This book is the first study to place Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy in the context of his overall thought. It interprets Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy as a development of his earliest thinking as it is laid out in his school dissertation on Theognis of Megara. As author Carlos A. Segovia contends, the key figure in this early thinking is not Dionysus but Apollo, an earthly Apollo who, despite his partial erasure after The Birth of Tragedy, haunts Nietzsche in his later writings, including his unpublished fragments and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The author also shows that retrieving Nietzsche’s pre-Dionysian Apollo can help us move beyond the theoretical limits assumed by today’s two major philosophical trends, speculative realism and new materialism, thus stressing Nietzsche’s untimeliness from a strictly contemporary standpoint.
This book is essential reading for all interested in Nietzsche and the birth of contemporary philosophy, including graduate students and researchers.
“Carlos Segovia pleads his case for a reappraisal of Apollo in the corpus of Nietzsche, but he also leverages his case for an intriguing fresh look at the importance of Nietzsche’s thought for contemporary strategies of earth affirmation and reclamation. This study is well-documented, well-reasoned and reliable in its close readings of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and the host of sources both ancient and modern that contributed to The Birth of Tragedy and Nietzsche’s Dionysus-related writing. Segovia covers surprisingly vast ground in this small treatise—readers from numerous traditions will be pleased!” —Adrian Del Caro, Professor of German Studies, University of Tennessee; General Editor, The Complete Works
of Friedrich Nietzsche, Stanford University Press
By:
Carlos A. Segovia
Imprint: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Country of Publication: Switzerland
Edition: New edition
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 396g
ISBN: 9783034355469
ISBN 10: 3034355467
Pages: 202
Publication Date: 29 January 2026
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Abbreviations — Figures, Text Boxes, and Tables — 1. Introduction — Nietzsche, Apollo, and the Earth — 2. Swimming at the Confluence of Several Rivers — Philology, Aesthetics, Cultural History, Philosophy, and Mythology in the Young Nietzsche — 3. Unearthing Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo—Apollo and the Earth in the Elegies of Theognis of Megara and Their Hesiodic Subtext — 4. The Making of Nietzsche’s Dionysian Worldview—Or, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Tragedy and His Re-conceptualization of Apollo — 5. The Twilight-Happy Whose Souls Are Lured by Flutes to Every Maelstrom—Nietzsche’s Dionysian Apotheosis and the Erasure of Apollo in the Third Part of Zarathustra — 6. Leaning against the Earth Weary of Long Journeys and Uncertain Seas: Nietzsche’s Apollonian Truce and the Symbolic Elusion of Dionysus in the Fourth Part of Zarathustra — 7. Of Vines, Gorgons, and Shields: Nietzsche’s 1883 Fragment on Athena and Dionysus-Letters in Apocalyptic Perspective — 8. Of Paradises, Infernos, Limbos, and the Otherwise: Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo beyond Deconstruction, Post-Structuralism, Speculative Realism, and New Materialism — 9. Appendix: Figures (diagrams) — Bibliography — Index
Carlos A. Segovia is an independent British-Spanish philosopher working on the contemporary debate on contingency and worlding. Among his publications are Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide (2023) and Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings (2024).
