Nietzsche, Neuroscience, and Ancient Greek Heroes

Lightning Reviews April 2023

Art by Elliot Skow

1. Songs of Surrender, by U2.

Nietzsche explains Dionysiac art in The Birth of Tragedy. It’s art expressive of, and causing in its appreciators, a sort of super-intoxication. A man pursuing the Dionysiac state, Arthur Danto writes,

sets out not so much to forget the world as to forget himself, to overcome rather than emphasize the boundaries between himself and other things, which grow blurred as the intoxication heightens until, at the orgiastic climax, they are blotted out entirely.

One might forget oneself by losing one’s inhibitions—the actual effect of drunkenness; and drugs may be a common means to the Dionysian ecstasy. But that ecstasy is not simply an inhibitionless state. To unchain the id so that nothing stands between desire and action is maybe to stop caring about the boundary between yourself and other things; one does not, for example, hesitate to impose one’s awful singing on others. But one can stop caring about a boundary while still seeing it clearly. Alternatively, one might forget oneself by identifying completely with something else—another person or the universe in its entire. That, neither, is the Dionysian ecstasy. If one moves or rearranges the boundary of what one takes to be oneself (in belief or in imagination), the boundary is still there and one is still aware of it. No, the forgetting that constitutes the Dionysian state is more extreme and more radical. It is a losing of any difference between oneself and the other. You do not leave your feelings behind, or project them onto someone else; they remain, but now untethered from all individual subjectivity.