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Nietzsche states that the human intellect is insubstantial and transitory, yet its own possessor regards it as the center of the universe
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Most generally, intellect deceives humans
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Perception cannot lead to truth, it can only receive stimuli
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The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
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In this essay, Nietzsche focuses on pre-Platonic Greek thought, whose artistic forms and worldview he prefers
- other nineteenth century thinkers such as [[Matthew Arnold]] return to the pre-Socractic Greeks for principles to counter modernity
- Nietszche states that only as an aesthetic phenomenon (that is, a phenomenon mediated by perception) do existence and the world appear justified
- Life is only worthy if we experience strong feelings and sensations
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there is a short step from the aesthetic as sensation to the aesthetic as art. Art is the field of heightened sensation
- other theorists have focused on the spectator, but Nietzsche focuses on the artist joy in the struggle to dominate materials
- His theory has often been read as promoting individualism and the idea of a transcendent genius
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But this is not everything, human suffering is also central to his theory.
- Humans are subjected to a world that predates them and which is far more powerful than the self
- Greek tragedy offers a glimpse to a primordial unity prior to individuation
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Individuation is necessary for artistic creation
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The chaos of Dionysian nondifferentiation can only be expressed by the Apollonian semblance (conveyed by words and images)
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The great thing about Greek tragedy is that is does not consider that the Apollonian semblance is the truth
- there is a need, expressed in Prometheus, to establish an existence apart from the primordial unity
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the tension between the fact that we can only experience the universe as individuals, and the fact that individuation separates us from the universe, brings us an inevitable suffering
- Nietzsche states we must affirm that suffering
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if we believe that suffering is not evitable, tragedy dies and life is the justified not an aesthetic phenomenon, but because justice has been done
- comedic endings bring justice, thus for Nietzsche it is comedians like Euripides who are to blame for the death of the tragic worldview in ancient Greece
- Socrates and Plato then posit that it is possible to achieve universal truths and thus comfort through reason
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Nietzsche later attacks Christianity for its comic vision
- Aryan versus Semitic views on wrongdoing and sins respectively, feminine and masculine, which is highly problematic
- wrongdoing is not avoidable while sin is, and which if avoided, leads to no suffering
- but for Nietzsche, we must have strength to love life even if it entails suffering and indeed suggests that we are most alive when we suffer
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For many later thinkers, Nietzsche’s methods are just as important as his views
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[[Paul Ricouer]] called him, together with [[Karl Marx]] and [[Sigmund Freud]] one of the founders of the "hermeneutics of suspicion"
- we must not take any pronouncement at face value
- we must discover its genealogy before understanding the meaning of an utterance
- revision of dominant worldviews