If "existence and the world appear justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon" (p. 128), then what is real is that which is created at the interstitial meeting point of the observer and the observed. The real is thus local and created; it is explicitly positional.Nietzsche examines the dual-nature of the inherited western perspective, what he terms the Apollonian and Dionysian, and critiques the disappearance of the Dionysian perspective. The Apollonian, or the rational, the knowable, has subsumed the older, more primal Dionysian. Using the metaphor of Olympian Gods and Titans, Nietzsche believes the expulsion of the Titans, of a certain naturalness which prefigures the social, has left western thought and western society both impoverished and incoherent. How are we to know that, pace Socrates, 'knowledge is virtue'? The compulsion which drives the scientist or the philosopher, the spirit which animates the use of the rational approach and/or the dialectic, comes not from phenomena, but from that deeper, hidden aspect of the real. Nietzsche would echo - and somewhat alter - Schopenhauer, in terming this hidden aspect the will.
It is a somewhat fine point to differentiate between that which underpins Nietzsche's world and that which Socrates/Plato would term the eternal and the changeless (often the Forms). Nietzsche's main complaint is that Socrates/Plato has taken one side of the Apollonian-Dionysian duality and subsumed all of reality to an Apollonian perspective. The triumph of reason is, and has been, for Nietzsche, groundless, somewhat ironic, and has contributed to a widespread cultural impoverishment that 19th century Germany suffered greatly from (the sympathetic reader might extend this assessment to our contemporary situation). Whether this was Plato's intent or not, is debatable (see Zuckert 1985, Nietzsche's Rereading of Plato). What is clear is that Nietzsche takes the philosopher, and his teacher, very seriously. The implications he draws from these Athenians' teachings suggest we should as well. They have crafted the position we inhabit and thus the real we embody.
