1. in BT, Nietzsche has a firm division between a real world in which being can be at home with its essence through the intoxicating power of tragic music, and an apparent world of everyday experiences towards the gratification and sublimation of sensual delight, this is how the dual cults in Greek culture, the Apollonianism and Dionysianism, are connected symbolically with an attempt to bring about redemptive hope into a demythologized world suffering from the rupture of knowledge and faith. Like the romantic reception of myth, Nietzsche retains the liberating power of Dionysus to unmask the repression and alienation of the modern culture dominated by the cult of purposive rationality and colonized by the objectifying science. If the romantic fanaticism of mystical experiences is to afford an existential unity with a pre-cultured nature by destroying the arrogance of a self-centred ego, Nietzsche no less desires the discovery of a deeper nature lying in the self-disclosure of a de-centred subject which he believes remains pure and innocent, “liberated from all constraints of cognition and purposive activity, all imperatives of utility and morality” (Habermas). The intensification of pleasure found in the loss of subjectivity mediated by the enchanting power of art is countered to the enfeebling and deceitfulness of an apparent being historically burdened with the imperatives of lawfulness. What Nietzsche romantically bids farewell to is but the dialectic of enlightenment, on the one hand, he realized it must end up with more palpable rupture as reason intends to do everything to take the place of the traditional religion by manifesting itself as the ideologically false religiosity of modern culture, on the other, he was aware it is impossible to restore faith in the place of knowledge. However,as Nietzsche fires a combat against the illusion of belief in truth, he nevertheless finds itself trapped in his own total critique of the metaphysics, for he has to affirm the truth of will to power, an alternative to the Enlightenment truth-bound metaphysics, is not merely an illusion. Evident in Nietzsche’s break with Wagnerian opera, to which he is aversive due to its potential alignment with a romantic origin and taste, Nietzsche thinks it important not to fend off the old cult with a new mythology, but to what extent does Nietzsche succeed in overcoming the alleged failure of the romantic project, is his cult of Dionysus not a rejuvenation of the Christian God, is his will to power not dependent on a being of truth? Probably Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of the perspectivism inherent to the belief of truth unfortunately comes back to question his own privileged perspective in asserting the content of truth, a performative contradiction so to speak.
2. does Nietzsche, in the HH, create a new real world described and explained by science, if so, in what way this real world has a new face different from that in BT, how can we make sense that science is a better medium to, or radically, the very content of this real world than art, how does the cult of genius, to which Nietzsche is hostile, manage to perpetuate the impression of spontaneity leading to the degeneration of art, can this world of science sustain the hope of redemption for the ruptures in the modern culture, or Nietzsche has withdrawn his total combat against the dialectics of enlightenment and in HH he thinks it more important to envisage a new culture free from the existing ruptures and contradictions? Can we still rest our hope on the monumental art as a “signpost to the future”, the future of a rigorously productive humanity with a free spirit, and the future of a healthy culture representing the victory over the metaphysical nihilism after the death of God?
3. is the eternal return a test of time, if for the test of time the notion of eternal returns is suggested, then does Nietzsche have in mind a radically different consciousness of time from that one of the modernity’s which is largely indebted to the Hegelian self-unfolding of the Zeitgeist. is eternal return so cast in the concluding narratives of Zarathustra teachings an allusion to the deification of the present, namely, what occurs to the present shall set exemplary norms to the future and probably as a remembering of the past but what makes the present so special, and so important, to the formation of the consciousness of time, is that it is where and how we can will back to the past, and envisage the future which will become the present and then the past? Is this deification as well a redemption of the present, through which the present is but the hope, the truth, and the good we can have a firm grip of, is it in the sense that the present has an end in fulfilling and redeeming itself not in an idealized future, the typically Christianized concept of progress in redemption, but the present can be at home with itself in a way in which the relevance of the past and the future to the present is identical with and consummated in the willing from the present? If so, the present is where the historical consciousness is seeded and developed, the present is somehow the history we can affirm and participate.
4. amor fati, is it a test of being, in affirming the eternal return is all being must be subjected to, can we then rest in comfort and consolation? If so, is each one of us an exemplar to himself by affirming this fate with good intellectual conscience, for we are honest about who we are and what we are to be? Is Zarathustra with us as being a universal exemplar for amor fati , or does he ultimately have to be one of us, with the arrival of a new epoch heralding the birth of overman, a free species demanding no exemplar to be what he will to be?
