Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume TwoNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume Two
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy, Ancient
That impulse towards the formation of metaphors, mat fundamental
impulse of man, which we cannot reason away for one moment--for thereby
we should reason away man himself--is in truth not defeated nor even
subdued by the fact that out of its evaporated products, the ideas, a
regular and rigid new world has been built as a stronghold for it. This
impulse seeks for itself a new realm of action and another river-bed,
and finds it in _Mythos_ and more generally in _Art._ This impulse
constantly confuses the rubrics and cells of the ideas, by putting
up new figures of speech, metaphors, metonymies; it constantly shows
its passionate longing for shaping the existing world of waking man
as motley, irregular, inconsequentially incoherent, attractive, and
eternally new as the world of dreams is. For indeed, waking man _per
se_ is only clear about his being awake through the rigid and orderly
woof of ideas, and it is for this very reason that he sometimes comes
to believe that he was dreaming when that woof of ideas has for a
moment been torn by Art. Pascal is quite right, when he asserts, that
if the same dream came to us every night we should be just as much
occupied by it as by the things which we see every day; to quote his
words, "If an artisan were certain that he would dream every night
for fully twelve hours that he was a king, I believe that he would
be just as happy as a king who dreams every night for twelve hours
that he is an artisan." The wide-awake day of a people mystically
excitable, let us say of the earlier Greeks, is in fact through the
continually-working wonder, which the mythos presupposes, more akin to
the dream than to the day of the thinker sobered by science. If every
tree may at some time talk as a nymph, or a god under the disguise of
a bull, carry away virgins, if the goddess Athene herself be suddenly
seen as, with a beautiful team, she drives, accompanied by Pisistratus,
through the markets of Athens--and every honest Athenian did believe
this--at any moment, as in a dream, everything is possible; and all
nature swarms around man as if she were nothing but the masquerade
of the gods, who found it a huge joke to deceive man by assuming all
possible forms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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