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

god” (Ibid). Owing to their power of transfiguration,# the illusory but beautiful Apollonian codes that impose order on Dionysian frenzy repose the subject on a comforting state of self-knowledge and self-mastery, for the world is no longer absorbed as becoming, change and suffering but comprehended through clear rational models. The basic element in the Dionysian principle is the intoxicating experience that expresses itself through artistic rapture, an experience that dissolves subjectivity into the fluxes of becoming, for when the subject is under its intoxicating influence, “everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfulness” (Ibid). The Dionysian owes its power to its ability to upset the balance of social norms, values, and categories (nurtured by the Apollonian) that make our life normal and meaningful as “sovereign” individuals.

By tragic art Nietzsche means the effect of the dialectic between these two principles. He writes, “these two different tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance; and they continually incite each other to new and more powerful births, which perpetuate an antagonism, only superficially reconciled by the common term ‘art;’ till eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic ‘will,’ they appear coupled with each other, and through this coupling ultimately generate an equally Dionysian and Apollonian form of art-Attic tragedy” (Ibid). The two principles contest each other but also strengthen the effects of each other on the psyches of the tragic hero and his or her audience to create a tragic artistic experience, for whereas Dionysian rapture tends to build up in us a longing for a return to normality through Apollonian codes,

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