Some Questions for Nietzsche
Some further thoughts from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols.
"Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it."
"If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy."
"Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems . . . that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet."
"For heaven's sake, do not throw Plato at me. I am a complete skeptic about Plato. . . . Plato is boring. In the end, my mistrust of Plato goes deep: he represents such an aberration from all the basic instincts of the Hellene, is so moralistic, so pre-existently Christian--he already takes the concept 'good' for the highest concept--that for the whole phenomenon Plato I would sooner use the harsh phrase 'higher swindle,' or, if it sounds better, 'idealism,' than any other."
Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872)
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Why is language unable to render the cosmic symbolism of music?
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What is the distinction between the two art worlds of dreams and drunkenness?
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What qualities would you associate with the Apollonian?
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What qualities would you associate with the Dionysian?
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How does the Dionysian make possible a reconciliation between the human and the natural?
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When Nietzsche refers “modern” discussions of “harmony with nature” as the “ripest fruit of Apollonian culture,” what exactly does he mean?
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How does Raphael's "Transfiguration" support Nietzsche's argument about appearance?
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How does the lyric poet fuse the Apollonian and the Dionysian? How is the “mystical process of un-selving” related to this?
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What reasons does Nietzsche give for stating that subjective art is not really art?
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How does Nietzsche turn Plato on his head?
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By what means, and with what results, did Socrates change his position in his last days of life (according to Nietzsche)?
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What is Nietzsche's definition of art? What art does he consider to be degenerate, and why?