Nietzsche believed that both forces were highly necessary in individual and collective life: we need to be thoughtful and sober, yet open to the instinctive and the irrational – and it is by combining these two ideals that we stumble towards maturity.
The other, opposing force he termed the Dionysian, after the Greek god of wine, chaos, irrationality and freedom, Dionysus. The first is the pull of the Apollonian ideal, named after Apollo, the god of the sun, order, light, and knowledge. In his book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), Nietzsche described two opposing forces at work in our lives. Without music, life would be a mistake Nietzsche In other words, there is a role for music in opening up channels of feeling that have become dammed by habit, caution, excessive individualism, or the demands of daily life. Listen to Don’t Give Up by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush.Īt another point, when speaking of his intentions behind Sledgehammer, Peter Gabriel approvingly quotes Nietzsche’s line that art is a mechanism which takes “an icepick to the heart”. We may – for example – know in theory that keeping going is important, but it can take a song like Don’t Give Up (from Gabriel’s So) to turn a cliche into an effective call for redemption. Music is, he said, “the sensuous presentation of the crucial ideas”. The philosopher Hegel argued that music is so necessary because it rehearses in the language of the body concepts and truths we are in danger of losing touch with when they reach us only through our rational faculties. But it is quite a different thing for music to remind us of these lessons in its distinctive emotional idiom. We know all this, of course, at a theoretical level. We are urged to accept the constant dispersal and redistribution of energy across the planet. Gabriel begins an incantatory repetition of the lines: The loved one has only just breathed their last:īut after several of these tragic verses, there is a shift, subtle and then ever more insistent, towards a note of cautious redemption. It starts with what sounds pure lamentation. In this context, I Grieve performs a double manoeuvre for us.
As psychologists will explain, the grieving process tends to be beset by two dangers: that it cannot begin, or that it will not stop. It creates perfect conditions for a catharsis.
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The reason is that the song both knows how to release our sadness and yet also channels and contains it. The song has gone on to become a standard at many funeral services, a part of our informal collective secular liturgy. For example, in explaining the origins of I Grieve (a song which appears on his album Up), Gabriel remarked that he had been driven by a wish to create a song that would help people with the mourning process.
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