Apollo & Dionysus I: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

Nietzsche was not the first to refer to what is known as the Apollonian and the Dionysian (I believe that distinction belongs to the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann) — but Nietzsche was responsible for popularising the terms in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. According to Nietzsche, ‘the two art deities of the Greeks’, Apollo and Dionysus, represent antagonistic energies — the Apollonian and the Dionysian — the reconciliation of which ‘is the most important moment in the history of the Greek cult’: the birth of the artform known as ‘Attic tragedy’:

the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollinian and Dionysian duality — just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations […] These two different tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance; and they continually incite each other to new and more powerful births, which perpetuate an antagonism, only superficially reconciled by the common term “art;” till eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic “will,” they appear coupled with each other, and through this coupling ultimately generate an equally Dionysian and Apollinian form of art — Attic tragedy