Why did I use? VII

9 September 2020

There is a causal factor of addictive behaviours that was not included in Hashmet’s (2017) list.  I was reminded of this eternal force by a recent article on the British actor, Jason Isaacs.  He stated that, "I've always had an addictive personality and by the age of 16 I'd already passed through drink and was getting started on a decades-long love affair with drugs. Every action was filtered through a burning need I had for being as far from a conscious, thinking, feeling person as possible. No message would get through for nearly 20 years."  That burning need is the necessary but perilous Dionysian strain of human personality.

An indulgence of the Dionysian is what impels people to merge with crowds at rock concerts, hoping their troubled individual identities will disappear into the mass and the moment, ensuring euphoria continues, now and forever.  The Dionysian is usually contrasted with the Apollonian; the former being about the celebration of wine, sex, and music while the latter is about order, reason, and self-control. 

Wine, sex, and music are not innately problematic.  They can be the subject of serious study, joy, and elevation.  Those positive factors are not my current focus.  What interests me about the Dionysian is its call to merged chaos.   There is, within most of us, a desire to be rid of the noise in our heads, the anxiety in our guts, and the self-loathing in our mirrors.  I believe that some of us, like the younger Jason Isaacs, share that burning need to numb-out and be rid of sometimes painful, but always necessary, Apollonian reality. 

“…Nietzsche identifies the Dionysian as a frenzy of self-forgetting in which the self gives way to a primal unity where individuals are at one with others and with nature. Both the Apollonian and the Dionysian are necessary in the creation of art [and personality]. Without the Apollonian, the Dionysian lacks the form and structure [of] coherent...art, and without the Dionysian, the Apollonian lacks the necessary vitality and passion. Although they are diametrically opposed, they are also intimately intertwined (Sparks Notes on Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, 1872).”  A deep Dionysian dive is a desire to escape the difficulty of life/art.

But, as M. Scott Peck (1978) wrote, “Life is difficult...[however] once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”  Yielding to the Dionysian is hedonism; yielding to the Apollonian is rigidity, but balancing these difficult counterforces is vital health.