Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Smile of Tragedy: Nietzsche and the Art of Virtue

The Smile of Tragedy: Nietzsche and the Art of Virtue

Ahern, Daniel R.

Paperback

Series: Literature and Philosophy, Book 32

PhilosophyLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 0271052511
ISBN13: 9780271052519
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: May 15 2012
Pages: 184
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.42 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In The Smile of Tragedy, Daniel Ahern examines Nietzsche's attitude toward what he called the tragic age of the Greeks, showing it to be the foundation not only for his attack upon the birth of philosophy during the Socratic era but also for his overall critique of Western culture. Through an interpretation of Dionysian pessimism, Ahern clarifies the ways in which Nietzsche sees ethics and aesthetics as inseparable and how their theoretical separation is at the root of Western nihilism. Ahern explains why Nietzsche, in creating this precursor to a new aesthetics, rejects Aristotle's medicinal interpretation of tragic art and concentrates on Apollinian cruelty as a form of intoxication without which there can be no art. Ahern shows that Nietzsche saw the human body as the vessel through which virtue and art are possible, as the path to an interpretation of selflessness, as the means to determining an order of rank among human beings, and as the site where ethics and aesthetics coincide.

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