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Title: Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought

Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought

by Carlos A. Segovia (Author)
©2026 Monographs XIV, 202 Pages
Theology & Philosophy

Summary

This book is the first study to place Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy in the context of his overall thought. It interprets Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy as a development of his earliest thinking as it is laid out in his school dissertation on Theognis of Megara. As author Carlos A. Segovia contends, the key figure in this early thinking is not Dionysus but Apollo, an earthly Apollo who, despite his partial erasure after The Birth of Tragedy, haunts Nietzsche in his later writings, including his unpublished fragments and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The author also shows that retrieving Nietzsche’s pre-Dionysian Apollo can help us move beyond the theoretical limits assumed by today’s two major philosophical trends, speculative realism and new materialism, thus stressing Nietzsche’s untimeliness from a strictly contemporary standpoint.
This book is essential reading for all interested in Nietzsche and the birth of contemporary philosophy, including graduate students and researchers.
“Carlos Segovia pleads his case for a reappraisal of Apollo in the corpus of Nietzsche, but he also leverages his case for an intriguing fresh look at the importance of Nietzsche’s thought for contemporary strategies of earth affirmation and reclamation. This study is well-documented, well-reasoned and reliable in its close readings of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the host of sources both ancient and modern that contributed to The Birth of Tragedy and Nietzsche’s Dionysus-related writing. Segovia covers surprisingly vast ground in this small treatise—readers from numerous traditions will be pleased!” —Adrian Del Caro, Professor of German Studies, University of Tennessee; General Editor, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Stanford University Press

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication
  • Table of Contents
  • Abbreviations
  • Writings by Nietzsche
  • Greco-Roman sources
  • Other abbreviations
  • Figures, Text Boxes, and Tables
  • Figures
  • Text Boxes
  • Tables
  • CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Nietzsche, Apollo, and the Earth
  • 1.1. Overview
  • 1.2. From Nietzsche to Theognis and Hesiod: a twofold theme and its encrypted intertextual web
  • 1.3. No longer Maya’s emblem: Apollo’s birth and the joyful worlding of Gaia
  • 1.4. The subtle art of counterpoint, or the afterlife of Nietzsche’s pre-Dionysian Apollo
  • 1.5. Nietzsche beyond Nietzsche: reassessing Nietzsche’s Dionysian legacy in contemporary thought
  • CHAPTER 2 Swimming at the Confluence of Several Rivers: Philology, Aesthetics, Cultural History, Philosophy, and Mythology in the Young Nietzsche
  • 2.1. Revisiting Wilamowitz’s “Lycurgean” critique of Nietzsche
  • 2.2. Reinhardt’s misjudgment on the relevance of Nietzsche’s early philological works
  • 2.3. Die Geburt der Tragödie as an exercise in hermeneutic philology under the combined influence of Burckhardt and Wagner
  • 2.4. In the wake of the Idealist conceptual elan, Creuzer’s Symbolik, and Schopenhauer’s metaphysics
  • 2.5. Coda: Dionysus’s polyvalent talisman
  • CHAPTER 3 Unearthing Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo: Apollo and the Earth in the Elegies of Theognis of Megara and Their Hesiodic Subtext
  • 3.1. Bodily sounds and worlding tunes: Hesiod on Gaia’s two joys
  • 3.2. Beyond the earth’s self-sensing flesh: Gaia’s gradual disclosure and Metis’s role in it
  • 3.3. The phonic anagram behind Theognis’s Apollonian rewriting of Hesiod
  • 3.4. Gaia–Uranus sycygy, Hesiod’s two asymmetric series, and the argumentative basis of this book
  • 3.5. Coda: From Apollo to Dionysus
  • CHAPTER 4 The Making of Nietzsche’s Dionysian Worldview: Or, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Tragedy and His Re-conceptualization of Apollo
  • 4.1. A note on Nietzsche’s earliest fragments on Dionysus
  • 4.2. Towards a first philosophical draft: Die dionysische Weltanschauung and μοῖρα’s role in it
  • Box 1: The mirror motif in DW-2 (1870)
  • 4.3. Die Geburt der Tragödie and its reinterpretation of Attic drama and ritual after Shakespeare, Schiller, and Bernays
  • 4.4. Coda: Nietzsche’s dualism
  • Box 2: The shield motif in eKGWB/GT-2 (1872)
  • CHAPTER 5 The Twilight-Happy Whose Souls Are Lured by Flutes to Every Maelstrom: Nietzsche’s Dionysian Apotheosis and the Erasure of Apollo in the Third Part of Zarathustra
  • 5.1. Dionysus’s “sudden swell” and Nietzsche’s Schellingian imagery
  • 5.2. “Von Gesicht und Räthsel” and Nietzsche’s Dionysian apotheosis
  • 5.3. Nietzsche’s “eternal return” in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft and in Zarathustra’s third part
  • 5.4. Coda: Rereading Nietzsche’s against the backdrop of Severino’s three earths
  • CHAPTER 6 Leaning against the Earth Weary of Long Journeys and Uncertain Seas: Nietzsche’s Apollonian Truce and the Symbolic Elusion of Dionysus in the Fourth Part of Zarathustra
  • 6.1. Of lions, grapes, and other signs in Zarathustra’s diegetic timeline
  • 6.2. “Mittags”: A textual cum symptomatic analysis, with a further note on Hesiod, Theognis, and Hölderlin
  • 6.3. Specular inversions in “Mittags” and “Vom Gesicht und Räthsel”
  • 6.4. Satyr play, Apollonian consolation, or Apollonian truce?
  • 6.5. Coda: De profundis
  • CHAPTER 7 Of Vines, Gorgons, and Shields: Nietzsche’s 1883 Fragment on Athena and Dionysus-Letters in Apocalyptic Perspective
  • 7.1. Reinterpreting Nietzsche’s Turin breakdown after Francesc Tosquelles’s notion of an apocalyptic Erlebnis and Hans Prinzhorn’s notion of Gestaltung
  • Box 3: Chaos, Rhythm, and Forms (or the fragility of the human psyche)
  • 7.2. To sink down to shadows: Nietzsche’s Dionysos-Dithyramben and “Dionysus” letters
  • 7.3. Dionysus and the Gorgon in Die Geburt der Tragödie and Greco-Roman literature
  • 7.4. The conjuring: Athena’s shield in a key unpublished fragment from 1883
  • 7.5. Coda: On empty mirrors
  • CHAPTER 8 Of Paradises, Infernos, Limbos, and the Otherwise: Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo beyond Deconstruction, Post-Structuralism, Speculative Realism, and New Materialism
  • 8.1. Contemporary philosophy’s meta-conceptual star and Nietzsche’s central position in it
  • 8.2. Undecidability: the deconstructionist limbo
  • 8.3. Unrelatedness: the speculative-realist inferno (and its post-structuralist echoes)
  • 8.4. Connectiveness: the new-materialist paradise (and its post-structuralist roots)
  • 8.5. Coda: Nietzsche, the untimely, and the otherwise
  • CHAPTER 9 Appendix: Diagrams and Illustrations
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Abbreviations

Writings by Nietzsche

ACDer Antichrist > The Antichrist

ASZAlso sprach Zarathustra > Thus Spoke Zarathustra

BVNBriefe von Nietzsche > Nietzsche’s letters

DDDionysos-Dithyramben > Dionysus-Dithyrambs

DSDavid Strauss = UB, I

GDGötzen-Dämmerung > Twilight of the Idols

GMZur Genealogie der Moral > On the Genealogy of Morality

GMDDas griechische Musikdrama

GTDie Geburt der Tragödie > The Birth of Tragedy

GTGDie Geburt des tragischen Gedankens > The Birth of Tragic Thought

DWDie dionysische Weltanschauung > The Dionysian Worldview

EHEcce homo > Ecce Homo

FWDie fröhliche Wissenschaft > The Gay Science

FWaDer Fall Wagner > The Case of Wagner

JGBJenseits von Gut und Böse > Beyond Good and Evil

NCWNietzsche contra Wagner > Nietzsche contra Wagner

NFNachgelassene Fragmente > Posthumous fragments

NNHLVom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben > On the Usefulness and Disadvantage of History for Life = UB, II

PTZGPhilosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen > Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

STSocrates und die Tragödie > Socrates and Tragedy

TMDe Theognide Megarensi > On Theognis of Megara

UBUnzeitgemässe Betrachtungen > Untimely Meditations

WBRichard Wagner in Bayreuth > Richard Wagner in Bayreuth

ZaAlso sprach Zarathustra > Thus Spoke Zarathustra (in the eKGWB)

Unless otherwise indicated, and to facilitate their online consultation, Nietzsche’s writings are cited (according to the standard abbreviations listed above) after Paolo D’Iorio’s digital edition (eKGWB = Friedrich Nietzsche, Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke und Briefe, which is available online at Nietzsche Source, the website of the Association HyperNietzsche at the Écome Normale Supérieure in Paris)1 of the German reference edition of Nietzsche’s works, posthumous fragments, and correspondence founded by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari and continued by Volker Gerhardt, Norbert Miller, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, and Karl Pestalozzi (KGW = Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1967– + KGB = Friedrich Nietzsche, Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1975–). All references to D’Iorio’s digital edition are indicated by the acronym eKGWB followed (a) by a slash, the acronym of the work in question, a short hyphen, the number or the abridged title of the corresponding section (preceded, in the case of ASZ, by its corresponding part number in Roman numbers) and, if needed, a second short hyphen, plus the appropriate subsection number in the case of Nietzsche’s published works, private publications, authorized manuscripts, and posthumous writings (e.g., eKGWB/EH-Weise-1 = Ecce homo, “Warum ich so weise bin,” §1); and (b) by a slash, the acronym NF, a hyphen, the fragment’s year, a comma, the fragment’s group, and the fragment’s number in square brackets in the case of Nietzsche’s posthumous fragments (e.g., eKGWB/NF-1871,14[27] = Nachgelassene Fragmente, 1871, no. 14[27]). The citation of Nietzsche’s letters follows a similar pattern (e.g., eKGWB/BVN-1866,521 = Briefe von Nietzsche, 1886, no. 521). Where suitable, a reference to the corresponding English translation of each cited text or excerpt is appended (e.g., eKGWB/EH-Weise,1; Nietzsche 2005, p. 76). Conversely, when Nietzsche’s writings are referred to but no specific passage of them is cited, the corresponding reference is provided as per the conventional abbreviations and conventions mentioned above, but un-prefixed by the eKGWB sigla (e.g., EH-Weise,1; NF-1871,14[27]; or BVN-1866,521); in the case of ASZ, however, the number of each part’s section, instead of its abridged title, is then supplied (e.g., ASZ III.2, instead of Za-III-Gesicht), while the exact correspondence between these two reference systems is always provided alongside all ASZ citations to avoid any possible confusion thereof (e.g., eKGWB/Za-III-Gesicht = ASZ III.2). As for TM, which has not yet been included in the eKGWB, but whose text, digitalized by Robert Martin Kerr, is available online at The Nietzsche Channel,2 it is both cited and referred to after KGW I/3. Finally, KSA stands, as it is customary, for Colli and Montinar’s Kritische Studienausgabe of Nietzsche’s works in 15 vols. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1967–77 and 1988).

Greco-Roman sources

Apoll. Lib. Apollodorus, Library

Arist. Met. Aristotle, Metaphysics

Arist. Phys. Aristotle, Physics

Arist. Poet. Aristotle, Poetics

Aristoph. Age Aristophanes, Age

Aristoph. Birds Aristophanes, The Birds

Eur. Bacch. Euripides, The Bacchae

Her. DK Heraclitus, Diels-Kranz numbering

Hes. Sh. Hesiod, Shield

Hes. Th. Hesiod, Theogony

HH 2 Homeric Hymns, Hymn no. 2 to Demeter

HH 3 Homeric Hymns, Hymn no. 3 to Apollo

HH 11 Homeric Hymns, Hymn no. 11 to Athena

HH 14 Homeric Hymns, Hymn no. 14 to the Mother of the Gods

HH 26 Homeric Hymns, Hymn no. 26 to Dionysus

HH 28 Homeric Hymns, Hymn no. 28 to Athena

HH 30 Homeric Hymns, Hymn no. 30 to the Earth

HH 31 Homeric Hymns, Hymn no. 31 to Helios

Hom. Il. Homer, Iliad

Hom. Od. Homer, Odyssey

Macrob. Sat. Macrobius, Saturnalia

Nonn. Dion. Nonnus, Dionysiaca

Olymp. In Ph. Olympiodorus, Commentary on Plato’s Phaedo

Ovid, Met. Ovid, Metamorphoses

Parm. DK Parmenides, Diels-Kranz numbering

Pin. Nem. Pindar, Nemean Odes

Pin. Pyth. Pindar, Pythian Odes

Plat. Apol. Plato, Apology of Socrates

Plat. Crat. Plato, Cratylus

Plat. Parm. Plato, Parmenides

Plat. Ph. Plato, Phaedo

Plat. Phaed. Plato, Phaedrus

Plat. Tim. Plato, Timaeus

Plut. Mor. Plutarch, Moralia

Procl. In Resp. Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Republic

Soph. Ant. Sophocles, Antigone

Theog. Eleg. Theognis, Elegies

Other abbreviations

Matt. Gospel of Matthew

NRSVUE New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, updated edition

Rev. Revelation

Figures, Text Boxes, and Tables

Figures

Fig. 1: Adapting Nietzsche’s 1873 time-drawing (NF-1873,26[12])

Fig. 2: Gaia’s two joys, from Hesiod to Nietzsche

Fig. 3: Nietzsche and German Idealism

Fig. 4: Athena, Apollo, Dionysus, and Medusa in DW-2, GT-2, and NF-1883,9[17]

Fig. 5: Nietzsche and contemporary philosophy

Text Boxes

Box 1: The mirror motif in DW-2 (1870)

Box 2: The shield motif in eKGWB/GT-2 (1872)

Box 3: Chaos, Rhythm, and Forms (or the fragility of the human psyche)

Tables

Table 1: Dionysus’s twilight-, sea-like-, and abyssal imagery in GT (1872) and FW-V (1887)

Table 2: Specular inversions in ASZ III.2 (1884) and IV.10 (1885)

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Nietzsche, Apollo, and the Earth

1.1. Overview

A close examination of Nietzsche’s Valediktionsarbeit on Theognis of Megara, written by Nietzsche in Latin in 1864, suggests that Apollo’s overall subordination to Dionysus from DW (1870) onwards is not only dependent on Nietzsche’s reinterpretation of Schopenhauer’s Wille/Vorstellung dichotomy, Creuzer’s Symbolik (plus Bachofen’s slanted re-elaboration of it) and, possibly too, Burckhardt’s allusions to Schelling’s lectures on the philosophy of mythology, which Burckhardt attended in Berlin in the 1840s and, we now know, contained precious references to Dionysus as “a god to come” that might have stimulated Nietzsche’s imagination: it is a bifurcation, or even a deviation (seen from its inception, that is), from Nietzsche’s earliest thinking, the fruit of which is now available to the English reader thanks to Robert Martin Kerr’s bilingual edition and Oscar Velásquez’s English translation (both published in 2015) of TM. For, in his school thesis, the young Nietzsche, following Theognis, bestows on Apollo, tacitly but tellingly, earthly qualities which recall those that he would later confer upon Dionysus.

How else can one interpret then, from the viewpoint of what I am willing to call Nietzsche’s pre-Dionysian Apollo, the engulfing of Apollo by Dionysus’s “maelstrom” in the beginning of “The Vision and the Riddle” section in the third part of ASZ (III.2, which dates from 1884)? Moreover, how must one read Nietzsche’s 1883 unpublished fragment on Athena’s shield and the Gorgon (NF-1883,9[17])? Lastly, how do the “Midday” section in the fourth part of ASZ (IV.10, which dates from 1885), on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the Hesiodic subtext of Theognis and, hence, of Nietzsche’s earthly Apollo, thematically overlap—and what can one make of it? In this essay, I attempt to respond to these and other related questions. Furthermore, I argue that Apollo’s regained earthliness may help us rethink earth and world in their chiastic reciprocity and thus move beyond the speculative-realist inferno of universal unrelatedness, the flat-ontology paradise of new-materialist connectiveness, the deconstructionist limbo where ontological undecidability reigns instead, and the post-structuralist relentless circulation between limbo, paradise, and inferno. Nietzsche’s thought thus proves, once more, beautifully untimely.

1.2. From Nietzsche to Theognis and Hesiod: a twofold theme and its encrypted intertextual web

Nietzsche’s “faithfulness to the earth” has been reclaimed in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship by Adrian Del Caro (2004) and Peter Durno Murray (2018, pp. 230–76). It is also the conceptual axis around which Deleuze’s 1962 interpretation of Nietzsche turns: “A will of the Earth, what would a will capable of affirming the Earth be like?” asks Deleuze (1983, p. 79). Deleuze thus makes of Nietzsche’s philosophy a philosophy of the unconditional affirmation of life’s immanence, which is symbolized by the earth. In the Prologue to ASZ’s first part, Nietzsche himself writes: “The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes!” (eKGWB/Za-I-Vorrede-3 = ASZ I.0-3; Nietzsche 2006, p. 6, emphasis original; cf. ASZ I.22-2). For his part, Dionysus, who was identified in Ancient Greece with the earth’s younger consort and offspring (Dietrich 1974, pp. 12, 14, 172–3), becomes, for Nietzsche, the core symbol of an affirmative attitude towards life’s immanence, as he underlines when he writes: “Not only is the bond between human beings renewed by the magic of the Dionysian, but nature, alienated, inimical, or subjugated, celebrates […] her festival of reconciliation with her lost son, humankind. Freely the earth offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from mountain and desert approach in peace” (eKGWB/GT-1; Nietzsche 1999, p. 18, trans. slightly modified).

Details

Pages
XIV, 202
Publication Year
2026
ISBN (PDF)
9783034355476
ISBN (ePUB)
9783034355483
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783034355469
DOI
10.3726/b22884
Language
English
Publication date
2026 (February)
Keywords
Dionysus & Apollo Earthliness Nietzsche Nihilism New Materialism Speculative Realism Carlos A. Segovia Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought
Published
New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2026. XIV, 202 pp., 5 b/w ill., 2 tables.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Carlos A. Segovia (Author)

Carlos A. Segovia is an independent British-Spanish philosopher working on the contemporary debate on contingency and worlding. Among his publications are Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide (2023) and Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings (2024).