Nietzsche, greek tragedy, and master slave morality

I am trying to figure out the link between Nietzsche’s distinctions of the Appollonian/Dionysian and how it relates to his will to power and master/slave morality.

I am writing on nihilism. Firstly I read that his views of nihilism were that he thought the state of nihilism comes from culture leaning too much towards the Appollonian reason and individuality, which hence brought the overbearing of science while at the same time shunning Dionysian tendencies and anything related to the absence of reason. Nihilism then came out of this lack of touch with our Dionysian side.

Now Ive also been reading that he views nihilism as a situation which has come about through the master slave morality. Christianity (one of which) produced slave morality and nihilism and the Last man etc are legacies of this line.

I can see that master slave morality is just a result of the will to power of the masters over the slaves, exploiting the week etc.

I want to know how the Appollo/Dionysus theory relates to the master slave morality or how the formaer relates to the Will to power. Am I missing a link or are they two seperate views he happened to postulate over the course of his carreer? #-o #-o #-o

Agapr - firstly, read the Birth of Tragedy. It’s not that long a piece.

Okay - the Appollonians are the slaves, and the Dionysians are the masters.

By the time Christian morality became predominant in Europe, it had been much rationalised - all manner of argumenation, more or less formal, had been applied to it. It was only after this that a coherent Christian morality became evident. This rational treatment is identified with the Appollonian elements in Greek Mythology - but any coherent morality is the result of a rational process. It is this Christian morality that Nietzsche sees as nihilistic, in part because it subordinates “earthly” values to the quest for eternal happiness in heaven. The slaves - the Christians, adopted this morality as a way to check the power of more Dionysians types, whose will to power tends to be uncontrolled by ethical considerations.

Dionysians are said to act more on an unfettered Will to Power - perhaps not rationally, but almost biologically. Personally, I think he takes the analogies here too far. It is, at least, an interesting literary device, which is mostly how he treats it in TBOT.

Nietzsche sometimes writes as if Jesus himself, before all the theologians got ahold of him, created a slave morality, but N also suspects that we don’t know the unfiltered Jesus, any more than we may know the unfiltered Socrates.

Nietzsche also objects to pre- or non-Christian morality as well, of course. And N did not originate the idea of the Appollonian/Dionysian dichotomy.

The slaves have their own will to power, by the way, which is expressed by that very morality insofar as it is a brake on powerful men. I’m not sure if the commentary you are reading admits this - everyone has a will to power.

I think this is better seen in later works on Nietzsche’s, such as The Genealogy of Morals.

Thank mate that helps fil in a couple of gaps.

I was chatting to a buddy online about this for probably 2 hours straight and we figured out pretty much what you were saying so it helps that you reiterate it to solidify our thoughts.

We hadent however come up with the bit about the slaves having their own morality…could you expand on this a little. Im interested that they try and ‘keep the Dionysiacs down’ as this rings truer than ever in society today- social conditioning is very real. Also how is it an expression of their will to power?

Im already begining to read BOT but not got into it yet, I will make it a priority to do so once I get these three essays Im working on out the way (and yes Kant is one of that pack :smiley:). This is for my dissertation but Ive been so engrossed in ‘figuring it out’ that I have to make sure I get those others out the door first before I plunge headlong into it.

So is everything you were saying in BOT?

Cheers.

Also I was thinking…Would it be faesible to see Dionysus/Apollo as the same (loosely) as Schopenhauer’s Will and Representation respectively. I know they may not overlap that neatly but if thinking in broad strokes? Also is Apollo/Dionysus the same as Last man/Overman dichotomy, if not differences?

Gracis.

Being “powerful” automatically suggests influenciality and control, but to have total control over something, and for something to be under total control, is the exact opposite of “freedom”. In their quest for more power, they eventually say they will have more control over what happens around them, and thus they call this more “freedom”, or invision themselevs feeling more “free” once more powerful. This circular tautology is self-contradicting. I’m so tired of them saying how they want it to all be more free as they make it less free at that very same time, aswel as them wanting to make it more powerful, but in every case it just becomes more dependant, weak, needy and unstable. I guess I remembered the whole lie again, remotely, as I read through a bit of this thread. The power-full do not use up or expend the inherent energy that permiates all reality, and their neutrality allows them to store unlimited energy without waste or specification; these ones are neither slave nor master. I’ll go back to ignoring the twisted mess now, or at-least not talking of it.

I’d like to add a few more points to Faust’s good post.

Nihilism has different meanings depending on the context it is used in. There is nihilism as in Platonism and Christianity due to their belief in an ‘other-worldly’ realm. And nihilism as in when these two metaphysical systems die; because knowledge cannot find a static point of departure once the previous truths have been devalued.
Nevertheless, all Nietzsche’s use of the term did indeed come from too much emphasis on the Appollian. Socrates is nihilism’s instigator. He led people on a search for truth which continually questions existing truths, which in turn never allows a static truth to exist, this is Christianity’s downfall. Once the Renaissance arrives, scepticism in regards to Christian morality began to surface. After Christianity died out, nihilism in a different form arises, that of no solid point of departure for truth to launch itself from. In a nutshell, the cultivation of truthfulness leads to nihilism.

Schopenhauer, to my knowledge, gets his idea from a single strand of Kantian thought; that of human beings possessing an ‘intelligible character’. The unfolding of this ‘intelligible charcter’ is Schopenhauer’s ‘Will’.

The division between Kant and Schopenhauer is that while Kant took the noumenal to be unknowable, Schopenhauer says it is knowable via intuition. The inference is that the will itself is the noumenal. “World as will and representation” is for Schopenhauer the same as Kant’s “world as noumena and phenomena,” if you will, but with this distinction in mind.

I wouldn’t go that far. The Dionysians are every bit as much slaves as the Apollonians. It is those that have a balance between the two that are the masters. Now, Nietzsche made a point of saying that society is presently biased towards the Apollonian so it follows that those with a more Dionysian bent are bound to thrive but balance was the overall message.

What does truth matter at all?
Its authority is what is most appealing about it. It is akin to universal law, undeniable and omnipresent forcefulness. But without it having this “solid” point to launch from, to pull towards, do direct and to essentially control the mind in totality of complete belief, man has no way to respond to the uncontrolled freedoms outside of all belief and all limits of finite meaning/purpose. And so if a man ever reaches that point, he either goes blind, dies, or goes back into his cage. Freedom and human life don’t really mix well together at all, for man is religion, and religion never makes one more free or really “saved” from their own rubbish.

The greek “philosophers” accepted many foolish things. At that time, religion and philosophy was not separate, and it was merely an extention of the general rationalism and moralism aswel as the metaphysics of the time…

Xunzian - I’m, wondering if that is your view, or if you are ascribing it to Nietzsche. Nietszche did state that a balance results in a good greek tragedy, but I don’t read him as meaning that it makes for a good human.

I do agree with what is at least a tangential point to Dan~'s, although Nietzsche himself is not always consistent in this - that the powerful need not exercise their power, and certainly have no reason to much of the time. Also that Truth is a political idea. And a very handy one.

Agape - I mean that the masses truned the tables on their masters using Christianity - to wit: the conflicts between kings and popes throughout the Middle Ages. Sometimes the popes won. One reason Britain came up with a Magna Charta so soon is that papal influence was not effective. Too many pagans there, anyway.

Also, maybe tangential to Fent’s point - Nietzsche uses the word “nihilism” in more than one sense, which can be confusing. N uses nihilism as a tool himself. As in Fent’s example, it is actually nihilistic to seek a “dynamic” truth, which is also what Nietzsche does. Nietzsche’s case for this is a bit longwinded, and is found everywhere in his writing, on any subject.

The trick is to find out what is being degraded, what is decaying as a result. A nihilistic analyisis will always degrade something - it’s up to the individual to decide on what to turn this weapon.

He talked about the Dionysian societies that failed, like the Babylonians I believe. The genius of the Greeks was in finding a balance between the two as exemplified in their tragedy. Nietzsche viewed creativity and artistry as the highest expression of humanity and he viewed tragedy as the highest form of art. I don’t think that it is too far a stretch to say that he felt the uebermensch was a mixture between the two.

Mebbe.

I agre with you Xunzian, and this is the direction I am going to take my dissertation. I am going to speak of the pitfalls of an unhealthy Apollonian bent (Socrates and Western society leading us into nihilism) as well as that of the untamed Dionysian, then bring about the taming of the two in what results in the Ubermench.

I think it would be a mistake to take the concept of the Overman as anything more than a rhetorical device, and certainly erroneous to consider it the main point of Nietzsche’s philosophy. This leads one down the road of labeling Nietzsche a virtue ethicist as some have already done, which he most certainly wasn’t, despising as he did the “perfectors of men”.

Also, I think we ought to pay more attention to Nietzsche’s conception of the self as a biological and psychological multiplicity, lest we mistake him for an individualist, which he also wasn’t.

There is no such thing in Nietzsche as “master slave morality”.

A most persuasive thesis, Sauwelios :astonished:; forgive my passive aggressive quip but would you care to back that up with some useful reasoning as to how you came to such a conclusion so as we too might perhaps be persuaded as to your viewpoint.

Well, for one thing, Nietzsche, as far as I know, never uses the phrase “master slave morality”. Where did you get that phrase anyway - Wikipedia? But Wikipedia writes “master-slave morality”, which we could rewrite as “master/slave morality”. And indeed, you Initially do write it this way. I suppose that what is meant by this phrase is “the interplay between master morality and slave morality” - a dynamic. But then you say:

“Ive also been reading that he views nihilism as a situation which has come about through the master slave morality.”

If you mean “through the master/slave dynamic” or “through the interplay between master and slave morality”, I think you’re wrong: it has come about through slave and herd morality - which are not one and the same! George Morgan says of these two moralities:

“The flock [die Heerde], needing leaders, was seduced by decadents, its morality perverted in the direction of decadence ideals. But in the course of time herd instincts proved more powerful: the decay of ascetic Christianity and the rise of democratic humanitarianism was a return of Flock Morality to its natural form. Nietzsche believed that Flock Morality is the most important element in present morals, and that this fact threatens ultimate stagnation for humanity.”
[Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, page 161.]

The ascetic priest, too, was too extreme for the herd (and of course he was himself a kind of nobleman: a “spiritual nobleman”, a person closer to God than most people, than “laymen”).

Anyway, this is how Nietzsche ultimately describes nihilism:

"Supposing that what is at any rate believed to be the “truth” really is true, and the meaning of all culture is the reduction of the beast of prey “man” to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal, then one would undoubtedly have to regard all those instincts of reaction and ressentiment through whose aid the noble races and their ideals were finally confounded and overthrown [that is, slave instincts, not herd instincts] as the actual instruments of culture; which is not to say that the bearers of these instincts themselves represent culture. Rather is the reverse not merely probable—no! today it is palpable! These bearers of the oppressive instincts that thirst for reprisal, the descendants of every kind of European and non-European slavery, and especially of the entire pre-Aryan populace—they represent the regression of mankind! These “instruments of culture” are a disgrace to man and rather an accusation and counterargument against “culture” in general! One may be quite justified in continuing to fear the blond beast at the core of all noble races and in being on one’s guard against it: but who would not a hundred times sooner fear where one can also admire than not fear but be permanently condemned to the repellent sight of the ill-constituted, dwarfed, atrophied, and poisoned? And is that not our fate? What today constitutes our antipathy to “man”?—for we suffer from man, beyond doubt.
Not fear; rather that we no longer have anything left to fear in man; that the maggot “man” is swarming in the foreground; that the “tame man,” the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man, has already learned to feel himself as the goal and zenith, as the meaning of history, as "higher man"—that he has indeed a certain right to feel thus, insofar as he feels himself elevated above the surfeit of ill-constituted, sickly, weary and exhausted people of which Europe is beginning to stink today, as something at least relatively well-constituted, at least still capable of living, at least affirming life.

[…]

“Here precisely is what has become a fatality for Europe—together with the fear of man we have also lost our love of him, our reverence for him, our hopes for him, even the will to him. The sight of man now makes us weary—what is nihilism today if it is not that?— We are weary of man.”
[Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, 1, 11-12.]

The part I have made bold describes the herd type. As you can tell, Nietzsche ranks this type higher than the slave type. Indeed, Nietzsche believed in the desirability of “a strong and healthily consolidated mediocrity” [The Antichrist(ian), section 57]. Such a mediocrity is the foundation of the culture pyramid (“culture” not in the sense used above, though…):

“A high culture is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its first presupposition is a strong and healthily consolidated mediocrity.”

This mediocrity would consists of “slaves”, it is true; but not resentful slaves, but rather like the serfs of medieval times:

“The third [and bottom] layer of the social structure is that of the rural peasantry, this is the function of fecundity and prosperity, this class can be associated with the class of slaves - although this class is very different to the slave class of the early modern era and is probably best thought of as an underclass.”
[Philip Quadrio, Odhinn and Tyr.]

The dropouts of the social structure (from all three layers), those who rank below the bottom, are what Nietzsche calls the chandalas: the pariahs, outcasts, the truly hated (for the mediocre are just despised: despised and loved). It is from these dropouts that slave morality, the slave instinct of resentment, arises:

“Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker’s sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge… The source of wrong is never unequal rights but the claim of “equal” rights… What is bad? But I have said this already: all that is born of weakness, of envy, of revenge.— The anarchist and the Christian have the same origin…”
[Nietzsche, ibid.]

This origin is shared by Marx and Paul.

As for your question “how the Appollo/Dionysus theory relates to the master slave morality or how the formaer relates to the Will to power”, this is a pretty difficult question. Nietzsche’s Apollo was subsumed by his Dionysus in his later understanding, so that the imposition of Form (Being) on the flux of Becoming was understood as a very Dionysian - forceful - act. Thus his later Dionysus (an Apollinian Dionysus) was antithesised with Christ (Dionysus versus the “Crucified”) - who was understood as a decadent form of Dionysus.

Said imposition of Form on the flux may even be said to be (of) the essence of the will to power:

ilovephilosophy.com/gold/php … 9&t=159843

Dionysus is the god of superabundance (or ascending life), Apollo the god of moderation (or descending life). Descending life only creates to the extent that it satisfies its will to conserve.

EDIT: this theory is retarded :blush:

Sorry, but this is real bullshit. Moderation (as opposed to mediocrity!) is an expression of strength - yes, of superabundance: of overflowing strength which is applied precisely to dam this overflowing of strength.

Nay, it is not so simple as “Dionysus is good, Apollo is bad”; the grand style is Apollinian! It is the imposition of Order on the chaos of existence, not “pure chaos” or another pure folly.

This, my dear Impious, is why you must read The Will to Power.

In section 940, the camel, lion and child are described:

“The teaching meden agan [“nothing in excess”] applies to men of overflowing strength–not to the mediocre. The enkrateia [“temperance”] and askesis [“ascetic exercise”] is only a stage toward the heights: the “golden nature” is higher.
“Thou shalt”–unconditional obedience in Stoics, in the Christian and Arab orders, in the philosophy of Kant (it is immaterial whether to a superior or to a concept).
Higher than “thou shalt” is “I will” (the heroes); higher than “I will” stands: “I am” (the gods of the Greeks).
The barbarian gods express nothing of the pleasure of restraint–are neither simple nor frivolous nor moderate.”
[section 940, entire, with added emphasis.]

This is why I said Nietzsche’s later Dionysus - the one antithesised with the “Crucified One”, not with Apollo - was an Apollinian Dionysus. For all the Olympian gods were Apollinian gods, as Nietzsche stated in The Birth of Tragedy. It is also in that book that he distinguishes between the Greek (Apollinian) Dionysus and the barbarian Dionysus.

The lion (or tiger) must temper himself: only then can he reach the “I am” of the Olympians:

“[P]recisely to the hero is beauty the hardest thing of all. Unattainable is beauty by all ardent wills [and all strength is strength of will: so overflowing strength means overflowing will, all-too-ardent will].
[…]
The virtue of the pillar shalt thou strive after: more beautiful doth it ever become, and more graceful - but internally harder and more sustaining - the higher it riseth [and how Apollinian is that!].”
[Zarathustra, Of the Sublime Ones.]

The grand style is of course concerned with beauty:

“”[B]ecoming more beautiful" is a consequence of enhanced strength. Becoming more beautiful as the expression of a victorious will [the victory of the striving and struggling hero], of increased co-ordination, of a harmonizing of all the strong desires, of an infallibly perpendicular stress. Logical and geometrical simplification is a consequence of enhancement of strength: conversely the apprehension of such a simplification again enhances the feeling of strength-- High point of the development: the grand style.
Ugliness signifies the decadence of a type, contradiction and lack of co-ordination among the inner desires–signifies a decline in organizing strength, in “will,” to speak psychologically."
[WtP 800, with added emphasis.]

Thus the barbarian, though evidently superior to the mediocre, is still relatively “weak”. The feeling of superiority of the Greek over the barbarian was not originally a feeling of moral superiority; it was a feeling of aesthetic superiority (the word barbaros is an onomatopoea reflecting the “bar bar” sounds the outlanders seemed to make to the Greeks).