necessary to the weak inspired by weakness.... These people are not at liberty to "know,"--decadents stand in need of lies,--it is one of their self-preservative measures. He who not only understands the word "Dionysian," but understands _himself_ in that term, does not require any refutation of Plato, or of Christianity, or of Schopenhauer--for his nose _scents decomposition._ 3 The extent to which I had by means of these doctrines discovered the idea of "tragedy," the ultimate explanation of what the psychology of tragedy is, I discussed finally in _The Twilight of the Idols_ (Aph. 5, part 10).... "The saying of yea to life, and even to its weirdest and most difficult problems: the will to life rejoicing at its own infinite vitality in the sacrifice of its highest types--that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I meant as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not to cast out terror and pity, or to purge one's self of dangerous passion by discharging it with vehemence,--this was Aristotle's[2] misunderstanding of it,--but to be far beyond terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of Becoming itself--that lust which also involves the joy of destruction." ... In this sense I have the right to regard myself as the first _tragic philosopher_--that is to say, the most extreme antithesis and antipodes of a pessimistic philosopher. Before my time no such thing existed as this translation of the Dionysian phenomenon into philosophic emotion: tragic wisdom was lacking; in vain have I sought for signs of it even among the great Greeks in philosophy--those belonging to the two centuries before Socrates. I still remained a little doubtful about Heraclitus, in whose presence, alone, I felt warmer and more at ease than anywhere else. The yea-saying to the impermanence and annihilation of things, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; the yea-saying to contradiction and war, the postulation of Becoming, together with the radical rejection even of the concept _Being_-- in all these things, at all events, I must recognise him who has come nearest to me in thought hither to. The doctrine of the "Eternal Recurrence"--that is to say, of the absolute and eternal repetition of all things in periodical cycles--this doctrine of Zarathustra's might, it is true, have been taught before. In any case, the Stoics, who derived nearly all their fundamental ideas from Heraclitus, show traces of it.