“Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Dionysus and the Id
Nietzsche described how the original impulse that led to the lyric poet’s invention of the song also led to a type of music which more resembles an archetype of what music is today, as opposed to the kind of simple Apollonian percussion. The sound of music and its physical instruments have a peculiar nature. Since they are physical objects, that must be visible, make a sound, and be heard, they would be more connected to Nietzsche’s Apollonian concept of aesthetic, or phenomena, which refers to Schopenhauer’s idea of a dualistic nature of being, of which some of those terms and concepts Nietzsche adopts. However, through opposition and union this dualistic nature causes things to take outward form in its opposite. Aside from the objects that make music, we are interested here in the essence of music with its connection to unconscious psychological forces, as viewed through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s theory. A Freudian analysis of The Birth of Tragedy understands music as an expression of the id.
Nietzsche observes that the aesthetic act of music, in outward, physical phenomena, becomes actualized through an Apollonian incarnation, the opposite of the Dionysian. But it is the essence of the Dionysian that is being expressed, which exists as the nature of man’s low desires and impulses. These same desires are identified by Freud. In his theory of the psyche, the self has a tripartite structure, of which the id is the source of these desires, urges, or impulses. These motivating impulses are what energizes the mind. They fall into two basic categories: eros, the drive to preserve life, as well as sexual desire, and thanatos, the drive for death and aggression. What unites these terms for our concern, is that they can all be associated with that drive within the human being that is most repressed and hidden, and even more so, can be hidden from one’s own self, in the unconscious. So, the term “drive” can sometimes be applied as our chosen term for what the Dionysian concept compels, or in Freud’s case, the id, compels.
In Nietzsche’s view of life, this unconscious sphere of the self, is the essence of the human, and counter to the view of society, should be embraced, the way the Greeks embraced it before the time of the Socratics, which Nietzsche sees as the brilliance of 5th century BC Greek tragedy. This view is quite special to Nietzsche in that he saw in that period of Greek tragedy a harmony of the Apollonian and Dionysian drives, whereas in other times of Greek culture, the Apollonian had dominated. In his view Aryan and Semitic cultures were essentially Apollonian cultures. Nietzsche considers cultural mythology to be a product of humans reconciling their existence, and this accounts for the religions of these cultures. For Nietzsche, there is a dualistic cosmology of active and passive, or male and female vying forces of nature. Greek tragedies, such as those of Sophocles, show that the Greeks had achieved a harmony in the two vying forces, by properly embracing the Dionysian, and this caused their culture to thrive. Nietzsche believed German society was in decline because it was dominated by the Apollonian drive.
Will & Representation
Schopenhauer’s view of the world affirmed this conception, and it was his two opposing forces from which Nietzsche built his ideas. For Schopenhauer, the world was will and representation. Will makes up the essence of the human, and it is what drives the human, and can be likened to the Dionysian drive. The opposite force is representation and is the aesthetic phenomena outside the realm of the conscience self, like that of the Apollonian realm. The will is affected by passions, desires, emotional states, and the resultant suffering from having to reconcile with representation.
Nietzsche described song and music originating from the lyric poet as expressing a different feeling and style in contrast to the Homeric epic poet. This lyric poet sang his words with a “musical mood,” and his words were different from the epic poet’s words in that they represented a subjective view of what he was expounding upon; and this subject matter was from his passions, desires, and intoxication. He differed from the epic poet in that he spoke of the objective events, by representing the pain of the individual because of his situation in existence. Under the influence of the Dionysian intoxication and desires, he produced lyrical poems. These poems developed into what came to be called tragedies, but more precisely gave birth to the dramatic dithyramb, the choral hymn that was dedicated to Dionysus. According to Nietzsche, Archilochus was the first lyric poet, and “scholarly research has discovered that he introduced the first folk song.”
Similarly, Schopenhauer described the essence of the song as the subject of the will and was “more often in the form of an inhibited willing” affected by his becoming conscious of himself in the natural surroundings. The alternation of becoming conscious and the sorrow of passions, and desires of the will is what is expressed by the song, and what constitutes the “lyrical state itself.” So, the dithyramb, and hence the song, is inherently an expression of the self, or the “I,” what Freud identified as the conscious self, or ego.
Indeed Plato says that the dithyramb is the example of poetry where the poet, himself, is the only speaker. But, with regards to Freud and the ego, we want to show that the ego is merely the vehicle or seat which carries that expression out of the depths of the id. This is when harmony has been achieved between the super-ego and the id, mediated by the mind that is conscious of itself, namely the ego. In this typology, the super-ego can be identified with the Apollonian drive, and the id can be identified with the Dionysian drive. Now, the super-ego is like the Apollonian drive in that it is the world outside the self, like Schopenhauer’s world of representation. It encompasses cosmic and earthly nature. All these layers are the objective force that contends with the will and its desires, the essence of the individual.
In Freudian theory the super-ego imposes over the self, pushing back on the content of thoughts dawning upon the id. As the control mechanisms are initiated, desires and impulses of the id are repressed in response. However, the repressed ideas remain in the unconscious as latent content that may regress and come back, or cause anxiety or even neurosis to an individual, depending on how severe or traumatic they are. One way that the self goes further in controlling this is by condensing waking experiences in dreams, and then the process of displacement redirects the impulse in a dream, purging it from the unconscious. However, when this doesn’t happen, repressed wish-fantasies, or other impulses lead to neurosis, and the person will not know why. Freud’s method of psychoanalysis deals with the waking-state of a person by systemically drawing up from the unconscious what was repressed. Once it becomes identified to the conscious self, or ego, reconciliation can happen through self-understanding of the motivating impulse.
Consonance and Dissonance
This harmony between the powerful impulses of the id, facilitated by the ego, is very similar to the function of Attic tragedy in which Nietzsche thought was genius. The purge of the Dionysian desires through the balance of forces in tragedy takes place as the dithyramb allows the impulses and unfulfilled wish-fantasies to surface. The individual has reconciliation through music and the tragedy in a way that can be likened to sublimation, in Freud’s theory, as it displaces the dark motivations in a constructive and meaningful way. We must now look at how Nietzsche sees true potential for change in German society by developments in music that correlate with his philosophy of the Dionysian in Richard Wagner’s experiments with dissonance. It is merely natural since music can be shown to be connected to the universal essence of the human psyche. The systematic embrace of dissonance employed by Wagner exploited the psychological moods that restless chords evoke. The pain brought about by dissonance accompanies release into consonance.
Wagner’s experimentation with dissonance was related to his interest in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music. The musical discord was related to the suffering and repression of the will. In this method of exploiting these themes Wagner was creating, in Nietzsche’s view a promising model of German music that he attributed to the dual world of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. He identified dissonance with the Dionysian drive. Popular music during Nietzsche’s time had, up until Wagner, been played in an Apollonian interpretation that repressed its essential nature. The harmony achieved by Wagner showed music in a light similar to Attic tragedy, where it is mediated through a balance of suffering and consolation through Apollonian forms, but it is expressing those innermost repressed urges.
Schiller’s duality of poetry
Nietzsche and Freud are united through their common accounts of the power of motivating impulses by the ideas of the poet-philosopher, Friedrich Schiller. Schiller developed a duality that influenced Nietzsche’s model, that of naïve and sentimental poetry. For Schiller, sentimental poetry contrasted with spontaneous naïve poetry, as it was self-conscious. In Schiller’s view of tragedy, he described the chorus as having the function to block the world from affecting the tragedy itself. This shows a similar pattern of the ego mediating between the id and the super-ego, with the id like that of the tragedy. It is a little like repression, but more so a kind of protection in order to nurture the tragedy for sublimation, in the sense that it protects it from the outside world, or super-ego. In this sense Schiller gives a similar value to the Dionysian drive that Nietzsche does. This is because he sees the tragedy itself as more natural than the outside world, which is more like an illusion. So, the tragedy being aware of itself because of the chorus, is like the id and the ego, and in this sense, is directly connected to the individual, as opposed to the super-ego.
Freud wanted to credit Schiller with acknowledging the creative power of “free-rising,” “undesired ideas.” Schiller thought that it was bad to examine every though that was coming into the mind. He imagined gates, and the intellect holding the thoughts there and examining them before they were allowed to come through. He admitted that an isolated thought could be insignificant, but that some of these thoughts, considered together, could be of creative service. He believes that a creative mind lets the thoughts rush in, where they are then observed as a collective. He acknowledged that this is a “momentary passing of madness” and that people fear this and are ashamed of it. Schiller says that one who guards their thoughts like this holds themselves back from creative power. It is difficult to guess if Schiller is referring to being somehow conscious of more latent content, but at any rate he is referring to thoughts being repressed, and ultimately unable to be sublimated. Freud says that this process of examining thoughts is not difficult but takes a little conscious exercise to initiate.
Schiller’s advice, and Freud’s affirmation of the practicality of analyzing one’s subconscious thoughts and using them for creative power seems to confirm Nietzsche’s theory about the significance of the concept of the Dionysian drive. It confirms that art and especially music are directly connected to the powerful most inward sphere of the human psyche. This sphere enjoyed a time of prominent embrace in the 5th century among the Greek masters of tragedy. Music was the key to healing and catharsis for people who suffered with their dark desires, the same way that the id is the key to Freud’s treatment in psychoanalysis.
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