The Apollonian and Dionysian Dialectic

As a college student I was fascinated by philosophy.  Having returned from 8 months in Germany in 1975 with a reasonable competency in the language, I took a series of three courses at Stanford in German philosophy called Deutsche Geistesgeschichte.  One of the books we read was Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy.  This was Nietzsche’s first significant work.  At the time he was under the spell of Richard Wagner, the great opera composer, and the spirit of Wagner’s music was undoubtedly a big influence on Nietzche’s thinking.  The full title of the book was actually “The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music”, though it is generally known by the shorter title.

In this book Nietzsche argued, among many other topics, that art, and indeed the human condition, was a struggle between Apollonian and Dionysian forces.  For Nietzsche, Apollonian is used to describe the light-filled, measured and rational impulses in man.  Apollo, of course, is the god of light, and is also associated with refined beauty and aesthetic taste.  Apollonian character attributes are those that express individuality, control, refinement and intellect.

Dionysus, on the other hand, is the God of the wine harvest and the festival, of uninhibited, often sensual release and inebriation.  From Nietzsche’s perspective, Dionysian impulses connect us to a more primitive state of being, without the rigid boundaries of individuality, allowing us to connect to the energy and intoxication of a communal life force.

For Nietzsche, and here I agree from my own experience, music is primarily Dionysian in its effect, allowing us to transcend our egos and individuality to experience a state of primordial unity and experience a rush of pure, ecstatic emotion.

But the Dionysian is also seen in other aspects of culture – in our efforts to lift ourselves out of the tyranny of the day-to-day and the sometimes stultifying effect of our disciplined, sober lives.  Drinking, eating, dancing, laughing, sex, sport, gambling all have elements of the Dionysian, because they challenge the order and restraint of our lives.  Dionysus offers chaos, excess and ecstasy as an anti-thesis to Apollo’s discipline and ‘know thyself’ restraint.  Dionysus encourages total immersion in contrast to Apollo’s maintenance of a critical intellectual and aesthetic distance.

Isn't this dialectic, though presenting us with a lifelong contradiction of impulses, the very source of life’s most sublime moments?  Doesn't the art of living consist of finding the proper balance, not suppressing one or the other?

For surely those who view the Dionysian as sinful and try to order their lives in a purely Apollonian manner become dry husks of human beings with no ecstasy and a very narrow scope of joy.  And those who totally indulge the Dionysian lose the edges of their individuality and self-control, slipping into the abyss of debauchery and hedonism.

But balancing the dialectic is not an equation or a recipe in the battle of life.  There is no formula for success and there is risk at every juncture.  We careen from one corner of the ring to the other, a self-righteous, arrogant creature on one side and an inebriated, profligate mess at the other.  It is naive to hope for perfection, for order, for peace, for harmony.  Life is a struggle.

A Liberal Arts Education

College students are all choosing business majors and educators are wringing their hands, wondering what will become of the liberal arts education!

The definition of the so-called liberal arts education has long been elusive.  I would define it as a thorough grounding in literature, languages, history, philosophy, theology, the arts (music, theater, painting, sculpture, etc.), math and science. 

But with this definition we would have to confess that a liberal arts education has been rare for some time.  Long ago students began to divide themselves into math/science types and non-math/science types, neglecting any education in the opposite realm after secondary school.  This may have been partly due to the volume of accumulated knowledge in all fields, which made it difficult to become conversant in the full spectrum.  But it also occurred because of a growing chasm between the arts and the sciences, with certain personality traits and characteristics being ascribed to each group that made it difficult to bridge the gap.  The ‘renaissance man’ archetype, once a common aspiration of many intellectuals, became a relic, discarded on the dustbin of history. 

One of the things I am proudest of in my life is that I made a big effort to avoid this distinction, getting both a B.A. in German Studies and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering.  Now admittedly, this was partly because I have never been able to focus very well, but it has proven to be one of my best decisions and has provided my intellectual life with a rich diversity of passions.

But the current economic conditions have sent tremors through the university system, and everyone is trying to identify ‘practical’ majors that will ensure a job upon graduation.  The liberal arts major is seen as a monument to irrelevance, and its adherents are viewed as useless intellectuals with nothing to contribute to the heroic efforts of ‘job creation’ that have become the mantra of modern business.

In addition to the lemming-like movement to business and management majors, now there is a growing urgency in education to teach everyone to ‘code’.  This is a reaction to the ubiquity of information technology, which is built on software.  But the fad of teaching programming skills to every child seems as misplaced as an effort to teach everyone how to design machinery in the industrial age.

Education is not ‘one size fits all’!  Germany, one of the few nations that has been successful in avoiding the loss of middle class jobs in the globalization time, long ago instituted a state-funded spectrum of educational paths that has served it well.  A university education is only available for a minority of students.  The rest have a cornucopia of options, from highly hands-on technical to purely administrative, and everything in-between.  Students pay a modest fee for this training if they pay anything at all.  The system is not perfect, but what system is?  The decision to prepare for various paths is made fairly early and it is not a simple matter to change once that decision has been made, which leads to some frustration and wrong choices.  But overall it seems to be a much better system than ours, especially for the non-university students.

The U.S. has long had a rather absurd goal of sending every person to a university.  This is foolhardy.  How many college students truly have the desire to immerse themselves in deep study of literature, political science, economics and the like?  Certainly only a small percentage of those that actually attend.  But because a college education is seen as a pre-requisite for any well-paid career, legions of students spend their parents’ or their own hard-earned treasure to pay their dues in uninspired academic languor, all the while focusing most of their energy on the serious business of partying and watching college sports.

As jobs have become more scarce, the masses of students in university have become more utilitarian, choosing job training subjects that were not even options a couple of decades ago.  The most popular choice is the so-called business major – emphasizing accounting, organizational behavior, marketing and other business world topics.  Formerly, these topics were only taught in business schools, and typically to students who had already been out in the real world and returned for an MBA.  But now, in the desperate quest to gain advantage in job searches, students have turned away from traditional liberal arts subjects in the belief that this more practical knowledge will give them the edge.

This is precisely the type of education that Germany has put in a separate category from university education.  There is no need for a four year university education to learn business fundamentals.

Many will argue that a classic liberal arts education is no longer relevant, that majors such as history or literature do not prepare one for the workplace.  But I strongly disagree.  The skills that one obtains by deep study of history, literature and other liberal arts are exactly the enduring skills that allow one to become a profound contributor to society – critical thinking, complex logical analysis and writing, a sophisticated understanding of the nature and progression of civilization.

These are skills that are still immature at the end of high school.  It is a sad fact that most people read their last piece of classical literature or philosophy in their senior year of high school when they do not have the intellectual depth or foundation to truly understand or incorporate its message in their lives.

Similarly, many people never pursue a rigorous study of history or the evolution of political and social thought because they equate it to the memorization of facts, figures and dates that they abhorred all through high school.

Ideally, a liberal arts education in college gives a person a basis for lifelong learning and a capacity for deep inquiry and comprehension that will contribute to success in any endeavor.  This can certainly be acquired outside of the university, but it rarely is.

Many students will not have the passion to continue liberal arts studies.  They should not be encouraged or required to do so.  Having large hordes of indifferent students attending universities taking courses that hold meager interest for them is a waste on many levels.  And perhaps the transformation of many universities into ‘trade schools’ that focus on business majors is simply a way of backing into this realization. But the simultaneous disparagement of the liberal arts education and the associated decision by many parents to pressure their kids into ‘practical’ majors is indeed a sad trend.