How much of life is a battle between logic and not-logic. Whatever is the opposite of logic is what Nietzsche hopes to represent in the Dionysiac: logic’s dialectical antithesis. It is the same not-logic that dominates Freud’s conception of our unconscious. It is what ever is not-logical that compels people to believe in gods. Hegel praised the ascendancy of logic. Marx tended to lament it. How does capitalism (as we understand it) represent logical tendencies taken to extremes? In what way does Marxism or postmodernism, advocate a return to not-logic?
Every (major or minor) social revolution seems to begin in Dionysiac frenzy, a sudden, brief, but extreme restructuring of social and psychological ideas around not-logic, followed by a slow rehabilitation into a state of Apolline logic. This is easiest to see in war (especially simplified in revolutionary civil war, a physical changing of the guard). It is equally true for revolutions in thought. Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, all those theoretical arguments that align themselves with not-logic, whose theoretical implications rock our human understanding to its core, insodoing tend to stir up the Dionysiac embers embedded in each (and all) of us. However, all of these revolutionary ideas also end up incorporated into logical patterns of thought, given logical applications.
As Hegel and Marx seem unable (unwilling?) to do, Benjamin conceives of this cycle not as progress toward some final synthesis, but as an ongoing and continuous process of dialectical potentiality. The dialectic compels us to consider where we stand within this cycle.
But how does our hope that things get better drive us to act, and what is the consequence of a position which denies the concept of progress?
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