The Most Influential Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche
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will to life, enjoying its own inexhaustibility in the sacrifice of its highest types,—that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I divined as the bridge to a psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to get rid of terror and pity, not to purify from a dangerous passion by its vehement discharge (it was thus that Aristotle misunderstood it); but, beyond terror and pity, to realise in fact the eternal delight of becoming, that delight which even involves in itself the joy of annihilating!27 In this sense I have the right to understand myself to be the first tragic philosopher—that is, the utmost antithesis and antipode to a pessimistic philosopher. Prior to myself there is no such translation of the Dionysian into the philosophic pathos: there lacks the tragic wisdom,—I have sought in vain for an indication thereof even among the great Greeks of philosophy, the thinkers of the two centuries before Socrates. A doubt still possessed me as touching Heraclitus, in whose proximity I in general begin to feel warmer and better than anywhere else. The affirmation of transiency and annihilation, to wit the decisive factor in a Dionysian philosophy, the yea-saying to antithesis and war, to becoming, with radical rejection even of the concept 'being,'—that I must directly acknowledge as, of all thinking hitherto, the nearest to my own. The doctrine of 'eternal recurrence,' that is, of the unconditioned and infinitely repeated cycle of all things—this doctrine of Zarathustra's might after all have been already taught by Heraclitus. At any rate the portico28 which inherited well-nigh all its fundamental conceptions from Heraclitus, shows traces thereof."
4.
"In this book speaks a prodigious hope. In fine, I see no reason whatever for taking back my hope of a Dionysian future for music. Let us cast a glance a century ahead, let us suppose my assault upon two millenniums of anti-nature and man-vilification succeeds! That new party of life which will take in hand the greatest of all tasks, the upbreeding of mankind to something higher,—add thereto the relentless annihilation of all things degenerating and parasitic, will again make possible on earth that too-much of life, from which there also must needs grow again the Dionysian state. I promise a tragic age: the highest art in the yea-saying to life, tragedy, will be born anew, when mankind have behind them the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars, without suffering therefrom. A psychologist might still add that what I heard in my younger years in Wagnerian music had in general naught to do with Wagner; that when I described Wagnerian music I described what I had heard, that I had instinctively to translate and transfigure all into the new spirit which I bore within myself...."
1. And shall not I, by mightiest desire, In living shape that sole fair form acquire? SWANWICK, trans. of Faust.
2. My friend, just this is poet's task: His dreams to read and to unmask. Trust me, illusion's truths thrice sealed In dream to man will be revealed. All verse-craft and poetisation Is but soothdream interpretation.
3. Cf. World and Will as Idea, 1. 455 ff., trans, by Haldane and Kemp.
4. Te bow in the dust, oh millions? Thy maker, mortal, dost divine? Cf. Schiller's "Hymn to Joy"; and Beethoven, Ninth Symphony.—TR.
5. World as Will and Idea, I. 323, 4th ed. of Haldane and Kemp's translation. Quoted with a few changes.
6. Zuschauer.
7. Schauer.
8. Anschaulicher.
9. Anschaut.
10. An eternal sea, A weaving, flowing, Life, all glowing. Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor.—TR.
11. "Here sit I, forming mankind In my image, A race resembling me,— To sorrow and to weep, To taste, to hold, to enjoy, And not have need of thee, As I!" (Translation in Hæckel's History of the Evolution of Man.)
12. Der Frevel.
13. Die Sünde.
14. We do not measure with such care: Woman in thousand steps is there, But howsoe'er she hasten may. Man in one leap has cleared the way. Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor.—TR.
15. This is thy world, and what a world!—Faust.
16. See article by Mr. Arthur Symons in The Academy, 30th August 1902.
17. Die mächtige Faust.—Cf. Faust, Chorus of Spirits.—TR.
18. Woe! Woe! Thou hast it destroyed, The beautiful world; With powerful fist; In ruin 'tis hurled! Faust, trans. of Bayard Taylor.—TR.
19. In me thou seest its benefit,— To him who hath but little wit, Through parables to tell the truth.
20. Scheinbild = ειδολον.—TR.
21. Cf. World and Will as Idea, I. p. 339, trans. by Haldane and Kemp.
22. That is "the will" as understood by Schopenhauer.—TR.
23. Cf. Introduction, p. 14.
24. Essay on Elegiac Poetry.—TR.
25. See Faust, Part 1.1. 965—TR.
26. In the sea of pleasure's Billowing roll, In the ether-waves Knelling and toll, In the world-breath's Wavering whole— To drown in, go down in— Lost in swoon—greatest boon!
27. Mr. Common's translation, pp. 227-28.
28. Greek: στοά.
The Antichrist
Translator: H. L. Mencken