Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy: Apollo and Dionysus

It’s more complicated than just order and chaos. . .

At one time, quite long ago — A period including the end of my undergraduate studies, the early years of my graduate studies, and the interval between, when I worked a series of low-paying jobs, studied languages, and trained obsessively — I would unapologetically identify myself as a Nietzschean. That wasn’t the hardest thing to do, of course, not least because taking that kind of stance grants a person permission to indulge their appetites and desires, rancor and bitterness, propensities to compete and confabulate, to put others down, to lie to oneself and other under the guise of a higher, more brutal, cleaner honesty.

Transgression becomes, if not a duty — for really, a Nietzschean has only self-imposed duties — a compensation, an exploratory effort, something to enjoy and to bask in. One gets to set oneself within an elite as equally opposed to present, philistine elites as to the mass, to the ordinary, dull people — though, really, that kind of life, for which Nietzsche’s ideas and writings provide articulation, represents a certain shape of adolescence, sensitively spoiled as much as revealingly barbaric.

This explains one side of Nietzsche’s perennial appeal as a philosopher, an incorporation of his writings into…