#  Nietzsche’s Dionysianism and the Re-Imagining of Human Existence 

 



 This research project is broadly focused on the thought and experience of Friedrich Nietzsche, and how his legacy shapes contemporary efforts to understand religion and humanity in new ways.

 Though Nietzsche is often characterized as an atheistic critic of religion, it is more accurate to read his works as a thoroughgoing effort to reinvent religion in response to the particular challenges facing human life in the modern west. The project focuses especially on Nietzsche’s Dionysianism, which he offers as both an alternative and antidote to traditional philosophical and religious forms of human life and being.

 Nietzsche’s Dionysianism can offer resources for imagining new forms of human existence. This can be explored specifically with respect to the problem of Nietzsche’s madness, which he himself linked to Dionysus, and which might be interpreted as an important consequence of his dealings with Dionysian divinity. For Nietzsche, Dionysian divinity portends a profoundly transformed experience of reality, especially with respect to the self, to language, and to the body. Investigating Nietzsche’s Dionysianism is therefore significant to theories of subjectivity and consciousness, humanity’s relationship to the natural world, connections between aesthetics and spirituality, and to efforts to reimagine the human body itself.

 In other words, this line of research has important consequences for various contemporary scholarly conversations in philosophy of religion, but also for efforts both inside and outside the academy to imagine transformations in the ways that human beings experience embodiment, divinity, and life itself.

 Nietzsche’s example may also serve as an invitation to interrogate the role of philosophy of religion within the study of religion, as well as the broader structure of the academy. Philosophy of religion has typically been heavily focused on critical discursive analysis, which privileges negation and reduction in its descriptions and valuations of human life and existence. However, philosophy of religion can also provide a venue for positive imaginings and visions of human transformation and possibility beyond the academically-sanctioned purview of the rational, social, and empirical.

 *Project point person: [Nicholas Low](/people/nicholas-low), Postdoctoral Fellow, Philosophy of Religion*