We're a Nietzschean Dialectic!

The following is a January 2014 email exchange between Art and Will.

Will:

I think constructing the story of Arthur White fits my Apollonian leanings and throwing it in a postmodern blender fits your Dionysian leanings.   

I'd love to talk whenever you have the chance, but I think it's clear that as far as we and our alter egos are concerned, after we come up with ideas, my job is mostly to impose order and your job is mostly to mess with it.   

I'm most in my element trying to form the legend in my head from start to finish.  I think it's best that you take charge of the architecture of all things stream of consciousness, meta-narrative, disjointed, post-structuralist, tangential, and destabilizing.   

I'm hardwired to write an epic morality tale...that's the strength and the shortcoming I bring to the table.  I'm depending on you to screw that up in meaningful ways...I hope you'll depend on me be the straightening force. 

I think carltonfarthington@gmail.com falls under the purview of your wisdom, not mine.  I think it's a good idea not because I get it, but because you do.

Art:

Yes, I remember now: we're a Nietzschean dialectic!  

Nietzsche was bent bringing back the Dionysian, which he felt had been paved over by the Socratic man, the Alexandrian age, the Enlightenment, his own age...   

But I would like to rewind back to the Hegelian and say, you're right: we need to "know no shrinking or half heartedness" in being the thing we most are.  That's what the all-important sublation/synthesis most needs in order to occur.   The "only wrong" in this dynamic is when "one desires to deny the other power" not realizing itself as just one part of the synthetic whole.   

And I'm referencing Hegel's ideas on tragedy, so there is danger in this.   

As A.C. Bradley explains in his lectures on Hegel, what is tragic about tragedy is that the observance of one power involves the violation of the other (usually with one or more deaths in the process).  But Hegel also pointed out tragedies in which the synthesis is achieved through adjustment of demands/repentance.   

Like how Athena is able to save Orestes by brokering a deal between Apollo (Apollonian/Olympian) and the Furies (Dionysian/Chthonic).  I think we want to go for that latter option, appreciating and making room for the demands of the other...all without falling into half-heartedness.   

And yes, I do look to you to be that other, straightening force!

Will:

It's working...I'm already questioning whether you wrote that response or Dr. Carlton Farthington did!