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
Yes, exclaims Heraclitus, but only for the limited human being, who
sees divergently and not convergently, not for the contuitive god;
to him everything opposing converges into one harmony, invisible it
is true to the common human eye, yet comprehensible to him who like
Heraclitus resembles the contemplative god. Before his fiery eye no
drop of injustice is left in the world poured out around him, and even
that cardinal obstacle--how pure fire can take up its quarters in
forms so impure--he masters by means of a sublime simile. A Becoming
and Passing, a building and destroying, without any moral bias, in
perpetual innocence is in this world only the play of the artist and of
the child. And similarly, just as the child and the artist play, the
eternally living fire plays, builds up and destroys, in innocence--and
this game the _Æon_ plays with himself. Transforming himself into water
and earth, like a child he piles heaps of sand by the sea, piles up
and demolishes; from time to time he recommences the game. A moment of
satiety, then again desire seizes him, as desire compels the artist to
create. Not wantonness, but the ever newly awakening impulse to play,
calls into life other worlds. The child throws away his toys; but soon
he starts again in an innocent frame of mind. As soon however as the
child builds he connects, joins and forms lawfully and according to an
innate sense of order.
Thus only is the world contemplated by the æsthetic man, who has
learned from the artist and the genesis of the latter's work, how the
struggle of plurality can yet bear within itself law and justice,
how the artist stands contemplative above, and working within the
work of art, how necessity and play, antagonism and harmony must pair
themselves for the procreation of the work of art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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