Nietzsche, Artistic Intoxication, and the Overcoming of Nihilism: the Body as an Ontology of Practice

temperamentally satisfy us; that is, such interpretations have grasped the metaphorical (symbolical) reality of the body since they draw on the latter’s multiplicity and continuity with the practical forces of becoming to impose perspectives on the world.

In Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy we learn that great art is a product of a dialectic between two metaphysical and artistic principles: the Dionysian and the Apollonian (BT 1). The terms are derived from figures of Greek mythology, Apollo being the god of the plastic arts and Dionysus being the god of the musical arts. The Dionysian and the Apollonian, Nietzsche argues, are metaphysical principles because they are forces that underlie the world but also represent real dynamics of human subjectivity, whose synthesis represent the tragic experience in art.#

The modes of functioning of the two principles are then different in a way that proves important for artistic production. As metaphysical forces they point to the existence of a unified and transcendent reality of an artistic will (Ibid); the role of the Dionysian is to commune with that “primal unity”, and the role of Apollonian is to make that communion meaningful to us as individuals. The basic modality of the Apollonian is the dream experience, which expresses itself through the categories of imagination, illusions and representation, which in turn are crucial for the self to understand itself as a unified subjectivity, for they supply the forms and schemes that the subject inherits from society and imposes on the world to make it meaningful. Nietzsche asks us to “keep in mind that measured restraint, that freedom from wilder emotions, that calm of the sculptor

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