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My death I praise to you, the free death which comes to me because I want it.
The mythic figure most significant in the life and thought of Nietzsche was Dionysus. Indeed, Nietzsche maintained he was “… a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus.” (14). And this discipleship assumed archetypal significance when Nietzsche, like the mythic bacchantes who followed the “mad god,” suffered “the eruption of the destructive madness which belongs to the reality of Dionysus….” (24). This study intends to disclose some aspects of the relationship between the tragic wisdom of Nietzsche's Dionysian philosophy and his “madness.”
According to Martin Heidegger, “… all the themes of Western thought, though all of them transmuted, fatefully gather together in Nietzsche's thinking.” (6) That is, at the end of the nineteenth century, the dialectic of Western thinking was synthesized in the thought of a philosopher who understood himself as a disciple of Dionysus; and both the disciple and his Dionysian philosophy were, as Nietzsche prophesied, “… something decisive and doom-laden standing between two millennia.” (18)
Nietzsche's thought concerned itself with fundamental questions, i. e., how does one justify existence, how does a man justify existing! Nietzsche did not ask what existence is, nor did he ask how it was with existent men. These answers Nietzsche “knew” beforehand; they constitute fore-knowledge in his thought. And what he knew, in advance, was the depth of nihilism—“…the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability…. The philosophical nihilist is convinced that all that happens is meaningless and in vain; and that there ought not to be anything meaningless and in vain.” (23) The question then is this: given suffering, the meaninglessness of