On the Dionysian in Nietzsche

Nietzsche reverses Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy of the Will into an entirely affirmative direction. The unity of all being in the Will, that desiring energy, which constantly forms and re-forms the world, he sees embodied in the Greek divinity, Dionysos. Even though the Dionysian idea underlying The Birth of Tragedy seems to disappear from Nietzsche's subsequent work in explicit terms, it remains implicitly the cornerstone of all his thinking.

It re-appears in two main forms in Thus Spake Zarathustra: As the idea of the Eternal Recurrence of all things and as the holistic perspective from which Nietzsche views and evaluates existence. The individual has for Nietzsche significance only as a symptom of the condition the whole of being has attained. This symptomatological view of the individual underlies Nietzsche's medical approach to human existence which endeavours to enhance the health and well-being of the whole species to which individual life and happiness has to be subordinated. At the same time, however, the state of the whole of existence manifests itself only in individuals. Thus individual greatness, though symptom, is by the same token supreme end in itself.

While holism accounts for aspects of Nietzsche's thought which are close to the eugenic ideal, it also leads to a, in the broadest sense, liberal sense of "justice" in which all aspects of an idea or problem are to be taken into account. Nietzsche's Dionysian monism engenders complexity, ambiguity, and irony. It is the radical enemy of all fanaticism, i.e., of any monocausal interpretation of phenomena. Nietsche's Dionysianism is ultimately an aesthetic, a spectator's approach to being. It seeks to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the spectacle that existence presents.