The Birth of Tragedy · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
2.
"This beginning is singular beyond measure. I had for my own inmost experience _discovered_ the only symbol and counterpart of history,--I had just thereby been the first to grasp the wonderful phenomenon of the Dionysian. And again, through my diagnosing Socrates as a decadent, I had given a wholly unequivocal proof of how little risk the trustworthiness of my psychological grasp would run of being weakened by some moralistic idiosyncrasy--to view morality itself as a symptom of decadence is an innovation, a novelty of the first rank in the history of knowledge. How far I had leaped in either case beyond the smug shallow-pate-gossip of optimism _contra_ pessimism! I was the first to see the intrinsic antithesis: here, the _degenerating_ instinct which, with subterranean vindictiveness, turns against life (Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense already the philosophy of Plato, all idealistic systems as typical forms), and there, a formula of _highest affirmation,_ born of fullness and overfullness, a yea-saying without reserve to suffering's self, to guilt's self, to all that is questionable and strange in existence itself. This final, cheerfullest, exuberantly mad-and-merriest Yea to life is not only the highest insight, it is also the _deepest,_ it is that which is most rigorously confirmed and upheld by truth and science.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.