Rethinking Dionysus and Apollo: Redrawing Today’s Philosophical Chessboard

1 Introduction

Putting forward new metaphysics (or speculative depictions of reality in toto)^[1] appears to be the tacit consensus in the contemporary philosophical scene^[2] – even if any truly new metaphysics must, we are reminded, assume a paradoxical status. For, whatever its idiosyncrasy and lest it seem anachronistic, any new metaphysics is expected to be post-metaphysical, or to confine itself to exploring the fragmentary furniture of what, in the lack of any sure correlation between what things are and how we take them to be,^[3] must be assumed as a scrappy un-world.^[4]

Instead of venturing yet a new kind of metaphysics, however, I am willing to pursue here – within the limits of my possibilities – Kant’s critical project, which resonates variously, inter alios, in Heidegger,^[5] Wittgenstein,^[6] and Deleuze.^[7] Such project, it could be argued, consists in inquiring how is it that thought is actually possible against any maximalist pretension that would make such inquiry superfluous (as though reality would simply speak to us) and against the minimalist claim that thought is arbitrary and thus flawed (as if the aspects of reality that it cannot grasp were more fundamental than those translucent to it). Yet, it also consists in examining how is it that thought and reality mirror, albeit asymmetrically, one another.^[8] Now, I should like to pursue that project in strict post-metaphysical terms, taking in this case the term “metaphysics” to denote, with Heidegger, the reduction of being to actualitas and the subsequent “positioning” (Ge-stell) of everything that is as a “standing reserve” (Bestand) of things characterised by their “assured availability” (Sicherstellung) and thus susceptible of being appropriated, scientifically analysed, technologically manipulated, commercially exchanged, and collectively and/or individually consumed and replaced at will.^[9]

My purpose, moreover, is to do so in dialogue, on the one hand, with contemporary ethnographic theory and, more specifically, with Roy Wagner’s thesis on the interplay of “elicitation” (Barok: gala) and “containment” (Barok: kolume) among the Usen Barok of Papua New Guinea^[10] and the role of such categories in sociocultural life at large;^[11] but also in conversation, on the other hand, with the core premise of Schelling’s philosophy of mythology – that is, with the idea that conceptual figures are figures of pure thought^[12] – by positing Dionysus (roughly: event) and Apollo (form)^[13] as two possible conceptual personae matching such notions. Hence, in this essay, I propose to play with Dionysus and Apollo in a manner closer to Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation of the conceptual characters of “Coyote” and “Lynx” among the Salish-speaking peoples of America’s Northwest Coast,^[14] or to Tim Ingold’s recent take on “exposure” and “attunement” in human education,^[15] than to Nietzsche’s own “Dionysian philosophy.”^[16] I do so in the wake of Gilbert Durand’s untimely dream^[17] of a “new anthropological spirit” that would (at last) overcome the “bureaucracy”-or-“madness” dichotomy which has (since Nietzsche) left its imprint upon contemporary thought, as evinced by the latter’s endorsement of anarchism or negativity (read: underdetermination) against totalitarianism (overdetermination).^[18] And, in this sense, it may not be exaggerated at all to affirm that reintroducing Dionysus and Apollo qua conceptual personae, or rather as a single Janus-faced conceptual persona in today’s philosophical game, amounts to disrupt it under the effect of a “thought-event”^[19] that hints at the Otherwise.

It might be helpful, however, to begin by looking at the role played by Dionysus and Apollo in ancient-Greek culture, which Nietzsche reworked to build his own synthesis of both gods.

2 Dionysus

Nietzsche’s interpretation of Dionysus is indebted to Schopenhauer’s reinterpretation of Buddhism^[20] as much as to the portrayal of the god in Euripides’s Bacchae.^[21] The deceiving illusions of individuated life, grants Nietzsche, lead to sorrow, and sorrow can only be overcome by dissolving oneself into the eternal, impersonal life that breaths inside us and that pushes us in no matter what directions, all of which one must therefore affirm. Yet, at the same time, as an artiste,^[22] one cannot renounce to create self-affirming masquerades, and as long as one assumes them as what they are, everything is fine, for one must just not lose sight of the fact that something more powerful and incontrollable beats under these: an impersonal “will” (Wille) of which any individuated “will” is a partial expression, an absolute “power” (Macht) that my own “will to power” (Wille zur Macht) reflects, a force that our moral or Apollonian “representations” (Vorstellungen) try to tame and to whose affirmation Dionysian intoxication and ecstasy are but the door.^[23] Nietzsche inventively mixes here Schopenhauer’s flirt with Buddhism with the irrationalism of what Heinrich Rickert and other Neo-Kantians called nineteenth-century “biologism”^[24] and supplements both with what he takes to be art’s metaphysical potential.

Yet, Nietzsche’s interpretation of Dionysus is erroneous inasmuch as it is overenthusiastic, and it is overenthusiastic in that it portrays Dionysus as delivering a substitutive experience: one that replaces the ordinary, in fact illusory, experience of reality, for a truthful one. The problem with this understanding of Dionysus – which, allow me to stress it once more, Nietzsche first put forward in The Dionysian Vision of the World – is that it somehow misses the Greek construal of the god. For despite his claims to revive the “tragic philosophy of the Greeks,” Nietzsche inspired himself in Dionysus’s Roman re-instantiation, whose counter-cultural trimmings^[25] served him to formulate his criticism of what Philip Rieff has called “the banality of liberal culture.”^[26] True, Nietzsche later criticises his early “Dionysian vision of the world” and, more specifically, the way he had initially presented it in The Birth of Tragedy, which he declares to be a “badly written” book, “clumsy, embarrassing, with a rage for imagery and confused in its imagery” in addition to being too “emotional.”^[27] Plus he emphasises we simply do not have the response to the question: “What is [the] Dionysiac?”^[28] But he continues to make of Dionysus’s tragic acceptance of “suffering” a pessimist counterpart to an “optimism” he finally assumes – by associating it with Epicurus rather than with Plato’s Socrates alone^[29] – as being something more than a vain masquerade.^[30]

What was the Greek Dionysus like, then? It is neither in Euripides nor in the Dionysia or annual festivals dedicated to the god in Athens, Ionia, and elsewhere,^[31] but in the Eleusinian Mysteries (“one of the apices of Greek life”)^[32] that one must actually search for the original meaning of Dionysus in light of his Mycenaean precedents, on which B. C. Dietrich’s classic volume on the origins of Greek religion^[33] remains fully relevant more than forty years after its publication.^[34]

As it is well known, the mysteries at Eleusis turned around the myth of Demeter and Persephone as it is recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter:^[35] upon discovering that, while gathering flowers, her daughter, Persephone, has been seized by Hades and taken with him to the underworld, Demeter (i.e. the earth viewed through the lens of its fertility) causes a terrible draught seeking with it to coerce Zeus to allow the return of her daughter; Zeus agrees on the condition that she does not taste the food of the underworld; yet tricked by Hades, who gives her a bunch of pomegranate seeds, Persephone eats of what she should have abstained from and is therefore obliged to spend a third of each year (the winter months) in the underworld and permitted to reunite with her mother and to spend with her on earth the remaining part of the year.

A child, though, called Plutus (Πλοῦτος, “wealth”), is born from Persephone after her abduction^[36] by Hades (who was also called Pluton [Πλούτων, “wealth-giver”]):

In two representations of the Eleusinian goddesses intended for the general public, two magnificent vase paintings in late Attic style, we see the child; once as a little boy standing with a cornucopia before the enthroned Demeter, and once in the cornucopia being handed to Demeter by a goddess rising out of the earth – as though he had been born down there in the realm to which Kore had been carried away.^[37]

In all probability, writes Dietrich, this child’s birth “formed the nucleus of the Mysteries from their inception.”^[38]

Like Persephone, then, the initiates at Eleusis would symbolically descend to the underworld, i.e. to the “invisible” (ἀιδές) domain of Hades (Ἅιδης),^[39] and subsequently ascend from it, but would do so born anew like a new-born child – or like Dionysus, one of whose many names was precisely Διμήτωρ (notice the phonetic affinity with Δημήτηρ), i.e. “twice-born” – after having reached a “vision” (ἐποπτεία in Plato’s and Aristotle’s words)^[40] that opened for them^[41] the “joyful knowledge of life’s beginning and end,” as Pindar says.^[42] What kind of knowledge? The knowledge that “life” qua ζωή is immortal, that new living forms shine forth from the earth when others die and relapse into it and vice versa, and that the impersonal life that flows through our veins will flow through them like the sap runs through the leaves of the vine. In this manner, Eleusis’s newcomers were initiated into the knowledge of the domain of that which lacks any visible “aspect” and recognisable “form,” i.e. into the ἀ-ιδές realm of Hades, wherein, insofar as they do not shine forth into the unconcealed as X, Y, or Z, but remain hidden and mixed in a state of mere possibility (as it corresponds to all things inside the earth’s womb), things lack any distinction or determination and, thereby too, any εἶδος.^[43] Hence, Heraclitus’s otherwise surprising statement that “Hades and Dionysus are one and the same.”^[44]

There are good reasons to suspect that Plutus was also Dionysus,^[45] who, furthermore, must be viewed as both the earth’s offspring and the earth’s consort.

Like in many other places of the ancient Near East, the sacred union of a Mother Goddess ( [po-ti-ni-ja] in the Linear-B tablets from Pylos)^[46] with a male figure whose birth, life, and death represented the annual birth, growth, and death of nature was a mythical feature not unknown in ancient-Greek culture, where it served the purpose of ensuring both “human fertility and the fruitfulness of the fields.”^[47] Its presence can be already found in the archaeological record of Minoan and Mycenaean Greece in the form of male figurines playing either a harp (Apollo’s instrument) or a flute (Dionysus’s).^[48] Dionysus’s main festival in Athens, the Anthesteria, is reminiscent of such union, for in it the god’s sacred marriage with the wife of the senior magistrate of the city^[49] was enacted^[50] in what looks like a reversal of the elsewhere habitual formula for such union, which normally followed the pattern: goddess + young monarch.

Therefore, Dionysus cannot exactly be seen as an Olympian god, as he is intimately linked to the earth, while the Olympians represented a stage in the earth’s history that was no longer that of Gaia, in whose womb everything remained mixed and potential. Zeus’s victory over Gaia and Uranus’s children the Titans – or, put differently, his victory over the all-too-basic qualities^[51] of a not-yet-fully-consistent and not-yet-fully-conscious, chthonic proto-world – paved the way for a new phase in the process that goes from Chaos to Cosmos,^[52] a phase that, while being part of Gaia’s own reality and history,^[53] inaugurated something outside Gaia’s womb. Conversely, Dionysus leads back to the earth, wherein everything belongs in the last instance, i.e. wherein all life begins and ends. Indeed, as Walter Otto famously argued, Dionysus was not part of the Olympian cohort that intervenes in the human affairs. This can be easily deduced from his absence from the core of the Homeric epic. But it is also perceptible, among other things, in the way in which he was pictorially represented, e.g. in the Attic vases, in one of which (the so-called François Vase) he is portrayed frontally, with wide-open eyes, looking at the viewer, unlike the other gods. The encounter with Dionysos is different from the encounter with these in that while these may or may not approach you, he, alone, is ineludible,^[54] which is why he is also depicted wearing a mask,^[55] not so much to underline his distance as to highlight his irresistible otherness and his disquieting proximity.^[56]

Yet, the picture drawn so far remains incomplete. Dionysus was not only in Greece the god that led one back to the earth’s womb:^[57] he also symbolised life’s emerging power. Thus, the branches and foliage of a vine^[58] cover his mask, climbing to it from his feet.^[59] This not only explains the widespread worship of Dionysus as a “tree,”^[60] but also the frenzy that marked the union with the god in the festivals dedicated to him, a frenzy that, allowing Dionysus’s devotees to come out of themselves, epitomised their union with all the living. Károly Kerényi’s disclaimer apropos the association of the vine with Dionysus remains in this respect perfectly valid: “any account of the Dionysian religion must put the main accent not on intoxication but on the … powerful, vegetative element which ultimately engulfed even the ancient theaters, as at Cumae.”^[61] It is in Rome – as it may be expected from a society in which law was more appreciated than knowledge and the commanding moral will to enforce and live up to the law was preferred to the intellectual passion to decipher life’s enigmas – that Dionysus acquired – as the necessary counter-figure to such preference – his famous intoxicating traits.^[62] True, Dionysus erased all boundaries between mortals, animals, and gods, and thereby too any social privileges and gender divisions. He was, one might say, the trickster who “acts as if privileges, exceptions, or abnormalities could become the rule,”^[63] which is why he is associated with the hare, whose ambiguity is a well-known mythological topos elsewhere.^[64] But none of this aims at subverting the social–political order of ancient-Greek life, an order that, in consequence, cannot be viewed as undesirable, let alone as illusory. Dionysus is the reminder that nothing can pretend to stand above the earth whenever a conflict between the earth’s law, so to speak, and that of the polis arises. Thus, for example, Antigone’s defence, against Creon, of her brother’s right to be buried, since, in their quality as mortals, in the moment of their death, i.e. when they go back to dissolve into the earth, all mortals must be treated respectfully by those who shared their lives with them, regardless of whether they were viewed as political enemies of the city in their lifetime. In this manner, earthbound mercy towards the other, whoever the other may be, is requested in correspondence with the mercy that the earth shows to everyone through Dionysus.^[65] Plus this explains, too, Dionysus’s inspiring-presence in the tragedies performed during his festivals: whereas Apollo presides over the scene where the action takes place, and Athena presides over the audience that attends the play, Dionysus exerts his influence upon the choir, which gives voice to a solemn but faceless type of wisdom that, more often than not, seems to emanate from the bowels of the earth.

The fact that Dionysus fostered the integration ^[66] of life’s indestructible and all-inclusive perspective into the everyday lives of the ancient Greeks – so as to remind them, on the one hand, that something impersonal in them would survive them independently of whether they themselves had achieved the excellence needed to be remembered and become immortal; and, on the other hand, that all the living are worthy of similar respect – proves Nietzsche’s mistake about the identity of the god, who was decidedly anything but a rebellious one. Against the frequent Nietzschean-oriented misinterpretation of Dionysus that makes of him the god of “dissonant dynamics, … noise …, intoxication, self-abandon, oblivion, and revelry,”^[67] Cornelia Isler-Kerényi adroitly recovers, through a careful examination of the extant iconography, the originally integrative aspect of the Greek Dionysus, and emphasises the god’s role in “ritualising transitions that could potentially be traumatic for the individual and risky for the community,”^[68] like individual rites of passage (birth, maturity, marriage, etc.): “It is at these moments,” she writes, “that Dionysos, the god of metamorphosis, must have been active, as guarantor both of a happy transition from one phase to another and of the temporary but unavoidable sojourn in the intermediate phase.”^[69] This gentle dimension of Dionysus affects moreover, she goes on to say, the production and the consumption of the substance with which the god is most habitually associated, as well as the material in which it was put. Coming from a plant (the vine) that grows only in the rural area, i.e. neither in the city nor in the forest, but in between both, and that demands considerable care in order to grow properly and to bear fruit,

wine itself reveals other meanings beyond being an intoxicating drink which favours ritual reversion to the wild state.^[70] It is also a symbol and at the same time a means of civilised interaction in that it makes one happy only if consumed in the correct manner and in the right amount. And finally, it is a way of being moved transitorily to a level above daily life: to see and also reveal reality beyond appearances. The pottery of the symposium also belongs to this dignity of wine: a dignity that explains its often very high techne, out of proportion to the material value of clay and so successful in the market. Ultimately wine is a metaphor of the gradual and troubled make-up of the real world: like the whole cosmos, and like the citizen who has attained his akmè, it is the result of a long process. To produce grapes the vine must be cultivated and then cut, the grapes themselves must be trodden and closed into vats so that they can be transformed into wine: these preparations of the drink must have made it suitable for its ritual role in individual metamorphoses.^[71]

In one thing, however, Nietzsche was right: Dionysus symbolised in Greece, as I have remarked, life’s emerging force. Interestingly, Schelling – who Nietzsche never quotes but whose Berlin lessons on the philosophy of mythology, in which Dionysus figures prominently, Nietzsche’s admired mentor, colleague, and friend Jacob Burckhardt had attended in the 1840s^[72] – had drawn, some thirty years before Nietzsche, important philosophical implications from it. First, Schelling speaks of a fundamental ontological “process”^[73] through which a “primordial being” acquires its different expressions and modalities and defines such process as the “primordial event”^[74] accounted for in Greek mythology. Secondly, he takes the figures of Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus to represent that process’s three successive moments, which he identifies with (1) the pure possibility of being, which lacks determination (= Hades); (2) its overflowing self-determination or self-affirmation, which lacks form and intelligence (= Poseidon); and (3) its fully achieved and fully conscious determination, which contains the two previous moments and brings all things’ morphogenesis to fulfillment (= Zeus).^[75] Thirdly, Schelling labels such moments the three “pure causes” of (all) being(s).^[76] Lastly, he identifies Dionysus with moment no. 2 (hence with Poseidon)^[77] but also, more broadly, with the whole process,^[78] which, accordingly, he calls “the triple Dionysus”^[79] and “Dionysus in an absolute sense.”^[80] Therefore – one may deduce after Schelling – when Heraclitus talks about that which “never submerges” (τὸ μὴ δῦνόν)^[81] and compares it to an “ever living fire” (πῦρ ἀείζωον) present in all things,^[82] and, similarly,^[83] when Parmenides talks about that which is “continuous” (συνεχές), “steadfast” (ἀτρεμές),“whole” (οὖλον), and “complete” (τέλειον),^[84] they both, despite their different approaches to the principle of being, elaborate on an idea of which Dionysus can said to be the conceptual persona.

Not only is Dionysus intimately linked to the birth of philosophy, though: his twin- or “half-brother”^[85] Apollo is as well.

3 Apollo

Dionysus and Apollo shared the Sanctuary of Delphi, which is located on a ridge of the Parnassus mountains overlooking the Valley of Phocis and the surrounding hills, near the town of Crissa north of the Gulf of Corinth in today’s region of Sterea or Central Greece. Dionysus was worshiped there in the winter, whereas Apollo returned to Delphi every spring. Whatever the apparently chthonic origins of the shrine, which might have been first dedicated to Gaia,^[86] Apollo’s presence in Delphi is attested in the eighth century BCE.^[87] As for Dionysus, his connection to Delphi may be even older.^[88] Be that as it may, a Delphic vase of c. 400 BCE depicts the two gods “holding out their hands to one another,”^[89] and in a fourth-century Delphic relief “the Proxenos of the Dionysian cortege raises a rhyton, a Dionysian drinking vessel, and pours its content into a cinnamon-colored phial, a familiar accoutrement of the cult of Apollo.”^[90] Plus there is also Plutarch’s testimony that the two gods were actually one: a single god with two names, with Dionysus’s symbolising nature’s becoming and Apollo’s symbolising being.^[91]

There is a crucial difference between them, though. While Dionysus retains his wisdom by keeping it enclosed within himself, so that whoever attempts to obtain it must fuse with him by means of an ecstatic experience, Apollo, instead, delivers his in such a way that it can be rendered into the oracular words of his priests and priestesses (at Delphi, Didyma, and elsewhere) and seers like Teiresias and Calchas.^[92] Can one say, then, that Apollo allows an easier access to that which Dionysus demands at a higher price? Not really. For Dionysus shares his wisdom without any restrictions with those who partake in it by means of their ecstatic experience. Instead, Apollo only speaks through signs or “signifies,” in the sense that he merely “indicates” (σημαίνειν), as Heraclitus says.^[93] Apollo, in short, is the archer-god whose wisdom remains at a distance.

It could be argued, therefore, that Apollo’s epigeal distance contrasts with Dionysus’s hypogeal immanence. Furthermore, it is this distance that philosophy initially revolved around. Thus, Plutarch, who was himself a philosopher and a priest of Apollo, portrays the latter as a god lover of “reasoning” (διαλεκτική) and of truth qua “disclosure” (ἀλήθεια) and thereby too as the god of philosophy.^[94] First, because the words of his priestesses, priests, and seers demand to be interpreted, not simply believed in,^[95] which is both Apollo’s challenge and the game that philosophy consists in.^[96] Secondly, because the words thus proffered by the god’s speakers echo that which philosophy aimed at reaching from the very start. To find it out what that something is it is important to recall once more that Apollo’s priestesses, priests, and seers are those who speak for the god.^[97] Apollo himself does not: Apollo sees. But what does he see, what can be said to be Apollo’s vision, which is later turned into words and without which no oracle would be possible in the first place? Homer provides us with a clue to this when he introduces Calchas as someone who could “see” (ὃς ᾔδη) “what is, what will be, and what had been” (τά τ᾽ ἐόντα τά τ᾽ ἐσσόμενα πρό τ᾽ ἐόντα).^[98] Similarly, the oneness of that which “was,” which “is,” and which “will be” is what philosophy originally aimed at elucidating. Accordingly, Parmenides affirms of “what is” (ὡς ἔστιν),^[99] whose “disclosure” philosophy pursues,^[100] that “it is not born” (ἀγένητον) and “imperishable” (ἀνώλεθρον);^[101] hence, he adds, it can neither be said that “it has been” (οὐδέ ποτ᾽ἦν) or that “it will be” (οὐδ᾽ἔσται)^[102] as it is “one” (ἕν) “now” (νῦν ἔστιν)^[103] “altogether” (ὁμοῦ πᾶν).^[104] On his part, Heraclitus affirms of “the never-submerging before which one cannot hide” (τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι),^[105] that “it was, it is, and will be an ever-living fire” (πῦρ ἀείζωον)” whose “gleaming” (κόσμος) all things display.^[106]

In a nutshell, Apollo’s eye is also the eye of philosophy: an eye that procures the thought-vision (the “thinking,” νοεῖν) of that which “is” (i.e. of “being,” εἶναι), as Parmenides has it,^[107] and that “gathers” it as its λόγος (logos), in Heraclitus’s words.^[108] Unlike Zeus (whose light is what makes things spring up in the first place), Artemis (who protects that light from being corrupted by human ambition), and Athena (whose light supplies the clear vision of how things stand in the course of an action), Apollo is the light that measures all things (which explains his fundamental role in the tragedy, where he presides over the scene while Dionysus does over the chorus) and he whose lyre the poets hold to sing the κλέος (“glory”) of all things.^[109] For whereas all things, whose being Apollo thus illuminates, shine forth for a while and then recede into concealment,^[110] those who compete for κλέος and struggle to remain present in the domain of the unconcealed often tend to do so by not letting others rise up to their own ambitioned position, as Agamemnon’s behaviour in the opening song of the Iliad makes patent. Yet, from Homer to Euripides and from Anaximander to Plato, ancient-Greek culture provided the corrective, if not the remedy, to it in the form of a reminder that Heraclitus enunciates as follows: “excess (ὕβρις) needs to be put out more than a house on fire.”^[111] Hence, the two Delphic imperatives in which all Greek citizens were educated: Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (“Know yourself”) and Mηδὲν ἄγαν (“Nothing in excess”), as well as Apollo’s attitude on the west pediment of Zeus’s temple at Olympia, where he stands at the centre of a scene likely depicting the mythological battle between the Centaurs and the Lapiths:^[112] Apollo rises soberly over the contenders and extends his right arm horizontally, as if urging them to put an end to their violent fight. The god’s gesture is authoritative, yet serene at the same time, as also is the expression of his face.^[113] In sum, Apollo rises above all mortals, awakens their αἰδώς, and thereby induces them to have mutual esteem, so that, in spite of their legitimate struggle to achieve everlasting fame, they may put down any ἀδικία among them. Should they, nonetheless, try to overstep their mortal limits, Apollo’s arrows bring if needed an end to their ὕβρις, as it happens with Diomedes and Patroclus in the Iliad.

Accordingly, if Dionysus leads back to the earth, which is both the source and the destiny of all the living, if he shows that they all partake in a single indestructible life and cares for them by reminding them of their pre-individual unity and earthbound-ness, Apollo gathers them in their shining forth from the earth into unhidden-ness, inspires them to acknowledge their limits, and cares for them by impeding their mutual injustice, so that each can exercise its right to be. For this reason too Apollo stands as a political god; in fact, Apollo’s name derives very possibly from that of the Dorian assembly, the ἀπέλλα (“boundless” in the sense of “lacking” [ἀ-] any delimiting “stones” [-πέλλα] around it),^[115] in allusion to the empty space at the heart of the Spartan polis where the assembly gathered – a symbol of political freedom and justice against any attempt to submit the political to particular interests. Now, all this means that Dionysos and Apollo function as twin gods, as per Lévi-Strauss characterisation of the mythological twins in Amerindian thought:

It is clear that Lynx and Coyote in North America, and Maire and Opossum in South America, fill complementary but opposite functions. The first separates the positive and negative aspects of reality and puts them in separate categories. The other acts in the opposite direction: it joins the bad and the good. The demiurge has changed animate and inanimate creatures from what they were in mythical times into what they will be thenceforth. The trickster keeps imitating the creatures as they were in mythical times and as they cannot remain afterward. He acts as if privileges, exceptions, or abnormalities could become the rule, while the demiurge’s job is to put an end to singularities and to establish rules that will be universally applicable to all members of each species and category.^[116]

But it also means, pace Lévi-Strauss, that one need not just look into the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus as it is told by Plato in the Protagoras to find in the Old World a motif that, for some reason, found in the New World (and elsewhere!)^[117] a more favourable ground on which to grow.^[118]

Therefore, identifying Apollo, as Nietzsche does, with the god of appearances (be they artistically creative or deceiving, necessary or spurious) is highly questionable. Whereas Dionysus’s task is to enforce life’s oneness and continuity regardless of the spatial and temporal discreteness of all living forms, Apollo’s is to prevent these from clinging to their being in a manner that they could deprive others from their equal right to shine forth. In other words, ζωή and βίοι stand in reciprocal presupposition, and so Dionysus and Apollo protect life’s rhythm in two different, albeit complementary, ways.

4 Today’s philosophical chessboard and the otherwise

I have written elsewhere on what I have labelled the Ulysses syndrome of post-Nietzschean thought.^[119] “Man of many tricks” (ἀνήρ πολύτροπος),^[120] Ulysses/Odysseus^[121] is unable “to sing and accompany himself with [Apollo’s] lyre”:^[122] when he hears the mermaids singing the κλέος of the heroes, he asks his men to tie him up to the mast of his boat, so as not to fall under the spell; and when he hears of his own κλέος, he cries, “because in his world forms are merely aspects of the event, fame an illusion, and pain the only true reality … [which] cannot be sung but narrated.”^[123] One recognises here some traits distinctive of contemporary thought, such as the preference for the event over being^[124] and for narrative over poetry (save when poetry is turned existentially introspective, like in Baudelaire)^[125] and knowledge (other than negative),^[126] as also the refusal to acknowledge the κλέος of things (as still sung by Hölderlin)^[127] under the pretext that the experience of anything is painful at best and, at worst, meaningless.^[128] Now, even if Odysseus is not equivalent to Dionysus, the fact is that Nietzsche’s plea for “‘ecstasy’ … under the aegis of Dionysus as ho lysios – the ‘liberator’ – who undoes boundaries,”^[129] not only involves “suffering”^[130] but runs parallel to the invitation to explore anew the “seas”^[131] (re-)opened by the “death of [a] God”^[132] identified, in turn, with the A and the Ω of everything.^[133] And from this neo-Odyssean image to that of Joyce’s Ulysses, there is, as Sam Slote suggests, a more-or-less-straightforward line;^[134] although it is true that Odysseus’s original landscape, like that of Nietzsche before his final crisis (i.e. prior to his falling into Dionysus’s “maelstrom”),^[135] was that of an untraced sea explored by someone capable of orientating himself on it, which he manages to do by experimentally re-conducing to their being the many appearances he comes across – hence a landscape different from that of Joyce’s Ulysses, whose characters are unable to orientate themselves in the overdetermined space of a modern city.^[136] I thus take a disoriented Ulysses willingly tied to the mast of his boat to be the epitome of our late modern condition, to which two consecutive world wars, the globalisation of social misery, and an unprecedented ecological crisis have contributed their own grains of sand. As a result, philosophy, or what is left of it, has ended up by lashing itself to the mast of absolute contingency, or to the “omnipotence of chaos.”^[137]

Heidegger has, to be sure, played a crucial role in this. For he intimates that early-Greek φύσις paved the way for the summoning of everything into the “assured availability” (Sicherstellung) characteristic of the modern “enframing” (Ge-stell)^[138] or “positioning” (θέσις) of reality,^[139] in a manner similar to how Deleuze contends that identity and representation conscript being’s flow.^[140] Hence, Heidegger’s demand to go “above … φύσις … [so as to] ground the domain of the open as such,”^[141] which he thinks in “abyssal” terms.^[142] True, Heidegger proves ambiguous concerning this point. For if, on the one hand, he writes: “‘Being’ has since the early days of the Greek world up to the latest days of our century meant being present,”^[143] on the other hand, he acknowledges that if the Ge-stell comes from the “letting-lie-before” (Vorliegenlassen) experienced by the ancient Greeks as a result from their “letting-come-forth” (Her-vor-ankommen-lassens) of everything into presence, “[w]hat stands through θέσις essences otherwise than what is brought forth here by φύσις.”^[144] Yet, overall, Heidegger’s surmise on the continuity between φύσις and θέσις has seemingly won the day and influenced the view that the undetermined (“beyng”) must be privileged over the determined (“being”),^[145] which admittedly reverses Aristotle’s axiom that “being is preferable to non being.”^[146]

Deleuze has had his share in it too. For, by claiming that the singularity of what is precludes its representation inasmuch as everything is inherently multiple, and hence ever-differing in respect to what can no longer be properly called itself,^[147] he has influentially reversed Plato’s premise that there are no things without their corresponding εἴδη^[148] (whence Deleuze’s commitment to nonsense, as well).^[149] In short, Deleuze is responsible for having promoted “difference” qua something rebellious and unassimilable to the doxological spotlight – in the two senses of the term δόξα – of today’s philosophical conversation, which is but another way of privileging underdetermination (here in terms of unpredictability) over determination; and he is responsible for it despite having made of a single δύναμις the substance of being’s transitory configurations,^[150] which supplies ontology a material anchor that is lacking in Heidegger.

But perhaps there has been no other stronger dismissal of being’s positiveness than that of Derrida, who – reversing Heidegger like Marx did with Hegel – makes of a being’s “trace”^[151] that which must be thought against the intolerable menace of its presence.^[152] “Only pure absence – not the absence of this or that, but the absence of everything in which all presence is announced – can inspire, in other words, can work, and then make one work” writes Derrida.^[153] Language understood not so much as ontologically disclosive – which is how philosophy originally conceived it^[154] – but as something irretrievably elusive of its referent provides Derrida the model.^[155] Yet, it is Levinas, with his view of textuality as that which bears on it the voice of an absent Other, and of that Other as an instance that cannot be appropriated and that incites my responsibility towards it, on whom Derrida relies in the last instance.^[156] In other words, Levinas’s substitution of ontology by ethics^[157] is equally at play in Derrida – and, via Levinas, Rosenzweig’s prejudice that one and the same trend of thought leads from the Presocratics to Hegel, from Jonia to Jena.^[158] Thus, Derrida’s perceived need to move beyond ontology altogether, which echoes Levinas’s embrace of an “infinite” contraposed to any “totality”; for, on both Levinas’s and Derrida’s interpretation, being⧹determination irredeemably implies “closure”^[159] and “violence.”^[160]

And here we are – lashed in one way or another to the mast of indeterminacy and negativity. In one way or another, therefore, today’s philosophical game revolves around what Ihab Hassan famously hallowed as a new cultural paradigm (“post-modernist,” “post-humanist,” etc.)^[161] characterised by the restatement of freedom and uncertainty. Negativity – or, what amounts to the same, subtraction – is thus its main ingredient. Therefore, if the history of Western metaphysics can be depicted as a series of more-or-less totalitarian deductions from a first principle (be it God, Man, the State, Class Struggle, etc.), its postmodern limes can be said to abound in anarchic subtractions that make patent the strict negative of any alleged principle (God’s death, the non-human, the unresolved possibilities of aesthetic playfulness in the absence of any compelling political imperative, etc.). For deductive or demonstrative logics have failed to procure what they aimed at providing, namely, a stable ground on which to build a world that has proven, more often than not, one or another kind of prison; whereas the counter-demonstrative illuminative logics offered by spiritualities of various kinds generally prove (perhaps with the exception of Buddhism)^[162] adamant to dissolve life into the intractable (or else display a predisposition to be engulfed in one or another kind of deductive apparatus of their own). The intractable: that, in the end, is what it is all about; the intractable taken to its uttermost extreme, so that even the surface on which the trace of our shipwreck might be located vanishes at the beating of a siren’s tail.^[163]

Hence, if philosophy was, it could be argued, born and shaped by the Mediterranean light, it is its originally cum distinctive co-implication as formulated by Parmenides (i.e. the mutual mirroring of being and thought) that is being questioned today on behalf of something like a global-nordic mist. And just like Plato fancied in the Sophist a Stranger who taught that being is ineluctably affected by Sameness and Otherness, contemporary philosophy is only able to fancy reality, as it were, as a different kind of stranger: a Stranger barely perceptible because of being surrounded by fog, submerged in the mist, about whose being, consequently, nothing can be surmised, let alone known, and before whom one can only ask oneself endlessly, for otherwise the game would be over: “how do I (or what can no longer be called “I,” anyway) relate to it (if it is an “it” after all)?” And as essential and courageous as initiatives to find out minimal provisional answers to such question may be in a time in which many seem only willing to listen to the question itself in their self-absorbed minds just for the pleasure of hearing it, one wonders whether this is the only game philosophy is entitled to play today.

Yet, for another game to be possible, Dionysus’s anarchic tyranny (for he is the god of the yet-undetermined possible), and with it Nietzsche’s legacy, may have to be put into question once and for all. Not, though, on behalf of Apollo’s own tyranny (the tyranny of crystallised form). Actually, Apollo is not truly himself without Dionysus, nor is Dionysus truly himself without Apollo. What would happen, then, if we reimagine the philosophical game on the chiastic board of dual thinking, on which Apollo cuts Dionysus’s continuum, which Dionysus restores despite Apollo’s cuts? For were it not for Apollo, nothing definite would begin; and were it not for Dionysus, things would not be in position to begin otherwise. Chaos/Cosmos, Earth/World, Limitlessness/Limitation, Possibility/Compossibility, Emergence/Shape, Becoming/Being, Transformation/Stability, Allowance/Care are among Dionysus’s and Apollo’s many names – or, if you wish, among the many markers of their twin-ness. Their list goes back to the Pythagoreans,^[164] whose mistake was to moralise it. But it can be found too in Hassan’s The Dismemberment of Orpheus,^[165] where the myth of Orpheus is symptomatically recalled to warn the reader about the fatal consequences of forgetting Dionysus: Orpheus did in his willingness to serve Apollo alone and was, as a result, dismembered by Thracian Maenads. Hassan, however, overlooks that Dionysus was also torn to pieces by the Titans,^[166] that nothing durable comes out of Dionysus even if he is and sustains everything – nothing durable and nothing habitable.^[167]

Yet, the twin-ness of the two gods should be clear by now to all of us, since Marcel Detienne inaugurated the twenty-first century by re-stressing it (contra Nietzsche).^[168] It is, however, Roy Wagner, who has, I think, done more to re-stress their reciprocal presupposition by affirming, first, in that if “power over something” is not only the ability to master it, but also the ability to “negate” or “destroy” it or replace it by something else; by contending, secondly, that “social power … cannot [then] be merely a function of the social order itself,” that is to say, “[i]t cannot, despite Durkheim’s assertions to the contrary,^[169] amount to society’s representation of itself,” or to society’s mirror;^[170] and by concluding, therefore, that it cannot be exclusively “represented as ‘order’ or establishment,” for “[i]t may … be [either] elicited or contained,”^[171] and when it is elicited, it overflows any possible container. In other words, its elicitation must be acknowledged to be broader than its containment – which means, too, that Dionysus is broader than Apollo. Still, what sense would it make to be in position to elicit such force without simultaneously being in position to contain it? Wagner again:

Imagine a tree whose top foliage cuts the shape of a human face against the sky,” say the Tolai people of East New Britain, in Papua New Guinea, “and fix the shape of that face in your mind, so that it appears as a real face, and not just a profile. When you have finished, go back to the tree, and visualize it as a free-standing object without reference to the face. When you have both images firmly fixed in your mind, just hold them in suspension and keep shifting your attention from one to the other: tree/face, face/tree, tree/face, and so on.

That is what we call a tabapot. Man is a tabapot. For you see the human being is encased within the boundaries of their own body, but they want what is outside of their own body. But when they get what is outside of their own body, they want to be encased back in the body again.^[172]

Not only does Dionysus and Apollo’s twin-ness supply the meta-model model of social life (and cultural) life (as per its dialectics of convention and innovation)^[173] but also that of human behaviour in its likewise chiastic rhythm. And the same mutatis mutandis may be applied to the dissymmetric relation existing between what Merleau-Ponty called the world’s “flesh”^[174] and its symbolic representation, i.e. between reality and thought.^[175] For neither is reality transparent to us nor are those of its facets that we cannot grasp more relevant and significant than those we can read into; in fact, translucent-ness, rather than transparency or opaqueness,^[176] results from the always-already infinitesimal combination of knowledge and ignorance, presence and absence, phenomenon and noumenon which frames our relation to the world.

Now, on a philosophical chessboard on which, apparently, only one game is recurrently being played – that of their mutual contraposition – can Dionysus and Apollo’s dual affirmation be viewed as anything but an invitation to redraw that board so as to allow on it the game of the Otherwise?^[177]