Abstract
The isolation of the individual ought not to deceive us: something flows on underneath individuals.
Although it impinges on virtually everything that he writes, Nietzsche’s thinking of becoming is never elaborated in comprehensive terms. Silently and anarchically, the energy of becoming pulses through his writings, a dark and vagrant current upon which so much of his philosophy is buoyed. From his first acquaintance with the serenity of ancient Greek art, Nietzsche had the suspicion that something rippled underneath the orderly and implacable Hellenic world. In The Birth of Tragedy he suggests that Apollonian delight in restraint, exemplified by the imposing columns and statues and rigid political structure of the Doric state, could only be understood as a permanent military encampment against the rush (Rausch) of the Dionysian (BT, 4). In his later writings on will to power the world is envisaged as a “sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and flood of its forms” (KSA, 11:38 [12]).