austere wrote:I'm going to have to read "Beyond Good and Evil" or "The Birth of Tragedy" next before I can claim to really understand it, but your brief description really helps.
The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche's most difficult and least valuable book (it was his first, you see). That's why I put it at the end of Nietzsche's part of the list. Also his definition of the Dionysian there differs drastically from how he defines it in the later books. So steer clear of The Birth of Tragedy, basically, until you know what you are doing.
The concept of the Dionysian is described best in Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo.
austere wrote:My working assumption was that you already had these ideas somewhere (e.g. one of your books), but decided to explicitly destroy his premise by writing the essay. So in this case it wasn't really a necessary precondition, since we would have read something equivalent in your book later.
Yes, but with nowhere near as much clarity and detail, and certainly without as much humor, as you yourself already surmised. The clarity and the detail are consequences of this thread, and this thread is a consequence of that stupid book, you see. At the end of the day even artfan had a hand in this essay, because many of the examples and explanations to be found in it are a result of an effort to clear up all his confusions...
austere wrote:If my assumption was correct, then I understand why you said a single page from one of your books was worth more than all the essays on Insomnia! Does that statement still stand after the publication of this essay, though?
Dude, that comment was about Manufactured Realities. The first two books ARE the essays.
