The Panacea of Knowledge 141that he experiences the so-called gravity of life only as a game. A work
of art can make us "soothingly dissolve reality into a delusion in which
this earnest reality itself in turn, seems like nothing but delusion"
(Wagner, Denken 315). Nietzsche had on March 2,1873, recommended
that his friend Gersdorff read this essay by Wagner, calling it "among the
most profound of his literary products" and " 'edifying' in the noblest
sense" (Β 4,131). Two years later, in the notebooks of 1875, Nietzsche
rejected the idea that it is possible to lie our way into "deliberate mad-
ness" without suffering a loss of intellectual integrity. We should exam-
ine the forces that shape art without any illusions: "the pleasure in lying,
in the obscurely symbolic" (8,92).
From this point on, Nietzsche no longer wanted to allow himself to
employ sophisticated reflection—that is, reason—to nullify reason and
dream his way into an aesthetic myth that would ultimately have him
believing that he believes. He explained his unwillingness as follows: "In
a religious cult, an earlier degree of culture is retained as 'leftovers.^5 The
eras that celebrate it are not the ones that devise it" (8,83). How much
further removed from the origin are the times in which the "cult" of
tragedy was not even celebrated, but only enjoyed aesthetically! We are
just fooling ourselves with all of this allure of tragedy. Nietzsche thickly
underlined key phrases in the following note, as though trying to drum
them into his head: 'The fact that the essence of ancient culture has
become thoroughly decrepit for us severs us from that culture permanendy.
A critique of the Greeks is also a critique of Christianity, because the
basis in a belief in spirits, in the religious cult, in the enchantment of
nature, is the same" (8,83).
When Nietzsche looked back one decade later at the period of his
dreams of a renaissance of myth and tragedy in the wake of Wagner, he
wrote in his notebook: "Behind my first period smirks the face of
Jesuitism, by which I mean conscious clinging to illusions and forced
incorporation of them as the basis of culture" (10,507). As eariy as the
mid-1870s, before even one decade had elapsed, Nietzsche took resolute
clinging to shattered illusions to task. He wrote that "impure thinking"