The Dionysian Interval: After Aristotle and Before Nietzsche

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Introduction

When Nietzsche announced himself “the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,” he also implied he was the first to take the god seriously.¹ A glance at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German letters tells another story. From Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s classical reveries to F. W. J. Schelling’s speculative “Dionysiology,” Dionysus had already become a cipher for artistic frenzy, erotic excess, and metaphysical renewal. This essay retraces that pre-Nietzschean itinerary, beginning with Aristotle’s definition of tragedy and ending with the Romantics who wove the god into poetics, philosophy, and nation-building. By recovering this lineage we see Nietzsche’s gesture less as an ex nihilo discovery than as a brilliant reframing of an idea that had been fermenting—much like wine—through German thought for a century.

Aristotle’s Dithyrambic Legacy

Aristotle famously derived tragedy “from the poets of the dithyramb,” linking dramatic art to the ecstatic choruses of Dionysus.² Although Nietzsche bypassed the Poetics, the Stagirite’s genealogy remained the point of departure for later aesthetic speculation. What matters here is the conceptual triad: music, ritual intoxication, and collective catharsis. Subsequent German writers would return to those motifs, confronting a puzzle that Aristotle leaves open: how can an orgiastic rite become the paradigm of ordered art?

Winckelmann: Classical Beauty and the Hidden Bacchus

Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764) is remembered for “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” yet its pages also harbour an intensely sensual Bacchus. “The image of Bacchus,” he writes, “is that of a beautiful boy…half submerged in a delightful dream, his features full of sweetness.”³ By pairing Apollo’s masculine harmony with Bacchus’ androgynous allure, Winckelmann subtly legitimated desire—even homoerotic desire—as an index of aesthetic judgment. The Dionysian thus slips inside the very heart of German classicism, not as drunken uproar but as a languid, dreamlike radiance concealed behind marble perfection.

Hamann and Herder: Orgies of Sense and Song

Where Winckelmann aestheticised Bacchus, Johann Georg Hamann exploded him. In Aesthetica in nuce (1762) he warns writers: “Do not venture into the metaphysics of the fine arts without first having attained perfection in the orgies…and the Eleusinian mysteries. The senses are Ceres, and Bacchus the passions.”⁴ Poetry, for Hamann, issues from fermented blood and wine, not from rational form.

Johann Gottfried Herder extends the argument. True dithyramb, he says, “descends perhaps the farthest…to animal-like sensuality in order to attain its heights.”⁵ The poet must plunge into “the abyss of the soul,” where intoxication overturns reason and births nation-forming song. Hamann provides the Dionysian manifesto; Herder supplies its cultural program.

Romantic Inflammations: Hölderlin, Novalis, and the Returning God

With early Romanticism Dionysus becomes both myth and messiah. Friedrich Hölderlin tethers the god to eschatology:

“But they are like the Wine-God’s holy priests,
Who proceeded from land to land by hallowed night.”⁶

In the elegy “Bread and Wine,” Dionysus heralds the comeback of the “heavenly” amid modern “impoverished times,” merging with Christ to promise transfigured community. Novalis, in Hymns to the Night, refracts the same impulse through mystical love-death: the grape, the host, the tomb, and the bridal bed all converge in Dionysian imagery.

The god’s meaning thus doubles: he is at once liberator of the senses and harbinger of a supra-Christian revelation. Romantic poetry stages this tension through paradox—exaltation in suffering, unity in fragmentation—anticipating Nietzsche’s later equation of Dionysus with tragic joy.

Philosophers of Ecstasy: Schlegel and Schelling

The Romantics’ critical project needed metaphysical scaffolding. Friedrich Schlegel located “immortal joy” and “wonderful abundance” in the Eleusinian Dionysus, proposing a new mythopoeic science.⁷

Schelling, however, offered the most systematic account. His Philosophy of Mythology (1828 – 48) describes a threefold Dionysus—Zagreus, Bacchus, Iacchus—charting the passage from unconscious nature to reflective spirit. The secret of art, Schelling insists, is to be “intoxicated and sober not at different times, but simultaneously.”⁸ Here the dialectic of frenzy and form foreshadows Nietzsche’s “music-making Socrates,” yet with a crucial difference: for Schelling the dialectic culminates, not in nihilism, but in a reconciled theology where Apollo and Dionysus converge.

Conclusion: Toward a Genealogy of Ecstasy

From Aristotle’s analytical seed to Schelling’s speculative harvest, Dionysus mutated from cult image to poetic principle, from erotic metaphor to philosophical engine. Winckelmann’s statues, Hamann’s orgies, Herder’s national song, Hölderlin’s hymns, and Schelling’s triadic speculation all prepared the ground on which Nietzsche would later plant his own vine. His innovation lay in distilling the tradition into a single intoxicant called “life-affirmation,” then serving it as philosophical pathos. Recognising the older vintage does not diminish Nietzsche; it enriches our palate, reminding us that every great wine retains the sun and soil of earlier seasons.

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Notes and References

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in Werke, II, p. 1030.
2. Aristotle, Poetics 1449a.
3. J. J. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), pp. 158 – 61.
4. J. G. Hamann, Aesthetica in nuce (1762), ed. Ziesemer & Henkel, II, 201.
5. J. G. Herder, Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Litteratur (1767), I, 310 – 11.
6. F. Hölderlin, “Brot und Wein,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Beissner, vol. 2, 1797/98.
7. F. Schlegel, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, pp. 234 – 36.
8. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation (1842), lecture I, 26.