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6. Eros Frenzied and the Redemption of Art: Nietzsche and the Dionysian Origin
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NIETZSCHE’S ORIGIN AND THE OTHERS If the origin is dark, how dark? As dark as eros turannos is dark? Or perhaps dark with a more mysterious eros? Or perhaps with a love yet other again? The question returns with Nietzsche, whose response is not Platonic, or Kantian, or Hegelian, or Schopenhauerian, though in all these, with the exception of Kant, the draw of the erotic origin is felt. Schopenhauer’s influence remained immense: his erotic origin, prior to reason, other to reason itself, beyond complete determination by the principle of sufficient reason, since it determines this principle, is rendered even more intense in Nietzsche’s Dionysian origin. This Dionysian origin mixes eros and mania in a frenzied creativity, an “heroic furor,” to echo Bruno. And here too are made more extreme claims for an intenser form of art’s redemptive power. Of course, Schopenhauer’s view of reason suggests many variations not quite Schopenhauerian. One thinks of Hume famously saying: reason is and always will be the slave of the passions. Hume’s “fall back” position seems to be an ungrounded, because not ultimately justifiable, respect for common sense. Is this a form of “say-so”: custom—it just happens to be so, and further reason we must not ask? Hume’s “fall back” turns away from a kind of abyss that gapes at that point of maximum skepticism. He fortifies himself against horror with a glass of claret and a game of backgammon. The sweats subside as the accustomed conviviality of company lulls to sleep the dread. Hume has no further relevance here, except that what he puts to sleep reawakens differently in other thinkers. Kant’s transcendental strategy, his discipline of taste for the terror of genius, or his moral therapy for the rupture of the sublime, show strategies that shield us from this abyss.They do not quite lay to rest disquieting hauntings of 165 6 Eros Frenzied and the Redemption of Art Nietzsche and the Dionysian Origin otherness beyond the self-determination of reason, hauntings taking darker forms in Schelling, Schopenhauer, and now Nietzsche. Nor does Hegel’s dialectical origin give quiet. Plato and Hegel do differently deny reason’s instrumentalization: there is a reason ontologically intimate with the deepest nature of being. Of course, we must make qualifications . A Platonic advocacy of reason knows the limit of human reason, hence is open to an appeal to a “beyond,” the sense of whose otherness might necessarily have to be expressed in muthos rather than logos. By contrast, Hegelian reason, far from acknowledging a limit, claims to incorporate all limiting others within its own progressive self-justification. The Platonic origin is other and excessive, not because it is antithetical to reason but because it is too much for human reason: excess of light dark to us, but not dark. Dialectical paradoxes arise: excessive illumination stuns the beholder into a dazzled blindness. The ultimate light blinds us because we are not gods. This blinding is not the rebuff of the jealous god. It is the gift of the Good. Hegel’s god is not jealous, to be sure, but not because its gifts are agapeic, but because in everything it is concerned with itself. Hegel’s dialectical origin, as self-mediating in otherness, is such that there is no surd of otherness, or mystery of transcendence: otherness as rationalized is simply reason’s own otherness, hence no irreducible otherness; reason masters mystery in the circle of its own self-determination. Hegel forfeits the Platonic finesse for the inspiring disjunction between humans and gods, and remakes the between, as the milieu of their communication through eros and mania, into the medium of reason’s own comprehensive self-communication. Nietzsche is closer to Plato, in being closer to Schopenhauer’s sense of the excess of the origin to idealistic self-determination. In an intriguing juxtaposition of opposites Nietzsche refers to himself in Daybreak (preface) as one of those underground (unterirdisch) “who tunnels and mines and undermines.” How remain true to the earth under the earth? Where does the light of day break? Under the ground or above it? At the end of what tunnel is there light to see? In what caves of night are we? There is in Nietzsche also a mingling of darkness and festivity which has a quasi-Platonic flavor: at the limit of our reason, we may celebrate an otherness that resists any simple logicizing, in the release of the disruptive powers of eros and...