Goldmund Telos 2800

MONOBLOCK POWER AMPLIFIER

- JIM AUSTIN

Frederich Nietzsche distinguished between two approaches to culture: The Apollonian, which is characterized by order and rationality, and Dionysian, which is about chaos, intoxication, and vitality.

Apollo was the god of Music, Art, Light, and Knowledge, and to Nietzsche, the Apollonian impulse was the main source of beauty. It is characterized by order, clarity, individuation, and measured restraint. To me, Greek sculpture and the paintings of the Great Masters best represent this impulse. It's not just their classical forms—there's a strength to it, a solidity. Also think of the great Classical composers: Haydn. Mozart. Beethoven to a point.

Dionysus, on the other hand, was the god of wine, religious ecstasy, and ritual madness. The Dionysian view of culture is quite the opposite of the Apollonian view. The impulse is—quite different. In classical music terms, I think of Robert Schumann and his Florestan and Eusebius. And Meister Raro, who tried to bridge the gap decades before Nietzsche.

Nietzsche wrote about this in the context not of music but of theater, in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, from 1972. Western culture, the youthful Nietzsche argued, had been biased toward the Apollonian impulse since the ancient Greeks, to its detriment. He wasn't aiming for a Dionysian makeover but for a rebalancing. In that pursuit, he made a case for setting aside ethics, order, even consciousness and the sense of self as a way of recovering authenticity and deeper meaning. At the time, Nietzsche was under the spell of Richard Wagner and Wagner's soon-to-be wife, Cosima.

As a college kid, I was fascinated by the Dionysian—as I think many college kids are, though many fewer intellectualize it. In an essay published 14 years after The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote that it was “badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused.” Some three years after that, he went insane. Draw your own conclusions.