Monday, May 27, 2019

Dionysian and Individual

In the first section of Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's description of the Dionysian experience, "He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself", has more in common with Spinoza's description of the experience of Intuition, and Kant's description of the experience of Genius, than with the drunken oblivion that is connoted by the common use of 'dionysian'. Now, the instantiation of a universal power is nothing other than the process of Individuation.  Thus, the Apollonian principle, according to which an entity is isolated from all other entities, is, properly speaking, not an Individual, but a Singularity, as has been previously discussed.  Likewise, the fictitious "one" of the Gay Science #1 is a Singularity, not an Individual.  Finally, like Spinoza, Nietzsche misses the possibility that the Dionysian experience is, in fact, an Organic one, of which the celebrants are Parts, not either Individuals, in the proper sense of the term, or nonentities, as might be the case in some drunken mobs.

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