One can guess from all this just where the great question mark about the worth of existence was placed. Is pessimism necessarily the sign of collapse, destruction, of disaster, of the exhausted and enfeebled instincts—as it was with the Indians, as it is now, to all appearances, among us, the “modern” peoples and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual inclination for what in existence is hard, dreadful, evil, problematic, emerging from what is healthy, from overflowing well being, from living existence to the full? Is there perhaps a way of suffering from the very fullness of life? A tempting courage of the keenest sight which demands what is terrible as the enemy, the worthy enemy, against which it can test its power, from which it wants to learn what “to fear” means? What does the tragic myth mean precisely for the Greeks of the best, strongest, and bravest age? What about that tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian?^[4] And what about what was born out of the Dionysian—the tragedy? And by contrast, what are we to make of what killed tragedy— Socratic morality, dialectic, the satisfaction and serenity of the theoretical man?^[5] How about that? Could not this very Socratism [Sokratismus] be a sign of collapse, exhaustion, sickness, the anarchic dissolution of the instincts? And could the “Greek serenity” of later Greek periods be only a red sunset? Could the Epicurean will hostile to pessimism be merely the prudence of a suffering man?^[6] And even science itself, our science—indeed, what does all science in general mean considered as a symptom of life? What is the point of all that science and, even more seriously, where did it come from? What about that? Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an excuse in the face of pessimism? A delicate self‑defence against—the Truth? And speaking morally, something like cowardice and falsehood? Speaking unmorally, a clever trick?^[7] O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O you secretive ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?—

What I managed to seize upon at that time, something fearful and dangerous, was a problem with horns, not necessarily a bull exactly, but in any event a new problem; today I would state that it was the problem of science itself—science for the first time grasped as problematic, as dubious. But that book, in which my youthful courage and suspicion then spoke, what an impossible book had to grow out of a task so contrary to the spirit of youth! Created out of merely premature, really immature personal experiences, which all lay close to the threshold of something communicable, built on the basis of art—for the problem of science cannot be understood on the basis of science—a book perhaps for artists with analytical tendencies and a capacity for retrospection (that means for exceptions, a type of artist whom it is necessary to seek out and whom one never wants to look for . . .), full of psychological innovations and artists’ secrets, with an artist’s metaphysics in the background, a youthful work, full of the spirit of youth and the melancholy of youth, independent, defiantly self‑sufficient, even where it seemed to bow down with special reverence to an authority, in short, a first work also in every bad sense of the word, afflicted, in spite of the problem better suited for old men, with every fault of youth, above all with its “excessive verbiage” and its “storm and stress.” On the other hand, looking back on the success the book had (especially with the great artist to whom it addressed itself, as if in a conversation, that is, with Richard Wagner), the book proved itself—I mean it was the sort of book which at any rate was effective enough among “the best people of its time.”^[8] For that reason the book should at this point be handled with some consideration and discretion. However, I do not want totally to hide how unpleasant the book seems to me now, how strangely after sixteen years it stands there in front of me—in front of an older man, a hundred times more discriminating, but with eyes which have not grown colder in the slightest and which have themselves not become estranged from the work which that bold book dared to approach for the first time: to look at science from the perspective of the artist, but to look at art from the perspective of life.