Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography

CHAPTER 6

The Panacea

of Knowledge

Rift with Wagner^ β Hocked on Socrates · The panacea of

knowledge · Necessary cruelties · Staying cool · Falling

atoms in empty space · Human, All Too Human

In THE S UMMER of 1878, when the first volume of Human, All
Too Human had just been published and his rift with Wagner was a fait
accompli, Nietzsche wrote in his notebooks: "Wagner's nature makes
poets out of us and we invent an even higher nature. This is one of his
most splendid accomplishments, which ultimately turns against him"
(8,543). One feature of this "higher nature," which Nietzsche had
devised under the influence of Wagner, was an ability to experience and
conceptualize the "suprahistorical" as a metaphysical vision that may
not conjure up any heavenly order, but discovers the "character of the
eternal with a fixed meaning" (1,330; HL § 10) in existence. In his unfin-
ished "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks," written in 1873,
Nietzsche used the pre-Socraric Thaïes to illustrate the suprahistorical
viewpoint "When Thaïes says 'Everything is water/ we jerk up from the
wormlike probings and creepings of the individual sciences, sensing the
ultimate solution of things and using it to surmount the vulgar limita-
tions of the lower levels of knowledge. The philosopher seeks to hear
within himself echoes of the entire sonority of the wodd" (1,817; PTA

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