Nietzsche, the Sublime, and Artistic Processes

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”, Nietzsche seeks to characterize Greek tragedy by appealing to two archetypal creative impulses: the Apollinian and the Dionysian impulses. The Apollinian is associated with the arts which seek to represent images or dreams, such as painting or sculpture. Nietzsche also seems to associate the Apollinian with the impulse to build and refine along with the impulse to create civilization and to impose law and order on the world. The Dionysian, by contrast, is mostly associated with arts which seek to intoxicate and are more elusive than the Apollinian. Examples of this would be arts such as music and dance. The Dionysian impulse would be associated with a more primal notion of art, one that is both destructive and life-renewing. It would be destructive in that it counters the taming impulse of the Apollinian while life-renewing because it allows a less refined and more innately ‘natural’ impulse to come out, behind the images of the Apollinian. Nietzsche uses these two art impulses to explain ancient Greek tragedy as a fusion between these two seemingly opposing forces. I am reminded at this point of the Heraclitus quote, “The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.” It seems that Nietzsche agrees with this sentiment (and from what I’ve read, he tends to refer to Heraclitus quite a bit). This quote seems to give us an insight into the reverence that Nietzsche gives tragedy throughout the book as a great art form. However, despite this, Nietzsche recognizes a third impulse, one he claims is essentially unartistic, the Socratic impulse. This impulse, Nietzsche claims, underlies all or most subsequent thought about the world. The impulse is that which seeks to classify and understand all things through the use of logic and reason. This is reflected through much of Western philosophy and science and Nietzsche seems to harbor a rather intense dislike towards this impulse as it tends to destroy the artistic impulses of the Apollinian and the Dionysian, and especially the latter. Insight in how the artistic impulses are suppressed by the Socratic impulse can be found in Kant’s, “The Analytic of the Sublime.” In it, Kant speaks about the mathematically sublime. This type of sublime affect is created by the experience of something so vast, that we cannot possibly comprehend how vast the experience is. However, Kant writes that if we are able to reduce our experiences into some kind of logical or break it down into parts which are manageable for the mind to comprehend, then we no longer receive the feelings of the sublime. Complete understanding for Kant is contrary to the human experience of art. Indeed, it does seem that at least prima facie, that if we understand a work of art it ceases to be able to give us aesthetic experience. It seems that if we ever discover the secrets of art, we will cease to enjoy art as much. This is why Nietzsche dislikes the Socratic impulse so much, is because it hurts our ability to appreciate the world as art, and we then see it as a scientific, reductionist world where everything can be determined empirically and reduced to mere numbers and equations. However, Nietzsche realizes that something about the Socratic impulse is actually inherently a Dionysian impulse, that to discover the world and be able to understand the world, to face a world of so many different unknowns with rational thought, to resist staying in an obscure world, in which there seem to be many more questions than there are answers, is in fact a sublime task in and of itself. So what motivates this Socratic impulse is, in actuality, an art impulse. It seems like what Nietzsche may be concluding in this book is that to be an artist is inevitable to being a human being. Even when we attempt to compartmentalize and reduce the world to numbers and pure reason, we are being motivated by essentially artistic and irrational impulses, not the rational. But Nietzsche leaves us at the end of his book with a problem: science and rational thought pushes at epistemic boundaries. This means that science and rational thought cannot possibly account for all of the mysteries of the universe, even theoretically. And rational thought inevitably will understand that it has its own limits. This can be seen today as the philosophy of science is beginning to see certain problems that arise from its positivistic and naturalistic approaches to philosophy. There are certain things that logic, reason, and trust in an empirical world simply cannot tell us. Nietzsche uses an example from the narrative of Socrates that we receive from Plato. He gives us a scene where Socrates receives dreams from the gods commanding him to play music, and although Socrates condemns playing music as essentially worthless, he cannot help but think that maybe he just simply cannot understand why music is not worthless, that there is something about art and its impulses that cannot be understood through logic or reason. This demonstrates and symbolizes to Nietzsche the limits of logic to understand the world and how logic itself leads to the embracing of that which we cannot understand, the embracing of art and its mysteries. This leads us to a strange dilemma though: how do we move on from here? It seems that science and rational thought propelled us forward, and still continue to do so, but it seems like we are steadily pushing up against its boundaries. Should we just simply embrace the fact that we cannot possibly know everything, even with the most rational and logical approach? And let ourselves be dragged down into nihilism? Should we continue to attempt to approach the world rationally and logically and attempt to learn all we can, even when rational and logical thought itself has shown the futility of this? It seems like we are in an age where we have to both accept the futility of rational thought but still use rational thought to search for the answers we cannot obtain, in hope that we can make the best out of the situation we have. We have to be ‘agnostic’ much like the Socratic ideology wishes us to be, we must at the same time attempt to know what we can and admit that we cannot know for absolute certainty any of it. But I sense a bit of optimism in the end of Nietzsche’s work: What if we can find a way to fuse both the Socratic impulses with the artistic impulses of the Apollinian and the Dionysian? What if we can do like what the Ancient Greeks did and fuse two opposing forces together? What results from art and science working together? How do we even go about attempting to achieve this cooperation of the two impulses? How do we negotiate these two opposing impulses into propelling us to lead happy and fulfilling lives? Is there something ultimately sublime and fulfilling about existing at a perpetual standstill between reason and art? I wonder if art becomes greater when it exists at the edge of the possible knowledge we can obtain. If we push the limits of our rational and logical knowledge to its greatest boundaries, then it seems as if art can benefit by being as great as it possibly can be, by holding out on the edge of reason. This way no one can understand art completely, no matter how hard they try. But art and the irrational pushes on the boundaries in the opposite way by showing truths that cannot be possibly be captured through reason, and gives reason a challenge for it to attempt to understand. Now we are left with a beautiful duality of knowledge. We have nature being challenged to become so great it cannot be understood by reason and reason to attempt to understand what is brought to it by nature. (I’m using nature here to symbolize the irrational or the artistic impulses). This way we are in a perpetual conflict, but one which is mutually beneficial to our understanding and our appreciation of the world.