Nietzsche’s Die dionysische Weltanschauung:

The “Affirmation of Transitoriness and Destruction” 1

Part One

Crane ROHRBACH

“For the eternal joy in creating to exist, for the will to life eternally to
affirm itself. …All this is contained in the word Dionysis…”2

Nietzsche’s Dionysian is an interpretive form of thought, not a conceptual

philosophical discourse; the “Dionysian” as an interpretive metaphor for
interpretation--an interpretive discourse concerning the interpretation of
interpretation:

“That the value of the world lies in our interpretation; that previous interpreta-
tions have been perspective valuations by virtue of which we can survive
in life, i.e., in the will to power, for the growth of power.”3

The value of this metaphorical thought is based on the concept of multi-

plicity--a scheme of plurality which has recourse only to metaphoricity to
express some form of synthesis. The Dionysian as a schematic metaphor of
multiplicity which frees the imaginative response to the determining issues
of life which otherwise grounds human existence in nihilism. Nietzsche’s
Dionysis seems to posit imagination as the creative foundational human
faculty, that which is something prior to the tool of Reason. His “Dionysian

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worldview” is the imaginary language of the metaphorical; an imagination
interpreted in imaginary language of reality’s perceived chaotic plurality
but being an essential unity. The metaphorical Nietzschean Dionysian is an
imaginary interpretive tool, a creative perspective to certain tragic terms of
individual life—arbitrary suffering, tragic death, and ultimate transitoriness.
His Dionysis as metaphor is a response to the Silenusian wisdom, “The
very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to
be, to be nothing. However, the next best thing for you is--to die soon.”4
Or more directly, it is Nietzsche in response to Schopenhauer’s perfect
rational pessimism of the burden of one’s existence and its Nichtigkeit,
nothingness (pace Chalderón, “Pues el delito mayor / Del hombre es haber
nacido”5):

“For that thousands had lived in happiness and joy would never do away
with the anguish and death-agony of one individual; and just as little does
my presentwell-being undo my previous sufferings. Therefore, were the
evil in the world even a hundred times less than it is, its mere existence
would still be sufficient to establish a truth that may be expressed in various
ways … namely that we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the
existence of the world; that its non-existence would be preferable to its
existence; that it is something which at bottom ought not to be.”5a

The issues of suffering and senseless tragedy are for Schopenhauer the
issues which make any (rational) affirmation of life objectionable; however,
for Nietzsche they are the very issues which give the possibility of value
for life and, therefore, an affirmation to it. This is so because they are
necessary for their oppositions to exist: life because of death; joy because
of sorrow; creation because of destruction; even the eternal because of
the transitory.

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 Nietzsche agrees that “painful destruction” is a necessary condition of
reality, and that all are “forced to gaze into the terrors of existence”--but
what is allowed, according to Nietzsche, when we are “pierced by the furious
sting of these pains” is a “primordial delight in existence and (to) receive
an intimation, in Dionysiac ecstasy, that this delight is indestructible and
eternal.”6 Nietzsche’s Dionysian actually takes the very transitoriness and
sufferings of life as its essential eternal features, that these are the meaningful
distinctions to life, without which life would lack passion and purpose, and
only because of them can life become significant and purposeful.

This is not to say that individual suffering, tragedy, death--complete

self-annihilation--is somehow to be celebrated, but that the reality of these
features of life is what makes life precious in itself, for “What is aught,
but as ‘tis valued?”7 The value which Nietzsche’ Dionysian is primarily
concerned with ‘revaluing’ is the anthropocentric “holy lie. … the well-
being of mankind.”8 He asks, “To improve mankind—how is this intention
inspired? Where is the concept of improvement derived from?”9 That for
Nietzsche is the essential humanistic error: “To ‘humanize’ the world,
i.e., to feel ourselves more and more masters within it—”10 “Mastering”
the world through man’s power of reasoning and rationality does not give
mastery over reality itself--for tragedy is inherent in human life and cannot
be “mastered.” Nietzsche is critical of both attempts at mastering reality--
rationality (as fulfilled in science and which eases certain aspects of life)
and the “holy lie” (religious anthropocentrism). He views modern nihilism
as the rational response to rationalism and Christianity as feebly trying
to rationalize itself for man against a reality which seems oblivious to
his questioning. Pessimism is the consequence, and humanity may hold
nothing but some form of indulgent faith—that which is no more than
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to believe in something of which there is no evidence. Man clings to the
faith that he is significant of something, but for Nietzsche man is master
of nothing, not even his own rationality--he merely belongs of the world
and is intimately bound to it.

Rationality and Christianity are for Nietzsche constructions “…build-

ing under the seduction of morality….”11 They are forms of ‘knowledge’;
knowledge as a moral tool to build meaning; that which Reason itself
constructs. What is odd is that this very tool is then employed to construct
further reasoning: Reason constructs the tool of knowledge which then
constructs the instrument of further Reason. But for Nietzsche, “knowledge”
is nothing but that which constructs its own foundation, it is merely “a
majestic moral structure”12 which aims at certainty and ‘truth.’ However,
such founding is but one more interpretation, and therefore, interpretation
is the schema for revaluing life values. Man makes of himself something
to be meaningful, but can’t reason his way out of an arbitrary existence
that has no essential meaning. His search for ‘knowledge’ is a vain attempt
to value the world, but all values are mere interpretations.

Ausdeuton

“If the value of the world lies in our interpretation…”13

Interpretation (ausdeuton) attributes meanings to that which in-itself is

unknowable. Knowledge as a human text, the text that contains its own
constituting rule—Reason, trust in reason, as such it becomes subject to
the interpretation, “Why not mistrust?” Then every interpretation is a “per-
spective valuation”14 and this seems to lead to nihilism, of man’s mean-

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inglessness—that there is no single meaning, and thus, all is meaningless.
Nietzsche doesn’t see that perspectivism leads reasonably to nihilism or
even to pessimism, quite the contrary: perspectivism is not negation, it is
the plenitude of meanings that it makes possible. Nietzsche’s Dionysian is
a revaluation of values, as an interpretation which allows for a constructive
(positive) perspectivism. Nietzsche’s Dionysis is a perspectivism necessarily
the distinctive character of the individual interpretor, and as such it does
not seek a universal ‘understanding’ as does rationality or ‘salvation’ as in
Christianity, but is purposeful in allowing the interpretor to create purpose.
Nietzsche’s dionysische Weltanschuuang is the idea that life is an “aesthetic
phenomenon” of one’s own creation—that “the existence of the world is
justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon,”15 and that the individual who
embraces all of life—the horrible and the beautiful--is that phenomenon.

Ultimately, what is valued of the knowledge provided by rationality and

Christianity is significant only in relation to how it benefits mankind, and
Nieztsche criticizes the self-serving convenience of such truth and faith;
his Dionysian, on the other hand, is an alternative perspective on what
is beneficial that embraces all possibilities and is grounded in life itself.
The issue for Nietzsche is to address nihilism, rationalism, and delusional
religious metaphysics as sources of “truth” and to confront the responses
which they bring forth--human meaning or meaninglessness, eternal life
or transitoriness, purpose or tragedy and arbitrary suffering, structure or
chaos. Nietzsche doesn’t accept any adherence to this faith in antithetical
values: life constitutes all of these features. For Nietzsche, these features
are neither good nor bad; they are all what afford one the opportunity to
be heroic, majestic, beautiful. Beauty is the heroism which faces life in all
of its potentials; it is Nietzsche’s ‘aesthetic phenomenon’ derivative of a
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Dionysian worldview and answering to Plato’s Őντινα χρη τρόπον ζην.16

For Nietzsche, the Grundstimmung17 of human existence is absurdity:

absurd suffering, man’s absurd search for meaning. In Nietzsche’s critical
world-view, there is no immutable unconditioned, rational reality lying
behind the world of change. Reality is itself the becoming which faith
in knowledge mistakenly tries to transcend; it is a Promethean reality in
which man must live18 for the world has “no goal, no final state.”19 Ni-
etzsche employs an imaginative construction of the classical Greek gods
Dionysus and Apollo to express and encompass specific symbolic powers,
those which would transform the understanding of the tragic state of man’s
being (as terror and pity, the arbitrary and unmerciful of the unresponsive
universe) into one which is affirmative of life. The “Eternal Yes of being” is
Nietzsche’s dionysische Weltanschauung reflected, mirrored, in one’s active
being of the ceaseless becoming of the world:

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in
my mirror? This world: a monster of energy without beginning, without
end;firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller,
that does not expend itself but only transforms itself;… a sea of forces
flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back,
with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flow of its forms;…
this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-
destroying…”20

This essay addresses specific Nietzschean ideas21 and how they inter-
relate to form a positive evaluation of human life against the presupposed
significance of both rationalism and religious metaphysics in providing
meaningful knowledge to existential questioning, and most importantly

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against the advent of nihilism, which, ironically, both rationalism and re-
ligious (Christian) ideals have brought forth. These dominant Nietzschean
concepts—Übermensch, Wille zur Macht, Valuation and Perspectivism, Amor
fati, Ja-sagen, the Dionysian-Apollonian, all have elements that argue for
life despite its essential tragic nature; united they bring forward a differ-
ent worldview that can accommodate man’s inescapable sufferings—the
seeming meaninglessness of life’s consequences.22

Erlebnis: One’s Lived Experience

For Nietzsche, the advent of ‘meaninglessness’ is due to man’s need for
universal meaning; meaningfulness pursued through rationalism (science
and logic), meaningfulness adhered to in metaphysical faith. ‘Meaning’
is now knotted within itself, for rationalism cannot be interwoven into
man’s metaphysical ideal of himself for rationalism and metaphysics op-
pose one another. Man’s desire of being in a world of ceaseless becoming
is a conceptual thread too slight and delicate for use: the intellectual and
emotional struggles to untangle this Gordian knot of man’s ‘meaning,’
of one’s being and the becoming of the world neither rationalism nor
Christainity alone can explain, and together they contribute to even more
existential confusion, as in the ever growing presence of nihilism in modern
life. Nietzsche’s Dionysian worldview perspective is a resolution to eternal
fate; a fate that does not respond to “Why?” but rather to just what is of
the world: Man is of the world, and life and death, joy and suffering all
are simply of his world--these are not issues of “Why?,” they are just all of
what is of and necessary to the world of reality. The Dionysian worldview
is for one to embrace ‘Erlebnis,’ one’s lived experience (one’s being in the
world), to embrace all of life, and to transform oneself continually through
its experiences (life is always the becoming). Self-transformation is the
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creative essence of life, and one’s ‘meaning’ itself is transformed into a
new concept--that of significance. Significance replaces meaning; one no
longer looks for meaning ‘out there’—for “there is no ‘there’ there”23--for
“the value of the world lies in our interpretation.”24

The Dionysian
What is important to this interpretation is the ideal of existential sig-
nificance, personal ‘greatness’—this is Nietzsche’s der Übermensch.25 The
Dionysian worldview is about such interpretive personal “significance,”
and this attribute does not need to be universally meaningful, nor is it
meaningless because it is not eternal and universal. “Greatness” is the
measure of one’s significance, not “meaning.” This greatness is achieved by
one accepting all of what the world is, even its tragic sufferings, and not
succumbing to the desire for ‘meaning’ in the events of life. The Dionysian
is a harnessing of the will, Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht26 for life itself
despite its horrors; the Dionysian revalues what seems to be antithetical to
happiness for “When we speak of values we do so under the inspiration
and from the perspective of life: life itself evaluates through us when we
establish values.”27 (Culture and society establish false values, according
to Nietzsche; culture is a “faith of antithetical values”28 : The ‘good-bad’;
‘right-wrong’; ‘happiness-sorrow’; ‘life-death’; ‘justice-tragedy’ distinctions
are what misleads, not guides man to understanding his existential nature.)
Nietzsche’s perspectivism of the Dionysian attempts to reinvigorate life from
the onslaught of modern nihilism not through answering to the question
of ‘meaning’ in all events but to looking at all of life as necessary for all
of life to be so. It disdains the objective language of rationality and the
metaphysical language of religious faith,29 it speaks of life as an “aesthetic
phenomenon” through which the love of life, “Amor fati,” is made possible.
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The Dionysian is the creative response to life’s eternal becoming with
affirmation, “Ja-sagen”;30 it is just one’s symbolic being in the becoming
of the world: man is a symbol of his own language of the world.

The dionysische Weltanschauung makes of man a symbol of his own

language; it would have that “goal” is illusory, for there is no ‘being’
of man; his presence, his existence, is just the ‘becoming’ at one with
the universe of pure ‘becoming’: man is of the world, not for the world.
Nietzsche’s Dionysian worldview is for one not to seek static moral values of
the unknowable in some form of correlation with his dualistic metaphysical
language--‘meaning/meaningless,’ ‘good/bad,’ eternal/temporal; rather, it is
the understanding of one’s life in terms of being and becoming; that one’s
life can be purposeful, significant, great—if nonetheless cosmically meaning-
less--if it is lived in the image of life itself—the being and becoming of
creativity. Here the creative is the ‘possible’ of man’s existence; his creative
potential to make ‘sense’ of even the most horrible tragic sufferings in a
world without God or rationality. The Dionysian Life is purposeful, and
therefore, significant because it can be the stage on which man can display
his heroic presence and its beauty; We should really look upon ourselves
as beautiful pictures and artistic projections, and in that significance as
works of art, we have our highest value, for only as aesthetic phenomena
are existence and the world eternally justified.”31

The Dionysian and der Übermensch

“For now he must descend into the depths. of existence with a string of
curious questions on his lips: why do I live? What lesson have I to learn
from life? How do I become what I am and why do I suffer from being

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 what I am?”32

And, “To the question: ‘To what end do you live?’…This eternal becoming
is a lying puppet play in beholding which man forgets himself, the actual
distraction which disperses the individual to the four winds, the endless
stupid game which the great child, Time, plays before us. …In becoming,
everything is hollow, deceptive, shallow and worthy of our contempt; the
enigma which man is to resolve he can resolve only in being, in being
thus and not otherwise, in the imperishable.”33

The issue for Nietzsche is, if existence has no ‘meaning,’ that is, if there
is no directing God for man, and as science points to man as nothing
more than an evolutionary occurrence--then how can human existence be
significant of anything? What is left to answer to the paralysis of nihilism?
If as Nietzsche would have it, “God—(is) the deification of nothingness…”34
then what is there for man in life? For Nietzsche, what man has is his
own becoming, and that its being is its own form of creation:. Man must
create himself as der Übermensch:

“May your spirit and your virtue serve the meaning of the earth…and may
the value of all things be fixed anew by you. To that end you should be
fighters! To that end you should be creators!”35

Man is what he is by a higher and innate necessity, and to speak of him

as he ought to be is an illusion. In this sense every human being is a unique
and prodigious phenomenon, and yet, he exists nonetheless of a necessity.
This cosmic law of necessity is Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht. The force
of this “will to power” is what man experiences—suffers on occasions in
life; but to understand existence in the perspective of suffering alone is the

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tragic, for there is no ought--“A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us
as insipid as “a tree ought to be.”36 (The world is just as it is.)

Wille zur Macht

“This world is will to power…”37

Life is will to power; life as the force of the energy which constitutes
life. The force, power (Macht) drives reality and necessarily acts upon it.
The ‘will to power’ is a reference to what is its obvious conclusion: reality
is change and impermanence; that is what it must be by its very nature.
In the Dionysian context, the beauty of birth and regeneration is possible
only because there is decay and disintegration, and therefore, both are to
be valued as inherent features of one another.

All intentions, all actions, as it were, are amoral, since all reasoning about
underlying motives and emotions turns out to be a fabric of rationaliza-
tions. Thus Nietzsche dispenses with nihilism by reinterpreting reality as
man’s necessary suffering; and what is necessary is neither good nor bad.
But modern man in his herd-like, purely economic and social existence
is striving for an even more specific meaning of life, for smaller risks,
lesser dangers, perfect security; a fundamentally life-denying existence
because it views tragedy as meaningless and suffering as waste. A life
valued according to social accomplishments, wealth, and secure duration
of the years is for Nietzsche a form of nihilism, a nil admirari, for it
refers to the veiled crisis of those who are not satisfied with affirming all
of life, but to those who wish to preserve it just in that manner. The issue
revolves around one’s sense of preservation or affirmation in relationship

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to life and reality. Middle-class self-preservation is an empirical value
not a metaphysical one; its goal is being in a world of becoming, and
this Nietzsche claims is no more than a “a principle of disintegration and
decay.”38 Disintegration and decay because life is subject to the inevitable
growth and change of life, yet man still seeks to make of himself the
category of monumental meaningfulness through his own metaphysical
hermeneutics; for Nietzsche all that he accomplishes is a futile sense of
preservation: mankind as Ozymandias personified39: his desire to preserve
his grand stature in a world of transitory existence make of him no more
than a mockery to himself.

The Faith in “Antithetical Values”

“The logical world-denial and nihilation follow from the fact that we have
to oppose non-being with being and that the concept ‘becoming’ is de-
nied.”40

The dialectic here is that “becoming” is the synthesis of being and non-
being; that an authentic life is one whichs affirms the becoming of the
world—and the ‘becoming’ of the world requires the affirmation of all
common dualities: joy and suffering, good and bad, etc. Nietzsche sees
man as living in ‘nihilation’ (nihilisierung) because his science of the world
and metaphysics of himself cannot accommodate the antithesis non-being.
Man’s being of his own becoming is all there is—man’s being in the
imaginary teleology of ‘God’s Kingdom’ and its promised eternal life is
delusional. For Nietzsche, nihilism is a crisis of meaning for most because
they choose a faith in antithetical values—of rationality (its sciences and
forms of logic) and its antithesis of religious dialectics. Modern humanity

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suffers a crisis of meaning because it pursues a life of self-preservation,
not affirmation. The question of ‘meaning’ is given if one’s life is safe, fat,
rich, convenient--and comprehensible. However, this manner of preserving
life cannot ultimately avoid the truth of the reality of tragic suffering.

Man needs “reason,” chooses to live under the seducement of ‘ultimate

significance’—“Man would rather will nothingness than not will.”41 Here
“nothingness” is not the praxiological ‘nothing is worth doing,’ not the
ontological ‘nothing exists,’ nor the epistemological ‘nothing is knowable’;
it is the ‘nothingness’ of false belief that ‘reason’ is essential to the pur-
posiveness of man. For Nietzsche, the preservation of the (false) virtue of
Reason (meaning) is the denial of the affirmation of life—for life has no
reason—it just is. Life is the becoming of all that can be, and to deny
that is to deny life itself.

“Reason” has contrived man’s “little kingdom, in the midst of the universal
muck.”42 Reason as ‘for what?’ is the source of nihilism: “The nihilistic
question ‘For what?’ is rooted in the old habit of supposing that the goal
must be put up, given, demanded from outside—by some superhuman
authority.”43 Returning to the idea of being as ‘preservation,’ the preservation
of reason and meaning as virtues, the need for such virtues, is Nietzsche’s
source of criticism of modern culture. He answers ‘preservation’ with the
Dionysian world view of affirmation—the becoming in which reason plays
no part. Becoming is the chaos of ‘no-reason’ from which an affirmation
of life is still possible and beautiful: “I tell you: one must have chaos to
give to a dancing star.”44 Becoming is Wille zur Macht.

For Nietzsche, the will to power is the “always changing” strength and
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energy behind the formal essence of existence. It is, for Nietzsche, a cosmic
law: the force of “being.” As such, “becoming” (man’s historicity45) is a
kind of pathos because there is no becoming to anything, according to
Nietzsche. Now, since pathos implies passivity, man’s trying to become
something (to become meaningful) is, ironically, an act of resignation. In
Nietzsche’s thought of the world—where consciousness falsifies all values
by rationalizing them—the individual never senses the true role he plays
within the overall drama of existence; one does not ‘do’: one is ‘being
done.” Nietzsche sees the misunderstanding of pathos in the very separa-
tion of the concept from that of “action,” and that misunderstanding as
rooted in language itself, and hence in consciousness: since language and
thought can only proceed by way of “distinctions,” and only distinguish
or categorize by positing pairs of oppositions, Nietzsche reconsidered the
relationship as that seeming opposites occur organically intermingled as a
complex and, as it were, a kind of hermaphroditic unity.

Meaning, rationality, knowledge and truth in terms of their mutual depen-

dence is Nietzsche’s critique of humanity’s ideology of itself; a humanity
in strife with itself and the nature of things; a humanity suffering the crisis
of ‘meaning’ and in constant turmoil with reality which is not for man in
any sense whatsoever, but of which man is just a temporal part.

Nietzsche’s “Meaning” and “Language”

Man has attempted to create meaning (meaningfulness) through the tool
of language, but for Nietzsche, “Language is the most naïve of grand
prejudices…one reads disharmonies and problems into things because we
think only in terms of language—and thus believe in the ‘eternal truth’
of reason.”46
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 Meaning and rationality are types of Nietzschean ‘moralities’47 as ex-
emplified by their false idealization of humanity, by their setting up of
ratio-linguistic hypostatizations as realities in logic and science: “Logic
applies only to fictitious entities that we have created. Logic is the attempt
to comprehend the actual world by means of a scheme of being posited
by ourselves; more correctly, to make it formulatable and calculable for
us--.”48 But, “Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself
has imported into them…”49

For society, meaning is a transcendence, that there is always something

more; Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Dionysian is the struggle to eliminate
this presumption of transcendence. Man once had meaning before it was
nullified by his overreaching pursuit of rationalism. Rationalism killed
metaphysical faith: “The greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead,’ that
the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable…some sun seems
to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into
doubt…”50 The “doubt” which becomes nihilism (or at least the Schopen-
haurerian pessimism51); nihilism as the ironic conclusion of humanity’s
(over) rationality and headlong pursuit of veridical knowledge in constant
confrontation with its faith in metaphysical transcendence:

“We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges
behind us—indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us.
Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not
always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries
of graciousness. But hours will come when you realize that it is infinite
and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird
that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel
homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no

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 longer any ‘land’.”52

Nietzsche’s Language of “Meaning”

In English as well as in German ‘meaning’ is used to denote purpose
or goal. When one asks, “What is the meaning of life?” one is asking
what is its purpose. The significance of this quasi-existential question is
that the ordinary language and the semantic concepts53 of meaning are
confused. This becomes Nietzsche’s examination of the idea of purpose as
a category of ethics as well as of science. The rational man figures as the
embodiment of the ‘theoretical optimist” who would attribute knowledge
the power of a panacea, and of error as sin, irrationality as false. This is,
however, for Nietzsche nothing but the powerful illusion of knowledge, of
the confusion of existence with essence, “Dasein” and “Wesen.” Nietzsche
rejects the drawing of inferences from the concept of knowledge to being,
from essence to existence; for Nietzsche, knowledge and being are the most
contradictory of all realms. Knowledge is a moral imperative of modern
society; this imperative exists namely for those who seek consolation and
healing in ‘truth’; however, that which they have sought has given no
consolation to the tragedies of life. Nihilism is the barren reproach of the
search for ‘truth’. For humanity there is no solace in knowledge, only a
cold indifference in the face of science and its rationality. Here Nietzsche
states very clearly the weaknesses of the positivism of the natural sciences
and rationalism, disciplines that pressed forward to a “success” that was
purchased with the loss of the question as to the Why? of life.

“…science rests on the same base as the ascetic ideal: the precondition of
both the one and the other is a certain impoverishment of life,--the emo-
tions cooled, the tempo slackened, dialectics in place of instinct, solemnity
stamped on faces and gestures…”54

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 Existence, in all its manifestations, is one infinite and eternal pathos –a
suffering, a fate, a moira --personifying itself in countless “actors” on all
ranks of its hierarchy. That life is as theatre, as drama, as a dark mirror
to life, which shows the individual as a sufferer at the hands of a power
that wills and acts through him, and over which he exercises practically
no control whatsoever. It turns the subject through whom it works into
a sufferer, not into a “free” agent. Instead of spontaneously acting, the
individual in the end recognizes that he is and has been no more than a
pawn in the hands of a fate to which he has silently consented.

“Meaning” and Rationality

Meaning and rationality are grounded upon authority; and the individual
must find a place within the whole of this authority, and this he does ac-
cording to ‘laws’ and customs. Humanity is a social community based on
certain forms of authority, that is, it is defined by authority, and authority
is the essential element in the community and in further determining its
laws (values) and customs —not only in the ethical-moral sense, but in that
sense pertaining to how one should live—one’s meaning, one’s purpose. It
is as if man has created the cultural law that ‘meaningfulness’ is necessary
to life, and the authority which enforces it is man’s historicism. Ironically,
Nietzsche states this as humanity’s “formula” for happiness: “A Yes, a
No, a goal…”55 Words will not suffice, however; language and thought,
rationality and reason give no comfort to the tragedy of existence:

“Life is no argument. We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we

are able to live—with the postulation of bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and
effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of faith,

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 nobody could now endure to live!”56

Meaning and Rationality as moralities ask of life what things are and
how they come to be what they are—and would answer to their own
questioning. Nietzsche’s Dionysian questions existence from an altogether
different perspective (anticipating Wittgenstein57): it questions why they
exist at all or why there is something rather than nothing. If one supplies
to the question concerning the existence of the world the answer that is
has no meaning, we have come full circle to Nietzsche’s address: if there
is no meaning to be had from life can there yet be a great significance
to it? For Nietzsche meaning (or rather meaningfulness) and significance
are quite distinct concepts.

Nietzsche’s dionysische Weltanschauung is the nullification of both ratio-

nality and the (religious) metaphysics of transcendence as meaningful value
categories of and for man’s existence. The essence of reality as becoming
and passing away is Nietzsche’s agreement with Heraclitus58; Nietzsche
rejects the logic of reason and the faith of transcendence, and would
maintain that one’s life bears within itself its own simple antithesis—to
be and not to be, and that is all--there is no fixed meaning possible to a
universe in flux, but this does not entail that one cannot achieve personal
significance within it.

“…becoming has no goal and that underneath all becoming there is no

grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as
in an element of supreme value, an escape remains: to pass sentence on
this whole world of becoming as a deception and to invent a world beyond
it, a true world. But as soon as man finds out how that world is fabricated
solely from psychological needs, and how he has absolutely no right to

̶ 140 ̶
 it,the last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any
metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a true world. Having
reached this standpoint, one grants the reality as the only reality…”59

Rationality and Knowledge

“Chaos Sive Natura”60 If human reality is chaos, how can knowledge
order and reform its essential nature? “The question ‘What is this or that
(table of values) really worth?’ will be set under …different perspectives”61
expresses Nietzsche’s pessimism of the worth of knowledge for it begs the
further question valuable for what, to what end? “For we cannot analyze
the question ‘Value for what?’”62 Nietzsche’s considers that Knowledge had
become a search for happiness; the world and reality as a unified system;
a system for the culmination of human happiness.

However, Nietzsche considered that “knowledge” directed toward dis-

posability (prognosis) cannot bring happiness through understanding, but
only power—namely, the power to dispose by means of calculation in
all empirical and analytic sciences, whether those of “nature” or society.
His prejudice is the pessimism of knowledge and certainty—he does not
see the possibility of control by rationality (within society), even of the
conclusions of science. ‘Knowledge’ here is not referring to its applica-
tions, but to knowledge as ‘certainty,’ and certainty as to Truth itself.
“Knowledge-in-itself in a world of becoming is impossible; so how is
knowledge possible?”63 I don’t believe that Nietzsche is referring to the
usefulness of science and knowledge, but to the idea that knowledge is
some sort of end in itself, a goal as a kind of pure Truth achieved; Truth
as some kind of Kantian “Ding-an-sich.”64

̶ 141 ̶
 “Man projects his drive to truth, his ‘goal’ in a certain sense outside himself
as a world that has being as a metaphysical world, as a ‘thing-in-itself,’ as
a thing already in existence.”65

Truth as Knowledge; knowledge as meaningful; but ‘meaningful’ begs

the question ‘Meaningful of what?’ What does such teaching mean? What
is the virtue of meaning? Certainly, science and rationality provide little
comfort in life, for they do not address the irrational forces of man’s
existence: “Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it
has no future before it, in this world.”66

“What alone can our teaching be?—That no one gives a human being his
qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not (even) he
himself. No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted
as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he
lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of
all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special design,
a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain to an ‘ideal
of man’ or an ‘ideal of happiness’ or an ‘ideal of morality ‘—it is absurd
to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the
concept ‘purpose’: in reality purpose is lacking. … One is necessary, one
is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole—there
exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being,
for that would be to judge, measure, condemn the whole. … But nothing
exists apart from the whole! That no one is any longer made accountable,
that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced back to a causa prima,
that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as ‘spirit,’ this alone is
the greatest liberation—thus alone is the innocence of being restored.”67

Perspectivism of Knowledge and Morality

“Nitimur in vetitum”68 Here the “forbidden” is knowledge: knowledge as

̶ 142 ̶
meaningful; meaningful as Truth; and Truth as codified in morality.

Man seeks ‘the Truth’: a world that is not self-contradictory, not deceptive,
does not change, a true world—a world in which one does not suffer;
contradiction, deception, change—causes of suffering! He does not doubt
that a world as it ought to be exists; he would like to seek out the road
to it.”69

Nietzsche’s harsh views of normative morality does not make him an

immoralist, however, except in the sense that he criticizes inveterate notions
of morality. Nietzsche merely rejects the ideal of a metaphysical ‘solution’
to the complexities of reality; he, thus, denied the existence of a divine
sanction for universal morality, such morality that provides meaning to
existence. Nietzsche is not an irrationalist either (this does not mean that he
is an anti-rationalist). For Nietzsche, instinctual reactions are to be favored,
but instinct (Trieb) must be in-hand with reason. Rather, Nietzsche is a
proponent of Perspectivism (rather ‘inverted perspectivism--Perspektiven
umzustellen). Nietzsche’s perpectivism regarding morality and rationalism
is often taken to imply that ‘truths’ and their ‘meanings’ are in fact il-
lusions, i.e., that there is no single truth-meaning, just different ways of
seeing and interpreting the world, maybe infinitely many; that, therefore,
universal relativism follows from personal perspectivism:

“We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually
fashion something that had not been there before: the whole eternally grow-
ing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations,
and negations.”70

This interpretation of perspectivism is relevant to “meaning” for if there

are no “objective” truths, one might argue, it is futile to think of reason

̶ 143 ̶
as an instrument for the pursuit of moral truths. In particular, perspectiv-
ism does not make presuppositions about truth, meaning, knowledge, and
reality. And because of this, it plays a more useful role in one’s ability
to determine personal significance than either rational thought or belief in
metaphysical faith--neither of which can hold a privileged place in human
life because they are mutually exclusive.

Nietzsche’s perspectivism does not entail that there are no knowable

truths. If so, then such an argument would be self-defeating. (That there is
no truth to the truth of perspectivism.)71 According to Nietzsche, we must
examine the notions of knowledge, morality, and their “truthfulness” from
a different standpoint: Truth is not something absolute and unchanging and
neither are the men who seek it. Magna est veritas et prævalet (commonly
misquoted from “Magna…prævalebit)72 for Nietzsche is more along the
lines of the fictional English schoolboy Billy Bunter--asked to translate the
Latin, he came up with “Truth is mighty and will prevail a bit.”73

Die dionysische Weltanschauung is the perspective of both life and

tragedy from the viewpoint of the ‘artist’ who experiences the creative
process which originates in chance but, paradoxically, is of an inescapable
necessity, engendered as it is by forces rooted deeply beneath the reaches
of consciousness. The artist, in acts of creation, needs to excite himself
(back) into the instinctual (Dionysian) states of ecstasy, joy, and lust so
that he will be able to project and sense the purpose and determine the
adequacy of his ‘images’ of meaning. The images are of meaning in the
sense of purposefulness—what is it one can do, not of what one ought
to do--and those are derived from reality itself. Reality without answers
(meaning) is preferable in the Dionysian perspective, for such a reality
̶ 144 ̶
provides the “sign of necessity” for the individual: the “necessity” that one
must fulfill oneself through one’s own values. Saying “No” to metaphysical
significance and rational ‘meaning’ is not a desecration of life, it is rather
the Dionysian affirmation of the eternal “Yes of being.” Nietzsche himself
derives precisely from this interpretation his affirmation, not only of art,
but also of life:

Sign of necessity!
Supreme star of being!—
That no desire attains,
That no NO desecrates,
Eternal YES of being,
Eternally I am your YES:
For I do love you, O Eternity!— 74

End Part One

Key to Abbreviations of Texts

BGE Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Güt und Böse)
BT The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie)
D Daybreak (Morgenröte)
DD Dionysische Dithyrambs (Dionysos-Dithyramben)
EH Ecce Homo
GM On the Geneology of Morals (Zur Genealogie der Moral)
GS The Gay Science (Die fröliche Wissenschaft—La Gaya Scienza)
HAH Human, All to Human (Menschliches, allzumenschliches)
TI Twilight of the Idols ( Die Götzen-Dämmerung)
Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra)
WP Will to Power (Der Wille zur macht)

̶ 145 ̶
Notes

1. EH. The Birth of Tragedy, 3, quoting from TI

2. TI. What I Owe the Ancients. 4
3. WP. Bk. iii. 616
4. BT. 3. p. 42. Silenus Greek woodland deity, foster father and companion of
Dionysis “For many of life’s events are such that they cause men to throw life away,
for instance diseases, excessive pains, storms; so that it is clear that on account of
these things any way it would be actually preferable, if someone offered us the
choice, not to be born at all.” Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia 1.1215b
5. Calderón de la Barca, (1600–1681) La Vida es Sueño
5a. Schopenhauer. W2. 576
6. BT. 17
7. Shakespeare, Troilus, ii, 2, 52
8. WP. Bk. ii. 142
9. ibid.
10. WP. Bk. iii. 614
11. D. Preface. 3
12. ibid.
13. WP. Bk. iii. 616
14. ibid.
15. BT. Preface 5
16. Plato. Gorgias 500c. “What course of life is best?”
17. Grundstimmung: Man’s pathos is that he tries ‘to be’ in a world of ‘becoming’:
man is accustomed to consider the ‘goal’ as the driving force, but it is merely a
direction in which one takes. There is only one’s being-in-becoming, that is, one’s
being is (the) becoming, and its meaning or goal is what is created through its
becoming.
18. BT. 9 ‘Goethe’s Prometheus’
Here I sit—I make men
In my own image,
A race like me,
To suffer, to weep,

̶ 146 ̶
 To enjoy life and rejoice, and then to pay no attention, like me.
19. WP. Bk. iii. 616: “The world of which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not
fact but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations;
it is ‘in flux,’ as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing
but never getting near the the truth: for there is no “Truth.’”
19a. Ecclesiastes 1: “All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. To the
place where the rivers flow, there they flow again.”
20. WP. 1067
21. It is a bit hazardous to generalize about Nietzsche, his dominate themes and ideas
(eternal recurrence, will to power, the Dionysian-Apollonian, transvaluation of values
and perspectivism, the death of god, among others). His entire output is characterize
by what may be called, at best, flashes of consistency. However, particularly in the
case of Nietzsche’s Dionysian, this leitmotiv occurs throughout all of his works,
implicitly or explicitly detailed, and thus, there is a great amount of thought that
can gleened for some interpretation. Nietzsche’s account of the Dionysian is diffuse,
flamboyant, and shot through with unique ideas, and while one cannot speak of a
coherent ‘system’ in connection with this concept, it is, nonetheless, characterized
by a unity provided by a pervading ethos: man’s life albeit essentially tragic has
redemptive value. How can these Dionysian forms be significant as redemptive forces
to the issue of meaninglessness? How can they be creative of meaningfulness? Most
significantly, how can they be truthful? Answering those questions, requires ‘know-
ing’ (although too exact a term) what is encompassed by Nietzsche’s Dionysian and
Apollinian values in the varied contexts of rationalism (knowledge, truth, logic),
morality and perspectivism; tragedy and nihilism; being and becoming; ‘willing’
and ‘self-transformation; symbolism and artistry, affirmation and denial, and sundry
others which will be touched upon.
22. What makes Nietzsche’s philosophy difficult to formulate in some unified inter-
pretation is his style of stringing together aphorisms and disconnected paragraphs
and alternating texts, anacoluthons, synesis; dots and dashes and inverted commas;
a style further characterized by overheated and hectic tones, self-indulgent rhetoric
and over-confident statements of a prophetic nature, and a defectiveness of logical
argument confidently asserted. The magnitude of this philosopher is measured more
in what he inspires others to think and consider rather than in so much what he

̶ 147 ̶
convinces with didactic argumentation.
23. Gertrude Stein. Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4; or Brewsie and Willie
(1946), Ch. 7
“I tell you boys there ant aint any answer, just you belive me, there aintany answer,
… there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that’s the
answer.”
24. WP. 616 “Daß der Wert der Welt in unserer Interpretation liegt.”
25. Der Übermensch: I have opted to keep specific terms in German when their
multiple connotations cannot be reflected in an English equivalent or when there is
no adequate equivalent. (Translated literally as the ‘Overman’; translated figuratively
as ‘Superman’ both are inadequate to its sense. I keep the original “Übermensch”
for ‘Overman’ is just odd and ‘Superman’ too comic.)
25a. Z. Prologue, #38 “The Übermensch is the meaning of the earth.”
26. “Will to power” As “will to power” is senseless in English, ‘Wille zur Macht”
will remain the dominant term.
Wille zur Macht: “…‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a law-giving, … will to
truth is—will to power.”
26a. BT. 2 This “Will to Truth” is the desire for “…unity with the innermost basis
of the world…”
26b. WP. 617 “To impose upon becoming the character of being—that is the supreme
will to power” / “Dem Werden den Charakter des Seins aufzuprägen—das ist der
höchste Wille zur Macht.”
27. TI. Morality as Anti-Nature, #5 (Moral als Widernatur)
28. “Faith in Antithetical Values”: BGE. Bk. i. 2 / “Der Glaube an die Gegensätze
der Werthe.”
29. TI. The Problem of Socrates, #6 referring to the Language of rationality and
metaphysics--“Dialectics can be only a last ditch weapon in the hands of those who
have no other weapon left.” / “It can only be a self-defense for those who no longer
have other weapons.”
30. WP. #1032 ‘Ja-sagen”: Affirmation: “The first question is by no means whether
we are content with ourselves, but whether we are content with anything at all. If
we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence.
For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul

̶ 148 ̶
has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity
was needed to produce this one event— and in this single moment of affirmation
all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”
31. BT. Preface 5. “the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phe-
nomenon.” / “…dass nur als ästhetisches Phänomen das Dasein der Welt gerechtfertigt
ist.”
32. UM. Bk. 3, iv.
33. UM. Bk. 3, iv.
34. AC. 18 “God the deification of nothingness…” / “In Gott das Nichts vergöt-
tlecht…”
35. Z. Part 1. Of the Bestowing Virtue 22.2 s. 9
Von der schenkenden Tugend: “Euer Geist und euer Tugend diene dem Sinn der
Erde, meine Brüder: und aller Dinge Werth werde neu von euch gesetzt! Darum sollt
ihr Kämpfended sein! Darum sollt ihr Schaffende sein!”
36. WP. sec. 332
36a. ‘Ought’ implies ‘can’ and the recognition of some imperative, in this case
moral; ‘ought’ as a moral imperative, therefore, is a constraining force upon the
free will, whereas as Nietzsche perhaps would see it, what is ‘moral’ is the ideal
which attracts the moral agent.
37. WP. Bk. iv. 1067. “Diese Welt ist der Wille zur Macht--”
38. BGE. Part 9. 259: “Principle of decay and disintegration” / “Auflösungs und
Verfalls-Princip”
39. Ozymandias. (1818); Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
40. WP. Bk. iii. a. 580.4
41. GM. iii. 163
42. Samuel Beckett. Molloy (1951)
43. WP. Bk. i. 20 (Spring-fall 1887)
“The nihilistic question ‘For what?’ is rooted in the old habit of supposing that the goal
must be put up, given, demanded from outside—by some superhuman authority.”
44. Z. Prologue. 5 “Ich sage euch: man muß noch Chaos in sich haben, um einem
tanzenden Stern gebären zu können.”
45. Historicity: Man’s hermeneutic understanding (Verstehen in Dilthey) of himself
historically and how this undertstanding depends on a manner of interpretation in-

̶ 149 ̶
herited from the past; it is a kind of ‘tradition’ of thinking of himself and “Every
tradition grows ever more venerable—the more remote its origin is. The reverence
due to it increases from generation to generation. The tradition finally becomes holy
and inspires awe.” HAH. I.96
46. GS. Bk. 5. 344 The hypothesis that ordinary language constrains thought and in
so doing creates its own worldview, is Nietzsche’s—cf. Sapir and Whorf: ‘We see
and hear… very largely as we do because the language habits of our community
predispose certain choices of interpretation.” The Status of Linguistics as a Science
(1929); B.L.Whorf. (1956) Language, Thought, and Reality. Benjamin Lee Whorf.
46a. Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn. (1873). 4
‘What then is Truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropo-
morphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and
rhetorically intensified, ytransferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage,
seem to people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we
have forgotten are illusions.”
47. Nietzsche’s criticism of the concept of a teleology in moralities in general leads
to his vehement rejection of specific prescriptive moralities, namely the ‘moralities’
of rationality, science and logic.
47a. “We see that science also rests on a faith, there simply is no science “without
presuppositions.” The question whether Truth is needed must not only have been
affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the
conviction finds expression: ‘Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to
it everything else has only second-rate value.’”
48. WP. Bk. iii. 516.7
49. WP. Bk. iii. 606 “Der Mensch findet zuletzt in den Dingen nichts wieder, als
was er selbst in sie hineingesteckt hat…”
50. GS. Bk. 5. #343 “Das größte neuere Ereigniss, --daß “Gott todt ist,” daß der
Glaube an den christlichen Gott unglaubwürdig geworden ist—. …scheint eben irgend
Sonne untergegangen, irgend ein altes tiefes Vertrauen in Zweifel umgedreht…”
51. Schopenhauer: W.1. 252 The “terrible side of life”—“The unspeakable pain,
the wretchedness and misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful
mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent are all here
presented to us; and here is to be found a significant hint as to the nature of the

̶ 150 ̶
world and of existence. …”
52. GS. 124
53. Frege. Sinn und Bedeutung (1892) Sense (connotation) and reference (denota-
tion)
54. GM. Third essay, #25
55. TI, Maxims and Arrows, #44 “Formel meines Glücks: ein Ja, ein Nein, eine
gerade Linie ein Ziel. …”
56. GS. 121
“Life is no argument: We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can
live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and
content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does
not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.”
57. Wittgenstein: Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung: 6.44 “Not how the world is,
is the mystical, but that it is.”
58. Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. C.500 B.C.E.) Everything is in flux, “One cannot step
into the same river twice.”
58a. WP. 616 “The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not a fact
but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of obsevations; it is
‘in flux,; as something in a state of becoming….”
59. WP. bk.1 a.12.I. 4.
60. “Chaos sive natura” (From Spinoza’s ‘Deus sive natura’ (God=nature)
61. GM. First Essay, 17. ll. 18–20
62. ibid.
63. WP. #617 “Erkenntnis an sich im Werden unmöglich; wie ist also Erkenntnis
möglich?”
64. “Ding-an-sich”: Thing-in-itself. For Nietzsche “The ‘thing-in-itself’ is nonsensi-
cal” (WP. Bk. iii. 558) ; “The ‘in-iself’ is …an absurd conception.”
65. WP. Bk. iii. 552 (Spring-Fall 1887)
66. Oscar Wilde. Mrs. Cheveley, act I
67. TI. The Four Great Errors, 8
68. Nitimur in vetitum. Ovid, Amores, III, 4.17 (In EH, preface, 3) (We strive for
the forbidden)
“Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from

̶ 151 ̶
hardness against oneself…
In this sign my philosophy will triumph one day, for what one has forbidden so
far as a matter of principle has always been truth alone”
69. WP. Bk. iii. 585 (A)
70. GS. 301
71. If perspectivism is itself just another perspective, then there is no reason to
accept the ‘truth’ of the proposition ‘all knowledge is perspectival.’ Contrariwise, if
there is at least one form of knowledge which is not perspectival, then perspectivism
is false.
72. “Magna est veritas et praevalet “Latin Vulgate Bible, First book of Esdras; Book
of Ezra, King James Bible)
73. Related to this Billy Bunter translation is the poem The Unknown Eros (1877)
by Coventry Patmore:
Here in this little Bay
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.
74. Dionysus-Dithyrambs (Fame and Eternity, sec. 4. s.3 )

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