»IN V IN O M E T A P H O R A «
Nun feieren wir, vereinten Siegs gewiss, Das Fest der Feste:
Freund Zarathustra kam, der Gast der Gäste,
Nun lacht die Welt, der grause Vorhang riss,
Die Hochzeit kam für Licht und Finsterniss.
Nietzsche
»If G od is dead, everything is permitted.« To a philosopher of the nine
teenth century, these w ords must have sounded either like the promise o f lib
eration o f the harbingers o f an unthinkable catastrophe. W ith the advent of G od ’s death, atheism spawned a form o f nihilism which, as its most bitter critics had predicted, led to a com plete lack o f conviction in any moral stand
ards. Friedrich Nietzsche, living as he did in the tumult o f this death-blow, saw beyon d the nihilism o f the new atheism inasmuch as he perceived in it the possibility fo r a new breed o f human being. If God is dead, Nietzsche w rote, the Ü berm ensch is possible. It was this possibility o f a w orld that might exist beyon d good and evil that Nietzsche predicted and developed in most of his w ork. W hile it m ight, and in fact did, seem to many that atheism could on ly produce a m oral chaos in the form o f nihilism, Nietzsche’s w ork stands as a testim ony to the idea that w ith G od ’s death something infinitely more n oble m ight fin ally arise, shaking o ff the weight of a m oribund Christian tradition and establishing hum an-kind as the standard or norm for what might n ow be accom plished.
F or Nietzsche then, atheism did promise liberation, although not in the fo rm o f nihilism. W hat it m ight liberate was a potential inherent in human life itself w hich had been buried under the w eight o f the life-denying doctrine o f Christianity. In this paper, I w ish to show one o f the form s liberation might take after the death o f God. I shall be w riting about the Dionysian and about intoxication (der Rausch). In »In V in o M etaphora«, I wish to affirm that God is indeed dead and that new, forbidden and irrational form s of human lib
eration m ay now release that human potential which has atrophied fo r two millenia under the censure o f decadent Christianity and for a century under the m ore recent trium ph o f nihilism. Nietzsche assaulted not only Christianity but also those doctrines w hich attended its death. W ith atheism, as Nietzsche demonstrates, w e have neither to accept nihilism nor a new transcendental.
H ow ever sinful or prohibited it may seem, intoxication opens up and affirms a once dorm ant and human, all too human, potential in the form o f an intoxi
cated w ill to power.
Nietzsche scholarship has been divided with respect to an interpretation o f the w ill to power. On the one hand, philosophers have understood Nietzsche
as espousing a m etaphysical or ontological m onism or dualism and, on the other, as being a nihilist. The first position has been m aintained b y W alter K aufm ann1 and Jean Granier,2 to name on ly tw o, and the second b y A rthur C. Danto.3 While I cannot argue away the inconsistencies in N ietzsche’s pre
sentation o f the will to power, I shall adopt Sarah K ofm a n ’s interpretation as outlined in Nietzsche et la M étap h ore* A lth ou gh in m ost o f the above- mentioned work, the w ill to pow er is seen as N ietzsche’s central doctrine, the question o f its interpretation does plague m ost exegetes. One is forced, then, to choose between this plurality o f readings. In this paper, it is K ofm a n ’s interpretation o f the w ill to pow er that w ill serve as a guide.
In her w ork, Sarah K ofm an argues that m etaphysics and on tology are derivative o f Nietzsche’s w ill to p ow er understood as a psychological and phys
iological phenomenon. To quote K ofm a n :
. . . one cannot say that Nietzschean psych ology is . . . an ontological m ethod for research (Granier, p. 17) since, on the contrary, it is the »essence« o f being which is constituted b y the psych ology o f each being. In N ietzsche’s w ork, one cannot separate on tology and psychology. Y et it is on tology that is subordinated to p s y ch o lo g y . . . and not the other w ay around.5 Thus, m y view is simply that Nietzsche rejected, and succeeded in rejec
ting, an ontological conception o f the hum an person in terms o f the w ill to power. There are m any w ho w ould contest this point and th ey are w elcom e to do so. Nietzsche did repudiate a system atic philosophy d la Hegel, but there are som e passages in his w ork that w ou ld support the ontologisation o f the will to power. Nevertheless, Nietzsche him self stated that all ontological and metaphysical concepts are derived fro m a m ore fundam ental, but em pirical, source. This source is not, fo r Nietzsche, som ething that lies beyon d the body, the senses or life in its more concrete aspects. It is indeed fou n d in the psychology and physiology o f every human experience.
»R eason« is the cause o f our falsification o f the testim ony o f the senses.
Insofar as the senses show becom ing, passing away and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus w ill rem ain eternally right w ith his assertion that being is an em pty fiction. The »apparent« w orld is the on ly on e: the
»true« world is m erely added b y a lie.®
Nietzsche is quite explicit in his rejection o f m etaphysics and ontology.
Both are, fo r Nietzsche, derivations o f m ore original m etaphors engendered by the senses. In the above passage from the Twilight o f the Idols, w here he discusses the genesis o f the idea o f the so-called »true w orld «, Nietzsche demonstrates how this idea has becom e as invalid as the notion o f the apparent world. Both ideas derive fro m the b od y and the senses as m otivated 1 Walter Kaufmann: N ietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, 4th ed., Princeton Uni
versity Press, Princeton 1974. See especially pp. 235—246.
2 Jean Granier: Le Problèm e de la Vérité dans la Philosophie de N ietzsche, Seuil, Paris 1966, quoted in : Sarah K ofm an: Nietzsche et la M étaphore: see below.
8 Arthur C. Danto: Nietzsche as Philosopher, The MacMillan Company, New Y ork 1965. See especially pp. 80—81.
* Sarah Kofman: Nietzsche et la Métaphore, Payot, Paris 1972. See especially pp. 175—187.
5 Ibid., p. 180.
8 Friedrich Nietzsche: Twilight o j the Idols, in: The Portable Nietzsche (translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann), Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth 1968, pp. 480—81.
b y the w ill to pow er, that is, from a psychology and physiology which are m ore fundam ental and yet not ontologically so.
The great n ovelty Nietzsche discovers is that knowledge itself should be referred to life and truth to the w ill to truth. The Nietzschean question is not »W hat is the essence o f truth?« but »W hat does the w ill that wills truth w an t?« For the w ill to truth is, in its turn, only a sym bol and a sym ptom .7
The w ill to truth, ontology, metaphysics are derivative o f the senses and the m etaphors they produce. There is nothing in Nietzsche to which an onto
lo g y or m etaphysics could correspond: no true world, no Ding-an-sich. What remains, and what ultim ately defeats a nihilist atheism, is the w ill to power as the creative and m etaphorical activity o f a body w hose senses invent a w orld from a source w hich cannot be made adequate to any transcendental ground.
In all o f his w ork, Nietzsche associated the Dionysian with an intoxicated fo rm o f the w ill to pow er. Dionysus is the god of wine and o f the harvest.
In him, Nietzsche also sees the Ewig-Leidende or that suffering which lies at the heart o f human existence. Dionysian rituals are re-enactments o f the dism em berm ent (Z erbrech u ng) o f that dem i-god himself. Initiates to the cult o f Dionysus w ou ld drink freely, then engage in dancing and singing, hoping b y this means to induce Dionysus to appear to them. A ccording to some myths, these initiates, in the fren zy o f their intoxicated state, w ould dismember an animal or human and proceed to eat it, assimilating the pieces o f their once dism em bered god. The association o f the god with suffering is linked to this practice o f dism em berm ent inasmuch as the practice inflicts, not so much physical pain, but the pain w hich results from what must be interpreted as individuation. D ism em berm ent represents the process whereby the primordial u nity is torn asunder by the A pollonian principium individuationis. Its value, then, is the re-enactm ent o f an event that should be view ed metaphorically.
Intoxication, in Dionysian festivals, represents the opposite process o f disin
tegration — the disintegration o f individuals. By means o f intoxication, bound
aries and distinctions im posed b y values and norms are broken down. In intoxicated states, one reaches the painful realisation that such distinctions and values are empty. The resulting identification o f the intoxicated Dionysian w ith everything that surrounds him or her is, as Nietzsche puts it, an iden
tification w ith »the prim al unity, its pain and contradiction«.8
The Birth o f Tragedy is not only Nietzsche’s first published book, it is also his first fu lly developed presentation of the Dionysian, a theme that w ould occu py him throughout all o f his works. In this its earliest formulation, the Dionysian appears as an artistic energy which bursts »forth from nature herself, w ith out the m ediation o f the human artist«.9 It is clearly a metaphys
ical principle; one o f the tw o forces or drives (Triebe) which make it possible fo r there to be a w orld at all. A s a metaphysical drive, the Dionysian is also artistic and Nietzsche him self believed that he had produced a brand of aestheticism in his first w ork. Human artists only tapped the more primordial 7 Nietzsche et la Métaphore, p. 181.
8 Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth o f Tragedy, in: Basic Writings of Nietzsche (translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann), The Modern Library, New Y ork 1968, p. 49.
9 Ibid., p. 38.
Dionysian forces and w ere therefore artists on ly b y analogy. N ot on ly was the Dionysian an artistic and m etaphysical principle, how ever, it was also more fundam ental with respect to that other force, the A pollonian. The D io nysian was the primal mud out o f w hich could arise the dream w orld o f the schönen Schein engendered b y the A pollon ian drive.
The dialectising o f the worlds o f intoxication and dreams w ou ld not remain in Nietzsche’s later w ork, h ow ever. He him self realised that he could not affirm the metaphysical principles existed w ithout contradicting his own views concerning the illusory character o f all on tology and m etaphysics. These latter w ere produced by what Nietzsche called the Socratic tendency, or the drive towards systématisation and rationalisation: the w ill to truth. Dionysian intoxication became one form — a m ore integral one — o f intoxication ; the Apollonian dream w orld w ould have its ow n brand o f intoxication. Intoxication was also no longer specifically associated w ith drinking. It could be foun d in sexual excitement, »all great cravings, all strong a ffects; the fren zy o f feasts, contests, feasts o f daring, victory, all extrem e m ovem ent; the fren zy o f cruelty;
the frenzy in destruction; the fren zy u nder certain m eteorological influences, as fo r example the frenzy o f spring; or under the influen ce o f narcotics; and finally the frenzy o f will, the frenzy o f an overcharged and sw ollen w ill«.10 In addition, both Apollonian and Dionysian intoxication becam e modalities of an essentially protean w ill to pow er in its m ore creative and n oble aspects.
Yet, while the w ill to pow er could take any one o f a num ber o f form s, the Dionysian still remained one of the m ore life-a ffirm in g and artistic o f these.
As a m odality o f the w ill to p ow er in one o f its healthier aspects, the Dionysian shares characteristics w ith the A pollon ian and other n obler m od
alities. In the first place, it too is creative o f the illusions, in the fo rm of metaphors, which give life its meaning and value. Intoxication, as the disinte
gration o f norms and values, is creative o f an identification w ith everything that exists such that a unifying bond is established betw een all existents; the principium individuationis breaks dow n. This unity is n o longer a primal one in any metaphysically significant sense; it is the u nity o f all form s of existence and is also an illusion. The second and m ore im portant character
istic o f the nobler form s o f the w ill to p ow er is just this life-a ffirm in g trait o f Dionysian intoxication. As in The Birth o f Tragedy, intoxication allows one to affirm those irrational and painful aspects o f life through reconcil
iation. This reconciliation is productive o f a text or a rhetoric in the form o f musical — in the widest sense o f that w ord — metaphors that m ay excite the entire physiological system o f the intoxicated Dionysian. The Dionysian says yes to a life in w hich it discovers su fferin g — the m otivation, if not the force behind much value-creating activity. S/he realises in the experience o f in toxi
cation the arbitrariness o f all values, norm s, customs and habits and exem plifies this understanding in a music o f discord and dissonance. W hile the Dionysian and intoxicated w ill to p ow er is destructive, this destructive behav
iour becomes creative in the sense that it obliges one to recognise illusion as illusion and to affirm the irrationality o f life. There is no good reason, as the Dionysian experience shows, fo r accepting one illusion over another and, in the disintegration o f all illusion, the Dionysian produces its ow n — a rhetoric o f the body and the senses in the form o f music.
» ibid., p. sis.
One may, if one wishes a m ore contem porary example o f this rhetoric of music, think o f rock music. The parallels between listening to rock and intox
icated states have certainly been noted by many o f its afficionados and critics. One w riter, rem arking on W alter Benjam in’s discussion of intoxication (der Rausch) has said: R ock m usic »renders the bodies of its adepts com plete
ly m obile and emancipates them from what is regular and periodical. It appears to give pleasure in the adaptation o f one’s heart-beat to the beat of the musical m otor.11 W alter Benjam in saw the effects of intoxication in much the same w a y as Nietzsche. In both, intoxication takes the form o f a dis
integration o f the self and o f all kinds o f values and norms. This disintegration or dism em berm ent is often effected by certain kinds of music — itself an into
xicant — and results in the emancipation of the body and the senses so that these becom e overtaken by the rythym o f the music. In Nietzsche especially, the association o f intoxication and music — either as an intoxicant itself or as one o f its effects — is a strong one.
Nietzsche describes the intoxicated will to pow er in both psychological and physiological terms. He is Baudelaire’s doctor-philosopher w ho has made a forcefu l study o f wine, a kind o f double psychology. This study follow s upon Nietzsche’s view o f the w ill to p ow er as a psychological and physiological force.
In Dionysian intoxicated states: »the whole affective system is excited and enhanced: so that it discharges all its means o f expression at once and drives forth sim ultaneously the pow er o f representation, imitation, transfiguration, transform ation, and every kind o f mimicking and acting«.12 Indeed, intoxi
cation takes total possession o f the body in dancing and singing, the represen
tation o f animals or humans, producing a tremendous synergy — and apotheosis o f the physical and psychological. It is also no accident that the music o f this totalising and synergic intoxicated state should be part o f a ritual such as a Dionysian festival or a rock concert. These occasions provide an opportunity fo r a com m unal experience o f celebration and transformation which only heightens their effects and succeeds in rem oving them from the com m on and everyday. The p ow er ox such communal experience should not be understi- mated either artistically or politically.
I have already m entioned that the psychological effect o f Dionysian intoxi
cation serves to break d ow n all kinds o f norms and values. There are interesting analogies here betw een B enjam in’s and Nietzsche’s views. The Zerbrechung of Nietzsche’s intoxication also exem plifies its primary effect in Benjam in’s work.
In the latter, how ever, disintegration has explicitly political implications I should like to explore further. Once the indiviual has been dismembered qua individual, one is able to see its origins in its value fo r instrumental reason. The Lockerung des Ich is a means to breaking down and cognising the bourgeois aura o f individuation. Further, the intoxicated individual also sees through the aura o f things, the history of their value in relation to capitalism. The everyday and historically conditioned connection between man and man, man and him or herself and man and things is thus called into question. The values o f instrumental reason disintegrate and the possibility of salvation, o f a life w ithout pathos, can be glimpsed through the mortified aura o f these values.
11 Norbert B olz: »Illumination der Drogenszene« in Walter Benjamin: Profane Erleuchtung und Rettende Kritik (edited b y Norbert Bolz and Richard Faber), Konigshausen und Neumann, Wurzburg 1982, p. 236.
1! Twilight, p. 519.
12 Vestnik IMS
For Benjamin, however, intoxication could on ly have a political signifi
cance if it were dialectically linked to profane illum ination in relation to which it was only a Vorschule.
Benjamin transforms the archetypal image o f the Dionysian destruction o f the principium individuationis into a dialectical one: the dialectical tearing to pieces o f the individual into creature and class subject. As a creature, one hopes for redem ption, as a class subject, one is com m itted to revolutionary action.13
It w ou ld be interesting, how ever, to analyse the form o f com m unality established in Dionysian rituals — w hether ancient or contem porary. W hile Nietzsche and Benjamin neglect to study this aspect o f intoxication, concen
trating solely on the individual’s solitary experience o f intoxication, their ideas concerning the effects o f intoxication w ould appear to sanction an analysis o f it as an instance o f a kind o f prim itive solidarity. The breaking dow n o f ties, bonds, habits, customs, norms and values — perhaps n ow here better seen in its Dionysian splendor that at W oodstock — creates a sense o f shared exp e
rience which could be precursor to institutionalised form s o f political and revolutionary action. Certainly the m ore vocal detractors o f the rock music experience all share this fear to a certain extent. Peace and lo v e as voiced by the hippies on L. S. D. 25 still hold som e prom ise and continue to engage, if only marginally, all those o f us w h o m ay have gon e on to becom e life in
surance salespeople. That governm ents and individuals in ancient Greece and more contem porary times have expressed concern over everything from the length o f the hair o f the initiates to the lyrics o f their music certainly speaks fo r the political aspect o f the experience o f intoxication be it through music or drugs.
In terms of its artistic significance in N ietzsche’s w ork, intoxication was divested o f some o f its artistic value as Nietzsche continued to reassess the Dionysian force or drive. Intoxication, in either its Dionysian or Apollonian forms, becomes one, among other, artistic and intoxicated activities. This newer conception of the Dionysian artist accords w ell w ith N ietzsche’s m ore developed views of the will to power as protean. Indeed, it w ou ld appear that the D ion y
sian in art can be surpassed and this by means o f »the great act o f will, the will that moves mountains, the frenzy o f the great w ill w hich aspires to art«.14 This greater will is that w hich produces architecture — the highest artistic expression o f the will to power. H owever, in those passages where the D ion y
sian and the Apollonian lose some o f their value with respect to artistic acti
vity, it is not clear that Nietzsche means to deprecate Dionysian music. He seems rather to want to enhance another aspect o f the intoxicated Dionysian.
Music and the Dionysian continue to be closely linked in the idea o f the D iony
sian artist and yet the Dionysian m ay take yet another form . This later form , while not incompatible with its artistic one, makes Dionysus m ore than sim ply a vehicle fo r music.
The new conception o f the Dionysian associates it with scepticism and the playful, mocking behaviour of an illusion-producing dem i-god w ho knows itself to be illusion-producing. Dionysus grow s in w isdom and appears in 13 «-Illumination der Drogenszene«, p. 237.
14 Twilight, p. 520.
B eyon d Good and Evil in the mask of a philosopher and Nietzsche’s teacher.
In the tearing dow n o f values and norms — the activity of the destructive Dio
nysian — in the unm asking o f illusion and the mask o f illusion Nietzsche dis
covers his protophilosopher. He appears there as Silenus, Dionysus’ teacher, a figure w hich m ay also be fou n d in The Birth of Tragedy. The rhetoric of nihilism is indeed overcom e in the disintegration of our human, all too human, illusions and in the affirm ation o f life in its illusion-generating forms o f the w ill to pow er. The E m peror know s that he wears no clothes and yet feels no shame. Dionysus is reduced in the end to a mask which, and importantly so, knows itself to be one. Nihilism is defeated, not by attempting to find a new transcendental ground fo r values, but in the generation o f a plurality of grounds, m etaphors and illusions. The important thing is not to deny nihilism but to push it to its limits. As Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil:
. . . w h oever has really, w ith an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye, looked into, dow n into the most w orld -d en yin g o f all possible ways o f thinking — beyond good and evil and no longer, like the Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion o f m orality — may just thereby, without really m eaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive and w orld-affirm ing human being who has not only com e to terms and learned to get along with what is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo — not only to him self but to the w hole play and spectacle but at the bottom w h o needs precisely this spectacle — and w h o makes it neces
sary because he needs him self and makes him self necessary.15
The dreadful abyss o f noon, the great noon o f which Zarathustra spoke is indeed just this approach o f the paradoxical silenus — Dionysian. If he is destructive, barbaric and anarchic, it is only because, as Dionysian, he must shatter the old tablets and sound out the old gods with a tuning fork until the source o f all values has been discovered. Dionysus, though a mask himself, also makes possible the stripping away o f all masks. In Dionysian intoxication, the source o f all value-creating activity is laid bare and without shame. Nihi
lism, pushed to its limits, is just this discovery, the approach o f the great noontide o f a human life w hich needs only itself to create values and meanings.
Beyond nihilism lies the laughter, dance and song o f Dionysus — the god of wine, fertility and life itself.
15 Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, in: Basic Writings of Nietzsche, loc. cit., p. 258.
