"At bottom, Rosen’s counter to the self-legislating, radically self-making romantic image that flows from Rousseauian romanticism through Kant to later German philosophy, as well as to the overly reverential awe before the “fundamental problems” that Rosen thinks characterizes the conservative, to some extent the Heideggerian and especially the Straussian, position, might best be called a Platonic interpretation of a famous Nietzschean image. “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—-a rope over an abyss,” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra announces in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The image does not imply that this situation is temporary or avoidable. (Just the opposite: “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”) It is the same as saying that a human being is essentially, not incidentally or temporarily, erotic, and so perhaps tragically erotic, wanting what it cannot ever have (a complete comprehensive wisdom) and thereby tempted to extreme measures at completion (measures that greatly increase the risk of falling into the abyss) or tempted by a paralyzing, overly prudential caution (or a “cheerfully nihilistic” rejection of the questions). The trick would be to keep moving (with little prospect of ever really becoming more than or “over” human) without falling off. And that is a difficult form of eros to bear, to endure, one also suggested by Nietzsche elsewhere in an image that seems to me an apposite Rosenian one. Nietzsche notes that “our passion,…the drive to knowledge,…has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or [to be able to want the happiness] of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imagine such a state of things is painful to us! Restless discovering and divining has such an attraction to us, and has grown as indispensable to us as is to the lover his unrequited love, which he would at no price relinquish for a state of indifference—-perhaps, indeed, we too are unrequited lovers."