I'm going to purposefully, blatantly sound like a fuddy-duddy, but this is a good excuse to revisit my occasional compelling need to post a music video. Remember when pop stars were pop stars because they could. just. sing?

I haven't gotten around to watching Obama's acceptance speech yet; I'll watch it as a podcast when I have the time, as I will McCain's. But a Kingdom-sympathetic, bridge-building, space-spanning person like myself can't help but raise a thumb upward for Greg Boyd's brief comments on division, polarization, empire and Kingdom.

I was sitting around tonight thinking of music, and this idea I have once in a while of including music videos in this blog. Usually I stop short of doing so, because I find that sort of thing distracting when I read other blogs that are concerned primarily with the arena of spiritual discussion. Admittedly, I face the same thing when I put posts in here about Spadefoots, complete with photos, but hopefully I've written enough explanations as to how the Spadefoots fit into my discussions of faith.

At any rate, I was thinking of music and also of my desire to present something a little less rambling and thrown-together than my recent posting trend. And then along came to my mind a short, informal assignment from my first class in grad school. It covers both of the bases I was looking for tonight, so here it is. (I'm making my first attempt at embedding video in the blog, so let's hope it works. And I will mention, as a reminder to myself, that this song is intriguing in its own right for its appeal to Heaven in the wake of a friend's suicide. It deserves a post of its very own, some day.)

And, uh, I recognize that the claim I'm making, to place this song into anywhere near the same realm as Nietzsche and Greek tragedy may seem absurd, but—I dunno; think about it. Here's the paper:

The professor asserts:

I see [Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy] as an argument about culture and the role language plays in the shaping of culture. I include literature and rhetoric within the broad category of language. The relics of language including literature and recorded oratory map the progress or degeneration of culture. This assertion, however, comes close to being a tautology. (If only a tautology, would Nietzsche have spent so much time writing, rewriting, and qualifying The Birth of Tragedy?) There must be a greater purpose.

Response:

MY ANSWER begins with an image of war. Nietzsche mentions briefly in—but significantly, at the beginning of—An Attempt at Self Criticism that The Birth of Tragedy was conceived during the Franco-Prussian War. What Nietzsche does not note is that he was serving in that war, in the Prussian army, as a medical orderly. At the time he placed pen to paper, a young Nietzsche was witnessing first-hand the horrors of war. This is far from trivial, and in attempting to wager what The Birth of Tragedy's greater purpose may be, we must consider Nietzsche's immediate situation as a possible causal element in his thought process. If we attempt to place the imagery of warfare, the dead and the dying, the blood on Nietzsche's hands and garments into our minds, it begins to make perfect sense that, as he further notes in An Attempt at Self Criticism, he finds himself pondering science, life, religion, art and morality(3). In the middle of man's greatest horrors, horrors often intensified by the genius of science, legitimized by morality and sanctioned by religion, his staggering intellect is brooding with a depth few of us will ever fathom. It is brooding over some thing he considers to be "of utmost importance and… deeply personal." And the nagging question haunting his classical mind is, "What is the Dionysian?" The greater purpose of The Birth of Tragedy (and let us pretend there is only one) is an idea born from a synthesis of all these constituents; an amalgam formed in a crucible heated by the fires of war. In what proportions it is mixed we cannot say, but we can make some sense as to the type of product the synthesis produces.

NIETZSCHE'S PRESENTATION and analysis of Greek tragedy demonstrates Dionysian art as an art that transports the artist beyond himself, to "become art itself" and into the eternal nature of the world. This alone, according to Nietzsche, is man's escape from illusion and mask. Art is the greatest expression of humanity; Man's only pure expression and experience of what it means to contact existence itself(4). But against this salvation stands a modern science, which in gestation destroyed Nietzsche's beloved tragedy and in middle age is advancing the horrors wrought by an ever more modernized warfare. Allied in effect with this science is a sterile morality that seeks to destroy art and thereby nullify Man. Both science and morality appear as anti-life, and therefore as young Nietzsche's enemies. In a calculated response born of his romantic mind, Nietzsche creates and chooses for himself a discipline of life that is anti-moral and pure art. He names it The Dionysian.

It would be an obvious mistake to take this summary and label Nietzsche's presentation as simple, uncomplicated or straightforward. But it is not unfair to say that The Birth of Tragedy is verbose enough to obscure the fact that Nietzsche is being very human in the face of a timeless and very human dilemma. For all its riches, The Birth of Tragedy remains, in large part, a scene taken from a perennial play; the struggle of the individual to find its relationship to, and place within, the Universal. It is typical that this struggle is born of or greatly intensified by the worst of conditions, and wartime strongly qualifies as one. We see Nietzsche traveling, as each of us do, his own unique path to a resolution. Nietzsche's path was simply, but not merely, more intellectually stellar than that of the average person, and held Greek tragedy as one of its annotated waypoints. What we have in The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche's working out for himself a view of self vis-à-vis God; at least, a god-like spiritual reality that Nietzsche can acquiesce to consider God. For Nietzsche, it is The Dionysian that delivers one to such a place(4). This, I contend, is the greater purpose of The Birth of Tragedy. And can there be any greater?

WITH A NOD to [the professor], this analysis may well be tautological in its own right, and in a related sense I note that The Birth of Tragedy remains fully relevant for us today.

Contemporary culture in America abounds with analogs to the Dionysian concept, bringing to mind the words "extreme" and "edgy," especially in relation to trends such as body modification and radicalized performance art. Videos of alternative rock band members throwing themselves into crowds of frenzied fans come to mind, and it is difficult to deny that the very heavily tattooed and pierced person is not attempting to go beyond the performance of art to become art itself. Such practices can
be attempts to take humanity beyond humanity, into the realm that lies beyond (or under) humanity; to loose one's self of self. Not surprisingly, they are often intellectually unrecognized as such, and placed under the labels of trend and fashion.

When applied to our culture, Nietzsche's view of morality is most clearly represented in fundamental religion of monotheistic faiths, and in the less radical yet conservative evangelical Christian faith. These continue to exert the same art-nullifying influences against which Nietzsche rails. Nietzsche is correct in saying these influences are anti-art; which is to say, they are intent on stifling the creative urge in humanity. This remains today one of the great ironies of such religions; that ostensibly in the name of a Creator, they seek to attenuate the inherited Creative Urge gracefully breathed into the soul of the created. This nullifying element is represented by media in iconic form as America's religious right.

While both "Dionysian" and "moral" elements flourish in our culture, the Apollonian seems to be suffering. Fine art in "plastic" forms is relegated to museums, visual arts are limited to moving imagery and are often only in tertiary support of other mediums, and the higher ideals inspired by Apollo are mistakenly equated to morality per se. The resulting vacuum remains a tremendous weakness in our society: pundits incite the populace to reduce everything into binary quantities of the Dionysian versus the moral. Missing are Nietzsche's Apollonian, and a second form of mysticism Nietzsche himself had likely encountered yet happens to ignore completely(5). We are left in a state far less than ideal, for when the Apollonian does not exist to temper Dionysian, and other forms of mysticism are ignored, it remains far too easy to believe that everything capable of loosing us from ourselves is unquestionably expedient. This tendency is exacerbated by the intuitive realization that our society's only advertised alternative is an arid, life-limiting morality few find appealing.

The Creative, Artful Urge within us is telling us to run from that which stifles it and into the arms of its eternal source, and indeed we are often quick to run. But I am afraid our running is frequently blind, and not always to God.

Notes and points of discussion:

1. An example of contemporary Dionysian art?

Say Hello 2 Heaven, by Temple of the Dog. Seriously open to debate (and even more so to musical taste), but listen to the ending chorus, as the singer begins to loose himself of any concern of being a singer. The art is overtaking the artist. In the spirit of this paper, listen to the song while imagining a battlefield. I think one can begin to get an idea of art transporting us to a place that science and morality cannot:

2. Sources

Quotations below are from The Birth of Tragedy translated by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, last revised June 2003. An etext is available at:

http://www.mala.bc.ca/%7Ejohnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm

3. Excerpts noting the constituents of Nietzsche's dilemma

"Whatever might have been be the basis for this dubious book, it must have been a question of the utmost importance… a deeply personal one… Testimony to that effect is the time in which it arose… that disturbing era of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71… The issue which that bold book dared to approach for the first time… to look at scientific enquiry from the perspective of the artist, but to look at art from the perspective of life…"

"…above all the issue that there is a problem right here and that the Greeks will continue remains, as before, entirely unknown and unknowable as long as we have no answer to the question, 'What is the Dionysian?' Indeed, what is the Dionysian? This book offers an answer to that question…"

"We see that this book was burdened with an entire bundle of difficult questions. Let us add its most difficult question: What, from the point of view of living, does morality mean?"

"… art, and not morality, was the essential metaphysical human activity, and in the book itself there appears many times over the suggestive statement that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon… the entire book recognizes only an aesthetic sense and a deeper meaning under everything that happens..."

"And what about morality itself? Isn't morality… the greatest of all dangers? And so, my instinct at that time turned itself against morality in this questionable book, as an instinctual affirmation of life, and a fundamentally different doctrine, a totally opposite way of evaluating life, was invented, something purely artistic and anti-Christian. What should it be called? As a philologist and man of words…I called it the Dionysian."

4. Excerpts supporting the idea of Dionysian art as contact with the ground of being

"…it is possible for us to imagine how he sinks down in the Dionysian drunkenness and mystical obliteration of the self… his own state now reveals itself to him, that is, his unity with the innermost basis of the world…"

"Only this 'I' is not the same as the 'I' of the awake, empirically real man, but the single 'I' of true and eternal being in general, the 'I' resting on the foundation of things. Through its portrayal the lyrical genius sees right into the very basis of things."

"But insofar as the subject is an artist, he is already released from his individual willing and has become, so to speak, a medium through which a subject of true being celebrates its redemption… We should really look upon ourselves as beautiful pictures and artistic projections of the true creator, and in that significance as works of art we have our highest value…"

"This is the most direct effect of Dionysian tragedy… the gap between man and man give way to an invincible feeling of unity which leads back to the heart of nature."

"The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its destruction of the customary manacles and boundaries of existence, contains, of course, for as long as it lasts a lethargic element, in which everything personally experienced in the past is immersed. Through this gulf of oblivion, the world of everyday reality and the Dionysian reality separate from each other."

"The sphere of poetry does not lie beyond this world as the fantastic impossibility of a poet's brain. It wants to be exactly the opposite, the unadorned expression of the truth, and it must therefore cast off the false costume of that truth thought up by the man of culture. The contrast of this real truth of nature and the cultural lie which behaves as if it is the only reality is similar to the contrast between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the total world of appearances."

"Hence our entire knowledge of art is basically completely illusory, because, as knowing people, we are not one with or identical to that being who, as the single creator and spectator of that comedy of art, prepares for itself an eternal enjoyment. Only to the extent that the genius in the act of artistic creation is fused with that primordial artist of the world, does he know anything about the eternal nature of art, only in that state in which (as in the weird picture of fairy tales) he can miraculously turn his eyes and contemplate himself. Now he is simultaneously subject and object, all at once poet, actor, and spectator."

It seems reasonable to view these types of images as analogs to concepts of God we find in systems of spiritual and religious thought: non-duality in select Eastern religions, and God as "the ground of being" in Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology.

These lead me to believe that Nietzsche's concern is really one of (his) humanity in experience of and/or relation to true deity (i.e., God).

5. The mysticism that Nietzsche neglects

It's interesting that Nietzsche comments on Christianity yet limits his observation, apparently, to Orthodox and/or reformed orthopraxis. Nowhere is there mention of Christian mysticism, although can't we assume that Nietzsche would have been familiar with Meister Eckhart? Perhaps not, though, in his twenties?

Christian mysticism, and the spirituality it represents, are a missing element in Nietzsche's thought. Perennially, there are two basic approaches to mysticism in Man's spiritual traditions. There is the inward, meditative, emptying tradition (e.g., Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism) and there is the super-man, beyond man, I have become God approach. This latter approach is foreign to me except for having read about it. I wonder if the Dionysian is an example of this. At any rate, both approaches have the same end: dissolution of the individual into the eternal; not Man as God, but Man in God.