We Antipodes

Nietzsche admitted that he had mistakenly thought that Schopenhauer’s philosophy was the result of a strong attachment to life that enabled him to acknowledge life’s horrors. He also thought that Wagner’s music expressed a vital life force. But Nietzsche later realized that he was only attributing his own qualities to those men’s works. Both Schopenhauer and Wagner were against life. Other such decadents were Epicureans, Christians, Pascal, and Flaubert. Nietzsche, in contrast, celebrated the egoistical Dionysian Greek who affirmed life in spite of its many horrors and terrors.