ABSTRACT
I feel in accord with and enlightened by what I take as the two principal motivating ideas of Stephen Mulhall's paper (Mulhall 2012), namely that Nietzsche's early text The Birth of Tragedy is a central work of Nietzsche's perfectionism and that this work proves itself to exhibit in its working the thing it argues: that philosophy's ancient project of projecting, as in Plato, a world beyond in relation to this world, one that explains the coherence and the aspiration of this world, is to be understood simultaneously as a work that itself partakes of, not merely a work that is about, tragedy, a work showing human comprehension to effect and to require not alone liberation but suffering. 2 This understanding in effect turns Plato on his head, showing that what we take as our world's “imitation” of another world more perfect, guaranteeing our quest for knowledge, is itself the manifestation or flowering of a world otherwise dark to itself, allowing it to become known through our journey of perfection.
