link to George Monbiot's site

There's the weblink for the site I mentioned. This is one of the places where you can find out what's really afoot.

THE DIONYSIAN AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

I wonder how to respond to the strangeness of reality. Given that the world is ruled by forces seemingly beyond my control; the environment is hugely damaged; and almost no one wants to talk about it!

I find a lot of inspiration in Nietzsche - I was talking about him to my housemate last night (also a fan!) Nietzsche was dealing with a different set of problems - disillusion with German/European culture, as well as chronic loneliness, lack of recognition of his talents, etc. But his identification, or description rather, of the world chimes with me: a shifting reality that it's difficult to come to terms with, something like the Dance of Shiva where "everything that man instinctively desires - namely unity, stability, meaning and goals - is lacking." (Safranski - Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography)

He ended up naming this chaos the Dionysian, a term he'd been using since his first work where he identified this impulse as essential to Greek tragedy. His response to the Dionysian cosmos: joy!

When I find myself all at sea, pulled this way and that by forces that I scarcely understand, my life determined by threads of random chances, it's clear I have to swim and somehow catch a wave, keep my head above water, possibly shout to the better swimmers. (This happened to me in Thailand last summer, when I almost drowned. Only a 3-minute experience, but hard to forget.)

How to react to a face-to-face encounter with the Dionysian?
1. A theistic reaction - deny the chaos, interpret it differently, see the waves are not really engulfing you, but part of a benign - and essentially unitary - pattern.
2. The Buddhist reaction - don't be attached to the idea of living or dying, or to any particular conception of the sea. Just relax - you'll swim better.
3. Nietzsche's reaction - acceptance. Accept the inherently tragic side of life, including death, without illusions; in fact affirm it! And forge ahead. Eventually, with practice, you'll enjoy it so much, you'll be splashing around like a kid.

I don't think any of these responses has a greater validity than any other. What counts is facing up to the experience itself. No one comes away unchanged.

I have so much more to write about Nietzsche - the whole drowning idea just occurred to me now, by the way, and is very personal; it's not really a close reading of his ideas. What I like most about him is that - as my housemate said last night - he's always provocative. He always stirs you up with completely outrageous statements so that you have to think, "if I don't agree with that, why not?" Thought games.

"It is absolutely unnecessary for you to argue in my favour; on the contrary, a dose of curiosity, as if you were looking at an alien plant with ironic distance, would strike me as an incomparably more intelligent reaction toward me."

Irony? That I didn't expect!