pt.1 From Plato to Pico della Mirandola: Plato: creativity and desire -- Plato: the artist and the city -- Pico della Mirandola: man in Proteus's likeness -- pt. 2. From Goethe to Thomas Mann: Goethe: vocation and debt -- Hegel: clarity and melancholy -- Wagner: incipit comoedia -- Nietzsche: mind divorced from the city -- Thomas Mann: diseases of the will.