Russ asked:

Do you have suggestions for someone who feels caught between the ethics of Apollo and Dionysus?
I know Nietzsche fell firmly in the Dionysus camp, but I don't feel like he had it all figured out. I think
Aristotle's Golden Mean is more of my kind of ethic. Anyway, I'd be interested in any further readings
on the topic.

“The real question is how far a belief furthers and supports life, maintains and disciplines a species”
Beyond Good and Evil.

Nietzsche's celebrated distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian can be found in his first
book The Birth of Tragedy.If you are interested specifically in ethics, rather than the metaphysical
and aesthetic strands of the idea, I think the question to ask is how strong are Nietzsche's arguments
against moral realism and what exactly is the outcome of his position. Perhaps thinking about this will
help you feel less trapped; Walter Kaufmann's book on Nietzsche is excellent.

Here is my take: Nietzsche claims that we are psychologically prone to error through our desires to
conform and to avoid pain (pain in the sense of the terror that seeing the world as nauseatingly
absurd can induce in us) Descriptions of moral 'facts' are merely descriptions of a moral attitude.
There are no moral phenomena, only moralistic interpretations of them.

This is a specialisation of his general metaphysical view — there are no facts and no order (hence no
moral order) at all. In most need of re-evaluation are thus our meta-ethical beliefs concerning the
possibility of justifying the ethical beliefs we hold. His is a kind of 'error theory' about how we arrive
morally realist conclusions and is essentially a rejection of the correspondence theory of truth. In this
sense it is somewhat similar to J.L. Mackie's arguments for subjectivism in his book Ethicswhich I
recommend. Nietzsche also offers us a psychological explanation for why this error persists — what
is the non-moral provenance of moral interpreting and what is its function in human life (see the quote
at the top!)

A good question to consider is whether Nietzsche smuggles in some kind of moral realism with this
talk of what is 'life-enhancing'; it sounds like a normative notion based on his interpretation of Darwin.
Our nature is x, so we ought to do things to enhance it. His lengthy and bitter criticisms of Christianity
(see Anti-Christ) often focus on the thought that Christianity could never be life-enhancing and is
indeed inimical to happiness when practised because of the lack of value he sees it as placing on
existence in this world.

On a purely personal reading of Nietzsche, I thus think that his moral criticisms of Christianity are
actually very much along the lines of Greek virtue theory. So you are right to be thinking of Aristotle
and the Golden Mean as a possible alternative to some of the more gloomy aspects of what he says
elsewhere. Golden Means (e.g. courage is a mean between cowardice and irrascibility) encourage us
to function in the right way — they help us to survive and be happy. If you think Nietzsche gets it
wrong with the Apollonian and Dionysian aesthetic (roughly, hide from the absurdity in the first case,
glorify it and love it in the second), there is still something powerful in the 'virtue theory' aspects of his
thought — a virtue is to fulfill your nature as a human.

Nietzsche also speaks of the relativity of moral values however. Whether this sits a little more
difficultly with virtue theory is something I often wonder. As Zarathustra puts it:

Much that one people calls 'good' another calls 'shame' and 'disgrace'. So I found. I found
much that we here name evil and there decked in purple...a table of values hangs over every
people.

Note that this is not a good argument for 'irrealism' and does not mean that we should abandon
ethical realism altogether. Bernard Williams claims that we cannot engage with the ethics of a
Medieval Teutonic knight (say) not because his moral beliefs were necessarily false but simply
because those beliefs are too remote. Modern realists like David Wiggins and John McDowell would
agree with Nietzsche that if you gave up your language and conceptual scheme you would end up in
chaos; but does Nietzsche (and Mackie for that matter) make the right moves? Perhaps it is the
standard for realism that needs to be weakened, and that abandoning ethical realism completely is
not the move to make.

Adam Gatward