The Birth of The Birth of Tragedy 7.5itself. Cultures are the fragile and always precarious attempts to create a
zone of habitability within it Cultures sublimate Dionysian energies;
cultural institutions, rituals, and explanations are representations that
live off the actual substance of life and yet hold it at a distance. The
Dionysian lurks before and under civilization. It is the dimension of the
colossal power that both threatens and allures.
Alluring in the Dionysian is a threefold dismantling process, a three-
fold transcendence of the "principium individuations" (1,554; DW). Man
steps beyond his confines to blend with nature. He emerges from his
detachment to join with his fellow man in the "orgiastic" experience of
love and the frenzy of the masses. The third barrier is set aside from
within the individual. Consciousness opens up to admit the uncon-
scious. An ego that anxiously clings to its identity must perceive this
threefold dismantling as a threat. A Dionysian, by contrast, would be
receptive to the experience of a pleasurable demise.
When Nietzsche wrote his essay "The Dionysian Worldview" in the
summer of 1870, the Franco-Prussian War had just been declared. He
regarded the outbreak of the war as a Dionysian breakthrough complete
with tragic-heroic atmosphere. "Our entire threadbare culture is plung-
ing at the breast of the horrible demon," he wrote to Rohde on July 16,
1870 (B 3,130). The word "demon" is meant as a label not for France but
rather, as Nietzsche stated elsewhere, for "military genius" (1,775; TGS).
"Military genius" breaks through the thin crust of civilization; it appears
when life turns serious. Nietzsche's reactions to the war make explicit
what he had been hinting at in his perception of the Dionysian world.
This world of the elemental will is also the Heraclitean world of war,
which, in turn, is the father of all things.
In this hour of truth, as the "terrible foundations of being are
revealed" (Β 3,154; Nov. 7,1870), Nietzsche felt that he could not sim-
ply remain at his desk. He reported to the front as a medical orderly, even
though Cosima Wagner advised him against it and recommended that he
send the soldiers cigars rather than himself (N/W1,96; Aug. 9, 1870).
Nietzsche spent a mere two weeks in September at the western battle-