Indeed, his is a changed soul. He is no longer the "loyal Swiss" of
another time; he is a man among men, a German proud of his Germany. A
war has transformed him; he glorifies war. War awakes the energy of
men; it even troubles their spirits. It obliges them to seek in an
ideal order, an order of beauty and duty, the ends of a life which is
too cruel. The lyric poet, the sage, misunderstood in ages of peace,
are heard with respect in ages of war. Then men have need of them,
and are conscious of their need. The same necessity which ranges them
behind their chiefs renders them attentive to genius. Humanity is made
truly one, and is drawn towards the heroic and the sublime, only under
the pressure of war.
Friedrich Nietzsche, though still very weak and suffering, again took
up the notes of his book that he might record in it his new ideas. In
Greece, he argues, art was the visible form of a society, disciplined
by struggle, from the workshop, where the captive slave laboured, up
to the gymnasium and the agora, where the free man played with arms.
Such was that winged figure, that goddess of Samothrace, that had for
companion of her flight a bloody trireme.
The Greek genius emanated from war, it sang war, it had war for its
comrade. "It is the people of the tragic mysteries," wrote Friedrich
Nietzsche, "who strike the great blow of the Persian battles; in
return, the people who have maintained these wars need the salutary
beverage of tragedy." We follow in his notes the movement of a
mind which wishes to grasp the very idea of the tragic, athwart a
vaguely-known Greece. Again and again we find this word _tragic_
brought in as if it were a fundamental strain which the young
thinker trains himself to repeat, like a child trying to learn a new
word:--"Tragic Greece conquers the Persians.... Tragic man is nature
itself in its highest strength of creation and knowledge: he trifles
with sorrow...." Three formulas satisfy his research for a moment.
"The tragic work of Art--the tragic Man--the tragic State." Thus he
determined the three essential parts of his book, which he would
entitle as a whole: _The Tragic Man._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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