Reason and Passion

The continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality ... . In order to grasp these two tendencies, let us first conceive of them as the separate art-worlds of dreams and intoxication.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872. Walter Kaufmann translation, 1967)

Do you and I have a dark side?

You surely recall from high school the bespectacled young man, shy and reserved and too polite, who always studied hard and never partied or smoked or cursed ... And you recall how, when he was thirty, he climbed the bell tower at the college and shot seventeen people and then himself.

Or the plain little girl who always carried a Bible under her arm and wore her hair long and her dresses long and no make-up. You remember how one weekend she ran away to New York and became a junkie, an alcoholic. and a prostitute. And perhaps you recall Germany, the home of Beethoven and Bach, the envy of the technological world, its people clean, hard- working and serious ... And how it went utterly mad in the 1930's and 40's and reduced itself to a pile of rubble after systematically murdering twelve million Christians and Jews.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche introduced his famous dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Apollo, the Greek god of reason, drove the sun chariot across the sky, bringing clarity and light. Dionysus, on the other hand, was the god of wine and passion, the irrational life-force. Apollo represents the principle of individuation. Dionysus represents the drunken crowd. All individuals and all cultures contain within themselves both these principles. As civilized people we try to deny the existence within us of the dark side. But this is like capping the lid on a boiling witch's-cauldron. Sooner or later the lid will blow off in an explosion of violence and madness.

Every culture has certain institutions-art, religion, music, drama, literature-which can serve as safety valves for these dark forces. Rock music, for example, can be understood in just this way, as can the fundamentalist revival meeting. But when such institutions lose their grip, or try to completely suppress the dark side of the soul (as Christianity often does), the culture might explode into violence and irrationality.

Nietzsche advised us to pay attention to our dreams which, he believed, provide a doorway to the dark, hidden passions of the soul. Some years later the psychologists Freud and Jung made the interpretation of dreams a central feature of psychoanalysis. Are you aware of these two aspects of your own personality? in American culture in general?

Bibliography

Kaufman, Walter. "Friedrich Nietzsche," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, p. 504-514.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufman, New York, The Viking Press, 1968.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufmann translation, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1956.