Opening sequence from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.
Extract from Nietzsche’s “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” published 14 years after The Birth of Tragedy (texts available here):
Already in the preface to Richard Wagner it is asserted that art - and not morality - is the true metaphysical activity of man; several times in the book itself the provocative sentence recurs that the existence of the world is justified (gerechtfertigt) only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed the whole book acknowledges only an artist’s meaning (and hidden meaning) behind all that happens - a ‘god’, if you will, but certainly only an utterly unscrupulous and amoral artist-god who frees (lost) himself from the dire pressure of fullness and over-fullness, from suffering the oppositions packed within him, and who wishes to become conscious of his autarchic power and constant delight and desire, whether he is building or destroying, whether acting benignly or malevolently… Here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism ‘beyond good and evil’ announces itself…
