84 Nietzsche"dance floors" (1,14; BT"Attempt at Self-Criticism" § 3). The students
in Basel deserted him. In Tribschen, by contrast, he was hailed. Richard
Wagner was pleased with what he took to be an authentic portrait of
himself as Dionysus. It escaped the attention of this egomaniac that
Nietzsche was also portraying himself and his own passion for this
"unknown god" (1,14).
Nietzsche had gotten involved with the Dionysian power of life from
the relatively secure perspective of aestheticism. Now the game was
turning serious, and Nietzsche would have to bear the social conse-
quences of his stance, namely dissociation from the academy, which
considered him "dead." His professorship in Basel became onerous, and
he fell ill. Nonetheless, now that he had entered onto this path, he had
every intention of sticking to it. Nietzsche built his critique of the will
to knowledge around a Dionysian view of life. His 1872 essay "On
Truth and Falsehood in an Extramoral Sense" opened with the follow-
ing narrative: "Once upon a time, in a faraway corner of the universe,
poured out and glistening in infinite solar systems, there was a constel-
lation on which clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most
arrogant and devious minute of 'world history': but still only a minute.
After just a few breaths that nature took, the constellation froze, and the
clever animals had to die. Someone could invent a fable of that sort and
still not illustrate adequately how wretched, how shadowy and volatile,
how purposeless and random human intellect appears within nature"
(1,875; TF§1).
Life requires an "enveloping atmosphere" (1,323; HL § 9) of igno-
rance, illusion, and dreams in which to ensconce itself to make living
endurable. Most of all, however, life needs music, ideally the music of
Richard Wagner.