Muhammad Nehad’s Reviews > The Birth of Tragedy / The Case of Wagner > Status Update

With this insight a culture is inaugurated that I venture to call a tragic culture. Its most important characteristic is that wisdom takes the place of science as the highest end—wisdom that, uninfluenced by the seductive distractions of the sciences, turns with unmoved eyes to a comprehensive view of the world, and seeks to grasp, with sympathetic feelings of love, the eternal suffering as its own.

For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.

The demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: 'Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is to die soon.'

"It is apparent that it was a whole cluster of grave questions with which this book burdened itself.
Let us add the gravest question of all. What, seen in the perspective of life, is the significance of morality?"