by T. S. Love

Created on: December 05, 2007

Tragedy and the Tao

Walking in two worlds: Logos vs. Mythos

In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche defines the greatest philosophical schism in history in terms of Apollo versus Dionysus, two Greek Gods who represented Order and Chaos, loosely. To me, this can also be seen as the struggle for supremacy of the conscious versus the unconscious, the rational versus the irrational, and reason versus emotion. As someone with equally strong right brain and left brain tendencies, I have been obsessed with this dichotomy all semester.

Since the time of the Greeks, the Western world has had its gaze firmly affixed upon the Apollonian path of logic, science and reason, insisting that everything must be proven and ordered in order to be valid. Nietzsche, however, insists that there is more to reality than reason alone and maintains that achieving a Dionysian ecstatic state brings one into line with the collective, with the communal, the universal, which takes one out of oneself and connects one to the greater principle, or the hidden, truer reality - "his own condition complete oneness with the essence of the universe."[1]

Reading the Tao, however, added to my suspicions that there was more to this dualism than I had seen even with Nietzsche. Specifically, the concept of yin and yang brought an even deeper level of understanding to the concepts of duality and balance, almost a meta level. I could now tie in the Apollonian with hot male yang controlling energy, anxious to put structure and meaning onto reality, whereas the cool Dionysian feminine principle instead seems to coexist effortlessly with the spirit of existence. From the Tao:

"The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it.
So sometimes things are ahead and sometimes they are behind;
Sometimes breathing is hard, sometimes it comes easily;
Sometimes there is strength and sometimes weakness;
Sometimes one is up and sometimes down.
Therefore the sage avoids extremes, excesses, and complacency."[2]

The Tao also shed more light on what I suspect may be another way to tap into the Dionysian state of existence, aside from Nietzsche's single track focus on music. Each philosophical path seems to have a slightly different version of the same theme, an ecstatic, shamanic offshoot that rejects the path of reason and embraces instead the oft shunned path of intuition and faith. In Hinduism, it is bhakti yoga. In Buddhism, it is mindfulness.

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