Nietzsche and the Bad Boy

The question of why the asshole always gets all the women has puzzled philosopher for a long time. I imagine they have a bit of a personal stake in the game. It could be that some woman somewhere once said, “Damn, that philosopher is really hot,” but verifiable accounts of that sort of thing are hard to find.  Friedrich Nietzsche gave some thought to this problem, and it may have been because he was a bitter guy about whom no woman ever claimed such a thing. He had an incredible mustache, to be sure, but I don’t think it was enough. He proposed to Louise von Salomé three times, and she said no all three times. That had to sting a bit. Louise was a Russian psychoanalyst and a friend of Sigmund Freud so I think Nietzsche dodged a bullet there, but I’m sure he didn’t see it that way. Some say the reason he went a bit barmy in his last year and a half of his life was that he threw his arms around a horse’s neck in a tender and passionate appeal to its owner to stop beating it, the kind of sensitive act you’d think would drive women crazy. It didn’t.

Nietzsche said that we all feel a tension between the Apollonian side of things and the Dionysian side of things. Apollo is all about order, harmony and sobriety while Dionysus is all about chaos, passion and intoxication. In stories, and in life, presumably, heroes are Apollonian, always trying to return the plot back to some predictable course where girls are girls and men are men. Villains, on the other hand, are Dionysian, always trying to upend this relatively sane trajectory and leave us sitting in the alleyway behind the bar scratching our heads and wondering if we said anything stupid.

Hot guys have more of the later. The fellow on the riding lawnmower listening to Chopin on a pair of Bose he got at Sam’s club while picking up a rotisserie chicken for supper has more of the former.

The big question is, why don’t women prefer chicken, nice lawns and piano music over drunk guys in sleeveless tees? Well, first, they don’t always. Something in them still wants Apollo, which is why the hot guy is hotter still if he has a puppy. But, that said, they still won’t go for the nice lawn or, if they do, they still don’t have much respect for the guy who mowed it.

The problem lies with our 21^st century inability to grasp nuance. Here’s what Nietzsche wrote in 1872. “To reach a closer understanding of both these tendencies (Apollo and Dionysus), let us begin by viewing them as the separate art realms of dream and intoxication, two physiological phenomena standing toward one another in much the same relationship as the Apollonian and Dionysian..”  In 1972 ZZ Top wrote, “Beer drinkers, hell raisers, yeah. Well, baby, don’t you want to come with me?” It’s probably safe to say that Nietzsche didn’t have this in mind, even when he talked about intoxication. Intoxication is what happened when you listened to Wagner and let it do to you what it was intended to. As a side note, Nietzsche hit on Wagner’s wife, too. Still no luck.

Here’s the thing. Apollo and Dionysus were two faces of the same person with a lot of variations that show up in a lot of ways. At both ends were mythical characters. One was  stuck in utopian dream that would never come true. The other lived in a chaotic world of unbridled emotion. Neither really exists. Nietzsche was clear on this point. But we think they do. And we go looking for them.

So when we think of heroes, we think of Batman, Katniss Everdeen, and Rocky. When we think of antiheroes we think of the Joker, Mad Max and Mitch St. John. There is nothing in between, and, because there is nothing in between, Apollo and Dionysus get mixed up in our heads. Our heroes and our antiheroes are the same people. Is the meth-cooking chemistry teacher of Breaking Bad someone to admire or to despise? We don’t really know. The result? In order to have any identity at all, we abandon the struggle to manage the two and, instead, try to be both at the same time or, perhaps, entirely one or the other at one time or another. That’s impossible, at least in Nietzsche’s model, because this is a hypothetical construct meant to explain complicated people and the tension they feel between the wild side and the safe side. They don’t really exist. But somehow, we really think there are bad boys. Given that the chicken-buying-Chopin-listening lawn mower is the only alternative to the really bad ass bad boy, pathetic that he is, many think it’s best to opt for Dionysus.  This is why teenage boys ride Ninjas and middle aged golfers wear short pants and drink too much. They really think they can get to anti-hero status by doing these things.

You can’t. So better to go home after a solid days work during which we put back at least as much as we’ve taken out of the world, listen to Wagner, cut loose with a glass of wine, and feel something honest and human.