Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays Collected Works, Volume Two · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
CONCLUSION
Greek thought during the _tragic age is pessimistic_ or _artistically optimistic_. Their judgment about _life_ implies more. The One, flight from the Becoming. _Aut_ unity, _aut_ artistic play. Deep distrust of reality: nobody assumes a good god, who has made everything _optime_. {Pythagoreans, religious sect. {Anaximander. {Empedocles. Eleates. {Anaxagoras. {Heraclitus. Democritus: the world without moral and æsthetic meaning, pessimism of chance. If one placed a tragedy before all these, the three former would see in it the mirror of the fatality of existence, Parmenides a transitory appearance, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras an artistic edifice and image of the world-laws, Democritus the result of machines. . . . . . . . With Socrates _Optimism_ begins, an optimism no longer artistic, with teleology and faith in the good god; faith in the enlightened good man. Dissolution of the instincts, Socrates breaks with the hitherto prevailing _knowledge_ and _culture;_ he intends returning to the old citizen-virtue and to the State. Plato dissociates himself from the State, when he observes that the State has become identical with the new Culture. The Socratic scepticism is a weapon against the hitherto prevailing culture and knowledge.
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