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Let us transport ourselves back to the times in which religious life flourished most vigorously. We will find a fundamental conviction prevalent which we no longer share and which has resulted in the closing of the door to religious life once for all so far as we are concerned: this conviction has to do with nature and intercourse with her. In those times, nothing is yet known of nature's laws. Neither for earth nor heaven is there a must. A season, sunshine, rain can come or stay away as it pleases. There is wanting, in particular, all idea of natural causation. If a man rows, it is not the oar that moves the boat, but rowing is a magical ceremony whereby a demon is constrained to move the boat. All illness, death itself, is a consequence of magical influences. In sickness and death, nothing natural is conceived. The whole idea of "natural course" is wanting. The idea dawns first upon the ancient Greeks, that is to say in a very late period of humanity, in the conception of a Moira [fate] ruling over the gods. If any person shoots off a bow, there is always an irrational strength and agency in the act. If the wells suddenly run dry, the first thought is of subterranean demons and their pranks. It must have been the dart of a god beneath whose invisible influence a human being suddenly collapses. In India, the carpenter (according to Lubbock) is in the habit of making devout offerings to his hammer and hatchet. A Brahmin treats the plume with which he writes, a soldier the weapon that he takes into the field, a mason his trowel, a labourer his plough, in the same way. All nature is, in the opinion of religious people, a total of the doings of conscious and willing beings, an immense mass of complex volitions. With all that takes place outside of us no conclusion is permissible that anything will result thus and so, must result thus and so, that we are comparatively calculable and certain in our experiences, that man is the rule, nature the rule- less. This view forms the fundamental conviction that dominates crude, religion-producing, early civilizations. We, contemporary men, feel exactly the opposite: the richer man now feels himself inwardly, the more polyphone the music and the sounding of his soul, the more powerfully does the uniformity of nature impress him. We all, with Goethe, recognize in nature the great means of repose for the soul. We listen to the pendulum stroke of this great clock with longing for rest, for absolute calm and quiescence, as if we could drink in the uniformity of nature and thereby arrive first at the enjoyment of oneself. Formerly it was the reverse: if we carry ourselves back to the periods of crude civilization, or if we contemplate contemporary savages, we will find them most strongly influenced by rule, by tradition. The individual is automatically bound to rule and tradition and moves with the uniformity of a pendulum. To him, nature—the un-comprehended, fearful, mysterious nature—must seem the domain of freedom, of volition, of a higher power, indeed as an ultra-human degree of destiny, as god. Every individual in such periods and circumstances feels that his existence, his happiness, the existence and happiness of the family, the state, the success, or failure of every undertaking, must depend upon these dispositions of nature. Certain natural events must occur at the proper time, and certain others must not occur. How can influence be exercised over this fearful unknown, how can this domain of freedom be brought under subjection? thus he asks himself; thus, he worries: Is there no means to render these powers of nature as a subject to rule and tradition as you are yourself?—The cogitation of the superstitious and magic-deluded man is upon the theme of imposing a law upon nature: and to put it briefly; religious worship is the result of such cogitation. The problem which is present to every man is closely connected with this one: how can the weaker party dictate laws to the stronger, control its acts about the weaker? At first, the most harmless form of influence is recollected, that influence which is acquired when the partiality of anyone has been won. Through beseeching and prayer, through abject humiliation, through obligations to regular gifts...

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For example the very existence of a god. The consensus Gentium and especially Hominum can amount only to an absurdity. Against it, there is no consensus omnium sapientium whatever, on any point, with the exception of which Goethe's verse speaks: “All greatest sages to all-new wisdom must look upon fools. As creatures who are never the better for schools.” Stated without rhyme or metre and adapted to our case: the consensus sapientium is to the effect that the consensus Gentium amounts to an absurdity.

760000-16

Even your best love is only a rapturous allegory. Here we have a factual situation (love or marriage) carrying symbolic meaning for those involved in that situation and for others. This is a case of a particular image (real marriage) that symbolises an idea but also serve as a set of practices or institutions that may inspire one to understand or pursue that ideal. In this case, the ideal is the role of masculine and feminine drives within the total health of both organism and culture. There is a similar use of the concept of allegory.

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Philosophical thinking about the nature of allegory begins early. While music is understood to be directly symbolic of the original unity of things, lyric poetry employs allegories to try the same symbolic work. The same point is made concerning the allegorical nature of myth. The pure musical route, though, is untranslatable or incommunicable, and thus is not anything like an insight into or wisdom concerning the original unity. Thus, while Apollonian images are appearances – and thus, it would seem something like the opposite of knowledge – when they function as allegories, they are in fact an important mechanism of wisdom.

760000-14

An allegory is an image (visual or described in language) that has a certain coherence on its terms (is, for example, a recognisable thing, a character, a narrative) but also carries a symbolic meaning. This is conventional for a few added examples. Allegory can be termed ‘ironic’ when the allegorical vehicle already has a symbolic meaning of its own, but something else is meant. An example would be the use of the image of the heavens. The heavens become a symbol of the absence of providence.

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'The Great' King of Macedonia and famously conqueror of the known world from Greece east to India by the age of 32. Alexander gave Greek culture throughout the ancient world and brought Eastern culture West. When, 'Alexandrian' culture is a reference to wide dissemination, but also the attendant, Socratic turn of cultural scholarship to the mere accumulation of information (symbolised by the library at Alexandria). Thus, what are needed now are a series of 'anti-Alexanders' who concentrate and purify. Alexander is already a caricature of early Greek civilisation, exaggerated and simplified, although still displaying their deep-rooted cruelty ('Homer’s Contest’). The story of Alexander cutting the Gordian knot is a commonly used image.

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Thus, the concept of the agon is also part of 'modern ideas' such as equality, democracy or socialism. Similarly, tyranny is a monopoly of power that collapses power towards an individual—the struggle among agents within a social group. Struggle is also internal; however: since the individual self is formed of a multiplicity of drives, an agonistic 'society' is also found within the self. Thus, for example, the ascetic struggles to repress specific drives, or against enervation.

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The struggle is either among those of equal power, or unequal. The former may yield enhancement (for both parties). One reason struggle may not be productive is that it is not among equals: to war against an inferior is ignoble or shameful, to war against a superior is irreverent. Agon is productive, then, only if it recognises differences, rather than collapses them.

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Cultural advancement happens through conflict; likewise, the history of scientific development and the development of dialectic in philosophy and ultimately of logic ('Socrates and Tragedy'); the best friendship is not an agreement but antagonism: 'let us be enemies too, my friends!', and similarly a good enemy is an asset; man and woman are said to be locked in antagonism; likewise the masculine and feminine, by means of which agon is symbolised erotically; Wisdom 'loves only a warrior' is a metaphorical evocation of agon in philosophical overcoming. The instinct for struggle is not always productive, however, and must be had or discharged in a way that does not threaten. This was the role of a state; in other words, the proper function of the state is to harness the agon.

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For existence is an essential condition for natural selection). There is a fundamental difference among these influences: on the Greek conception (and arguably also in Darwin), strife and contest are positive, generating in Heraclitus a cosmic sense of justice, in Greek culture generally pushing humans towards greatness, and in Darwinian thought, the struggle is a crucial feature of the mechanism of natural selection and the development of species. This struggle for limited resources is not the chief characteristic of the overall 'economy' of life.

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Though one believes oneself absolutely weaned away from religion, the process has yet not been so thorough as to make impossible a feeling of joy at the presence of religious feelings and dispositions without intelligible content, as, for example, in music; and if a philosophy alleges to us the validity of metaphysical hopes, through the peace of soul therein attainable, and also speaks of "the whole true gospel in the look of Raphael's Madonna," we greet such declarations and innuendoes with a welcome smile. The philosopher has here a matter easy of demonstration. He responds with that which he is glad to give, namely a heart that is glad to accept. Hence it is observable how the less reflective free spirits collide only with dogmas but yield readily to the magic.

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The Catholic Church, and before it all ancient education, controlled the whole domain of means through which man was put into certain unordinary moods and withdrawn from the cold calculation of personal advantage and from calm, rational reflection. A church vibrating with deep tones; gloomy, regular, restraining exhortations from a priestly band, who involuntarily communicate their own tension to their congregation and lead them to listen almost with anxiety as if some miracle were in course of preparation; the awesome pile of architecture which, as the house of a god, rears itself vastly into the vague and in all its shadowy nooks inspires fear of its nerve-exciting power—who would care to reduce men to the level of these things if the ideas upon which they rest became extinct? But the results of all these things are nevertheless not thrown away: the inner world of exalted, emotional, prophetic, profoundly repentant, hope-blessed moods has become inborn in man through cultivation. What still exists in his soul was formerly, as he germinated, grew, and bloomed, thoroughly disciplined.

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There is not enough of love and goodness in the world to throw any of it away on conceited people.

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Modern science has as its object as little pain as possible, as long a life as possible—hence an eternal blessedness, but of a very limited kind in comparison with the promises of religion.

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Because it was perceived that an excitement of some kind often made the head clearer and occasioned fortunate inspirations, it was concluded that the utmost excitement would occasion the most fortunate inspirations. Hence the frenzied being was revered as a sage and an oracle giver. A false conclusion lies at the bottom of all this.

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All the visions, fears, exhaustions and delights of the saint are well known symptoms of sickness, which in him, owing to deep rooted religious and psychological delusions, are explained quite differently, that is not as symptoms of sickness.—So, too, perhaps, the demon of Socrates was nothing but a malady of the ear that he explained, in view of his pre-dominant moral theory, in a manner different from what would be thought rational to-day. Nor is the case different with the frenzy and the frenzied speeches of the prophets and of the priests of the oracles. It is always the degree of wisdom, imagination, capacity and morality in the heart and mind of the interpreters that got so much out of them. It is among the greatest feats of the men who are called geniuses and saints that they made interpreters for themselves who, fortunately for mankind, did not understand them.

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Homer is so much at home among his gods and is as a poet so good natured to them that he must have been profoundly irreligious. That which was brought to him by the popular faith—a mean, crude and partially repulsive superstition—he dealt with as freely as the Sculptor with his clay, therefore with the same freedom that Æschylus and Aristophanes evinced and with which in later times the great artists of the renaissance, and also Shakespeare and Goethe, drew their pictures.

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If one have understood how "Sin came into the world," namely through errors of the reason, through which men in their intercourse with one another and even individual men looked upon themselves as much blacker and wickeder than was really the case, one's whole feeling is much lightened and man and the world appear together in such a halo of harmlessness that a sentiment of wellbeing is instilled into one's whole nature. Man, in the midst of nature is as a child left to its own devices. This child indeed dreams a heavy, anxious dream. But when it opens its eyes it finds itself always in paradise.

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In contrast, destruction requires both scholarly or scientific attention and a ‘cruel’ will to overcome. The ability simultaneously and joyfully to affirm all the aspects of Dionysian reality is what is at stake in an eternal recurrence. Therefore, the coexistence of both the creativeness and destructiveness are necessary. Regardless, we should think of Dionysus as an ideal, or personification, of the longing humanity should feel for its growth and overcoming, as well as the longing of life for the health of its highest products. Therefore, Ariadne is the figurehead (and mother) of the humanity that so longs; and, the character of Zarathustra is effectively a portrait of this Dionysian ideal.

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The contraction of the earlier concepts of both Dionysian and Apollonian through a third art drive, which is represented by architecture, allows the following formulation of a new, much broader vision of the Dionysian. Dionysus thus becomes a key figure, a god who tempts or seduces humanity to growth and health. The original ideas of Apollonian and Dionysian, rather than distinct drives, are thought of as moments within the overall creative and destructive cycle of Dionysus. Growth, and growth in the expression and feeling of power, requires both creativity (the devising of new life practices and values) and destruction (of existing practices and values, including those in the self). Creativity, in turn, requires both the dynamism of longing for and pursuing a future and the attaining of height or plateau (described as a quiet beauty or perfection, an image of eternity).

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The Dionysian is one of the three cultural drives in The Birth of Tragedy, along with the Apollonian and Socratic. The Dionysian is there associated with intoxication, ecstasy (being- outside-of-oneself), and thus with cultural productions such as lyric poetry and many aspects of music (especially harmony). This artistic drive implicitly has a metaphysics (i.e. a way of understanding the nature of reality). The coming together of Dionysian and Apollonian drives into a singular cultural production is the account of the nature of ancient tragedy.

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Dionysius is a Greek deity. It is employed with many features of the myths and cultural practices associated with Dionysus, either as anthropological reference points, or as symbols: the association with grapevines, wine and intoxication; the association both with harvest and with spring, and thus both with plenty and with sexuality; the fact that the tragedy and comedy competition was held at a festival to Dionysus; that Dionysus’ mortal mother made Zeus reveal his full divinity, and was killed by Zeus’ lightning; that as a child he was hidden and protected in a cave by nymphs; that, in some tales, he is torn apart but then reborn; that Dionysus marries Ariadne, after she was abandoned by Theseus; that he is represented both as kind and generous, though also cruel to his enemies; his association with lions and dolphins, as well as minor mythic creatures such as satyrs or nymphs; the reported savagely destructive behaviour of devotees during certain religious rites; and in general the association of Dionysus with joy and with release from labour or care.

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Similarly, human beings in the modern period are called homo pemphigus because they can consume everything, indiscriminately, without benefit and decision. In contrast, the ‘coming philosophers will have ‘teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible’, meaning will be able to deal with – and indeed form a new mode of life out of – dangerous truths. Excrement, the product of digestion, is a strong metaphor also. Pessimists only view the world’s ‘backside’. Writing is, therefore, a necessity, like having to relieve oneself – which is a joking elaboration of the idea that ‘my writings speak only of my overcoming’. Third, to consume or digest means to make something one’s own, and thereby have power over something.

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Certain daily life practices affect the spiritual domain of beliefs and ideas. Second, digestion is a metaphor for the ability of an individual or group to live with specific facts or conditions, which is about those who find life indigestible and therefore want its end.

750000-11

Courage and bravery are an ancient virtue that we need to appreciate and revalue. Courage is the ability to stick firmly to life and the real, and not to borrow one’s beliefs and values from imaginary other worlds or modes of being. Likewise, it is courage not to manufacture one’s beliefs and values by a fearful negation of becoming, uncertainty and suffering, which are the conditions of life and the real. Such courage in the type is represented by Epictetus (the Stoic philosopher who had been a slave) and contrasts it with the Christian slave characterized by faith and hope in a different life. A few sections later, courage is proclaimed as a key ‘future virtue’: the arrogance to understand and not be afraid of the world. This courage is not dissimilar to generosity. Thus, the courageous type of thinker who is aware of the ‘cruelty of the intellectual conscience’, which does not simplify but insists upon multiplicity and perspective. Such courage is a form of self-overcoming. Zarathustra talks about those among his disciples who are too cowardly to change the direction of their willing and thus soon abandon him in favour of their contentment.

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A conviction is a belief, held stubbornly to be 'unqualified truth'. There is a notion developed by the dangers and origin of conviction that one must be a 'noble traitor' to one's convictions. Convictions are opposed by both the genius of science and justice. Therefore, those who embrace science and justice are considered as the wanderer, a thinker who has no home or 'destination' (both understood as convictions).

750000-09

Convalescence means the course of suffering and surviving from illnesses caused by physiologies or cultures. The sickness led from cultures, in a sense, is by no means entirely metaphorical - that is ideas, beliefs, values, or modes of life that one has inherited and with which he or she is surrounded. When we talk about ‘convalescence’, it usually links to this second kind of illness, and its overcoming, in mind. Convalescence as an overcoming is thus contrasted to comforting as a relieving of suffering. Convalescence is also part of the cycle of creative states, linked to exhaustion and the need for repose.

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Control and Self-control denote reperching, among others. The idea of having control, especially over the self, is an essential source of the feeling of power. This can be in an ascetic sense, involving subordination of the self to an impossible or metaphysical ideal. Or it can be in the spirit of a productive subtlety in the war against oneself (self-overcoming). Self-control can also be associated with courage or strength.

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Whatever a continuum is that is given initially (sensation, nervous stimulation, etc.) is characterized by continuous flow, and not by discrete and stable qualities and quantities. In other words, only things are not given initially, but our cognition of them is a product of the action of perception (interpretation). Likewise, our analysis of causes and effects must first separate and make discrete that which is the cause and that which is an effect, from out of a continuum.

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‘Contentment’ is in the sense of a cosy and safe relationship with one’s existing mode of life. Examples would include the contentment [Behave] with one’s limitations and narrow-mindedness found in the ‘cultural philistine’, and the ‘wretched contentment’ of the ‘last humans’ described by Zarathustra. On the other hand, contentment as an occasional refuge for those with difficult tasks or who suffer. Therefore, the attitude to such the view depends upon whether this contentment is an end or an instrument within the duty of the furtherance of life.

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Certain spirits are merely reactive – whose values are always generated from out of a hatred of the values of others, or whose highest state is to serve – the vita contemplative can and should be a kind of action - ‘thinking well is an action’. This action may involve leadership or creativity in the realm of ideas or instances of self-overcoming. It is not merely renunciation. Luther’s Reformation was a hatred of contemplative types. Precisely because of this rejection, the Reformation was a historical disaster. In the accelerating tempo of modern life, contemplation is virtually impossible. The task here, then, is to rescue contemplation from the Church, to revalue the concept away from traditional forms, for example making it contemplation on the closest things.

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Badness has not for its object the infliction of pain upon others but simply our own satisfaction as, for instance, in the case of thirst for vengeance or of nerve excitation. Every act of teasing shows what pleasure is caused by the display of our power over others and what feelings of delight are experienced in the sense of domination.

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We do not blame nature when she sends a thunderstorm and makes us wet: why then do we term the man who inflicts injury immoral? Because in the latter case we assume a voluntary, ruling, free will, and in the former necessity. But this distinction is a delusion. Moreover, even the intentional infliction of injury is not, in all circumstances termed immoral. Thus, we kill a fly intentionally without thinking very much about it, simply because its buzzing about is disagreeable; and we punish a criminal and inflict pain upon him in order to protect ourselves and society. In the first case it is the individual who, for the sake of preserving himself or in order to spare himself pain, does injury with design: in the second case, it is the state. All ethic deems intentional infliction of injury justified by necessity; that is when it is a matter of self-preservation. But these two points of view are sufficient to explain all bad acts done by man to men. It is desired to obtain pleasure or avoid pain. In any sense, it is a question, always, of self-preservation. Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does right: that is, does what seems to him good (advantageous) according to the degree of advancement his intellect has attained, which is always the measure of his rational capacity.

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Care must be taken, in the contemplation of earlier ages, that there be no falling into unjust scornfulness. The injustice in slavery, the cruelty in the subjugation of persons and peoples must not be estimated by our standard. For in that period the instinct of justice was not so highly developed. Who dare reproach the Genoese Calvin for burning the physician Servetus at the stake? It was a proceeding growing out of his convictions. And the Inquisition, too, had its justification. The only thing is that the prevailing views were false and led to those proceedings which seem so cruel to us, simply because such views have become foreign to us. Besides, what is the burning alive of one individual compared with eternal hell pains for everybody else? And yet this idea then had hold of all the world without in the least vitiating, with its frightfulness, the other idea of a god. Even we nowadays are hard and merciless to political revolutionists, but that is because we are in the habit of believing the state a necessity, and hence the cruelty of the proceeding is not so much understood as in the other cases where the points of view are repudiated. The cruelty to animals shown by children and Italians is due to the same misunderstanding. The animal, owing to the exigencies of the church catechism, is placed too far below the level of mankind.—Much, too, that is frightful and inhuman in history, and which is almost incredible, is rendered less atrocious by the reflection that the one who commands and the one who executes are different persons. The former does not witness the performance and hence it makes no strong impression on him. The latter obeys a superior and hence feels no responsibility. Most princes and military chieftains appear, through lack of true perception, cruel and hard without really being so.—Egoism is not bad because the idea of the "neighbour"—the word is of Christian origin and does not correspond to truth—is very weak in us, and we feel ourselves, in regard to him, as free from responsibility as if plants and stones were involved. That another is in suffering must be learned and it can never be learned.

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Certain privileges and gateway of mature age, must be withdrawn from the contemplation of youth for its own advantage: relations which many divinities were busy in preserving and sanctifying, images of which divinities were duly placed in marital chambers as guardians. (In Turkish such an apartment is termed a harem or holy thing, the same word also designating the vestibule of a mosque). So, too, Kingship is regarded as a centre from which power and brilliance stream forth, as a mystery to the subjects, impregnated with secrecy and shame, sentiments still quite operative among peoples who in other respects are without any shame at all. So, too, is the whole world of inward states, the so-called "soul," even now, for all non-philosophical persons, a "mystery," and during countless ages it was looked upon as a something of divine origin, in direct communion with deity. It is, therefore, an adytum and occasions shame.

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In the second phase, we find a sceptical or even damning view taken. The age of art is over, once and for all—art and science in a different opposition and order of priority. Art is not a route to insight or knowledge, and indeed depends upon a certain ignorance or positing of metaphysical falsehoods.

745000-19

True art is both token and saviour of authentically unified culture – by way of discovery and employment of the myths that unify a people. Art is also the destination of post-Enlightenment critical science. In the first phase, everything revolves around tragedy, that art is the pinnacle of ancient Greek culture, as a mechanism for achieving insight into psychological and metaphysical realities and sees as the means of rehabilitation of modernity. Analyses of other genres, such as lyric poetry, epic, or modern opera, are all treated as contributing to the understanding of tragedy. Likewise, if art in modernity deviates from the Greek conception, it serves only as a narcotic, at best a temporary relief from the fragmentation of culture and art forms. This duality of real (Greek or tragic) art – and the broader culture that goes with it – and degenerate, modern art, is a central theme.

745000-18

Art can mean anything ‘made’, and not just the ‘fine’ arts. The category of ‘art’ covers the visual and musical arts most centrally, but also includes literature. The concept of art is also used in a broader sense, beyond its meaning as a particular cultural practice: thus, the necessary lies that are discussed in ‘On Truth and Lies’, and much later life’s healing instinct, are both termed ‘artistic’.

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Aristotle accounts the relation of tragedy to the chorus in ‘Greek Music Drama’; likewise, with the grand idea of the catharsis of pity and fear. Aristotle is a product of the decay of Greek culture: thus, despite his careful consideration of earlier philosophers, he has no real understanding of their greatness; likewise, Aristotle as both ‘powerful and harmless’ is exemplary of the man of science. Other themes in Aristotle include the account of time in terms of number and the notion of energeia.

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In Greek mythology, Ariadne was the Cretan princess who aids the Athenian Theseus in defeating the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Ariadne was the subtlety to Theseus’ destructive power. According to some versions of the story, Theseus promises to marry her but then abandons her on Naxos. There, the God Dionysus becomes her lover. Theseus abandoning Ariadne is humanity leaving its possibilities of growth and health, in favour of the turn towards European modernity; and an abandonment of the mythic feminine in favour of a misunderstood masculine. Ariadne thus stands as a representative of the specific greatness of Greek humanity, desirous of the Dionysian. The poem, ‘Ariadne’s Lament’, portrays this desire for the Dionysian. We moderns may have more scientific knowledge, but it has not made us more exceptional beings, quite the contrary – our subtle understanding. Thus, only in giving up a narrow conception of the utility of knowledge, of progress as preservation and the alleviation of suffering, and other such ‘heroic’ modern achievements, will growth and beauty of the human be possible again.

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Later, the notion of value becomes fundamental. If one rigorously rejects the hypothesis of a world, God or life that is somehow not here but ‘beyond’, then ultimately one also must rigorously refuse the notion of appearance itself. Appearance only makes sense to something ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ it. The idea of appearance becomes transformed into the notion of perspective or interpretation. A world understood as will to power is neither something in-itself nor is its appearance but is perspectival and evaluating. The building blocks of nature and very much, including the human, are perspectives or values – in other words, relations of will to power.

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Human feeling is from the ground up, a simplification of the world so that it appears as intelligible, predictable, available for human beings to use. The ultimate motive behind this is utility: without such interpretations, human beings could not survive. Moreover, different peoples interpret things according to their specific situation (e.g. climate, resources, their enemies). Thus, differences in understanding the world arise, in terms of what is valued (and what is approved or disapproved of morally).

745000-13

Beauty is a quality of the ideal (e.g. the gods) that a human value sets for itself; thus, beauty is a human measure, ‘given’ to the world, by means of which it affirms or even worships itself. Thus, the metaphor of everything being a mirror to one’s beauty. The spectacle of ascending life is beautiful; degeneration is ugliness. As again in Plato, an attraction in itself is not the goal or endpoint, but instead either a sign of health or that which ‘lures’ one towards further creation (the soft voice of beauty and wisdom and life personified). Thus, for example, experiences are the seductress, teasing with beauty; or beauty is a culture’s imagined happiness; likewise, the beauty of the over human. Such disinterest is both physiologically impossible (or at least unlikely), but more importantly also a perverse conception of what is beautiful (‘immaculate perception’). Instead, what is given up for the sake of beauty is only the ‘hero’s will’, and this leads not to disinterest, but ‘godlike’ (rather than heroic) ‘desires’.

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Similarly, beauty arises under constraint or discipline. All these instances are further evolutions of the original idea of Apollonian beauty as healing, but also as allegory a form of indirect wisdom. For further discussion, see the entry under feminine. However, the beautiful can also be ‘wild’ (e.g. the ‘beast-of-prey beauty’ of the sea; the beauty of wickedness; or noble passion). This reiterates the lack of a profound contrast to the sublime as conventionally thought, the fact the calmness of protective beauty is a symbol and not a straight-forward property so that beauty is only part of a concept of life, which also involves creation and destruction. Thus, for example, ‘struggle and inequality are present even in beauty’.

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Beauty has a decisive relationship to knowledge. Nothing is beautiful, but only because it is known; likewise, the origin of beauty may be ugliness coming to an awareness of itself. Because knowledge always involves projection of human values onto its object, and could only be knowledge of being, it is thus an illusion. The portrayal of expertise, as far as it must involve a metaphysical error, is beautiful; and the progress of knowledge is the transformation of the ugly into the beautiful. Philosophical reflection in terms of procreation and childbirth: the philosopher is pregnant with wisdom and requires a beautiful soul (Socrates) as midwife to bring this wisdom to term. The lover does not pursue beauty per se but gives birth ‘in beauty’. Thus, for example, history must be ‘overcome’ and ‘bathed in beauty’ for genius to be born. Beauty urges one towards procreation (either sexually or spiritually). The influence of Plato also contributes to the consideration of thinking of beauty as feminine. This feminine beauty means protective, preserving, approximating to being (i.e. relatively unchanging). The feminine and masculine become moments in an account of creativity.

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Beauty is both a narrower and a more comprehensive concept: more restricted, because not all art has been beautiful as its aim or effect; more extensive, because not all that is met as beautiful is art. Beauty plays a role as the healing quality of the Apollonian illusion, which both protects us from but also allows some access to wisdom concerning the true nature of the world. This also means that the primary distinction among aesthetic categories is not between beauty and sublimity (Homeric epic is a relevant category within the Apollonian), but between both together and a third: the Dionysian effect that rightly belongs to music. Beauty is a late innovation, masking the shudder in the presence of the divine.

745000-09

Barrel organ is a mechanical musical instrument and performs as a metaphor: music, repetition and without soul, is a culture without life, or something merely repeat without genuine understanding.

745000-08

Brutality also means lacking in any authentic culture, mainly where the idea is that such culture has been lost or undone. The history of culture could be written as the turning inwards, onto oneself, of the instincts of domination of the barbarian. The democratic mixing of races and cultures in Europe has led to a ‘semi-barbarism’, but this provides it also with its ‘historical sense’. Every higher culture begins because of the dominance of a ‘barbarian’ class, who are more natural, whole, animal and without impaired instincts.

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Happy because unconcerned with past or future, or not stricken by heavy thoughts (here, chewing the cud means focused in the present moment, not prone to nausea). The cow is also patient and seeing, and thus a metaphor for reading and interpretation as an art lost in modernity; rumination means to consider and contemplate without hurry. The cow is trusting, not slighted by distance or change; warm and reassuring like a faithful companion. The cow is an essential religious symbol in many Eastern religions: the ‘voluntary beggar’, learning contentment from a herd of cows, is a portrait of Jesus as a displaced and misunderstood Eastern sage.

745000-06

‘Contentment’ is in the sense of a cosy and safe relationship with one’s existing mode of life. Examples would include the contentment [Behave] with one’s limitations and narrow-mindedness found in the ‘cultural philistine’, and the ‘wretched contentment’ of the ‘last humans’ described by Zarathustra. On the other hand, contentment as an occasional refuge for those with difficult tasks or who suffer. Therefore, the attitude to such the view depends upon whether this contentment is an end or an instrument within the duty of the furtherance of life.

745000-05

A conviction is a belief, held stubbornly to be 'unqualified truth'. There is a notion developed by the dangers and origin of conviction that one must be a 'noble traitor' to one's convictions. Convictions are opposed by both the genius of science and justice. Therefore, those who embrace science and justice are considered as the wanderer, a thinker who has no home or 'destination' (both understood as convictions).

745000-04

Convalescence means the course of suffering and surviving from illnesses caused by physiologies or cultures. The sickness led from cultures, in a sense, is by no means entirely metaphorical - that is ideas, beliefs, values, or modes of life that one has inherited and with which he or she is surrounded. When we talk about ‘convalescence’, it usually links to this second kind of illness, and its overcoming, in mind. Convalescence as an overcoming is thus contrasted to comforting as a relieving of suffering. Convalescence is also part of the cycle of creative states, linked to exhaustion and the need for repose.

745000-03

Courage and bravery are an ancient virtue that we need to appreciate and revalue. Courage is the ability to stick firmly to life and the real, and not to borrow one’s beliefs and values from imaginary other worlds or modes of being. Likewise, it is courage not to manufacture one’s beliefs and values by a fearful negation of becoming, uncertainty and suffering, which are the conditions of life and the real. Such courage in the type is represented by Epictetus (the Stoic philosopher who had been a slave) and contrasts it with the Christian slave characterized by faith and hope in a different life. A few sections later, courage is proclaimed as a key ‘future virtue’: the arrogance to understand and not be afraid of the world. This courage is not dissimilar to generosity. Thus, the courageous type of thinker who is aware of the ‘cruelty of the intellectual conscience’, which does not simplify but insists upon multiplicity and perspective. Such courage is a form of self-overcoming. Zarathustra talks about those among his disciples who are too cowardly to change the direction of their willing and thus soon abandon him in favour of their contentment. Likewise, it is Zarathustra’s courage that tells the Spirit of Gravity to get off his back.

745000-02

Whatever a continuum is that is given initially (sensation, nervous stimulation, etc.) is characterized by continuous flow, and not by discrete and stable qualities and quantities. In other words, only things are not given initially, but our cognition of them is a product of the action of perception (interpretation). Likewise, our analysis of causes and effects must first separate and make discrete that which is the cause and that which is an effect, from out of a continuum.

745000-01

Control and Self-control denote reperching, among others. The idea of having control, especially over the self, is an essential source of the feeling of power. This can be in an ascetic sense, involving subordination of the self to an impossible or metaphysical ideal. Or it can be in the spirit of a productive subtlety in the war against oneself (self-overcoming). Self-control can also be associated with courage or strength.