Re: The old days - Aboard the Apollo - 1973
On this day, so please forgive my audacity in writing the below, Lakey's Apollo thread will reach 2 Million views, a great milestone.
Of gods and Narrenschiffs, thus, all things Apollo
(a Festschrift on the occasion of 2 million views)
To mark this commemorative or festive occasion, I have chosen to consider the god Apollo from whom the term Apollo arises. Since I am a Nietzsche reader, I'll just say up front that Nietzsche found Apollo's qualities to be mostly associated with the mind and rationality. Not the heart, not wine.....Apollo represents, in Nietzsche's mind, light, brightness and radiance, logic, rationality, organization, universals. Nietzsche opposed to this sort of 'clarity' Apollo represents, opposed the god Apollo with the god Dionysus, Apollo's brother and a god of love, wine and song whose activities were carried on with less precision, often in obscurity and animal innocence and also animal brutality. Yet, Apollo was certainly the god of music too....poetry, dance, and prophecy. But I imagine Dionysus would be listening to the Byrds and Apollo would be listening to Mozart if we were to interrupt them today for an interview on this thread anniversary.......
Both of these tendencies, dionysian and the appollonion, spring from the same fountain, the same family. Maybe they are two sides of the same coin, each cannot live without the other. In Scientology terms, Apollo would be the clear, Dionysus would be found in ethics or most likely not found, having escaped from ethics through a small window never before used for such a purpose. He's the incorrigible brother.
I guess a way of understanding the difference of Apollo to his brother is to consider that Apollo is an oracular god, a god of prophecy. Prophecy has to do with the future, and with order and time and with truth in a more universal sense. Apollo is forward wishing and his actions are more calculating; they are not all for the moment, now, today....let us eat and drink as in the case of Dionysus. For Dionysus, experience, existence itself is the only 'sense' we have. Universals are out of place....
These two forces balance each other, repudiate each other, and seem inescapable one from the other. We can see these two as forces at play in the modern world. Always in some sort of balance or imbalance. But what is interesting is that we don't often see so many statues dedicated to Dionysus, I mean monuments; except perhaps in poetry and literature and in film. The video Hats posted of Weimar Germany seems a strong mix of both the Dionysian and the Appolinian. We have a moon landing named for Apollo, and, Hubbard's ship the Apollo....and the Apollo theater....lots of monuments to that name. Monuments to the bacchanal are found in the arts, not the sciences.
Why is it I often wondered, that gods seem to represent powers? In Plato, each God is a form, it is the essence of some eternal form or quality. Such that Aphrodite is Love. Love actually walking around. And Apollo is Light or Rationality. Etc.
Taken in just the sense of forces of nature, the Greeks conceived the gods each to embody some force, a reality. The gods were specialized, not OTs the way Scientologists think of them but each focused on some power or gift to which he or she was most attuned. Human beings, also leaning to various needs, wants and desires, had the habit of aligning with gods they felt were most sympathic to their projects. And the gods also favored or did not favor some human beings even if most of the time the gods were quite derisive of human beings and believing anything such a god told one was a treacherous business, apt to go either way. The idea of respect was crucial, just as one respects the forces of nature lest one get swept away by a typhoon for not believing weather reports. The gods then were primarily interested in themselves and their own affairs, and then secondarily interested in humans to the extent humans could further those godly affairs. Harsh as it seems, humans in that scheme of things were not the lords of the castle even if they happened to be a human with actual keys to an actual castle.
Because the gods had these qualities, or essences, as their form of being, and because they were pure in each to their essence, it was only natural that gods clashed one with the other all the time. One force, the force of love would obviously conflict with Pallas, the god of warcraft. The goals were not the same. Socrates of course noticed this failing, that the gods had no agreed upon authority as to what was universally good or true. Instead each god championed its own allegiances and affiliations....that is, power was hierarchical and whatever essence was strongest prevailed.
Perhaps this is something like the way this world works, the way that one power prevails over other powers. The weakness or strongness of a power is really only a function of situation in a way.....In one setting, love will win and war would fall flat. In another setting, a different sort of force is needed.
Like the parable or story from Aesop in which the sun and the wind try and see who can get the man's coat off first.
Apollo, then, is the god of our modern age to the extent he epitomizes the force of technology, knowledge, and progress. Dionysus represents the maudit tendencies, as in the poet Rimbaud or the hippy movement. The Dionysian has its place now in the Apollinian world as a sort of release valve. A break from all of that Apollo clarity, the idea there being that life needs days off, a break from being clear sometimes, some animal innocence, some wine. Too much Apollo light can hurt. Too little leads into debauchery.
In the modern age, Apollo represents success, progress, solutions, completion, shedding light on every corner....these tendencies can of course be expressed in the wrong setting and give a bad result. Such as for example, a surveillance state or greed to the exclusion of more humanitarian feelings towards one's fellows.
Thus in the natural world, no one force has complete dominion. What we see, I think, is a combination of forces that interact. There is light and dark and there is hot and cold and there is reason which cares not for feelings and there is love which puts emotions in a privileged place. Often one force is marshalled to the use of another, for example, Mars god of war and Pallas are united under Apollo to colonize some unruly corner of reality, bring it to clarity. Apollo if I am not mistaken is also the god of colonization. How fitting then that the moon landing is named Apollo, the moon representing the desire to expand the human reaches beyond earth, to establish a new frontier.
This tendency of Apollo, to conquer the dark and colonize via the rational consciousness, was hated by the literary crowd in the Romantic period, which favored 'the unconscious' over clarity on a conceptual basis, in poetry, in fiction, and in life. Thus Dionysus was held up, as a god of the unconscious one could say. Apollo represented for them all that was calculating, controlling and which oppressed mankind. In literary circles, in the 60s, the banner of much of the anti-establishment was anti-Apollinian, essays were written by philosophers on such things, all highly metaphoric and in analogy to explain various upheavals. This anti-movement, literary in nature, attacked not just the Apollinion tendency in politics and psychoanalysis via Freud and Marx but also the Dionysian tendency in Freud and Nietzsche. Since the antis had no champion (they were mostly atheists), with no forces (gods) to get behind, those movements continue yet in a faded form. They never were able, so far, to get a unified power together sufficient to override an Apollo. Apollo and his mind of science continues today to be the force which cannot be overruled, that drives the world, although the poets and singers continue to rail against the impersonality of technology (rationality) and the way it has taken over the human sphere. Thus the irrational as poetic gesture becomes a meme of youthful defiance (drugs, art, sex, defiance to authority). Technology, the philosopher Heidegger writes, is acknowledged to be a god, is the god of modernity. In a Der Speigel interview Heidegger hints that perhaps all we can do in such an impasse, as he seems to see it, is await a god to come that might save us [from Apollo]. Of course he does not sound too optimistic in the interview....suggesting it might be hundreds of hundreds of years until such a time arrives.
Well I hope someone enjoyed this allegorical history of Apollo and the forces Apollo represents. Today we see those forces most at work in Silicon Valley and in projects and endeavors in all the branches of the sciences.
Please don't shoot the messenger....this is just a festschrift (a writing of honor or festivity) in honor of Lakey's thread reaching 2 million later today. I do realize that his thread began talking about the Apollo ship not the archaic Greek mythology. But I leave it to him to make any remarks about Apollo the ship since I was not there.
lol. Do you like Moll? 
