Third Lecture

For Nietzsche, what he was able to experience there became a real purpose in life and a tragedy of life. Scientific development itself in the last third of the 19th century became the innermost tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche's life, because now that he had become a fanatic of truth, a positivist, a Voltairean, he had to permeate his whole being with what was unloading in his head; he had to feel the full humanity of it. What he had previously dreamed up in his “Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music” and in his “Untimely Meditations” as consolation for the scientific tragedy of life, based on the spirit of the human head, on intellectual knowledge, he could no longer derive from his system of thought; it no longer yielded thinking for him. In the first epoch of his life, which I characterized yesterday as dark, he wanted to penetrate and illuminate perception, which seemed to come out of a sleep, with human soul content. But this human soul content became for him only what then turned out to be an illusion. And so, in his positivist period, he felt drawn to the one-sided world of perception, which is only part of reality, but not the whole of reality.