The disparate, or perhaps divergent, means by which we seek to encounter nature, by which we seek out a facet of nature in order to extract from it a part of our denkmittel—our means of thinking in the world to produce an historical, and therefore ensured, account of our experience—is a misinformed dichotomy. Ive been reading The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsches first and most aesthetic text, with diligence; its primary concern is to reveal how tragic art—as the dialectic which fuses the Apollonian imagery of subjectivity, of divine assurance, with the innate disorder of a Dionysian return to nature—is manifest as the Greek response to the stressors of a more insidious discovery: that the life which is best off is the life that hasnt existed at all. What the last condition means primarily is that the Greeks had conceded that to exist is paramount suffering; that it is the very premise of existing from which suffering is derived, since existence is the immediate preface of want, the preface of will and preservation, neither of which is endurable (Not unlike the Buddhist tradition). So they create gods for the distinct purpose of a true theodicy: to make the willful experience of existence tolerable in light of the notion that even those beings which are divine, capable of eternity and transcendence, are nonetheless subordinate to Moira, the fate of existing at all. The whole of Greek thought is founded upon this supposed synthetic, apriori judgment: a proposition that is conferred without experience, one which deduces its predicate from without its subject; that is to say, an affirmative statement that assumes a truth based neither on subjective experience nor the locatability of the predicate within the subject of that statement (for instance, every event has a cause). In short, a synthetic, apriori judgment is that statement which truthfully characterizes the relationship between two disparate entities without relying upon experience to derive that truth. This bridging of mind and materia, a aesthetic of space and time which allocates responsibility and verity to the endeavor of human thinking, is, according to some, the supposed bedrock of our existence; it is from these judgments that the Greek experience is derived. The gods exist regardless of their conception, of their corporeal manifestations, and thus are fundamental appropriations of nature, guaranteed historically, phenomenologically, epistemologically. The gods become a receptacle for nature, instead of the other way around. This is divine assurance. Dionysian experience is altogether different. This is drunkenness, a blurring of subjectivity; perhaps the temporary annihilation of it. The Dionysian experience dissolves the Apollonian subject, that one capable of synthetic judgements, of divining a world of appearances and critique. Rather, the Dionysian returns to primacy, to inchoate beastliness. This, too, is the rite of epiphany, for Dionysus is the god that arrives, seemingly from some foreign land. If it is the Apollonian experience which gives reason to the world, it is the Dionysian experience which encounters, perhaps, the germination of perceiving at all. It is Nietzsches project to adjoin these two forces, or stressors, into a critique of drama and Attic Tragedy which so endures in a Greek life. Nietzsches thesis amounts to this: that it was in suffering, in the enduring tradition of pessimism made poetic through tragedy—that tragedy derived from the abundance of Apollonian and Dionysian animation—which gave rise to science and common sense as conciliatory responses to pessimism. My problem is not with the thesis per se, but with its foundation of the two conflicting forces. This is the misinformed dichotomy: the achieved notion of binarism of mind developed through conceiving a person as the unitary, systemic, subjective and thinking individual, opposing the dissolved corporeal species that lives amongst and is part and parcel of the nature which informs it. Though this is not particular to Nietzsche—this is a construct that is universally recognizable. The reason-versus-instinct binarism dominates our epistemological traditions: we find it in religion, art, science, philosophy, sociology, anthropology. The dichotomy informs, with much more argument than most anything else, how we see the world: a naturally occurring phenomenon free to our observance, or a manufactured device profitable for its spacing of homogenous and heterogenous elements, items discrete yet similar enough to index in a common register of what is. Might I ask: is this not all science? Is this not all strategy? Just as arbitrary a fiction as the apriori synthetic judgement is the incoherent submission of will to divine madness—that which inspires thought. One realizes that an entire epistemology is really an index of terms, organized in a certain way, the varied combination of such providing an ontology and hermeneutics which attempts to not just remove the veil of Maya, but to destroy it, making every person akin to that master of existence. Is this not what we seek? Even the desolate Christian will admit that at the end of Gods love is 1 John 3:19-22, that we may be absorbed in truth, carnally, and be granted everything we ask of God. The Buddhist, equally, desires Nirvana as that total enlightenment, disparate from the obedient world of appearances. We see something wholly other in our objective of challenging forth nature to provide us with her most precious reserve, disconcealment, yet this disclosure is only as good as the terms used to unlock it. I provide a laminate to my experience; I call it analytic, objective, faithful, rational, etc. Whatever I may call it, one can be assured that once the smoke and mirrors of my proselytizing have dissipated, one sees naked words hurrying to cover their insipid shame like Eve before God. This is certainly the dramatis personae of Attic Tragedy: the forms of reason are stripped from the tragic hero, whose hubris overtakes him, and he must reconcile a new means of seeing, a Dionysian reflection of his plight, before submitting to his overall demise. As is Aristotelian tradition, we are better for it. We are cathartically revealed to ourselves through art. Yet this revealing is not purely sensuous, nor is it ultimately rational. This is the dialectic of Apollonian and Dionysian artifice. But it is just this: artifice. The terms of one are reorganized to meet the criteria of the other. A parlor trick; misdirection which provokes in its audience a state of wonder. The best science is a provocative parlor trick, one which calls a person into thinking, that calling a commanding of thinking into response. And yet this response is just as much artifice as is its call, but an artifice we nonetheless believe because of its consequence, because of its ability to make what appears to be differences in its having existed. What we look for when we look for thinking is this difference. We become the dramatis personae.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 21:48:54 +0000
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