40
PARTISAN REVIEW
In his madness
he
signed
some
letters "Dionysus," and his final
identification with the god is only the final stage in a Dionysiac
cultivation of his own potential for insanity. Dionysus had
been
central to his thinking ever since
he
started working on the notes and
lectures that prepared the ground for his first book
The Birth of
Tragedy
(1872).
In an 1885 notebook
he
identified the Dionysian with "that acme
of joy at which a man can feel apotheosised, can feel that Nature is
justifying itself in him." But "the slaves of 'modern ideas'," the
"children of a fragmented, pluralistic, sick, weird period" had lost that
capacity for happiness without which the Greeks could not have
participated in Dionysian festivals: the Greek soul had flourished
without any need for conditions of morbid exaltation or madness. And
in a notebook
he
kept from March to
June
1888, the last year of his
sanity, there are
some
definitions of the Dionysian.
It
is
a drive towards unity, reaching beyond personality, the quotidian,
society, reality, across the chasm of transitoriness: an impassioned
and painful overflowing into darker, fuller, more buoyant states; an
ecstatic affirmation of the totality of life as what remains constant–
not less potent, not less ecstatic-throughout all fluCluation; the
great pantheistic sharing of joy and distress which blesses and
endorses even the ghastliest, the most questionable elements in life;
the eternal will for regeneration, fruitfulness, recurrence; the aware–
ness that creation and destruction are inseparable.
This is to identify the drive towards unity with a hankering for
disintegration. Instead of postulating a self in which libidinous desires
could unite harmoniously with higher aspirations,
he becomes
a latter–
day worshipper of a god who is cut to pieces. In the myth the god is
indestructible. After
he
has
been
dismembered, the parts are distributed
into winds, water, earth, stars, planets, animals. But it is dangerous to
emulate the god. This idea of distribution and dispersal was basic to
Nietzsche's mental habits. He tried not to think in terms of identities
but of forces.
The
stable identity of the ego disappears, and he was
finally unable to differentiate between himself and other people, living
or dead.
If
we
could discount the probability of organic disease,
we
could
enquire
whether his insanity was the outcome of rejecting identity and
logic.
If
the old distinctions
between
truth and falsehood are invalid, if
there is no reality except in appearance, no coherent self behind the
voice that speaks or the mind that thinks or the body that desires, how
can
we
keep any anchorage in lucidity?
If
we
believe that every belief is
