In October 1865, a twenty-one-year-old Nietzsche admitted that he didn’t know “which demon” forced him hastily to buy Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation at a secondhand bookshop in Leipzig, but he was glad of the imp, because as he read the volume after throwing himself into “the corner of the sofa,” he “saw a mirror which caught sight of the world, of life, and of my own mind in terrifying grandeur.” So began Nietzsche’s lifelong struggle with the older philosopher, whom he initially worshipped, later reconsidered, and finally renounced. When he was still in his adoration stage, he subtly extended Schopenhauer’s thought to Greek tragedy.
In The Birth of Tragedy, from 1872, Nietzsche asserted that the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles were art in its highest form because they achieved balance between the Dionysian—analogous to Schopenhauer’s Will, nature in its horrific yet exhilarating indifference to human suffering—and the Apollonian, the forms, beautiful but limiting, that humans create to comfort themselves, close to Schopenhauer’s realm of Representation. Whereas most artworks veer too far to one side or the other—toward unsettling chaos or stilted order—ancient Greek tragedy expresses Dionysian energy through the music of the chorus and Apollonian restraint via the dialogue’s poetry. The content of the plays—how we find meaning in life’s inevitable suffering—reinforces the form.
One year later Nietzsche, in an essay titled On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense, suggests that human knowledge is Apollonian—illusion—while reality is Dionysian, beyond word and image. What most consider truth, then, is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
The goal of the philosopher is not to try to break through Apollo to Dionysius. This is impossible. What he should do is aspire to Sophocles: become an artist. He should be aware that all knowledge is art already and that most of it, because dogmatically fixed on one metaphor to the exclusion of all others and interested only in perpetuating its principles, is bad art: limited, predictable, static. The thinker should use this consciousness as muse: to inspire him to create new knowledge, more capacious, spontaneous, dynamic.