Extra-Moral Monstrosity: Nietzsche’s Dionysus and the Moral Value of Transgression

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

This Research Reflection by Nicholas Low, Postdoctoral Fellow, Transcendence & Transformation, Writing and Editing Specialist is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.

Monsters frighten and fascinate because they transgress boundaries and destabilize binaries. Inside/outside; self/other; God/creation: by straddling such boundaries, the monster reveals its discomfiting fragility.

Some monstrous transgressions expand our moral frameworks. But Friedrich Nietzsche saw that transgressing against the human itself led “beyond good and evil,” destroying rather than expanding familiar moralities. We should be careful to distinguish between these types of transgression.

Enlightenment thought organized the world according to strictly demarcated taxonomies: everything must be assigned its proper place. Humans who do not fit these taxonomies were often deemed “monstrous,” strengthening harmful stereotypes and excluding those who diverge from cultural norms.

Michel Foucault showed how such monsters can reveal the contingencies of those purportedly natural taxonomies. By crossing boundaries and mixing disparate realms, monsters show that such systems can be challenged and changed. Foucault examined the figure of the hermaphrodite, an exclusionary epithet from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, as an example. The hermaphrodite was labeled as a monster for transgressing both cultural and “natural” laws, crossing boundaries between male and female.

Foucault’s hermaphrodite is proof that life exceeds the taxonomies with which we organize the world. This particular monster shows that boundaries that appear natural—between races, sexes, and classes— are actually cultural; they are projections that inoculate established norms against contamination, keeping separate what should (purportedly) not be mixed. In transgressing these boundaries, monsters can denaturalize harmful norms, exposing them as human-all-too-human creations.

Monsters like the hermaphrodite thus encourage us to expand our moral frameworks. Labeling the other as monstrous is a harmful exclusion that urges us toward more inclusive norms. By revealing the contingency of our rules and taxonomies, certain monsters call for expanded social and moral formations.

But not all monsters signify such moral expansion. There are instances in which transgressions challenge the very boundaries of the human and thereby denaturalize more fundamental moral suppositions. These transgressions tempt us not just to expand but to go beyond familiar moral frameworks.

Animal studies, science and technology studies, and theorists of entanglement have shown that the boundaries separating humans from non-humans are also open to modification. Humans are permeated by fungi and bacteria, microplastics infiltrate our organs, and electronic devices shape our brain chemistry. Such transgressions against the boundaries of the human denaturalize the perception that the human is insulated against the “outside.” Like exclusionary cultural norms, these boundaries turn out to be cultural projections rather than natural facts.

But does this form of transgression promote moral expansion? We might hope that recognizing the contingency and permeability of boundaries that separate us from the non-human world will empower us to redraw those boundaries and morally expand what we understand by the human. But Nietzsche taught that refiguring these boundaries pushes us beyond familiar moral frameworks, denaturalizing not only exclusionary cultural norms, but some of our most basic moral convictions. Transgression itself is, he argued, morally ambiguous. Nietzsche explored this ambiguity in his Dionysian philosophy.

In Euripides’ Bacchae, written in the fifth century BCE, Dionysus is a monstrous, transgressive god. He freely mixes realms— between male and female, city and wilderness, divine and mortal—and, in doing so, brings rejuvenation to Thebes but also madness: men take on feminine traits, women shred animals and eat them raw, and the king is finally beheaded by his own mother. Dionysus throws the entire social order into chaos, destabilizing dubious cultural norms but also those that prohibit violence and domesticate excess. His monstrousness violently ransacks human social and moral order.

Nietzsche saw Dionysus as summoning us to recognize our entanglement with the non-human world while flaunting the garish violence that permeates that world. This ambiguity worried and excited Nietzsche. We should, he thought, open ourselves to the monstrous mixing of the human with the non-human. But he perceived that doing so denaturalizes our most fundamental ideas about good and evil.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes an encounter in which Dionysus proclaims that he wants to make humans “stronger, more evil, and more profound.” Nietzsche, astonished, reflects that “the gods could learn a thing or two from us humans. We humans are—more humane…” Dionysian transgressions tempt us beyond all “humane” moral imperatives; not all monsters teach moral lessons.

We are right to celebrate the transgressive power of “monsters” to denaturalize the exclusionary boundaries that we draw to preserve the unjust, exclusionary status quo. But Nietzsche saw that transgressions against the boundaries of the human could destroy, rather than expand, humane moral frameworks. In celebrating transgression, we must, therefore, be careful to distinguish which boundaries are being transgressed and what the ethical takeaways of those transgressions are.

Breaking down the barrier between the human and the non-human is alluring, but Nietzsche taught that doing so leads “beyond good and evil.” We should think carefully about how and when we cross this boundary.