PHENOMENOLOGY OF REASON

The title of this entry is an obvious allusion to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As I often do these days, I am leaving the task of improving it to a future consideration.

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Nietzsche’s early work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) with its “latter-day” Preface (1886) already occupies a separate entry Health, Tragedy And Laughter, which follows. Yet the importance of this work apparently requires more than one entry to do it justice. Not that my effort to date has done the said justice to it, but at least I am moving in that direction.

In several of my philosophical entries, such as, say, Reason And Passion, I have been promoting the proposition that the rational and the irrational do not exclude each other, nor subjugate each other, depending on the circumstances, but have a mutually complementary relationship, being impoverished and devalued by each other’s absence. Although Nietzsche never puts it in such terms, his train of thought here is along the same line, as he traces the evolution of the Greek Tragedy, not satisfied with staying confined to antiquity, but continuing this history through contemporary times.

The two principal actors in Nietzsche’s story are Apollo and Dionysus, that is, Reason and Passion, in my explanatory lexicon. In the beginning of Greek art was Apollo (Reason), and his isolation from his antipodal companion of a later day made him naïve and superficial. In other words, the god of light and art was not very artistic by himself. Then came Dionysus (Passion), and the Greek Drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles was born. The next move was the seduction of Euripides by the rationalism of Socrates, robbing Apollo of his Dionysus and thus undermining the precious marriage for the next two millennia plus, until a great artist of the future (Richard Wagner?) restored Dionysus into the neat family picture with Apollo.

So, here is, in my reasonable understanding, a whole phenomenology of reason, a contemptible bachelor by himself, yet a happily married genius when married to the irrational. True, Nietzsche disguises this thought in the elaborate and basically idiosyncratic setting of the history of the Greek theater, but such is my obstinate interpretation, and, for the purpose of this discussion, I stand by it.