracture is the crisis of modernity,
 9

where, uncertain and anxious, modern man rushes to name things in the service of scientific

solace, found in giving an explanation of phenomena, and for his domination of them.

Historically, we again feel the separation between the thing-in-itself and the world of images.

This crisis is the beginning of a return to myth.

The Apollonian is restored only by a return to myth, but the backwards potential for this

transformation is rooted not only in the failure of science, but in the recognition of the

consequences and the sacrifice that has been required by the movement towards rationalism.

This mourning character cannot come from the Dionysian drive—it must come from the

Apollonian, which has always provided the element of justice in myth and tragedy. Not only

will rationality turn against itself, as evidenced by the vacillations of Faust, but it must, and here

we may again find Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment prefigured. The return

to myth must also be accompanied by knowledge of what has occurred, since myth is precisely

this tragic knowledge in scientific eras. The initial movement of music to tragedy cannot be

repeated—in the movement back towards myth and art, a reversal of the process is required.

Nietzsche tells us that the tragic myth must first be reclaimed, and only the Apollonian tendency,

or thought, is capable of achieving this by way of harnessing the Dionysiac in such a way that it

might break through. The Dionysiac, “eternal and original power of art,” must be understood

precisely in its destructiveness and sublimity before the new Apollonian tendency, reason, is able

to supply the illusion necessary for art and also to act as the moral reminder of what has been

sacrificed to Dionysian striving (115). Thought’s recognition of its own striving and sacrificial

character effects the return to myth, and with the help of the ever-present Dionysian, calls to life

again the dream-like Apollonian and the possibility of true tragedy, in the form of tragic

knowledge, and this is precisely the mourning character of modern music. The Dionysian may
 10

supply the musical tendency, but myth and art require also the Apollonian and only tragic

knowledge can redeem the Apollonian. The original Apollonian, in its turn, also requires art in

order to re-appear, for in scientific eras, it both supplies and cognizes the sacrifice. This is why

the ever-changing relationship of thought, myth and nature is a thorny, cyclical revolution and

not a linear phenomenon, since it is also our lot that only when art presents the justification of

good and ill in our world may we glimpse the dialectic of myth and enlightenment. Finally, in

answer to Nietzsche’s question, it must be said that music that arises from the Dionysian will

come of the final movement from enlightenment to myth, or, only when the Apollonian has been

restored, by its own effort, to myth, and transcended by the Dionysian once more. For Nietzsche,

the failure of “Romantic” German music is that it rests on a false and one-sided mythology, since

the Apollonian required for the tragic myth is still too-present—if the dialectic were completed

in the direction opposite its origin, the element of justice injected into the music by the sacrifice

required would have dissolved into pure ecstatic sublimity, negating the metaphysics that

brought it into being. But long after Nietzsche’s initial grappling with these questions, the still-

transfigured Apollonian rationality in German romanticism would provide the world with a new

human tragedy to mourn, and tragic knowledge would again call for the explication of thought in

order to continue the dialectic. Fortunately, the exiles who took up the cause in Dialectic of

Enlightenment had both Nietzsche’s successes and failures to draw upon in their attempt to

redeem the Apollonian by showing the boundaries of its transfigured form. Had it somehow been

otherwise, the dialectic required by our world of semblance and separation may have ground to a

halt, and with it, the possibility of meaningful art.

 11

Source

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edited by Gunzelin S.

Noerr, Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Cambridge ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008. Print.