Monday, August 26, 2013

Dissonance, Eternal Recurrence, Will to Power

In #25 of Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche briefly suggests that an individual human is a instance of Dissonance, presumably because one is constituted by a combination of the Dionysian and the Apollinian principles, i. e. by impersonal and personal factors.  In contrast, in #37 of Human, All Too Human, he suggests a different dissonant constitution of Experience--it is "Janus-faced", i. e. simultaneously looking backwards and forwards.  Now, an example of the former dimension is the taking full responsibility for all one's previous deeds, while one of the latter is the initiation of a new action.  In other words, the concomitance, in individual experience, of the affirmation of Eternal Recurrence and the operation of the Will to Power constitutes a Dissonance, in which case neither is reducible to the other, contrary to some interpretations of their relation.

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