For Nietzsche, every great positive manifestation of what is most valuable for human beings has a shady or at least inferior simulacrum. If the simulacrum is understood properly, it may be harmless or even indispensable. Thus in our ordinary waking state there is no doubt that reason and reasoning are valuable activities. But they pertain to the world of illusion, or appearance, and are powerless to instruct us as to the nature of the real. Aesthetic Socratism, Nietzsche’s arch-foe at this first stage of his thinking, takes the opposite viewpoint; and the calamitous artistic result is that we
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