Philosophy and the Arts: Lecture 10

1. “Apollinian and Dionysian” Philosophy and the Arts: Lecture 10

2. Nietzsche!! • One of the most interesting philosophers we will study in this course is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).One problem is that it seems no two philosophers are agreed as to how he is to be interpreted.

3. From Darwin to Hitler • One way to read him is as a follower of Darwin. On this reading, he is seen as claiming that Nature is working toward a higher and finer type of man---and we need to help it along! Thus we should do all we can to prepare the way for the “Ubermensch.” We will condemn Christianity as a “Slave morality.” • It was probably this reading that made him the favorite philosopher of Hitler and his “Third Reich.”

4. Recall that this was a time when Bismarck had called for Europe to be unified by “blood and iron,” and a high military ideal prevailed in Germany. Nietzsche tried to be a soldier, but wasn’t built for the job. Ubermensch?? Soldat??

5. But how do we prepare the way for the coming of the “Ubermensch?” Art plays an important role. “Apollinian and Dionysian”

6. Pardon—the Laocoon Group • The Laocoon Group!!

7. Does Laocoon cry out?? • From the time of Winckelmann, about 100 years before Nietzsche, it was popular to say that Greek art was primarily Apollinian, i. e., that it was characterized by calm, restraint, even logic. And this group was considered a good example. It was said that even as he and his sons were being consumed by serpents, Laocoon was calm and restrained. • Nietzsche did not think so. He saw the source of Greek art in the Dionysian elements. Dionysus was the god of wine, revelry, and orgy. Nietzsche sometimes spoke of the Dionysian as a “wild Yea-saying to life.” And he saw this as basic to all great art. • But we need both, he argued. Without the Apollinian, with its restraint and order, art can become “mere sound and fury.”

8. Raphael: “Transfiguration”

9. And Nietzsche says this: • “Rafael, himself one of those immortal ‘naïve’ artists, in one of his allegorical paintings, has presented that issue of transforming an illusion into an illusion, the fundamental process of the naïve artist and Apollonian culture as well. In his Transfiguration the bottom half shows us, in the possessed boy, the despairing porters, and the helplessly frightened disciples, the mirror image of the eternal primordial pain, the sole basis of the world. The "illusion" here is the reflection of the eternal contradiction, the father of things. Now, out of this illusion there rises up, like an ambrosial fragrance, a new world of illusion, like a vision, invisible to those trapped in the first scene, something illuminating and hovering in the purest painless ecstasy, a shining vision to contemplate with eyes wide open.” • Again, said a different way, we need both.

10. This is Durer’s “Knight with Death and the Devil.” Nietzsche uses the Painting to praise…Schopen-hauer!! Durer

11. This is what Nietzsche said: • “Here a desperate, isolated man couldn't choose a better symbol than the Knight with Death and the Devil, as Dürer has drawn him for us, the knight in armour with the hard bronze gaze, who knows how to make his way along his terrible path, without wavering at his horrific companions—and yet without any hope, alone with his horse and hound. Such a Dürer knight was our Schopenhauer: he lacked all hope, but he wanted the truth. There is no one like him.”

12. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the author of The World as Will and Idea (or Representation; the German word is ‘Vorstellung.’), He left us with a rather dreary picture of our world. There is no end to our wanting, wishing, desiring—our will—but there is only so much we can have, so we always fall short. Schopenhauer!

13. Is art the way out?? • We seek relief from this unhappy situation by escaping the world of Will, and contemplating the pure, undefiled world of Ideas; art helps us do this. • There is, however, one prominent exception to this rule-music! {Think for a second of some bit of music that you like to pull up the car windows up, and play full blast!! I know I’m a Kentucky “hill-billy”, but I’ve done this with the Judds’ ”Why not me??”—shameful admission…}. • Music of this sort, with its surging, driving passion, is not an escape from the world of Will; rather, it pictures, depicts for us, presents that world of Will!! • But what composer wrote such music??

14. At the time he wrote The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was completely captivated by the operas of Richard Wagner (1813-1883)—works such as Siegfried, Tristan and Isolde, etc. He thought Wagner’s music carried out Schopenhauer’s ideals. Wagner!!

15. But sisters always get in the way… • Nietzsche later broke with Wagner—why? That’s a favorite question for Nietzsche scholars. Some say Nietzsche was simply jealous. The break seems to have come after Wagner wrote Parsifal (Of which I know nothing). Was it the Christian themes of that work? Nietzsche took the Norse mythology seriously—did this mean Wagner did not? • It may also be that Nietzsche objected to Wagner’s anti-Semitism. • That last point may be important. Nietzsche wanted a superior type of man to emerge, but he did not think this superiority could proceed along racial lines. • So Nietzsche was not a Nazi. But his sister Elizabeth was. And she took care of him during his last years (he went mad, you know), and published many of his books, such as The Will to Power, after his death. Another story not to be pursued here, but it is possible that the Nietzsche so beloved by Hitler and his crew was her invention.