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

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who, despite his partial erasure after The Birth of Tragedy, haunts Nietzsche in his later writings, including his unpublished fragments and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.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