And we
have arrived at the bottom of the abyss, at the irreconcilable conflict
between reason and vital feeling. And having arrived here, I have told
you that it is necessary to accept the conflict as such and to live by
it. Now it remains for me to explain to you how, according to my way of
feeling, and even according to my way of thinking, this despair may be
the basis of a vigorous life, of an efficacious activity, of an ethic,
of an esthetic, of a religion and even of a logic. But in what follows
there will be as much of imagination as of ratiocination, or rather,
much more.
I do not wish to deceive anyone, or to offer as philosophy what it may
be is only poetry or phantasmagoria, in any case a kind of mythology.
The divine Plato, after having discussed the immortality of the soul in
his dialogue _Phaedo_ (an ideal--that is to say, a lying--immortality),
embarked upon an interpretation of the myths which treat of the other
life, remarking that it was also necessary to mythologize. Let us, then,
mythologize.
He who looks for reasons, strictly so called, scientific arguments,
technically logical reflections, may refuse to follow me further.
Throughout the remainder of these reflections upon the tragic sense, I
am going to fish for the attention of the reader with the naked,
unbaited hook; whoever wishes to bite, let him bite, but I deceive no
one. Only in the conclusion I hope to gather everything together and to
show that this religious despair which I have been talking about, and
which is nothing other than the tragic sense of life itself, is, though
more or less hidden, the very foundation of the consciousness of
civilized individuals and peoples to-day--that is to say, of those
individuals and those peoples who do not suffer from stupidity of
intellect or stupidity of feeling.
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