The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music

    Nietzsche is the pioneer of deconstruction who posed question regarding the existence of God. He also has questioned the relation of language to truth. As Greek tragedy developed one impulse came to balance the other, Dionysiac ecstasy being ordered by Apollonian form but in modern life the tragic view has been suppressed in scientific optimism. Every culture that has lost the Dionsiac myth making spirit has lost by the same token its natural healthy creativity. Nietzsche secularizes the ‘truth’ in language as a lie.

    He attempts to classify the two basic psychological forces in human kind. Apollonianism and Dionysianism. The former related to refinement, order, morality and intellectuality. Apollo is Greek God of learning who demands reason and order. He stands for patience, calm and meditation. Apollonian world is phenomenal world where there is individuality or self, intellect, form, dream, consciousness and so on. Dionysianism is related to rupture, disorder and passion. Dionysus is god of wine and intoxication, ecstasy and noisy celebration. He symbolizes chaos, disorder, abandonment of reason. Nietzsche points out that Dionysian world is the world of emotion, irrationality, animalism, immorality. It is like unconscious world where we find mob, formless energy and collective world. Here, self is lost and the dichotomy between center versus margin is ruptured creation carnivalzed situation, where all are equal like the romantic world of song and music.

    Nietzsche points out that in Greek tragedy there was proper marriage between these two creative forces. Music, in the course of tragedy, revives myth and such myth- making faculty is important because it has the capacity to unify the culture. Myths are the expression of collective unconscious. Both Apollonian and Dionysiac forces, through they are opposite should be harmonized. But in modern time, science has attacked myth so it has become impossible to create such a great tragedy. When reason becomes dominant, the synthetic awareness of two extreme tendencies in culture comes to decline. The modern civilization has suppressed the Dionysiac myth-making spirit. Thus, the modern art has lost its natural and healthy creativity. Synthetic awareness of these two tendencies is required for the best art. Dream and intoxication equally influence great writers. Tragedy got its origination from the spirit of music, which is basically Dionysiac.

    He laments for the loss of mythopoeic world when rationality and enlightenment dominated mythopoeic spirit, it was the great tragedy for the world. By mythopoeic power we mean poetic power of myth. The poetic power of myth offers liberation to the intellectually confined suffocated mind. Nietzsche assumes the tragedy as musical. It was the greatest of the art because it involves a harmonization of the greatest possible tensions. The painters, the sculptors and the epic poets are characteristically devotees of Dionysus. To participate in the experience of genuine tragedy, man must put aside the brittle rigidities of his rationality. He believes that Greek tragedy grew out of the worship of Dionysus. True tragedy could be interpreted only as a manifestation and illustration of Dionysian states. He opines that tragedy does not release strong feeling through its effect but tonic.

     With the help of music and intoxication, people transcend the Apollonian world and get complete pleasure and freedom. In Dionysian world, people unknowingly commit mistake. When they return back to Apollonian world, they realize their mistakes and their realization makes them suffer a lot. This becomes the tragic feeling, which is the source of tragedy. Therefore, for the tragedy both these elements are equally important. Hence, Nietzsche views that in art Dionysiac element is equally important as Apollonian alone cannot complete art.

The Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense

     Nietzsche in his essay, “Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense" questions the age old belief that language can provide us with truth, and reason always deals with the real knowledge. For him the tendency of language is always towards abstraction and away from the individual and real, and finally in to the threat of rational fixity. He claims that reason never bends to truth. Most of the time, human intellect is satisfied with illusions. Nietzsche refuses the idea that the world revolves around intellect. He refuses the idea that the world revolves around the intellect and is guided by truth. He sees sensation and cognition as main causes of deception. Man is deeply immersed in falsehood and illusion. His sensation is satisfied with the surface knowledge of things and his cognition forms an idea of things out of this surface knowledge. He tends to thinks that it is the knowledge of the essence of the thing. This is an illusion with human beings and his knowledge is always incapable to lead to the truth. Nietzsche argues that human society us hypocritical, it longs for truth only because of its life preserving consequences. But what is supposed to be a truth is only a deception. Man hates not the deception but the evil consequences of deception. When man feels that the adopted or constructed truth can create an inimical situation, he does not hesitate to avoid it .

    Man uses language or words to indicate truth value or essence of the things. In reality, he uses only metaphors that arbitrarily indicate the essence of the thing. We merely designate the relation of that thing to man or it is just an anthropomorphic interpretation. Every time we take the relation of things to man from different perspectives, and with a difference or change in perspectives, we give different metaphors to the same thing .We have the knowledge of these metaphors, not of the real essence of things since metaphors are not capable of bearing the real essence of things. Language itself is a large system of such metaphors thus language cannot convey the truth. Through it seems that all word signifies truths or ideas but there is no such relation between words and ideas. Rather they are conventionally fixed, individual and particularized. They are fitted in the context of the similarity omitting some differences. Thus, ideas are formed equaling unequal. We never know the real. Therefore, only after ignoring the real we are able to form an idea. For Nietzsche “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms. This is a sum of human relations adorned and intensified poetically and rhetorically and after a long usage seems to be fixed and canonic. But truth is an illusion that emerges with the error of believing in illusion as truth and with the error of forgetting the illusive quality of truth. Truth always moves toward abstractions and man rationally submits to it in order to live socially. The abstraction is a generalization of impressions and schematization of metaphors to make perceptions appear as truth or idea. In the process of abstraction, man using an architectural genius creates a pyramidal order of laws, privileges and suborders. Whatever submits to this order is taken to be real. This constructed truth survival in the realm of reason making reason questionable. Thus, Nietzsche as a real deconstructionist deconstructs the notion that language bears with it reality, truth or idea. Moreover as the domain of reason is not separable from the mechanism of language, it too becomes something that can be questioned.

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