The both/and of creativity, of will to power, continuously dances this fine and dangerous line between tradition and madness, or between chaos and the repetition of the same. The same is true of Nietzsche's philosophical enterprise itself, or his attempt to affirm and reveal the unique, singular, and perspectival conditions for the possibility of identifiable habits, forces, values, and “knowledge.” This whole enterprise risks the possibility of either repeating venerated customs and philosophical traditions, or collapsing into the arbitrariness of relativism. One must, Nietzsche believes, both create new ideas and affirm the tradition. This is the dangerous both/and Nietzsche recognizes: "He who strays from tradition becomes a sacrifice to the extraordinary; he who remains in tradition is its slave. Destruction follows in any case." To avoid this destruction requires the paradox of creativity wherein we have both chaos in ourselves, a chaos which we creatively affirm without forsaking order, “knowledge,” and form; and we have the creator in ourselves who creates this order without disenfranchising chaos, and thus without succumbing to the repetition of the same. To extend Nietzsche's metaphor, therefore, "one must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star," yet this creative birth risks resulting not in a "dancing star," but collapsing either into a "black hole" of forever repeating the same, or exploding into a fiery "supernova" of madness.
Jeffrey A. Bell, Philosophizing the double-bind: Deleuze reads Nietzsche, Philosophy Today 39 (4):371-390 (1995)
