INTJ and Nietzsche’s Aesthetics of Night

By Ryan Smith

With regards to Nietzsche’s aesthetics, you probably already know his opposition between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, as featured in The Birth of Tragedy. (Jung examines this same opposition in Psychological Types, identifying the Dionysian with inferior Se, bound up with tertiary Feeling [§235], while the Apollonian is “a state of introspection … a state of introversion … intuition” [§236-8].)

But what I want to do in this article is reach back to Nietzsche’s earlier aesthetics, to what could be called his Aesthetics of Night. This aesthetic was crafted by him before he made the opposition between the Dionysian and the Apollonian the pivot of his aesthetical thinking. While the Aesthetics of Night can be seen as a forerunner for his eventual aesthetics in The Birth of Tragedy, the two are also divided by some important differences, and on the whole the Aesthetics of Night seem far more personal to Nietzsche than his eventual aesthetics in The Birth of Tragedy. ...