Abstract
Existence between comedy and tragedy: On the first paragraph of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. The paper offers a close reading of the first paragraph of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, focussing on its intellectual content as well as the aesthetic strategies for conveying this content. By reconstructing Nietzsche’s different textual sources, it will be shown how the various pre-texts of philosophers like Schopenhauer and Hegel, ‘evolutionary biologists’ like Spencer, Schneider and Büchner, or poets like Horace and Aeschylus are merged together into a polyphonic, tension-filled whole. The different semantics of evolutionary biology, philosophy of history and drama are closely interwoven: FW 1 connects the biological perspective of the preservation of the species with an interpretation of human existence both as a tragedy and a comedy while the paragraph’s narrator simulates both perspectives within different historical models. The various ambivalences of the paragraph can be interpreted as the product of textual strategies, which ultimately aim at repealing the logical structure of arguments.
