Can the Dyonisian and Apollonian relationships Nietzsche deals with in the Birth of Tragedy be related to the visual arts as well as music?

Aby Warburg used this opposition. He might be a useful source to consider.

Hi Emily

Your wording suggests that the question would presuppose that N. was largely or entirely correct in his thesis, a position that is debatable to start with. The cardinal vices in utilizing binaries (as e.g. his Dionysian-Apollinian - his spelling) were in full evidence in his work: He allowed the inherent simplicity in the over-arching idea to dictate day and night approaches where nuance and gray were called for. Thus he ventured upon the embarrassing rapture over Wagner as the epitome of the Dyonisian -- until, that is, the problem of anti-Semitism and various other unlovely characteristics. This was such as to compel the equally embarrassing retraction in the preface to the second edition of B.o.T.

His approach to art was as simplistic as his initial thralldom with Wagner, considering it "sentimental" - a worse pejorative from him could hardly be sought. Into this category he threw Goethe in his entire. Only much later, writing in The Gay Science did he publicly acknowledge various of these serious errors. There he specifically resurrected Goethe, a tribute to his intellectual integrity. But while he showered encomiums on his "teacher" Schopenhauer in youth, later years found him a stern and unforgiving and ungrateful ingrate. Part of this binary came, after all, from this man, who likened the Apollinian as saving a drowning man by hoisting into a boat.

In attributing the best to the Dionysian temperament - in which he artificially narrowed the potential large-scale scope identified by the Greeks themselves (see esp. Guthrie) to that of his Overman (a term borrowed from Emerson, who cottoned to the Zarathustrian vantage), he thus, in allowing the Apollinian as a day-and-night contrast to be equally narrow, made the same error, holding art to be a distraction from the main event, sentimentalism vs. worldliness. In so doing he of course disregarded entirely the role of protest art.

Art is what it is. DO NOT take Nietzsche as the guiding light of its essence. He employed it as a foil and/or scapegoat for most of his career. DO NOT presume to require tragedy in visual art. You brand yourself as childish to any Nietzsche scholar. Ask rather to what extent N's thesis CAN be found insightful or no, and why in each instance. Take the skeptical scholar's approach, which is, after all, what you doubtless were trained for. You will find tragedy, for example, in most protest art, in much monumental art, in some approaches to Gothic idealism, and so on. Nietzsche is the penumbral element art qua art is the core element and stands quite nicely on its own Nietzsche or no.

In your study of N, contrast Untimely Meditations with Gay Science and Ecce Homo. Consider also the Edmond Burke approach in which awe factors heavily. When is awe more serviceable as Apollinian, when as Dionysian? Examine Ruth Benedict's (Patterns of Culture) use of the binary in contrasting North Coast pacific Tribes with the Pueblos - Dionysian and Apollinian, respectively for her.

You can read my take on the latter approach here in Belief-Reliance as Mythic Ground for an Honor-Dignity Binary, as also specifically related to speech-as-political art in A New Cultural Binary via Content Analysis.

Good luck with your endeavors.

First of all you should understand that there is no serious way to discuss questions concerning Nietzsche and Warburg based only on translations.

E la stessa cosa vale anche per d'Annuncio.

Si deve leggere d'Annunzio nella lingua sua.

E poi si puo aprire l'orizonte e chiedere in che modo erano presenti Nietzsche, Warburg e d'Annunzio per un'artista Americana. Troppo complesso? Lo so. È così.

Oh for God's sakes get a grip you two. And Nelson you of all people are supposed to know better than allow a crass generalization to destroy the nuances so carefully translated by the best minds in the business. Between Kaufmann, Hollingdale and Golffing and some fifteen substantial texts worth of a man's reasonably consistent thought, to say I must be wrong on account of translations is an insult to me and and embarrassment to those you represent (if you are honor-based).

Were translations so necessarily errant, why should great Germans ever consent to translations of their works?

Now when a person is so married to a philosopher such as is Newman (or Emerson or Mencken, etc) one must wonder whether what they see is Nietazche's narrowed interpretations of his binary for the reason of ready identification (such as animated Nietzsche himself until he learned how to be very embarrassed at his impudence), whence one must serious question their capacity to get into the deeper layers of his thought. The moment I read that some artist expects the overman spirit to pour from music but not visual art, I am not even going to entertain the time to hear them out. When I hear that someone thinks that the overman concept can be at once virile and active and yet free from the foibles that usually accompany such traits (again, Nietzsche is a case study, a bipolar long before the effects of syphilis) again I am not interested. I have high standards. Apparently not everyone does.

Any Nietzsche scholar will counsel a circumspect approach in order to survey all the relevant nuances that Nietzsche pours forth in remarkable prose and poetry. That hardly means that careful translations necessarily invite false interpretations by careful scholars. And really, stop this insulting nonsense about the translation. If you don't like my read on this philosopher, accuse me of false or inadequate interpretation rather than idiotically blaming it on translations.

Thank you both Nicholas and Charles for your answer. I'm afraid I'm going to focus on these as opposed to the 'lost in translation answers' simply because I feel that the translation is justified to my level of study.

Your answers have both been most useful and I hope to keep this profile updated with my research.

Nicolas, you're suggestion sounds great. However I'm looking at the socio-political landscape and hopefully connecting that with Newmans 'Stations of the Cross'. It's all a bit pipeline at the moment.

Thanks again.

Emily

I don't mean to seem overly pedantic, but it does bear noting that the crux of this question must revolve about the growth of Nietzsche's thought, for as begins with crude lapses of insight as to the binary approach, swears it off only to return in depth to the discussion in metaphoric guise in the Gay Science.

Always one for symbolic notability, what do you really suppose he meant by "Gay Science"? Has science so changed in a century that we can't see him juxtaposing or even intercalating the two as renditions of the former narrow and overly-clean cut versions of the Dionysian and Apollinian, respectively? Here's a portion of one of his poems, going to the metaphor of dance, which I do think is quite excellent to the purpose (Kaufmann's tr) at p. 373, Vintage, '74.

To the Mistral - A Dancing Song

Mistral wind, you rain cloud leaper,

sadness killer, heaven sweeper,

how I love you when you roar!

Were we two not generated

in one womb, predestinated [sic]

for one lot for evermore?

Here on slippery rocky traces

I dance into your embraces,

dancing as you sing and whistle:

you that, shipless, do not halt,

freedoms' freest brother, vault

over raging seas, a missile.

. . . . .

Niettzsche, the Dionysic dancer, supposes now that the wind, musician of whistling, songs and roars - the Apollinian, are born of one germ and destined to reign together for eternity. Now you can modify details here as you will, but the point not to be glanced over is that he has radically altered his entire approach to the binary and has come to understand it correctly, and takes each as the broad generalities they must be in any binary analysis.

Where at first he supposed Wagner to be Dionysian and thus in all parts the same Dionysic, a position destroyed for all to ridicule as he had to acknowledge Wagner's anti-demitism and sundry other faults (while impudently denigrating the artistic temperament of a Goethe as merely 'sentimental'), he now sees clearly that far from being polars they are similitudes trending to distinct but related ideas. In metaphysics this is called a 'paradigmatic' relation defined as one in which a dyad's components are seen as esentialistic to one another and required for each other's definition. They 'partake' of one another. This is the view Nietzsche arrived at, and it is the correct view.

And you bothersome two who have no clue of the normative use of translations, don't even dare assert that my interpretation of the poem relies on faulty translations. I will call your respective institutions and ask them to reprimand their unruly children.

Now the upshot of all of this pedantry will be far less pedantic once related back to the original question. When we evaluate any modality of art form using Nietzsche's binary, our very first question is NOT to inquire whether either is present, but rather which is present in what percent to the other, and in what way does each add to the content communicated, and why. The full answers to these questions encompass all that can be gleaned from the exercise.

Your Ph.D's mean, Doctor of Philosophy. Though I am a metaphysician, the philosophic content requisite to the purpose that I here offer should have been plain without my assistance, translation or no.