The Essence of Human Nature and the Fight between Good and Evil in Nietzsche's Works - Essay Example

The Essence of Human Nature and the Fight between Good and Evil The concept of good has different meanings due to the fact that different wills have come to appropriate the concept. Meaning and the interpretation are signs that a will is operating on a concept that is truth. The concept of "evil" has to do with devilish things, things that are not holy, things that are ungodly. An understanding of Nietzsche's work relies on a solid grasp of his views on truth and language, his metaphysics and conception of the will to power. At the very bottom of Nietzsche's philosophy lies the conviction that the universe is in a constant state of change, and his hatred and disparagement of almost any position can be traced back to that position's temptation to look at the universe as fixed in one place. Nietzsche is doubtful of both language and "truth" because they are liable to adopt a fixed perspective toward things. Words, unlike thoughts, are fixed. Our thoughts can flow and change just as things in the universe flow and change, but a word, once uttered, cannot be changed because language has this tendency toward fixity, it expresses the world in terms of facts and things, which has led philosophers to think of the world as fixed rather than fluid. A world of rigid facts can be spoken about definitively, which is the source of our conception of truth and other absolutes, such as God and morality. Nietzsche sees the facts and things of traditional philosophy as far from rigid, and subject to all sorts of shifts and changes. He is particularly brilliant in analyzing morality, showing how our concept of "good," for instance, has had opposite meanings at different times. The underlying force driving all change is will, according to Nietzsche. In specific, all drives boil down to a will to power, a drive for freedom and domination over other things. The concept of "good" has had different meanings over time because facts and things depend for their meaning on ever-shifting and struggling wills, there is no such thing as one correct or absolute viewpoint. Every viewpoint is the expression of some will or other rather than try to talk about the "truth," we should try to remain as flexible as possible, looking at matters from as many different perspectives as possible. Nietzsche's ideal "philosophy of the future" is one that is free enough to shift perspectives and overturn the "truths" and other dogmas of rigid thinking. Such philosophy would see moral concepts such as "good" and "evil" as merely surfaces that have no inherent meaning; such philosophy would thus move "beyond good and evil." Nietzsche's ideal philosophers would also turn their will to power inward, struggling constantly against themselves to overcome their own prejudices and assumptions. Nietzsche's unorthodox views on truth can help to explain his unusual style. Though we can follow trains of thought and make connections along the way, there is no single, linear argument that runs through the book because Nietzsche does not see the truth as a simple, two-dimensional picture; he cannot represent it accurately with a simple linear sketch. Nietzsche sees the world as complex and three-dimensional: more like a hologram than a two-dimensional picture. And just as a hologram is a three-dimensional image made up of infinitesimal two- dimensional fragments, each approximating the whole, Nietzsche presents his worldview in a series of two-dimensional aphorisms, each approximating a more complex worldview (Overall Analysis and Themes, 2005). Between Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and one of his last, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), his thinking - that is, his orientation, his very presence - changes significantly. In the latter book, he criticizes the traditional philosophical emphasis on truth as well as its unreflective embrace of 'opposite values', such as appearance and reality. This same metaphysical truth and appearance-reality dualism, however, are essential aspects of his earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy, in which Apollo and Dionysus were conceived as natural-artistic life forces arising out of that "mysterious ground of our being", the 'primal unity'. Sixteen years later, Nietzsche has abandoned this primal unity and the metaphysical comforts associated with it, a fact that is not surprising to anyone familiar with the later Nietzsche's enthusiasm for what is difficult and earthly. Nevertheless, when finishing Beyond Good and Evil, he reserved his highest praise at the end of the book for the same god who had earlier provided our access to this primal unity. What then could the Dionysian be after Dionysus has lost his claim to metaphysical dominion And what would happen if we tried to employ Dionysian and Apollinian categories in order to understand Nietzsche's later - more developed - philosophy This latter question depends of course on what we mean by Apollinian and Dionysian. Thus, one question is: how is the new Dionysus (and Apollo) differently conceived in Beyond Good and Evil A second and overlapping question is: using his earliest conceptions of the Apollinian and Dionysian, how does Nietzsche's conception of the healthy, life-promoting human person become altered In other words, do Nietzsche's own values become more 'Dionysian', more 'Apollinian', or something else (Brant 2005) Only after tracing the interplay between Apollinian and Dionysian artistic energies as Nietzsche presents them in The Birth of Tragedy, will we be able to understand and feel how they, as well as Nietzsche himself, have changed by the time of Beyond Good and Evil. To get a sense of the world that lies beyond good and evil, we must go back to an earlier time, even before a time when the world could be taken up as tragic. We must go back before the tragic poet and before his predecessor, the lyric poet, and attend to the two forces which made possible these forms of poetry, these forms of human existence. We must attend to the Apollinian and Dionysian impulses well before there was tragedy, back when any spiritual justification for human existence, tragic or otherwise, was less of an issue than was sheer survival itself. (Brant 2005) In his book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche contrasted Dionysus with the god Apollo as a symbol of the fundamental, unrestrained aesthetic principle of force, music, and intoxication versus the one of sight, reason, form, and beauty represented by the latter, while the two remain intrinsically related and dependent upon one another in an endless state of conflict. The Russian poet and philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov elaborated the theory of Dionysianism, which traces the roots of literary art in general and the art of tragedy in particular to ancient Dionysian mysteries. His views were expressed in the treatises The Hellenic Religion of the Suffering God (1904), and Dionysus and Early Dionysianism (1921) inspired by James Frazer, some have labeled Dionysus a life-death-rebirth deity. The mythographer Karl Kerenyi devoted much energy to Dionysus over his long career; he summed up his thoughts in Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life (Bollingen, Princeton) 1976. The joyous necessity of the dream experience has been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: Apollo, the god of all plastic energies, is at the same time the soothsaying god, He is the "shining one," the deity of light, is also ruler over the beautiful illusion of the inner world of fantasy but we must also include in our image of Apollo that delicate boundary which the dream image must not overstep lest it have a pathological effect. We must keep in mind the measured restraint, the freedom from the wilder emotions that calm the sculptor god. Even under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which songs of all primitive men and peoples speak, or with the potent coming of spring that penetrates all nature with joy, these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages, too, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from "folk-diseases," with contempt of pity born of consciousness of their own "healthy-mindedness." But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called "healthy-mindedness" looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them. The Birth of Tragedy was angrily criticized by many respected professional scholars of Greek literature. Particularly vehement was philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who denounced Nietzsche's work as slipshod and misleading. Prompted by Nietzsche, Erwin Rohde - a friend who had written a favorable review that sparked the first derogatory debate over the book - responded by exposing Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's inaccurate citations of Nietzsche's work. Richard Wagner also issued a response to Wilamowitz-Moellendorf's critique, but his action only served to characterize Nietzsche as the composer's lackey.( Wikipedia) Dionysus (Dionysian): intoxication, celebration of nature, cruelty, music, dance, pain, and individuality dissolved and hence destroyed wholeness of existence, orgiastic passion, dissolution of all boundaries, excess, human being as the work and glorification of art, destruction. Apollo (Apollinian or Apollonian): the dream state, principium individuations (principle of individuation), plastic (visual) arts, beauty, stint to formed boundaries, individuality, reason, celebration of appearance/illusion, human beings as artists (or media of art's manifestation), self-control, perfection, exhaustion of possibilities, creation. Although most rudimentary aspects between these two conceptions seemingly contradict each other according to Nietzsche, the principles are actually intrinsically connected in an interconflicting balance of strife, where one cannot be mentioned without also intrinsically evoking the other. Indeed, despite Nietzsche's later disquisitions about his "Dionysian world", he had always maintained the Apollinian notion in the foreground, that is, the latter was subsumed and thus was remolded into Nietzsche's "Dionysian" conception found in his later writings. What is more, the two principles (even though there is much debate among scholars to deem specifically Nietzsche's significations of the two's association with each other) are of an intimate, dynamic relationship consisting of a necessary mutual exchange for their interplay and for the continual manifestation of their energies-neither is super ordinate to the other and each needs the other. Dionysian reality is justified in Apollinian beauty while Apollinian beauty is based on Dionysian reality. (Wikipedia) References Bryant, Bart (2005). Apollo and Dionysus: From Warfare to Assimilation in The Birth of Tragedy and Beyond Good and Evil. Janus Head, Duquesne University. Available online. Retrieved 27th May 2006 from Overall Analysis and Themes (2005). Beyond Good and Evil. Available online. Retrieved 27th May 2006 from The Birth of Tragedy (2005). Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Available online. Retrieved 27th May 2006 from Read More