I bought Murray Gell-Man’s “The Quark and the Jaguar” on a whim, and probably won’t seriously dive into it for some time. I did read the intro though, where I came across this bit:
“The philosopher F.W.J von Schelling introduced the distinction (made famous by Nietzche) between “Apollonians,” who favor logic, the analytical approach, and a dispassionate weighing of the evidence, and “Dionysians,” who lean more toward intuition, synthesis, and passion. These traits are sometimes described as correlating very roughly with emphasis on the use of the left and right brain respectively. But some of us seem to belong to another category: the “Odysseans,” who combine the two predilections in their quest for connections among ideas.”
Regular readers will recall references to “Apollonian” people in Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century”. I don’t remember if it referenced von Schelling. Slezkine gives short shrift to “Dionysians”, who he thinks are just Apollonians on holiday, but instead contrasts Apollonians to “Mercurians”. The individual he chooses to represent Mercurians is Odysseus. Especially perceptive readers will note my prejudice against Dionysians.
September 22, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Just to make sure some vain pedant won’t show up to bore everyone by strutting his Nietzsche knowledge, I’ll obviate him by saying exactly what he would say.
Kaufmann is probably right that the Apollonian applies mainly in Nietzsche’s early books. Later he contrasted the Dionysian mainly against “nihlistic” systems including christianity, buddhism, and proto-SWPLism, which aimed to extirpate or cripple – rather than regulate (Apollonianly) – primitive drives such as amorosity, ambition, malice, and anguish over mortality.
He also contrasted it against the modesty of Epicurus, who he admired for his realism and this-worldly focus (Nietzsche considered the devaluation of the only observable world and life in favor of some unobservable world to be the ultimate crime and scam). The mental-spiritual (geistlich) and cultural possibilities presented by Epicurus were a little under-inspiring and Nietzsche came to judge them inadequate.
Nietzsche was hardly some poetic dolt so buried in the geistlich that he had no idea of politics, social trends, science, economics, or technology. Yet he completely missed the looming arrival of total war. So by August 1914 he was in a way more important than ever but in a way already pathetically obsolete.
September 22, 2009 at 1:08 pm
“I contradict as has never been contradicted before and am nevertheless the opposite of a No-saying spirit. I am a bringer of glad tidings like no one before me; I know tasks of such elevation that any notion of them has been lacking so far; only beginning with me are there hopes again. For all that, I am necessarily also a man of calamity. For when truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys, the like of which has never been dreamed of. The concept of politics will have merged entirely with the war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have been exploded-all of them are based on lies: there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth. It is only beginning with me that the earth knows great politics.”
– Ecce Homo, Why I am a Destiny
trans. Walter Kaufmann
September 22, 2009 at 1:32 pm
To mention Kaufmann again, he was in his time the major anglophone Nietzsche scholar and is an impressive guy. What kind of guys they have now who think they have outdone him, I don’t know, and somehow I suspect I don’t want to find out.
Anyway Kaufmann admired the books of 1888 including Ecce Homo and sought to rehabilitate them from any suggestion that they might have been affected by some prodrome of Nietzsche’s approaching severe psychosis. I have come to the opposite conclusion; these books are nutty, shrill, embarrassing, and boring, when compared to 1887 or especially 1886 and before. They are clearly pathologically manic; they are dominated by bio-pathological aspects even though they are certainly not psychotic.
September 22, 2009 at 3:34 pm
So your statement ‘he completely missed the looming arrival of total war’ holds true because he predicted it (‘there will be wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth’) while mad?
September 22, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Oh – no, I didn’t really realize what your point was, and was just commenting on Ecce Homo generally.
As for the wars and all. He may have predicted large scale wars. But a lot of his energy was focused on revitalizing culture, and I don’t think he predicted the way it would be devitalized by the world wars. I’m not sure he predicted total war in specific (or weapons of mass destruction), or predicted any sort of war of so devitalizing a nature; he saw war (and national rivalry threatening war) as rather stimulating, or at least non-catastrophic civilizationally, and I think he thought it would stay that way. That’s what I allege was his great failing.
Indeed, he even hoped for a great power rivalry between Russia and Western Europe, because of its potentially stimulating effects.
Of course, most people still saw war in that same undisillusioned way on the eve of WWI – or so we are taught in class.
I’m taking for granted, I should add, the view that Belle Epoch culture was glorious (Art Nouveau, the Vienna Secession) and the general cultural pulse afterward has tended to get worse and worse. The living artists who I think will be hallowed centuries from now seem to be precious few in number considering our large population today, and in my view have nothing to do with contemporary cultural movements – I’m thinking of Terrence Malick, Cormac McCarthy, Arvo Part. I think almost all modern architecture is terrible and Belle Epoch architecture was uniformly awesome. Art Nouveau was uniformly awesome; and not only in the hands of a supreme geniuses. European cathedrals were uniformly awesome from 1000 AD right up to whenever.
September 22, 2009 at 5:29 pm
I would also say that film has generally been a big, nihlistic and/or overwrought failure and I think Nietzsche would have hated it. I haven’t watched Bergman yet but I think most of the praised european films were not great; they were medium-good in some cases, but often totally sucked. A movie like “Days of heaven” is a golden exception.
Philosophy, too. I don’t think Heidegger is quite what he had in mind. The other continental philosophers and critics besides Heidegger were far worse.
So that’s my picture of modern cultural decadence and the partial failure on Nietzsche’s project – a failure hinging on the big wars, as I see it.
September 22, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Ah, and poetry – who would we compare against Rilke? I think Sylvia Plath had talent but I’m not sure she would be treasured many generations hence. Actually I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be. The other hailed poets of the postbellum don’t amount to much.
I’m glad to be living today, though; it’s a good time for knowledge. Nietzsche would have cut his balls off with a rusty butter knife if it would have gotten him a brief communique on what we know now.
September 22, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Definitely out of my element here. The only Malick I’ve seen is parts of The Thin Red Line. Didn’t think it was that great. I watched Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring on youtube a couple weeks ago and thought it was alright.
September 22, 2009 at 11:25 pm
TGGP,
Well if contrasting Greek gods to human personalities interests you I recommend this essay.
Utlimately the author is a Kantian so he wraps the personality types into the Kantian dualism between the beautiful and the sublime. However he does refer to a number of other philosophers and psycholgists to build his typology. These others include Nietzsche, Jung and Confusicus.
September 28, 2009 at 2:18 pm
I thought Slezkine’s use of the terms Apollonian and Mercurian was one of the weaker aspects of his book. One understood what he wanted to contrast – the agrarian way of life and the identification of its people with the place from which they come, as opposed to an urban or cosmopolitan way of life and the identification of its people with a set of abstract principles. This is a marked departure from Schelling’s and Nietzsche’s use of the term Apollonian, which implies the subduing of passions by reason, and a way of life that is orderly, disciplined and future-oriented, as contrasted with the Dionysian, in which the passions govern and discipline is thrown to the winds in pursuit of present pleasures.
To one versed in classical mythology – especially as it was understood for much of the Christian era – “Mercurian” would imply an Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophy, as found in Ficino, Pico, Bruno, and the alchemists. Did not the alchemist Jan Baptista van Helmont name his son Franciscus Mercurius for such a reason? True enough, the devotés of the cabala might be identified with this strain of thought, but – Voegelin’s use of the term ‘gnostic’ as applied to some modern political philosophies notwithstanding – there does not seem to be much that is Mercurian or Hermetic about 20th-century Jews and Judaism.
September 28, 2009 at 2:39 pm
PS – as regards Dionysians being only Apollonians on holiday – this may be a distant reflection of Aristotle’s conceit, as found in the Poetics, that while the emotions were generally dangerous to the body politic, it was well for them occasionally to be purged through the “katharsis” afforded by the arts. Thus music and drama, which Plato proposed in the Republic strictly to censor and regulate, serve in Aristotle’s view as a sort of societal safety-valve.
What of course must be remembered is that the Athenians could not go to the theater every day – as Prof. Fyfe said in his 1928 edition of the Poetics, “that would be emotional dysentery.” The Athenian “took his purge regularly twice a year. Thus the emotions that would otherwise have curdled or atrophied were stirred to a storm and safely drawn off… Poets must be recalled from exile to serve as medical officers.”
What do you suppose Aristotle – or even a classics teacher of thr 1920s – would have made of a world in which cable television brought the cathartic dose into people’s homes 24/7, and music, with all the profound emotional “affect” of which it was capable, played constantly over loudspeakers in supermarkets? Not just emotional dysentery, but cachexia! It should not be surprising that the constant emotional catharsis that is offered in such society, whether wanted or not, has tipped the scales substantially in favor of the Dionysian. The current predisposition of Western societies towards hedonism, and their consequent mortgaging of the future to pay for immediate pleasures, are the characteristic maladies of the present age.
September 29, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Dan, thanks for the odd/interesting link.
Michael, the stuff I’ve read tends to indicate “everything bad is good for you”, or at least does not appear to result in harm. It could be that I read too many contrarian writers, whether from Reason, Slate or GNXP, but mainstream economics seems to have repeatedly found evidence with a plausible theory backing it. Distractions from simulated vice occupy time that would otherwise be taken up committing actual vice. Furthermore, art and life oftentimes have little reflection on each other. “Gangsta rap” rose to prominence in the 90s, when crime plummeted. The “Great Sixties Freakout” in contrast featured lots of music about peace and love. On the other hand, hip academic Lawrence Lessig concludes that Sousa was right about the baleful effect of phonograph machines, so you’re not alone.
September 30, 2009 at 1:52 pm
I think you may be engaging in a bit of post hoc ergo propter hoc with the suggestion that ‘distractions from simulated vice occupy time that would otherwise be taken up committing actual vice,” offering as evidence the simultaneous rise of ‘gangsta rap’ in the ’90s, when crime plummeted.
Crime fell during the ’90s but there are many other more plausible explanations than that simulated vice occupied the time of villains who might in its absence have been committing actual vice.
Among those more plausible explanations are the aging of the population during the ‘nineties (crime is primarily an activity of the young and the male), and the increasing rates of incarceration and execution. One of the remarkable points about crime is how much of it is committed by how small a number of people. Accordingly, a relatively small increase in incarceration and execution, assuming it primarily affects this small number of habitual criminals can yield a disproportionately large drop in the nuber of crimes committed. One cannot burgle houses while locked up, nor murder and rape when consigned to the prison lime pit.
Cultural trends seldom coincide temporally with their consequences. You mention the “Great Sixties Freakout.” Despite the “music about peace and love,” it coincided with a general deterioration of order and social cohesion, and a rapid rise in crime. The popularization of the vie de bohème amongst middle class white college kids, race riots and anti-war protests, the increasing disorder and degradation of the underclass, and the increase in crime were all consequences of social changes that had begun a decade earlier, perhaps longer.
September 30, 2009 at 9:03 pm
The music thing was post-hoc, but with that bit I was really just claiming the lack of a clear relation rather than a causal one in an unintuitive direction. Social scientists have looked at “natural experiments” which get around the post-hoc issue in claiming that everything bad is good for you. Things like television/internet access being randomly more available in some areas, weather making people watch more tv, the dates/times at which certain movies are shown.
October 2, 2009 at 10:18 pm
I’ve been a “Thin red line” fanboy for eleven years, and in such estate shalt I go down at the end of my dotage. But, I completely realize that it leans hard on one’s tolerance for childlike wonder and romantic lyricism, frequently threatening to create a total embarrassment. If that’s why you don’t like it you might like “Days” much better because it is a whole lot more reserved. A man of the classical world could watch it to the end without shame. Other than that the two are pretty comparable.
“New world” was just bad and tedious, but I am probably going to watch the new looong DVD cut anyway. It is my dharma as a fanboy to do this act, because of the samsara generated from the many reels of boring film.
October 3, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Like I said, I only saw the ending. Seeing the beginning might make a difference.