ANSWERS: 3
  • its easier to remember if you can remember what appolo and dionysis are in the myths. both are sons of zeus. but neither is a god in the same way that zeus is. one takes all the mental (?) or ideal qualities of zeus, and the other takes all the physical, or animal qualities. appolo (god of the sun and a lot of other pure and clean things) is an idealized son. perfect in a lot of ways that are really more theoretical than practical. is a dream of what he could be. appolo has his head in the clouds. dionysis (god of wine) is the son in reality. imperfect but practical, existing in the moment. dionysis is all caught up in the world, drunk on what is real. dionysis has dirt under his fingernails. so: the Dionysian state is drunk.
  • Apollonian and Dionysian, terms for the twin principles which the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche detected in Greek civilization in his early work Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872). Nietzsche was challenging the usual view of Greek culture as ordered and serene, emphasizing instead the irrational element of frenzy found in the rites of Dionysus (the god of intoxication known to the Romans as Bacchus). He associated the Apollonian tendency with the instinct for form, beauty, moderation, and symmetry, best expressed in Greek sculpture, while the Dionysian (or Dionysiac) instinct was one of irrationality, violence, and exuberance, found in music. This opposition has some resemblance to that between classicism and Romanticism. In Nietzsche's theory of drama, the Apollonian (in dialogue) and the Dionysian (in choric song) are combined in early Greek tragedy, but then split apart in the work of Euripides; he hoped at first that Wagner's operas would reunite them. Dionysian: intoxication, celebration of nature, instinctual, intuitive, pertaining to the sensation of pleasure or pain, individuality dissolved and hence destroyed, wholeness of existence, orgiastic passion, dissolution of all boundaries, excess, human being(s) as the work and glorification of art, destruction.
  • As opposed to the Apollonian will to thought or intellectual understanding, the Dionysian impulse is will to wine, song & orgy (abandonment of [self] consciousness). *Both* are necessary for transcendence of self, undertaking a "master morality" (existential power & responsibility) toward the next stage of human evolution, the "ubermench", or "overman" (sometimes translated as "superman", but has absolutely *nothing* to do with racial supremicists!). (I intentionally didn't read your answer, Professor (VSP). Now its no doubt time for me to be humbled!) ;-)

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