Abstract
This paper will attempt to rethink a common ground of kinship and love among myriad lives in a thoughtful remembrance of Nietzsche’s conception of nature in The Birth of Tragedy. By drawing special attention to an anonymous play of forces and “a fraternal union” of Apollo and Dionysus in the text, we will highlight the shared traits of nothing, irreducibility of the contraries, and Auseinandersetzung in the thoughts of Heraclitus, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
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Notes
- 1.
Charles E. Scott, The Lives of Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 185.
- 2.
I draw attention to Heidegger’s explanation of the Greek word Zao with its intensification with za in His “Aletheia” essay. See Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1984), p. 116; henceforth, EGT.
- 3.
Fr. B1: “Although this account holds forever, men ever fail to comprehend, both before hearing it and once they have heard. Although all things come to pass in accordance with this account, men are like the untried when they try such words and works as I set forth, distinguishing each according to its nature and telling how it is. But other men are oblivious of what they do awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do asleep.” Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1979), p. 62. Fragments cited in this paper are from Diels-Kranz’ edition.
- 4.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (NY: Vintage Books Random House, 1969), pp. 273–274.
- 5.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (NY: Vintage Books, 1967); henceforth BT. “…as artistic energies which burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist–energies in which nature’s art impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way–”, p. 38.
- 6.
Ibid. 1, p. 122.
- 7.
See my paper “Wonder of Emptiness,” in Art, Literature, and Passions of the Skies, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. CXII (Chicago: Springer, 2012).
- 8.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (NY: Random House, 1967). Section 1067: “…a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many…a sea of forces flowing and rushing together …with an ebb and a flood of its forms.”
- 9.
See Heidegger’s discussion of intricate connections between logos, memory, and forgetfulness in his Parmenides. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 185.
- 10.
Nietzsche, BT, 5, pp. 88–89. “…the enormous driving-wheel of logical Socratism is in motion, as it were, behind Socrates, and that it must be viewed through Socrates as though a shadow.”
- 11.
Ibid. 5, p. 89. “To this eye was denied the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian abysses.”
- 12.
Ibid. 5, p. 95. “…a profound illusion that first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science again and again to its limits at which it must turn into art–which is really the aim of this mechanism.”
- 13.
Nietzsche, BT, 5, p. 91. “Here philosophic thought overgrows art and compels it to cling close to the trunk of dialectic. The Apollinian tendency has withdrawn into the cocoon of logical schematism.”
- 14.
Charles E. Scott, The Time of Memory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), p. 113.
- 15.
Nietzsche, BT, 5, p. 45. “…we shall then have to look upon the dream as a mere appearance of mere appearance, hence as a still higher appeasement of the primordial desire for mere appearance. And that is why the innermost heart of nature feels that ineffable joy in the naïve artist and the naïve work of art, which is likewise only “mere appearance of mere appearance.”
- 16.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. Charlotte Mandell (NY: Fordham University Press, 2009), p. 7.
- 17.
John Sallis, Crossings (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 51. Sallis designates the word “Pharmakon” exclusively to Dionysus and the Dionysian duality in this remarkable book; however, in my view, it applies equally to Apollo and the Apollinian.
- 18.
Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)” in Reading Heidegger, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 192.
- 19.
Nietzsche, BT, 5, p. 59. “For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states.”
- 20.
Nietzsche, BT, 5, pp. 46–47. “…the ecstatic sound of the Dionysian festival; how in these strains all of nature’s excess in pleasure, grief, and knowledge became audible, even in piercing shrieks;……The individual, with all his restraint and proportion, succumbed to the self-oblivion of the Dionysian states, forgetting the precepts of Apollo. Excess revealed itself as truth. Contraction, the bliss born of pain, spoke out from the very heart of nature.”
- 21.
Ibid. 5, p. 50. “…The Dionysian musician is, without any images, himself pure primordial pain and its primordial re-echoing.”
- 22.
Ibid. 21.
- 23.
Charles E. Scott, Living with Indifference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), p. 122.
- 24.
I have in mind here a mimetic likeness to the conceptions of “dif-ference” and “Auseinander-setzung” in Heidegger’s thought.
- 25.
Ibid. 1, p. 62.
- 26.
Ibid. 2, p. 114.
- 27.
Ibid. 2, p. 77.
- 28.
Ibid. 18, p. 191.
- 29.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Gateway, 1962), p. 43.
- 30.
Ibid. 29, p. 44.
- 31.
Ibid. 29, p. 31.
- 32.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the world or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), p. 89.
- 33.
Ibid. 32, p. 71.
- 34.
Nietzsche, BT, 5, p. 52. “-for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified-.”
- 35.
Ibid. 5, p. 104. “…a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the changing figures. We are really for a brief moment primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear necessary to us, in view of the excess of countless forms of existence which force and push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the universal will. We are pierced by the maddening sting of these pains just when we have become, as it were, one with the infinite primordial joy in existence, and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructibility and eternity of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united.”
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Murata-Soraci, K. (2014). “Heraclitus/Nietzsche/Heidegger in Πόλεμς” - “τά δὲ Πάντα οἰακίζει Κεραυνός” – Heraclitus. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Phenomenology of Space and Time. Analecta Husserliana, vol 116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02015-0_29
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