Thus Spoke Zarathustra

this incarnation. Whoever has not known him is not capable of even imagining a man of his seriousness in the midst of the modern culture of semblance, fun, and entertainment. He was a necessary human being, a decision in the destiny of humanity. His immense vision of the future created for him creative eyes for the analysis of everything human to date—only someone who wished for the recovery of peoples and individuals from such a passionate heart could obtain such deep insights into their sinking.

The problem of décadence decline/decay takes the first place in his great soul-diagnostics. It already forms the core point of his first major work, "The Birth of Tragedy." — How new this must sound to the Wagnerians, who likely believed the book was directed at them (because of the application to Richard Wagner, which Nietzsche later retracted) but understood not a syllable of this problem: they intoxicated themselves primarily with the splendor of color and the youthful-mystical tone of the book; they had no idea that behind its colorful mists stand a number of the most important biological insights of a purely scientific nature. — "The Birth of Tragedy" points out the causes by which the Apollonian-Dionysian culture of the Greeks, along with its artistic manifestations, had to perish: it perished from the spirit that first speaks from Socrates, from the same spirit that finally led to Alexandrian culture and that still rules the world today. The actual main chapter of "The Birth of Tragedy" is its 13th section. The old Greek emotional life in Socrates has become insecure. In Socrates, the instincts are rationalized, that is: they are weakened and continue to weaken themselves more and more through rationalization. While the Greeks before and alongside him did the right thing instinctively, Socrates needed logical argumentation to hit the right mark in feeling and action. "On his critical journey through Athens, calling upon the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, he realized with astonishment that they all were without correct and certain insight regarding their profession and practiced it only by instinct. "Only by instinct!" — with this expression, we touch the heart and center of the Socratic tendency. With it, Socratism condemns existing art just as much as existing ethics. Wherever he casts his testing glances...

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