MAN AND THE ABYSS

Abstract

Man and the Abyss is a trip along a philosophical pathway within which lies an effort in the search of an esthetical liaison between the intricacies of the tragic thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and some of the posthumous works of the controversial Irish painter Francis Bacon. Thus, the present writing is nothing more than an adventure, a wild chase of the Death of Tragedy and its attempts of a comeback. It is reencountering obscurity, experimented in the faces of Bacon (Dionysian metamorphosis) asserting life and at the same time the suffering and not an Apollonian Appearance; it is the tragic man being a masterpiece himself. Here, there is a meeting with the thing-in-itself and not a mere representation of it (theoretical or Socratic man). In the painter’s works we see Dionysius asserting life but not justifying nor redeeming it, we see Zarathushtra enticing us to darkness; thus, his works are a multiplicity of forces in struggle, tearing apart, annihilating the body in the excruciating meeting with the thing-in-itself, whose outcome is the rupture of the fictitious image of the subject by asserting the pain of existence. We will finally arrive to the conclusion that Bacon, who was a tragic artist, conveys in his expressionistic brushes the return to the Primordial Unity.