Abstract

In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche uses Classical Greek tragedies to break down the human experience into two dichotomic cultures: the Apollinian and the Dionysian. The Apollinian culture represents humanity’s tendency toward order, pattern, and rationalism, while the Dionysian culture represents humanity’s simultaneous urge toward chaos and emotional intuition. Whereas Classical Greece allowed for both to coexist and augment one another through Greek Tragedies, Western thinking and culture allows for no such fruition; instead, Western society heavily emphasizes the Apollinian over the necessity or acknowledgement of the Dionysian. In The Death of Ivan Illyich, Leo Tolstoy takes this cultural practice a step further, giving readers a glimpse into a society that denies the Dionysian entirely. Through the demoralizing decline and eventual death of Ivan Illyich, Tolstoy suggests that rejecting the Dionysian not only obstructs society’s true understanding of human nature, but makes it wholly unprepared to handle humanity’s most essential truth: its mortality.

Highlights

  • In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche uses Classical Greek tragedies to break down the human experience into two dichotomic cultures: the Apollinian and the Dionysian

  • 50 Western thinking exalt humanity’s need and desire for or- prone to vice as any human being, leading Nietzsche to der and rationalism (i.e., Apollonian culture), only Classi- conclude, “ do the gods justify the life of man: they cal thinking respects the necessary chaos and emotional themselves live it.”[2]. With the gods of the day themselves instinct (i.e., Dionysian culture) that must be acknowl- representatives of humanity’s extremes, ordered Apollo edged to form a complete picture of the human experi- and chaotic Dionysus were able to live as fundamental opence

  • In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy posites without being in direct conflict

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Summary

Introduction

In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche uses Classical Greek tragedies to break down the human experience into two dichotomic cultures: the Apollinian and the Dionysian. They could exist if exemplifies the consequences of glorifying the Apollonian not in harmony, at least with mutual respect, allowing at the expense of the Dionysian by portraying the slow and reason and instinct, order and disorder to hold the same demoralizing death of his titular character Ivan Ilyich.

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