The Tragic Community Friedrich Nietzsche and Mao Tse Tung By James Luchte

VOLUME VII, ISSUE I, SPRING 2014

Abstract

Contradiction, in this Hegelian sense, is productive – Hegel tells us that we must ‘think contradiction’. He appropriated this notion in this non-analytic sense from Heraclitus (with Hölderlin and Schelling). Indeed, as I will show, the relationship between Nietzsche’s contest between Dionysus and Apollo and Mao’s indication of ‘contradiction’ finds its family resemblance in their own respective rootedness in early Greek thought and its topography of the ‘unity of opposites.’ The meaning of ‘contradiction’, as it is used in Mao – given his Marxian, Leninist and Hegelian ancestors – is a ‘dialectical’ contradiction, which, in its various manifestations in Hölderlin, Schelling, Schlegel, Niethammer, and Hamann, among others, is an early German romantic appropriation and interpretation of the early Greek notion of the logos as a unity of opposites. This appropriation was also the cradle in which Nietzsche was raised. This essay examines contradiction within the context of the tragic.

 

With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we link our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in origins and purposes, between visual (plastic) arts, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian. Both very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate for themselves the contest of opposites which the common word “Art” only seems to bridge, until they finally, through a marvelous metaphysical act, seem to pair up with each other and, as this pair, produce Attic tragedy, just as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872

Contradiction is universal and absolute, it is present in the process of development of all things and permeates every process from beginning to end. (II)By the former we mean that contradiction exists in and runs through all processes from beginning to end; motion, things, processes, thinking — all are contradictions. To deny contradiction is to deny everything. This is a universal truth for all times and all countries, which admits of no exception. (III)
Mao Tse Tung, On Contradiction (1937)

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