Nietzsche, Dionysus, and the Form of Chaos
Undergraduate: Mark Laird
Faculty Advisor: Gregory Flaxman
Department: English & Comparative Literature
The presentation will contain material from my English Seniors Honors Thesis. In my research I went back to one of the most influential philosophers for modernity, Friedrich Nietzsche. I investigated what themes drove the core of his work. Because Nietzsche was a scholar of Ancient Greece, not only did he possess an enduring admiration for their culture, but their way of everyday life. He looked to the Greek god, Dionysus as the starting point for many of his most significant questions. Marcel Detienne, in his work Dionysus at Large, explores the being of Dionysus. I used this work to shed light on the labyrinth of Nietzsche's mind, and in the attempt to reveal more in Nietzsche's own work. I found that Nietzsche went from a radical change in his philosophy. In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had the view that Dionysus was a force in Greek culture meant to be constrained by the form and control of Apollo. In his later works, he sees the chaos of the Dionysiac as something