Apollonian and Dionysian

Apollo, son of Leto, is the god of the sun, art, music, poetry, plague and disease, of rational thinking and order, and appeals to logic, prudence and purity and stands for reason.

The Greek spectators, by looking into the abyss of human suffering depicted by characters on stage, passionately and joyously affirmed life, finding it worth living.

To him in the pre-Homeric world, Dionysian civilizations were marked by barbarism, cruelty, and ecstatic sexual excess, unrestrained by rational or moral principles.

In doing so, they transformed Dionysus from a figure of visceral power into a god of suffering and redemption and, in parallel, converted man from a being of flesh and instincts into a soul burdened with guilt and the need for purification.

[4] Nietzsche criticizes this Orphic reinterpretation as an early decline in Greek spiritual health, arguing that it marked the beginning of an anti-life tendency that would later manifest in Platonism and Christianity.

[5] He further argues that Socrates and Euripides continued the Orphic trajectory, replacing instinct, myth, and artistic frenzy with rationalism, dialectic, and moral didacticism.

Plato continued along this path in his dialogues, and the modern world eventually inherited reason at the expense of artistic impulses found in the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy.

[10] Nietzsche's idea has been interpreted as an expression of fragmented consciousness or existential instability by a variety of modern and post-modern writers, especially Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.

Extending the use of the Apollonian and Dionysian onto an argument on interaction between the mind and physical environment, Abraham Akkerman has pointed to masculine and feminine features of city form.

In contrast, the Apollonian is associated with males, clarity, celibacy and/or homosexuality, rationality/reason, and solidity, along with the goal of oriented progress: "Everything great in western civilization comes from struggle against our origins".

[22] Moreover, Paglia attributes all the progress of human civilization to masculinity revolting against the Chthonic forces of nature, and turning instead to the Apollonian trait of ordered creation.