What would Nietzsche have said about virtual reality? Dionysus and cyberpunk

Abstract

Within Nietzsche's mythological system, the Apolline dream world of the stage action is married to the Dionysian ‘real’ world of the satyr-chorus: what is born is the tragedy as a reflection of real life. However, neither Dionysus nor Apollo suggests a flight from reality into an abstract virtuality. Both are advocates of reality even though they attain the stage of reality only through a paradox: the Dionysian man manages to stay close to reality only through the dreamlike element of the Apolline. Nietzsche might have been against virtual reality (VR) because for him it is the tragic consciousness of the drunken gambler and not the self-righteous enjoyment of the cold technocrat that creates the Dionysian spirit. Nietzsche puts forward ‘reality’ as a transcendent interplay of the Apolline and the Dionysian. Nietzsche might, however, have had sympathies towards another, more interactive form of VR in which a Dionysian quantity constantly challenges too static forms of the Apolline, preventing it from becoming an official world. What is required is, rather, the correct management of a paradox already anticipated by Nietzsche.