  As to his philosophy of art as such, Césaire’s views follow consistently from his surrealist poetics and eventually converge with his friend Senghor’s. Césaire’s notion of the primordial role that should be played by the Dionysian in art versus the Apollonian. These are categories that Césaire and Senghor adopted from Nietzsche’s philosophy (Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy) to express the opposition between the primal, obscure force of life considered as an organic whole (the Dionysian) on the one hand, and on the other hand the plastic beauty or the form which brings into light the individuality of the object (the Apollonian): the Dionysian speaks to our emotion while the Apollonian speaks to our intellectuality. Césaire evokes such a contrast when he states that: “The poetically beautiful is not merely beauty of expression or muscular euphoria. A too Apollonian or gymnastic idea of beauty paradoxically runs the risk of skinning, stuffing, and hardening it.” This is the seventh and final thesis of the propositions summarizing his views about Poetry and  Knowledge[14] and it is in perfect resonance with Senghor’s view of African art as the language of the ontology of vital forces.