Descriptions:
Video Description
Nietzsche ended his career calling himself ‘the last disciple of Dionysus’ — the Greek god of wine, madness, and rebirth. This lecture from Academy of Ideas follows that strange devotion to its root. Dionysus was the twice-born god of tragic contrast: the most delightful and most frightful of all deities, because in him creation and destruction, ecstasy and terror, are one. From that myth Nietzsche drew his deepest lesson — the full, joyful ‘yes’ to life, even with all its horror. The video ends where his philosophy always aimed: not to deny suffering, but to bless it, and still say yes.
Full Video Transcript
In his book, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote,
Herewith I again stand on the soil out of which my intention, my ability grows.
I, the last disciple of the philosopher, Dionysus.
For the entirety of his writing career, Nietzsche was heavily influenced by the ancient Greek god Dionysus,
the god of many forms and inexpressible depth.
Describing the multifaceted nature of Dionysus, Walter Otto wrote,
All of antiquity extolled Dionysus as the god who gave man wine.
However, he was known also as the raven god whose presence makes man mad
and incites him to savagery and even to lust for blood.
He was the confidant and companion of the spirits of the dead.
The flowers of spring bore witness to him too.
The ivy, the pine, the fig tree were dear to him.
Yet far above all these blessings in the natural world of vegetation stood the gift of the vine.
Dionysus was the god of the most blessed ecstasy and the most enraptured love.
But he was also the persecuted god, the suffering and dying god,
and all whom he loved, all who attended him, had to share his tragic fate.
The many myths and cults which surrounded Dionysus
exerted a great influence on ancient Greek society,
and in them Nietzsche perceived something he sensed as lacking in the modern world,
a celebration of what he called a tragic disposition.
Nietzsche stressed the importance of living with a tragic awareness of life
And asserted that only through the cultivation of such a state
Could genuine growth, creativity, greatness
And the capacity to truly affirm life be attained
There is only one hope and one guarantee for the future of that which is human
Nietzsche wrote
It lies in this
That the tragic disposition shall not perish
Drawing from Walter Otto’s astounding book Dionysus Myth and Cult
as well as from Nietzsche’s philosophical corpus.
In this video, we will investigate the nature of Dionysus
through the various myths and cults which surrounded this god of the ancient world.
In the process, we’ll decipher why Nietzsche was consistently enraptured with the figure of Dionysus
and illuminate his ideas on the nature of tragedy
and its connection to human greatness and the affirmation of life.
An intoxicated god, Walter Otto wrote of Dionysus,
a mad god, truly an idea which demands our deepest thought.
In contemplating the meaning and significance of Dionysus,
the most appropriate place to start is the myth of his birth.
Dionysus was conceived by a mortal woman, Semele, and an immortal god, Zeus.
While still in the womb of his mother, she was destroyed by a torrent of lightning born from Zeus.
In danger of perishing with his mother, Zeus took the unborn Dionysus from the flames which engulfed Semele,
and sewed Dionysus onto his thigh, caring for him until he was developed and healthy enough
to set forth in the world. A child of both the mortal and divine realm, born first from a mortal
woman and then an immortal god, Dionysus was referred to in the ancient world as the twice-born
one, a god of dual nature and paradox, whose very essence from the start differentiated him from
other gods as especially enigmatic. The suffering and death which characterized the myth of the
birth of Dionysus prefigured not only his fate, bestowing upon him the epithet the suffering and
dying god, but the fate of all those who cared for or took an interest in him. Tragedy or madness
befell them all. His mother’s sister, Eno for example, who took it upon herself to care for
the newborn and motherless Dionysus, died in a fit of madness by plunging herself into the sea
with her own child in her arms. In all the myths, whenever Dionysus appears, he comes violently and
in an alarming manner. His presence awakens a sense of urgency, ecstasy, and terror in the
hearts of all within his vicinity. The urgency his presence evokes is due to the inexpressible and
agonizing secretive nature of his being, of the fact that he symbolizes the eternal enigmas of
duality and paradox. For what can one do when Dionysus arrives, and one is confronted with a
stark awareness of the perplexing nature of reality, but fall back in euphoria, or else lose
touch in a transitory insanity.
The final secrets of existence and non-existence, wrote Otto, transfix mankind with monstrous
eyes.
This spirit of duality which distinguishes Dionysus is the source of the fascination
and the confusion which everything that is Dionysic evokes.
For it is the spirit of a wild being.
His coming brings madness.
The madness which his arrival inspires can be fathomed most clearly in the myths of the
nymphs and maenads, groups of women who cared for and nurtured the young Dionysus, and who,
when he matured into an adult, were possessed by his wild spirit and driven into the mountains,
where they nursed the young of wild animals, or else tore them to pieces and devoured their raw
flesh. The God who sends the mind reeling, the God who appears to mankind in the most urgent
immediacy, is welcome and fated by the women in an absolute ecstasy and excess of rapture.
They respond to his coming with the behavior of the insane.
The myth tells again and again how his fury ripped them loose from their peaceful domesticity,
from the humdrum orderly activities of their daily lives,
for the purpose of making them into dancers in the wilderness and the loneliness of the mountains,
where they find him enraged through the night as members of his rebel rout.
The madness of the Maenads was not only depicted in bloodthirsty pandemonium,
Where they devoured the raw flesh of wild animals and in some myths the flesh of their own children
But also in paralysis and deathly silence
Madness dwells in the surge of clanging shrieking and peeling sounds it dwells also in silence
The women who follow Dionysus get their name Maenads from this madness
Possessed by it they rush off world madly in circles or stand still as if turned into stone
stone. The madness of the Maenads is derived from the madness of Dionysus. The bloodthirstiness of
the Maenads is the bloodthirstiness of the god himself. As a child, according to the 2nd century
Greco-Roman poet Oppian, Dionysus delighted in tearing kids into pieces and bringing them back
to life again. He was called, among many other names, the Raging One, the Mad One, and the Eater
of Raw Flesh. But to focus too heavily on the bloodthirsty madness of Dionysus and his Maenads,
would be to distort his image.
For the madness which inheres in his being
and which overtakes all those he comes in contact with
is a double-sided madness,
capable of the most appalling and dreadful acts,
but also of the most fertile, life-enhancing, and creative.
The madness which afflicts Dionysus and all those who follow him
is a divine madness.
The madness which is called Dionysus is no sickness,
no debility in life,
but a companion of life at its healthiest.
It is the tumult which erupts from its innermost recesses when they mature and force their way to the surface.
It is the madness inherent in the womb of the mother.
This attends all moments of creation, constantly changes ordered existence into chaos,
and ushers in primal salvation and primal pain, and in both, the primal wildness of being.
When life begins to stagnate and decay, when one finds oneself in chains, self-imposed or otherwise,
when society becomes increasingly repressive and antithetical to the individual’s ability to
flourish, Dionysus arrives to break the chains, refresh and replenish the life that was in danger
of dying. In the Bacchae of Euripides, after being thrown in prison by the king, the Maenads suddenly
find their chains mysteriously absent, and witness the prison doors which surround them open of their
own accord. In myths, Dionysus frequently plays the role of the Liberator, another of the many
titles bestowed on him by the ancient Greeks. The liberating spirit of Dionysus is embodied in his
role as the god of wine, which has the power to animate, arouse, and inspire. It is said that in
public festivals which paid homage to Dionysus, streams of wine flowed spontaneously, and grape
finds blossomed and ripened in a single day. But, like all aspects which adhere in the figure of
Dionysus, wine too has a dual nature. It can enchant, but excessive use can also lead to
inebriated destruction and ruin. If the god of many forms can be said to have a basic nature
and essence, it is this, that paradox and duality are embodied in his being. The fullness of life
and the violence of death are one and the same, undifferentiated within him. Dionysus is the god
of tragic contrast. In the words of Otto,
joys, the dancer and ecstatic lover, the bestower of riches, the benefactor. This god who is the
most delightful of all the gods is also the most frightful. No single Greek god even approaches
Dionysus in the horror of his epithets, which bear witness to a savagery that is absolutely
without mercy. In fact, one must evoke the memory of the monstrous horror of eternal darkness
to find anything at all comparable. He is called the renderer of men, the eater of raw flesh.
who delights in the sword and bloodshed.
Correspondingly, we hear not only of human sacrifice in his cult,
but also of the ghastly ritual in which a man is torn to pieces.
To understand the significance of Dionysus in the modern day,
both Walter Otto and Nietzsche thought we must seek out the worldview
which lay behind the myths and cults surrounding the god.
The visage of every true god, wrote Otto, is the visage of a world.
There can be a god who is mad only if there is a mad world
which reveals itself through him. Where is this world? Can we still find it? Can we appreciate
its nature? The vision of the cosmos Nietzsche perceived as revealing itself through Dionysus
was a tragic worldview. He believed capable of restoring the dignity and capacity for heroism
which the modern world has largely lost. At the core of this Dionysian tragic worldview
is a principle contained in one of the fragments of Heraclitus. Everything always has its opposite
it within itself. In the myths of Dionysus, madness, destruction, and death hover over all
those he comes in contact with, but likewise does the possibility for healing, liberation, bliss,
and the removal of all sorrow and care. Dionysus is the great ambivalent one, who is both the divine
archetype of all triumphant heroes, and simultaneously the suffering and dying god.
The god of tragic contrast is symbolic of the tragic contrast within all things.
He expresses the truth that opposition and harmony, creation and destruction, ecstasy and terror, life and death, are inseparable from each other.
Such a tragic insight into the nature of things can stimulate what Nietzsche called a Dionysian affirmation of life.
A complete affirmation of the totality of being, where the negative and destructive elements are not slandered, explained away, or rejected,
but seen as a necessary component of the good the true and the beautiful and therefore as
ultimately desirable. The saying yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems the will to
life that is what I call Dionysian. But a tragic disposition and Dionysian affirmation of life is
not easy to cultivate requiring a strength of which most are incapable. To attain the capacity
to gaze simultaneously into and affirm equally both the horrors of the night and the heights of
bliss, to join together peak and abyss, or in the words of Thomas Carlyle, to see the universe as a
mystic temple and hall of doom, and still say yes to it, requires the rare state of being Nietzsche
called the great health. All those who lack this health would be destroyed by a tragic vision of
the cosmos. A mere glimpse into the abysses of life would cause them to slander existence,
like those whom Zarathustra called the preachers of death. Individuals who in the midst of pain,
suffering, or tragic insight assert, life is refuted, and advocate renunciation and world
wariness. They negate life, Nietzsche wrote of all those who preach world wariness. They slander it,
hence they are my antipodes. Nietzsche found in Dionysus a symbol for his opposition against all
those who preach renunciation. How differently Dionysus spoke to me, he wrote. How alien all
this resignation was to me. Within the myths and cults of Dionysus, Nietzsche intuited the presence
of a great health, which he believed saturated ancient Greek culture, enabling the Greek
individual to cultivate the strength required to not only endure, but worship as divine,
the tragic contrast embedded in the nature of reality. The fullness of life and the violence
of death are equally terrible in Dionysus, Otto explained. The Greek endured this reality in its
total dimensions and worshipped it as divine. The tragic sensibility which pervaded early
ancient Greek culture can be perceived in their worship of procreation and their recognition that
pain and suffering are necessarily intrinsic to all forms of birth and creation. What suffering
this race must have endured, Nietzsche wrote of the ancient Greeks, in order to create such beauty.
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche explained the feeling of sacredness the ancient Greeks felt
towards the pain which precedes birth and creation. For the Greeks, a sexual symbol was therefore the
most sacred symbol. Every single element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth
aroused the highest and most solemn feelings. In the Doctrine of the Mysteries, pain is pronounced
holy. The pangs of the women giving birth consecrate all pain, and conversely all becoming
and growing, all that guarantees a future involves pain. That there may be the eternal joy of
creating, that the will to life may eternally affirm itself, the agony of the woman giving
birth must also be there eternally. All this is meant by the word Dionysus. For Nietzsche,
Dionysus symbolized the justification of pain and suffering both on a personal level,
be it the agony of the woman giving birth, or the pain and suffering which precedes the creation
of oneself or a work of art, as well as on a cosmic level. A Dionysian worldview reveals a
universe in which the boundless fecundity of the world will builds up and tears down life forms,
worlds and galaxies, in an innocence and agony that conveys the idea that pain and suffering
are part of the primordial essence of all things, and that to remove them would be to remove life
itself in all its beauty and grandeur. As a result of this tragic worldview, the tragic man affirms
even the hardest lot on earth, realizing that as long as he possesses the great health,
pain, suffering, and tragedy, are to be not only welcomed but worshipped as the great
stimulants of his life, and that he will only grow stronger through the accidents that threaten
to destroy him.
To attain a Dionysian affirmation of life, and not only accept the horrible, evil, problematic
aspects of existence as necessary, but affirm them as a highly desirable part of the whole,
Is an ideal that is likely not achievable as a permanent state of being
The proclivity of human beings in the midst of intense suffering
To become resentful preachers of death
And long for some form of escape
Is far too strong to overcome once and for all
But if a Dionysian affirmation of the world is possible
Even as a fleeting and temporary experience
The struggle and effort required to achieve this mode of being
Is well worth the effort
For the heights that one scales when one is able to look into the dreadful abysses of life,
to experiment with the most painful thoughts and the most extreme form of nihilism,
and still be able to emerge from such depths and affirm life,
saying yes to it in its totality, is arguably the highest state a human being can attain.
In a passage from The Will to Power titled, My New Path to a Yes, Nietzsche conveyed this idea.
Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary quest for even the most detested and notorious sides of existence.
Such an experimental philosophy, as I live, anticipates experimentally even the possibilities of the most fundamental nihilism.
But this does not mean that it must halt at a negation, a no, a will to negation.
It wants rather to cross over to the opposite of this, to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is,
without subtraction, exception, or selection,
the highest state a philosopher can attain,
to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence.
My formula for this is Amor Fari.
Source: Academy of Ideas