Abstract

Mr. Meyer’s paper is worthy of our esteem for three reminders that it brings us: that tragedy endures as a significant category in Nietzsche’s thought; that the category of the tragic transcends the merely literary, and engages with Nietzsche’s fundamental philosophical interests; and that Nietzsche’s self-situation in the history of philosophy follows up on perhaps different thinkers than the standard historiography of philosophy would suggest. But there is also much here to disagree with, and I shall focus on four topics on which my disagreement with Matt is systematic and deep: what the “unity of opposites”(UO) might mean, what normative implications UO has, whether UO is significant in Nietzsche’s later work, and, finally, the relation of UO to the tragic.