subject: The Apollonian and Dionysian Struggle Within the Human Personality Part Four [print this page] The Apollonian and Dionysian Struggle Within the Human Personality Part Four
The Apollonian and Dionysian Struggle Within the Human Personality
PART FOUR
Norman W Wilson, PhD
In Part Three, I presented the argumentation between the Nietzsche and Jungian points of view regarding the base creative instincts within the human personality. Both have value. Whichever viewpoint you ultimately buy into; remember, to create something, something else experiences destruction.
If you are a painter with a blank canvas and you apply a wash, you have destroyed that blank canvas. If you build a house, you excavate the earth, you have destroyed what once was. The same is true in the biology of the human realm. A man has sex with a woman and impregnates her; he has destroyed what was. The creation of a new life results. With all of this said, I want to discuss a possible solution to the conflict between control and the lack of control, aesthetics.
An aesthetic approach immediately converts the problem of uncontrolled raw emotional creation into a picture which a viewer can contemplate at his easemerely experiencing its passions at a safe distancewith no danger of becoming involved. Consequently, the aesthetic attitude guards against any real participation, preventing one from any personal implication. This issue of involvement or action is one of the major problems facing the Romantics of the late 1700's and the early 1800's.
Carl Jung concedes Nietzsche has an inkling of the real solution to artistic control especially when the antagonism between the Apollonian and Dionysian creative forces in man are not bridgeable by art, but by what he calls a 'metaphysical miracle'. That miracle is the Hellenic will. Nietzsche most likely means the metaphysical will as espoused by the Ancient Greeks.
Jung, however, suggests we should replace the word metaphysical with the word unconscious thus, the desired key to the problem of the Apollonian and Dionysian conflict would be an unconscious miracle. He is critical of the choice of miracle claiming it to be irrational. In this case, it is "an act of an unconscious and irrational happening, shaping itself without the assistance of reason and conscious purpose."
The real key to understanding here is the word act. Despite what Jung claims regarding an 'unconscious irrational happening', the word act implies decision; something that is deliberate. In other words, there is a choice. Creation then, is a deliberate and controlled act despite the apparent abandon of such decision processes by artists of the Jackson Pollack ilk.
In Nietzsche, the description implies an unfolding, a streaming outward and upwards, a Dionysian expansion. It is a flood of overpowering universal feelings bursting forth and totally intoxicating one's senses. Others might call this ecstasy, but not as shown in Bernini's The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. While in this state, Jung claims the psychological function of sensation participates at the highest degree. From a psychological perspective, this is a complete extroversion of all the feelings bound up with sensation. In the Dionysian, these feelings have the archaic character of wild abandonment.
In the next article, I will complete the discussion of the two realms of the creative impulse. Neither is superior to the other, nor is there implication that one produces greater creative works. The purpose here has been to bring about an understanding of the two creative forces that contend for artistic dominance in the human personality.
