Examine nietzsche?s statement in the birth of tragedy that it is only as an ???aesthetic phenomenon? that existence can be ???justified? to eternity. assignment

It is clear that different people find beauty in different things. It is also clear that some may find beauty in nothing, as with meditation. But that brings into question whether we can really have a ‘ nothing’ in human experience, for even the most isolated and detached human experience cannot be fully impartial to the world of experience. The point however; is that although ‘ aesthetic phenomenon’ is a necessity; it is the openness and imagination of the perceiver that allows the object to justify existence to the eternal.

For beauty can exist in everything, but only on occasion do we see beauty to such high intensity that it awakens a recognisable feeling of the ‘ eternal’. For Nietzsche, art is a more powerful form of ‘ aesthetic phenomenon’, than naturally occurring beauty; the human is more familiar with art, often because it relates more to qualities in the realm of human experience, be it situational or emotional. This familiarity lures the perceiver into a greater degree of belief, acting as a catalyst to the erosion of self identity, as they more easily forget the self, and become overwhelmed by the ‘ will’.

Within the realm of existence, aesthetic delight serves the purpose of awakening that dormant innocence which provides openness to the primal spirit. This instinct put to sleep by our ‘ view’ of the world that quantifies things; a cognition we naturally take on, as the phenomenal world becomes more apparent and through childhood we develop a new paradigm that becomes less aware of the qualitative. This becoming of the individual is characterised by experience, and traded with innocence.

For Nietzsche ‘ Aesthetic phenomenon’ is necessary to create delight which awakens our dormant self, by detaching us from our conscious understanding, and giving way to a higher delight. Nietzsche describes this battle between the innocent and experienced lenses as a trend not only in the life of the individual but also in culture and its cultivation. The cryptic relationship between Apollo and Dionysus parallels the trend in most cultures to become more like Apollo, and forget their wilder innate counterpart whose characteristics are often mistaken for hedonism.

For Nietzsche the duality between Dionysus and Apollo is only a psychological one and his liking to the dominant organic notion of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy is possibly a result of his youth, and desire to escape the overly Apollonian culture he endured and despised. Heidegger offers an interpretation of Nietzsche’s use of the word ‘ Chaos’ that differs to those non-Greek translations whose etymology of the term, reduce it to words like ‘ primordial’ that do not capture the meaning which echoed in its use in mythic tradition. Heidegger’s classical reading of the word imbues an idea of “ that which yawns, the gaping out of itself. Applied to Nietzsche’s aesthetics, this would trivialise the role of the phenomenal which essentially repeats itself through time, in waves, a result of procreation that facilitates the reversal into the non-human, which is simultaneously the same effect as the eternal ‘ gaping out of itself’. The two dimensional effect is really of the same thing, and for Nietzsche has no direction or duration in the empirical senses of space and time; a concept better felt than imagined due to our impartiality, hence the difficulty Nietzsche mentions in describing notions such as the ‘ eternal return’.

To what extent then, does Nietzsche see the Dionysian and the eternal as relevant to one another, and separate from the Apollonian and phenomenal? If aesthetic delight leads the path from the phenomenal to the noumenal then at what point and to what degree do these dualistic entities that fit that divide the ‘ physical’ from the ‘ virtual’ relate to each other as properties? Nietzsche claims that attic tragedy is the art form which bonds the Dionysian with the Apollonian, the unison of opposition.

But Nietzsche holds that these two artistic domains are “ required to unfold their energies in strict, reciprocal proportion” so that one can only be “ permitted to enter an individual’s consciousness as can be overcome, in its turn, by the [other]” (BT: 25), if such is the case, then either Nietzsche believes these drives truly are the essence of a strict duality, or that they are too rigidly lain into the mindset to be abstracted from and comprehended as a whole.

However, if the latter is the case, then the justification of the world to eternity is a human matter, a question of interpretation, where being superhuman is being eternal, and ‘ aesthetic phenomenon’ plays no role. In later writings such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra he begins to point in this direction: “ the human is something that must be overcome”, for existence is to some degree a sense understood by the being, but if one can go beyond the being, then one can go beyond world that requires justifying to eternity.