Sunday, October 6, 2013

Procreation, Dionysus, Bacchus

It is unclear from the brief allusions to Bacchus in Birth of Tragedy if Nietzsche would agree with the equivalence of it and Dionysus that some seem to accept.  One reason that he would not is that his Dionysian principle, like Schopenhauer's Will to Live from which it is derived, represents fundamentally the procreative drive, which is why the focus in BT is on its rhythm of the dissolution of, and the re-formation of, individuals.  In contrast, 'Bacchanalian' typically connotes mere drunkenness.  So, while the concept 'drunken orgy' can be classified as both 'Dionysian' and 'Bacchanalian', 'orgy' is essential to the former, while 'drunken' is essential to the latter.  Thus, the conflation of the two tends to abstract gratuitous individual fun from what for Nietzsche in BT is a metaphysically significant overwhelming of an individual by the species drive that first produced it.

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