Becoming

"The psychology of the orgy as an overflowing feeling of life and energy within which pain acts as a stimulus provided me the key to the concepts of the tragic feeling, which was misunderstood as much by Aristotle as it especially was by our pessimists. Tragedy is so far from providing evidence for pessimism among the Hellenes in Schopenhauer's sense that it has to be considered the decisive repudiation of that idea and the counter-verdict to it. Affirmation of life even its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the  sacrifice of its highest types- that is what I called Dionysian, that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous emotion through its vehement discharge- it was thus Aristotle understood it-: but, beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming- that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction... And with that again I return to the place which I set out- Birth of a Tragedy was my first revaluation of all values: with that I again plant myself in the soil out of which I draw all that I will and can- I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysos- I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence..."

- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Twilight of the Idols"

It is strange that I had left reading this text so long and that the final pages are parallel to my own thinking of late. Of course, there are several aspects of his writing which do not parallel my own thoughts whatsoever, but the response will have to wait several days of reading. I still have to read his Anti- Christ and the Benedict des Spinoza's Ethics and then I should be able to write exactly what I mean to. The unfortunate thing about these particular writings is that the demand the readers full attention. 

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