ABSTRACT
It is easy to say that Nietzsche is an artist-philosopher; he says so himself. If Zarathustra represents for Nietzsche a world in which the artist-philosopher would again exist as something other than an outcast, Nietzsche saw his life as a flickering instance of that possibility. Though he is likely the first modern poet-thinker to call himself as such, Nietzsche comes on the scene of New Philosophy as yet another chapter in a long if unmarked tradition. In this respect perhaps it is worth noting that Nietzsche is born in the same year that Hegel dies. And while few would call Hegel an artist-philosopher, that is partly because very few indeed have considered the possibility that Nietzsche's Dionysian/Apollonian poetics could have anything to do with the author of The Science of Logic, Nietzsche's foremost predecessor, Hegel. Written in 1796, "The Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism" is put to paper in Hegel's hand but generally appears under Holderlin's name.
