Status Updates From The Birth of Tragedy

The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctively unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images: the hero, the greatest phenomenon of the will, is negated for our pleasure, because he remains only a phenomenon and the eternal life of the will remains untouched by his annihilation.

With this expression, Socratism condemns existing art as much as existing ethics: wherever it turns its searching gaze, it sees the lack of insight and the power of delusion and deduces from this lack the essentially perverse and reprehensible character of what exists.