What is Tragic About the Pre-Platonic Philosophers? On Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
What is Tragic About the Pre-Platonic Philosophers? On Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Summary/Abstract: This essay aims to understand the tragic character of the first philosophers in Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. It claims that their tragicity should be understood based on the categories of personality and grandiosity in so far as they are related to these philosophers’ experience of the monstrous and their heroic response to this experience through the artistic production of concepts. The first philosophers carry out a symbolic mediation of the presence of the monstrous in culture, which is so important to preserve the connection between culture and life, in such a way that they make it possible for their culture to live a life in abundance. Nietzsche is aware that the categories used by human beings in general have a fictional and intrinsically artistic nature. When considering the first philosophers, he consciously makes use of fictional and artistic categories (where the monstrous is included too). Like these philosophers, he asserts himself as a tragic hero who artistically produces this kind of categories in response to his own experience of the monstrous in modern culture. The tragicity of the first philosophers is, therefore, fundamentally related to them being an inspiring ideal created by Nietzsche the tragic philosopher.

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