Evening Twilight of Art: An Examination of Nietzsche’s Critique of Art and the Aesthetic Tradition
Aleksandra Subic
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctorate in Philosophy Degree in Philosophy
Department of Philosophy Faculty of Art University of Ottawa
Aleksandra Subic, Ottawa, Canada, 2015
Abstract
Since the earliest reception of his thought Nietzsche’s name has been consistently associated with a certain valorization of art that is taken to be central to his work and his overall concerns. Even a brief overview of Nietzsche literature will speak to the fact that Nietzsche is held in general to be the quintessential philosopher of art, the thinker who holds art to be a central aspect of life lived well and of culture ‘well turned out’. The broad aim of this study is to offer an alternative reading of Nietzsche’s thought on art that will suggest a need to re-examine this generally accepted consensus concerning Nietzsche’s philosophy; it is to recognize the deep suspicion and at times hostility that Nietzsche displays towards art and artists, to uncover philosophical argument and assumptions underlying this suspicion, to bring to surface his thoroughgoing and consistent attempt to uncover the power configurations and presupposition which, Nietzsche believed, underpinned not just a particular kind of art or work of art, but art in general, and finally to view this tendency as something deeply connected to other areas of his thought. While bringing to surface this much neglected aspect of Nietzsche’s treatment of art, I show that his critique may turn out to be quite radical and far reaching, inasmuch as Nietzsche goes perhaps further than Hegel in diagnosing the death of art, and because he systematically attempts to undermine, negate, and expose as self-defeating or life-denying not only the conception of art conceived by the aesthetic tradition, but also modern artistic practices and the consumption of art as a cultural good. Thus legitimate question that this thesis raises and attempts to answer is whether or not we could indeed attribute to Nietzsche a death of art thesis – a position which may seem unthinkable given the importance of art in his thought.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to express my profound gratitude to Professor Sonia Sikka for her expertise, guidance and support. During the development of this project there have been some dramatic changes in my life, all of which made me feel at times that it is impossible to continue. It has been a long and arduous process and I wish to thank Professor Sikka for her enduring patience, understanding and faith. My deepest thanks go to Professor David Raynor for our numerous conversations about Nietzsche, Hume, and much else, that were always intriguing and inspiring, and to Professor Jeffrey Ried for an incredible job for making Hegel seem almost human and the German Romantics so much more accessible. I wish to thank my partner Boris Vukovic without whose love, support, encouragement and patience this thesis would not have been written. Thank you for waiting this long and for believing in me, for working hard and taking care of our precious little girl all those hours I spent away with Nietzsche. Thank you to my mom for teaching me some German and for being my best friend, to my late dad for showing me what strength and determination truly are, and to whom I made a promise years ago. Last but not least, I dedicate this work to my little miracle, my daughter Mila for whom I want to be an example and who taught me a true meaning of unconditional love.
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Contents
Abstract ii Acknowledgments iii List of Abbreviations v Introduction p. 1 Chapter I: The Birth of Tragedy and Nietzsche’s Early Conception of Art p.19 Summery Of the Birth of Tragedy p. 29 The Apollonian and the Dionysian p. 33 The Apollonian and the Socratic p. 46 Chapter II: Epistemological Challenge p. 57 Truth and Language p. 58 Perspectivism and Interpretation p. 73 Interpretation and Will to Power p. 99 Chapter III: The Crisis p. 107 The Aesthetic Tradition p. 119 Wagner, Art and Modernity p. 154 Death of Art p.176 Chapter IV: Art Re-imagined p. 180 Interpretive Dialectic p. 191 Physiology and Art and Truth p. 191 Death of Art, Revisited p. 224 Bibliography p.245
iv List of Abbreviations
A Antichrist ASC Attempt at Self-Criticism BGE Beyond Good and Evil BT The Birth of Tragedy CW The Case of Wagner D Daybreak EH Ecce Homo GM On the Genealogy of Morals GS The Gay Science HATH Human All Too Human KGB Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesataumsgabe KGW Werke. Kritische Gesataumsgabe KSA Werke Kritische Studienausgabe NCW Nietzsche Contra Wagner OTL “On Truth and Lies in Non Moral Sense” P “The Philosopher. Reflections on the Struggle between Art and Knowledge” PHT “Philosophy in Hard Times” PTAG “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks” RH “Introduction to Rhetoric” TI Twilight of the Idols UM Untimely Meditations I “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” II “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” WP The Will to Power WS The Wanderer and His Shadow Z Zarathustra
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Introduction
This study is concerned with Nietzsche’s aesthetics, and primarily with his critique of art. There is a considerable difficulty in articulating what Nietzsche’s
‘philosophy of art’ might have been, or whether he did in fact have one. This difficulty stems from the fact that Nietzsche’s engagement with art was multi-dimensional and lasted throughout his productive life – a relatively brief period but nevertheless one long enough to see Nietzsche’s ideas on art go through significant, even dramatic changes. Thus the search for any single position describable as ‘Nietzsche’s philosophy of art’ might be ill conceived and more or less destined to fail. Rather, Nietzsche’s thinking about art must be seen as standing in a dynamic and reciprocal relation to his thought about everything else. And this means that any worthwhile attempt at a reconstruction of his ‘philosophy of art’ must be both developmental and contextual; it must, in other words, be an attempt to understand Nietzsche’s engagement with art within the larger context of his intellectual biography.
I approach Nietzsche’s thought on art in the hope of articulating questions which
I believe need to be asked of his account, and providing at least some answers which will allow us, as Nietzsche would say, to ‘see differently’ not only what Nietzsche
1 thought of art but also what is at stake in his treatment of it. The most general questions posed by this study are, what happens to art in Nietzsche’s thought after The
Birth of Tragedy (BT), or what are the changes in his attitude towards it, how do they come about and finally, how and to what extent Nietzsche’s new perspective on art alter arts capacity to answer the demands Nietzsche himself placed on it. This is not to say that I what I offer here is something one might call Nietzsche’s final word on art – a general or overarching view reconstructed from a careful examination of Nietzsche’s claims. It is, however, to suggest that there is a current in Nietzsche’s aesthetics that has gone largely unnoticed even though it has helped shape his thinking on art and determine its direction, from beginning to end. From the perspective of this study, it is rather surprising that most of our understanding of Nietzsche’s attitude towards art is narrowly focused on BT and its glorification and elevation of art to the status of cultural, and human redeemer. What makes this approach to Nietzsche even more puzzling is the simple fact that Nietzsche’s views developed over time, and more specifically that
Nietzsche’s relationship to art was complex and intimately related to his changing and maturing views about much else. Thus the task of this study is to bring to the surface this much neglected but, as I argue, essential element of Nietzsche’s thought on art – his severe critique of art and artists, as well as his critique of the philosophical aesthetic tradition which he saw as deeply rooted in religious and metaphysical thinking – and offer some reflections on the consequences that this critique will inevitably have on
Nietzsche’s conception of art.
2 Reasons to approach Nietzsche’s thought on art from the perspective of his critique go beyond a simple wish to understand better what Nietzsche might have thought about art and how those ideas might have developed. Part of the motivation lies also in a desire to provide an alternative account of Nietzsche’s thought on art, one not so much centered on the expression of his youthful enthusiasm about art in BT nor on the now famous and much discussed idea of the aesthetics of soul, but on the question of what becomes, or what indeed remains, of Nietzsche’s conception of art in a more practical sense once it becomes the subject of his deep suspicions and at times hostility. I call this an alternative account because it runs against a predominant understanding of Nietzsche as a philosopher who glorified art.
Some commentators have in fact recognizes that Nietzsche’s position on art is not quite so one dimensional as it may seem, but their interpretations have gone only so far as to suggest that there is a moment of ambiguity, of distancing and questioning in
Nietzsche’s thought on art. However, these are isolated instances and often tied to a particular period or particular text, such as HATH (for example Young, 1992, Putz 1978).
Furthermore, full-length studies of Nietzsche’s treatment of art in English language are rather few in number. Apart from the two collections of essays, Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts, edited by Kemal (1998), and Nietzsche on Art and Life, edited by Came
(2014), there are only a handful of studies devoted entirely to Nietzsche and art: Julian
Young’s Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Art (1992), Philip Pothen’s Nietzsche and the Fate of
Art (2002), Aaron Ridley’s Nietzsche on Art (2006) and Ludovici’s 1911, somewhat dated study Nietzsche and Art which offers an assessment of art heavily and uncritically
3 involved with the notion of the will to power. There are also studies such as Sills’
Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy (1991) and Silk and Stern’s Nietzsche on
Tragedy (1981) but they deal primarily with Nietzsche’s treatment of tragedy in his first book. In that respect they offer a limited perspective on Nietzsche’s aesthetics. Sills deals primarily with the issue of metaphysics, while Silk and Stern focus on an intellectual background of Nietzsche’s position.
I do not wish to deny or to diminish Nietzsche’s affinity and interest in art. This would be impossible not only because of the many elevating things he said about art but also because of his own ambitions as an artist – a poet and a composer – which testify to the kind of connection he had to art. And Nietzsche was indeed tireless in asserting the role of art in human and cultural development, so the importance of art in his overall philosophical project should not and cannot be denied. Quite contrary, it is safe to say that Nietzsche was concerned with art, perhaps more than any other philosopher of comparable stature. BT is almost entirely devoted to it, and shows, in full force,
Nietzsche’s youthful enthusiasm about art. Although this enthusiasm soon evaporates, art nevertheless figures prominently in each of his subsequent works, but lit from a variety of angles, playing variety of roles, until in 1888 – the final year of his productive life – he completed two works devoted exclusively to art, The Case of Wagner (CW) and
Nietzsche Contra Wagner (NCW). If we add to this that one of his books, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (Z), is intended to be a work of art, that the style and construction of all his books is self-consciously artistic to a degree approached only by Plato and the early
Wittgenstein among other philosophers, and the fact that throughout his life Nietzsche
4 regarded himself as a serious composer (despite the evidence of his actual compositions to the contrary), we have a quick sketch of, as Ridley calls him, the most art-fixated of the major philosophers.2
Thus it is generally argued that art played a fundamental role in the development of Nietzsche’s ideas, and Nietzsche is often seen as belonging to the tradition, implicit in modern philosophical thought, that suggests that art is, or perhaps even that it ought to be, something central to our cultural concerns - something of singular importance to our lives, our history, and our future. It can be argued that, at least since Baumgarten, it has been one of the unspoken tasks of philosophy to give expression to this belief about art’s apparently inherent importance, to promulgate it, and even justify it. It is perhaps only Hegel who in modern times is ever seriously considered to have questioned it. As far as Nietzsche scholarship is concerned,
Nietzsche’s thought is considered to have belonged, albeit on some readings problematically or idiosyncratically, to this very tradition.
There is therefore, a trend in Nietzsche literature that continually associates
Nietzsche’s name with a kind of glorification of art that is taken to be central to his work and his overall concerns. Perhaps this attitude originates in the early reception of
Nietzsche’s thought and the conception of Nietzsche himself, by Stephan George, as an exemplary ‘poet-philosopher’.3 It is also indebted to Heidegger’s reading, which takes the will to power as the highest expression of Nietzsche’s thought, and art itself as the highest expression of the will to power. Postmodernist accounts of Nietzsche too, such
2 Ridley 2007, pp. 2. 3 Kaufmann 1974, pp. 56.
5 as Deleuze’s, have cast him in a role of the thinker of creativity and becoming ipso facto of art. 4 Nehamas has argued that Nietzsche’s works and life should be understood as an expression of his aestheticism where art is seen as providing a model for understanding the world and life, and for evaluating both people and actions.5 In addition, some have claimed that art became for Nietzsche the principle that informed all of his philosophy.1
And given this intimate relationship between art and philosophy in his thought, we are also told that for Nietzsche art presents the most fundamental transformative impulse known to human experience.2 Thus, simply put, Nietzsche is seen as a quintessential philosopher of art, and a philosophical aesthete whose emphasis on the notion of the
‘artistic’ presents an effort to elevate the importance of the aesthetic criteria and the form of aesthetic understanding to the level previously denied by philosophical tradition.3
Virtually every study of Nietzsche’s work, regardless of what it takes as its main focus, at the very least, implicitly argues for the elevated nature and the central role of art in Nietzsche’s thought. Winchester has argued that aesthetics unifies and systematizes Nietzsche’s thought, while Nehamas claims that art and aesthetic concerns inform Nietzsche’s epistemological project.4 Stambaugh on the other hand, presenting a
‘mystic and poetic’ Nietzsche, argues that he saw art as fundamental to our existence, creativity as the only meaningful way for man to live, and art as constitutive of life
4 Deleuze 1993, pp. 185. 5 Nehamas 1985.
1 Berrios and Ridley, 2001 2 Staumbagh 1994. 3 Compte-Sponville 1998, Winchester 1995, Danto 1965. 4 Winchester 1994.
6 itself.5 As Danto sees it, the ‘artistic’ for Nietzsche defines our general engagement in and with the world in which ‘we are all artists all the time’.6 Many others have recognized the ramifications of Nietzsche’s emphasis on the creative and transformative power of art on his considerations of the personal, ethical, social and political realms.7
The difference in their approach and emphasis notwithstanding, these commentators all agree that Nietzsche saw art as a model for creation of both the self and the state, and the legitimation of order and value as dependent on aesthetic justification.
Thus what all of these interpretations of Nietzsche’s thought share is a common belief in Nietzsche’s glorification of art. But if we are still to maintain, unproblematically, that Nietzsche is a quintessential philosopher of art who holds art to be a central aspect of a healthy life and culture, we must not only acknowledge Nietzsche’s deep mistrust of art but also attempt to come to terms with his critique and its implications. My study does not purport to offer a critical evaluation of the validity of Nietzsche’s critique because such an evaluation would ultimately have to rest on at least some of the presuppositions about art that Nietzsche brings into question. Rather, it is concerned primarily with the internal consistency and coherence of Nietzsche’s treatment of art, since that is precisely what his critique of art seems to threaten.
The mention of Nietzsche’s name instantly brings to mind the image of the philosopher who hated (and killed) God, and loved art, and who thought that one could become a god oneself by learning few things from the artists – by giving style to one’s
5 Stambaugh 1994. 6 Danto 1965. 7 Ansell-Pearson (1998), Conway (1998), Crawford (1998), Martin (2006).
7 character. It would therefore seem almost unimaginable to suggest that the two are in fact related, that the death of God, in all his incarnations, may also signal the death of art – that the two should share a common fate. But this, I argue, is precisely the suggestion that needs to be taken seriously, since Nietzsche’s critique points strongly towards that conclusion. It is true that Nietzsche said some elevating things about art at the beginning of his career and that he also said them at the end. It is also true that his sense of the significance of art barely wavered. But because of the evolution of his thought as a whole, the apparent sameness of those ‘things’ and of that ‘significance’ cannot be taken as a sign that he cleaved throughout to any settled view, and not in particular to the kind of glorification he bestows on art at the beginning of his career.
Nietzsche’s personal and well documented love of art should not blind us to the fact that much of what he says about it in fact communicates deep disappointment and frustration, perhaps even resentment, rather than admiration, even if Nietzsche himself is not always entirely aware of it.
Admittedly, focusing on Nietzsche’s criticisms of art narrows the scope of my study. I do recognize, however, the intricate connections between various aspects of
Nietzsche’s thought. What he says about art is intimately connected to his ideas on morality, values, metaphysics, truth, knowledge, and a host of other cultural phenomena. Nietzsche’s shift, for instance, from glorification of art in BT its condemnation in Human All Too Human (HATH) has as much to do with his now open and freely articulated critique and rejection of metaphysics as it has with his changing beliefs about art. What is rejected is first and foremost traditional metaphysics and with
8 it the metaphysical conception of art. This shift is a small illustration of how deeply connected and conditioned Nietzsche’s ideas on art are by the changes and developments in other areas of his thought. Thus, I follow the development of
Nietzsche’s ideas on art as well as take into account their proper context. I believe the meaning of his critique and what it aims to accomplish is distorted when abstracted from the context of his general critique of the culture of modernity, metaphysics and
Christianity, and his understanding of the affinities art shares with these phenomena.
This context is crucial. Although Nietzsche’s interests are numerous and varied, I believe there are two themes that form the basic underlying framework of his discussions and fuel his arguments repeatedly: the crisis of nihilism inherent in the culture of modernity and the means to overcome it. His relentless tirades against religious and metaphysical worldviews, and their respective conceptions of self and its place in the world, are not only meant to expose these views as errors. Nietzsche also wants to show them as unworthy of belief and ultimately dangerous, and not simply because they are dubious fictions but more importantly because, once exposed as hollow, they lead to the state of absolute passive unbelief in which no values are legitimate, least of all those of the discredited metaphysical tradition. Nietzsche insists that the particular nature of the crisis of modern culture originates in the contradiction between this loss of the centre of gravity and the continued yearning for one.
Thus, I see the major focus of Nietzsche’s work turn to the problem of modernity, insofar as he is concerned with exposing what he takes to be the real nature of the crisis, as well as articulating the means by which it can be overcome. In other
9 words, what Nietzsche attempts to do is formulate a viable solution that would see the radical skepticism avoid the path of nihilism and make possible reconciliation of the acknowledgement of the contingency of all values and the continuing commitment to their necessity. Consequently, I see Nietzsche’s philosophical project as devoted to the question of establishing a ground for cultural values in an age in which the notion of any certitude seems highly problematic. And this is where art plays a crucial role, because for Nietzsche, it is only through adoption of a certain aesthetic practice that the problem of modernity may find some resolution. That is, Nietzsche’s formulation of the question of art is tied to his attempt to think through the problem of contradiction inherent in modern culture. I am not in a position to offer an exhaustive analysis of Nietzsche’s treatment of nihilism and the cultural crisis of modernity but I do offer some remarks on the nature of this crisis and engage the issue of Nietzsche’s treatment of art precisely within this context.
Making the distinction between Nietzsche’s personal love of art and this philosophical assessment of it is just as important as making one between Nietzsche’s idea of artistry of soul and what he has to say about art proper, a distinction that is often simply glossed over. Keeping these in mined will help us clear out at least some of the apparently obvious contradictions and inconsistencies in his treatment of art.
Indeed, and not surprisingly, Nietzsche has been accused of contradicting himself, or at any rate of having been thoroughly implicated in contradictions, including his position on art. Some commentators, such as Young for instance, see contradictions as invalidating Nietzsche’s aesthetic project, while others such as Jaspers take
10 contradiction to be a master concept.8 I see contradiction as an essential feature of
Nietzsche’s writing as it serves to organize much of his thought. And this notion of organization is important for while it eschews the notion of relentless system building, such as Hegel’s, Nietzsche’s thought is nevertheless organized and this organization, for all the variations in its texture, displays a certain consistency. It is this assumption of consistency that allows the commentator, even Deleuze, to write a coherent account of
Nietzsche’s text. Nevertheless, I also believe that ultimately there is a tension inscribed everywhere in Nietzsche thought, and in particular a tension between conflicting but strong tendencies in his treatment of art.
Drawing attention to the issue of contradiction and possible resolution inevitably raises the question of dialectic and Nietzsche’s proximity to Hegel. I do believe that, as critical as he was of Hegel and metaphysics, Nietzsche did not abandon dialectical thinking altogether. Broadly following Deleuze’s reading most current commentators see Nietzsche as the essential thinker of difference. This interpretation explicitly opposes the totalizing tendency of dialectic which will always seek to negate, to reduce the other, and in which the process of Aufhebung only preserves the other by simultaneously canceling it out.9 In Deleuze’s interpretation even the will to power becomes a means of affirmation of difference, of plurality, despite the many passages where Nietzsche writes of will to power as a process of overcoming and negation. In addition to Nietzsche’s explicit mistrust of the system building of Hegel, subsequent
8 Young 1992, Jaspers 1966. 9 There have been some dissenting voices, for example, see Breazeal, 1975. Breazeale argument suggests not only ways in which Nietzsche’s thought still bears traces of Hegel but also points out the extent to which Deleuze’s portrait of the latter thinker amounts to an insensitive caricature.
11 commentators have taken this anti-Hegelianism to inhibit Nietzsche’s writing on a more fundamental level. Strong, for instance, sees Nietzsche’s genealogy as specifically designed to undermine the structure of dialectic. Instead of gathering up, genealogy seeks to take apart, to lay bare the workings of signs and their history in order to dismantle the cultural construct of contemporary society.10
Notwithstanding importance of such interpretations, I believe Nietzsche’s relation to Hegel to be considerably more complex than merely one of negation and overcoming. While for Hegel the dialectical movement progresses towards the final moment of absolute determination, Nietzschean dialectics finds only provisional reconciliations, and not in an immanent and systematic unfolding of consciousness.
However, both Nietzsche and Hegel recognize the mediated and partial nature of cognitive claims and most importantly the productive function of the negative. Unlike
Adorno who, although drawing his thrust from Hegel, cannot and will not see beyond the infinitely negative dialectic, Nietzsche is always looking at what might come after.
This constitutes the dialectical nature of his own transvaluation of all values in which
‘knowledge’ and the human ‘subject’ are negated and transformed into ‘interpretation’ and the Übermensch’.
Nietzsche’s attempt to transform art then leads both to its negation and affirmation however, what is affirmed is not quite the same thing as what is negated. It is almost universally acknowledged that Nietzsche’s mature aesthetics represents an attempt to conceive it in a much broader sense than the accustomed but limited
10 Strong notes that in the genealogical understanding there is almost no automatic logic to the evolution of a set of events, certainly no Aufhebung. Strong 1975.
12 conception based on art proper. The emphasis now shifts away from art itself to the artistically motivated notion of self-creation. It is variously argued that art and creativity are, for Nietzsche, constitutive of life itself (Stambaugh) and that art and artistry now refer to artistry of the soul, of ‘giving style to one’s character’, (Ridley, Thiele, Nehamas).
Thus the aesthetic criteria properly associated with art are appropriated as a means to understand life, the world and one’s place in it and the relevant features or aesthetic qualities and principles properly associated with the work of art and the production of works of art come to be used by Nietzsche to define a particular, affirmative stance towards life and self. It might therefore be said that, while Nietzsche will consistently promote the idea of an aesthetic affirmation of life – in some sense relying on art and artistic principles to articulate a particular affirmative relationship towards one’s self and life -art itself nevertheless remains the target of constant criticism, questioning and suspicion. This is indeed how I see Nietzsche as partly working his position out and I believe that it is the dialectical nature of the interpretive process, one couched in the language of will to power that allows Nietzsche to hold such a seemingly contradictory position. In other words, it seems possible for Nietzsche to maintain the belief in the aesthetic creation and valuation of life and self while continuing to see modern artistic practices as decadent and caught in a dead end.
However, the emphasis on this broad aesthetics is of less interest here, since the question this study aims to address is what specifically happens to art itself in
Nietzsche’s critique. And this concern is legitimate for, although Nietzsche launches into a devastating critique of both aesthetic tradition and contemporary artistic practices,
13 there are nevertheless claims suggesting a continued admiration not for some unspecified art of self, but for art as we normally understand it, and its potential to propel individuals, if not even a whole culture, towards new understanding and system of valuations. When, discussing the notion of monological art in The Gay Science (GS),
Nietzsche speaks of the ‘first distinction that is to be made in relation to art’ (GS 367), he is referring to actual works of art rather than to some elusive art of self.
Furthermore, while his devastating critique of art all but literally spells out its death, he still frequently speaks of grand art and grand style. Thus the extent to which Nietzsche’s criticisms of art (as well as whatever may be reconstructed from Nietzsche’s works as his own more affirmative view of art) constitute an endorsement of death of art thesis has to be examined independently of any reference to the aesthetics of life, art of self or genius of life.
In the first Chapter I turn my attention to Nietzsche’s treatment of art in BT in order to show that its official enthusiasm about art seems rather forced. This is not only because Nietzsche was already dealing with doubts regarding Schopenhauer, but because certain suspicions and mistrust of art (Wagner included) were already operating in Nietzsche’s thought even so early on as the time of his first published work, which arguably represents his most sustained treatment of art, and the most positive one. Thus I draw attention to the features of Nietzsche’s argument that betray the fact that behind the scenes Nietzsche himself was not quite as convinced of the exact nature and the capacity which he attributed to art, officially at least. I argue that the coming together of the two artistic impulses responsible for the birth of tragedy is deeply
14 problematic and therefore indeed quite miraculous, not in the sense in which Nietzsche seems eager to convince us, but rater as quite literally being impossible. One of the reasons for this is art’s uncomfortable proximity to the very impulse Nietzsche himself recognizes as responsible for the demise of tragedy. This connection between them carries an enormous significance because in an important sense it already foreshadows the main problem of art, its estrangement from ‘life,’ and suggests if not the impossibility than certainly the unlikelihood of art ever obtaining that ‘healthy’ relationship to life.
Keeping with the acknowledgement of the innumerable points of connection and intersection of Nietzsche’s ideas on art and all other aspects of his thought, in Chapter 2
I trace the development of Nietzsche’s co-called doctrines of perspectivism, interpretation and will to power through his critique of the traditional metaphysical conception of knowledge and truth, which begins already in Nietzsche’s early investigation into nature of language. It is from the standpoint of this development and the ideas that come to be expressed in these ‘doctrines’ that Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics and art in particular gains its insight, motivation, and strength. Nietzsche’s complete and unmistakable annihilation of all aspects of the metaphysical conception of art would really be neither as interesting nor as compelling if the metaphysical universe was still allowed to stand. Thus the relationship of dependence between Nietzsche’s critique of art and his more general interpretive project warrants addressing it here in some detail. Even more so because it is on the grounds of Nietzsche’s notion of interpretation and will to power, which I see as interchangeable, that the conception of
15 art as interpretive will to power that I discuss in the final Chapter, comes into being.
Thus the function of my discussion in Chapter 2 is to ground Nietzsche’s critique of art, that is, to articulate the basis in which we may find justification for Nietzsche’s claims regarding art.
In Chapter 3 I show that there is in fact a sustained and a rather severe critique of art, that suspicions about art run deep in Nietzsche’s thought and that they are central to his philosophy overall. Nietzsche’s critical and sometimes scathing remarks are not occasional excursions into skepticism from which he easily and quickly recovers.
Sometimes as an undercurrent, sometimes fully out in the open, these suspicions to a great extent shape Nietzsche’s thinking on art. And because of art’s place in Nietzsche’s overall concerns, particularly in relation to his attempts to formulate a viable model of this worldly affirmation of human existence, his critical reflections seem that much more important. By closely examining his criticisms laid against the work of art, the artist and the relationship they hold to the spectator, I will show that the view of art that emerges from Nietzsche’s writings is far from simple glorification or enthusiasm. It is much more critical and much more radical then generally acknowledged and perhaps to such a degree that Nietzsche comes close to, or perhaps surpasses Hegel in proclaiming the death of art. Thus I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of art is far-reaching;
It involves systematic attempts to undermine, negate and expose as self-defeating or life-denying not only the conception of art and artistic production conceived by the aesthetic tradition, but also modern artistic practices, the consumption of art as a cultural good and the mass appeal of popular art.
16 In the final chapter I make an attempt to reconstruct what could be seen as a more positive conception of art grounded in Nietzsche’s insight into the perspectival and interpretive nature of our engagement in and with the world. I attempt to show what that may mean for Nietzsche and reflect on the question of what possibly all this could mean for the status of art and as a practical criterion for judgment of art. When applied to our understanding of art proper Nietzsche’s position seems virtually empty, suggesting nothing more and nothing more interesting than the idea that a work of art represents a creation – a material expression of a particular configuration of drives and impulses, perspectives and interpretations. And with that I arrive again at the question of the death of art and suggest that for all practical purposes this is indeed Nietzsche’s final word on art. The re-conceptualization of art which Nietzsche makes possible by way of grounding it in will to power and the physiology of the organism engaged in artistic process is an uneasy compromise between the need to rescue art from the dead end to which it has been lead by its association with the values of metaphysics, and the recognition of the impossibility of ever doing so in any meaningful way, that is, without stripping art of all that is properly speaking the purview of art.
Finally, a word on my use of the materials compiled and published under the title
The Will to Power. These are neither prepared for nor published by Nietzsche and therefore do not have the same status in Nietzsche’s oeuvre as do published works.
However, it seems appropriate and justified to draw on these notes for several reasons.
First, some writings from Nietzsche’s unpublished opus have received much attention, for instance his early essay ”On Truth and Lies in Non Moral Sense”, to the point that
17 whether Nietzsche wanted to publish them or not, they have in fact became a part of
Nietzsche’s oeuvre. Second, a good portion of the material reflects Nietzsche’s thought experiments and as such may help shed some light and provide alternative perspectives which Nietzsche considered seriously, even if he decided ultimately not to publish them or simply never got around to publishing them. Third, there are instances when going outside the published material is both necessary and beneficial. I do not believe that the unpublished material discloses the ‘truth’ behind Nietzsche’s published works, as
Heidegger appears to have thought, nor do I depend on their “arguments” which have been organized and in fact constructed by Nietzsche’s literary executors. However, while the notes have not been compiled by Nietzsche and shouldn’t be given a privileged status, they were nevertheless written by Nietzsche and therefore can be used as supplementary material.
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Chapter I
The Birth of Tragedy: Nietzsche’s Early Conception of Art
In this chapter I turn to the conception of art Nietzsche formulates in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, originally published in 1872. This may seem puzzling, given the focus of my study, but it is nevertheless necessary for there is an overwhelming tendency to view BT as giving voice to Nietzsche’s supposed glorification and celebration of art. As I have already noted, the general and longstanding consensus in Nietzsche literature has been that BT represents not simply an instance of Nietzsche’s valorization of art, but that its conception of art, its manner and tenor, are somehow representative of Nietzsche’s general attitude towards it. Closer reading of Nietzsche’s text, however, will show that contrary to this generally accepted view, Nietzsche’s early position already contains the seeds of his later critique and that underlying Nietzsche’s apparent celebration of art is a deep mistrust and suspicion that will only deepen and intensify in time, coming to surface in latter works in an openly hostile attitude towards art.
More specifically, I focus on Nietzsche’s conception of the two artistic impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and the relationship between them since, as
Nietzsche argues, it not only gave rise to the Greek tragedy but also maintained the
19 health of Greek culture and ensured it’s flourishing. This relationship, as I will show, is problematic because these two impulses, on whose genuine union rests the whole weight of Nietzsche’s argument in BT, in fact stand in an opposition that is perhaps even deeper than Nietzsche was willing to openly admit. If so, the genuine union of these two impulses so crucial to the wellbeing of Greek culture and to the strength of Nietzsche’s own argument, is to be recognized as be deeply suspicious, if not entirely unlikely.
Consequently, uncovering the problematic nature of the union between the Apollonian and the Dionysian will illuminate and bring into focus the equally problematic nature of the Apollonian itself, its rather uncomfortable proximity to the Socratic, the very impulse that according to Nietzsche brought on the demise of tragedy. Perhaps
Nietzsche was not entirely aware of this, but nevertheless, the Apollonian seems to have been connected to the Socratic on some deep and significant level and the nature of this connection both undermines Nietzsche’s insistence on the importance of the Apollonian as an equal partner in the union that gave rise to the Greek tragedy, as well as renders the Apollonian suspiciously akin to either the principle of “absurd rationality” or one of mere illusion and superficiality.
The result either way is that art has become alienated from life, a split that, I argue, subsequently forms the basis of Nietzsche’s attack on art and aesthetic tradition.
The charge is that art has lost touch with forces of life and has thereby become a superficial means of hypnotizing the masses, inducing either ‘stupefaction or delirium’, neither of which are indicative of the transformative, affirmative, and courageous embrace of existence. Thus given this and given not only the difficulties involved in the
20 union of the two impulses but also the problematic nature of Apollonian itself, it is not difficult to argue that certain concerns and reservations regarding art can be detected already in Nietzsche’s first book. In fact, these difficulties make it very clear that
Nietzsche’s early position on art, what might be called the official statement of BT, in fact rests on the substratum of suspicion and doubt and this can only suggest that at the time of writing BT the principles of Nietzsche’s mature position on art, and the lines along which Nietzsche’s critique will subsequently develop have already been drawn out.
This is a crucial insight for it challenges two very important and prevalent features of our widely accepted view of Nietzsche’s treatment of art. On the one hand, it brings into question the consensus regarding Nietzsche’s glorification of art (and therefore justifies an attempt to provide an alternative reading of Nietzsche’s first book). On the other hand, it presents the challenge to the idea that there is a sharp break in Nietzsche’s thinking between BT and the works that followed, and not only in the style and character, but crucially in the orientation of Nietzsche’s ideas.11 This would suggest that there is in fact far more continuity in Nietzsche’s thought on art than it is generally claimed, and that the picture of a sharp division in Nietzsche’s thinking simply lacks sufficient basis.
It is often argued that in BT Nietzsche adopted what could be called a metaphysical conception of art – art that was glorified for its ability to provide
11 Young goes even further to claim that Nietzsche has four distinct philosophies of art (Young, 1992.)
21 metaphysical consolations.12 To be sure then, Nietzsche’s seemingly sudden attack on art in HATH, and in the sporadic reflections scattered throughout his latter works, can be seen as motivated, to a certain degree at least, by his break with the metaphysics of
Kant and Schopenhauer. It is to be expected that once Nietzsche starts moving away from the influence of Kant and Schopenhauer he would have the occasion to turn his back on and criticize the conception of art that was couched in “their formulas”. This is indeed part of what Nietzsche does, but as I will make clear, the problem goes much deeper than the simple question of metaphysical commitments, to the very logical possibility of art, as Nietzsche conceives it in BT. And thus a closer reading of Nietzsche’s text can only show that his suspicions about art have already been at work even before his rejection of metaphysics, suggesting not only that his critique of art should not be seen simply as predicated on his metaphysical commitments, but also that his thinking on art is far more continuous and consistent than it is generally believed. This alone should be enough to justify my engagement with the work that seemingly has nothing to do with critique of art.
Furthermore, some reflections regarding the status of Nietzsche’s first book, including the new Preface entitled “Attempt at Self-Criticism” (ASC) Nietzsche placed in the second edition, will serve to show that indeed BT deserves a closer reading especially in the context of the critique of art. The supposed distance between the claims Nietzsche makes in his first book and those expressed in the later works, coupled
12 Young makes a strong claim that Nietzsche simply takes over or incorporates Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and his theory of art, while other commentators such as Ridley and Clark to name a few, more sensitive to the complexities and nuances of Nietzsche’s thought, recognize Schopenhauer’s influence but nevertheless do not see Nietzsche as dependent on Schopenhauer’s philosophy to that extent.
22 with the idea that BT is simply an expression of Nietzsche’s youthful enthusiasm and an unfortunate and misguided exercise in propaganda – a celebration of Wagner as a savior and redeemer of modern culture – suggest that the work suffers from the lack of maturity and perhaps any greater degree of philosophical import. And given the mature
Nietzsche’s reservations about it, it is not difficult to see how BT could be considered inferior to Nietzsche’s later works, both in style and content. Although in many respects this may be a correct assessment of Nietzsche’s first book, nevertheless it should not be allowed to undermine its significance in Nietzsche’s oeuvre.
It is not an exaggeration to say that BT was poorly received. The work was denounced, perhaps ironically, as an exercise in the ‘philology of the future’, and
Wagner’s music, which Nietzsche celebrated in the book, was at the time referred to as the music of the future. Nietzsche and Rohde, who came to his defense in couple of pamphlets published in response to Wilamowitz’s scathing critique of Nietzsche’s work, were castigated for their ‘inanities and wretchedness’, described as ‘rotted brains’ and
BT itself was criticized for its ‘ignorance and lack of love of truth’.13 This is perhaps not very surprising; as a work in classical philology it is often characterized as eccentric, at best, and as an exercise in philosophy it is deemed unfocused, verbose and frequently obscure.14 Kaufmann believes BT offers much that is interesting on the subjects of tragedy, art, science, Greek civilization and modern culture, and indeed much that is
‘exceptionally brilliant and penetrating’.15 It is however, far from Nietzsche’s best work.
13.Kaufmann 1967, pp. 5-6. 14 Ridley 2007, pp. 6 15 Kaufmann 1967, pp. 23.
23 Much of it is ‘badly overwritten and murky’, the prose is ‘occasionally hyper-romantic and turgid’ and far removed from the lucidity and aphoristic brevity characteristic of some of Nietzsche’s later works.
Nietzsche himself, as the ASC indicates, came to have the most serious misgivings about his first published work. Undoubtedly, he was entirely aware that in more than a decade since the first publication of the book he had turned against not only its general style and outlook, but also many of its central tenets, and in the most unmistakable manner. And yet, Nietzsche decided to publish the second edition of BT in
1886. As one commentator wonders, as a philosopher of amor fati – a doctrine that prescribes that one should love one’s fate – perhaps Nietzsche was in no position finally to disown any of his past writings, nor indeed any of his past actions.16 Even so, the appeal to Nietzsche’s doctrine does not sufficiently explain his decision to publish again the work against which he had come to hold serious reservations; Nietzsche could have simply stayed silent about it. But Nietzsche does not do so and in the ASC he seeks to establish, at different times, detachment and connection, continuities and discontinuities between BT and his later work. Pothen describes Nietzsche’s attitude as a species of the relationship of distance whose pathos is for Nietzsche one of ‘self assumed, but hard-won, elevation and superiority’.17 Whether this is the case or not, it is safe to assert that the purpose of Nietzsche’s remark is twofold. On the one hand, it is to suggest that BT is, in some important ways, already foreshadows Nietzsche’s mature philosophy, and on the other, to present what Nietzsche has subsequently learned of
16 Hall 1993, pp. 169 17 Pothen 2002, pp. 13.
24 himself. Thus, that the second edition was published at all, and with few revisions beyond the addition of a new preface, in fact indicates that Nietzsche had no desire to entirely disown the work. In spite of his most serious objections to it, BT was nevertheless to be read as a statement of his departure as a philosopher, as an important step in his development and, despite all its faults, as a work intrinsic to his oeuvre. And indeed, the Nietzsche of 1886 wishes to confront not so much the arguments of his first book but rather their ‘ill-health’ and his ‘stylistic excesses’.
Unlike BT itself, Nietzsche’s ASC has been hailed as one of the finest things
Nietzsche ever wrote and, as Ridley states, far as criticisms go, it is superior to most of those that others have directed against Nietzsche’s text.18 But the status of Nietzsche’s retrospective remarks is the issue of some debate; the question is to what extent, if any,
Nietzsche, as a Nietzsche commentator, has, or should be given, any authority. It has been suggested that ASC added to the 1886 edition of BT is an exercise in strategic maneuvering and textual manipulations, that Nietzsche employed the strategies of evasion, disingenuousness and even dishonesty, perhaps in an attempt to maintain the level of popularity of work (which was never quite high).19 For that reason ASC has been seen as an unsuitable means of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of
Nietzsche’s position in BT. Hall has argued that in 1886, Nietzsche was undertaking something of a damage-control, or as he puts it ‘damage-limitation exercise’ necessary,
18 Ridley, 2007 pp. 7. 19 Sloterdijk, for instance, argues that notwithstanding its ‘brilliance and aesthetic achievement’ Nietzsche’s “Self-Criticism” ‘is a ‘hypocritical one because in it the truth of earlier Nietzsche - his insight into primordial pain in stifled by the truth of his later works, the thesis on the will to power’ (pp. 9).
25 in Hall’s view, since BT was Nietzsche’s most popular work and he could not simply and entirely distance himself from it.20
Julian Young has claimed that, ‘from the point of view of scholarly accuracy’,
Nietzsche’s claims in his retrospective self-criticism are ‘deeply unreliable’.21 Their purpose, as well as that of the array of prefaces, second prefaces, and Nietzsche’s philosophical autobiography is ‘not to offer an objective scholarly assessment or introductory remarks intended to be helpful to the reader - their aim is not to provide an accurate mirroring of the textual (and biographical) facts’. Rather, Young suggests, they are interposed between the reader and the works in order to ‘create a work of art, an aesthetically convincing account of the intellectual and spiritual life of the man behind the work’.22 Young might indeed be correct here for Nietzsche does take some artistic freedom in tell his story in Ecce Homo (EC), but that this is a rather disparaging assessment is clear enough from Young’s opening statements where he announces that his own account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of art is modeled on Nietzsche’s EH, but with two very important differences. Young states that, unlike EH which he calls ‘in many ways mendacious and deluded book’, his is ‘a critical study of Nietzsche’s thought’ and it aims ‘not at the mere interpretation but at truthfulness’. Therefore, Young asserts, his own account is ‘an improvement over its questionable model’.23
While it may certainly be true that Nietzsche’s retrospective remarks have a strategic function, even the specific one Young claims to have detected in them, it
20 H all 1993, pp.169. 10 Young 1992, pp. 2-4 22 ibid. 23 ibid
26 would require a much more convincing argument to sustain Young’s scathing interpretation. For instance, and perhaps most importantly, Young needs to provide a clear statement as to the notion of truth against which he measures Nietzsche’s claims, and an argument that shows how and why specifically his ‘truthfulness’ it is to be considered superior to Nietzsche’s own claims. In other words, what is the standard by which Young can judge his ‘truthfulness’, whatever that may be, to be an improvement over Nietzsche’s ‘mere interpretation’? That Young never provides such an argument is problematic, but what renders his assessment even more puzzling is the fact that he is taking to task a thinker who devoted a considerable time and effort to dismantling the traditional conception of truth, calling into question its very value and claiming that all we have access to are in fact only interpretations and not truth. Indeed it is hard to imagine that Young, possessing considerable familiarity with Nietzsche’s thought, would not be aware of his attitude towards truth, and thus Young’s approach to Nietzsche does raise some questions regarding his motivations and intentions. They cannot be discuss here in any detail, but suffice it to say that at least in part Young’s interpretation seem to be colored by his obvious preference for Schopenhauer’s philosophy – a preference for Schopenhauer’s devotion to truth. Young devotes an entire chapter to
Schopenhauer with whom Nietzsche is compared throughout and who serve as a criterion against which Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of ‘romantic pessimism’ is evaluated throughout. While both philosophers recognize the role of illusion in human life, Schopenhauer’s stance towards it is ‘always Platonic – contemptuous’, and this is
‘because of his morality, his care for truth’, which ultimately leads him from altruism
27 into aesthetics and which ‘makes him a more human and more attractive figure’.24
Nietzsche on the other hand is able to affirm only a profoundly superficial substitute for truth (life), and therefore falls short of his own standard of honest confrontation with reality which is the sine qua non of genuine amor fati.25
This is in many respects a misunderstanding of Nietzsche’ views but nevertheless, Young’s point is not entirely lost. Although we need not go as far as Young in declaring Nietzsche’s affirmative project a failure nor his retrospective remarks as
‘deeply unreliable’ we may nevertheless maintain that they need not necessarily determine in any sense our own reading of the text and its place in Nietzsche’s oeuvre.
But what we can say with certainty is, at the very least, that ASC serves to highlight the fact that the Nietzsche of the 1880’s has clearly cast off much of the philosophical underpinnings of his first work, and that he is entirely aware that he has done so. It also reinforces the equally evident point that Nietzsche nevertheless wishes to maintain full responsibility for it. Indeed, far from denouncing his early work, later Nietzsche asserts that, whatever its specific faults may be, it is nevertheless to be seen as an important statement in his development where the problem is not so much that what Nietzsche said was wrong, or that he should not have said it, but rather that ‘he should have sung’
(ASC 3).
Others have taken the view that one of Nietzsche’s aims in the ASC, and in his later works as well, is to suggest that BT requires to be read in such a way that its inner contradictions, its silences, evasions, and its rhetorical stance are read and interpreted
24Ibid. pp. 150. 25 Ibid. pp. 151.
28 too, quite as much as what might be called argumentation with which the work seems most overtly to be concerned.26 Nietzsche seems to substantiate these claims, in the most obvious manner, with suggestions such as his well known remark that what the work is primarily concerned with is morality, or more precisely, Christianity - a subject with which the original text seems to have very little to do (BT 5; EH VI, 2). This approach to Nietzsche’s thought has become an overarching principle of deconstructive interpretations. But Nietzsche’s retrospective remarks on BT, its curious and often contradictory celebrations of Wagner, Schiller, Kant, Schopenhauer, and much else, and
Nietzsche’s subsequent or even contemporaneous rejection of these and other themes in his notebooks, provide an occasion for a more closely argued reading of the text, one that attempts to understand the work in terms of Nietzsche’s overall philosophical development.27 Such an approach would allow us to recognize a greater continuity in
Nietzsche’s thought, at the very least in terms of his engagement with the question of art. It would allow us, as I have already indicated, to see how certain suspicions about art are already at work at the time of BT and remain with Nietzsche throughout his productive life, how they subsequently develop and yet how in many respects they remain the same, and how in spite of the enormous changes that Nietzsche’s thought undergoes over time certain continuities will nevertheless remain apparent from the time of BT to EH.
26 De Man 1979, pp. 88. 27 Sallis has argued that Nietzsche in fact has rejected many of the central themes of BT even some years before its publication, and specifically in case of certain doubts regarding Schopenhauer’s thought, as early as 1867, (1991, pg 610). Similarly Klein writes that ‘Nietzsche had broken with the language of the book, as well as with his two mentors, when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy (Klein 1997, pp. 131).
29
Summary of The Birth of Tragedy
Tragedy, as an art form has long captivated the philosophical imagination, and not surprisingly since the tragic works of art seem to offer an insight into our human condition that is richer and more powerful than can be glimpsed through any other form of art. Nietzsche himself certainly believed that tragedy tells us the deepest and most horrifying truths about ourselves, but it does so in a way that makes this truth not just barely tolerable, but rather enlivening and even intoxicating. This is a very dramatic vision, one that is seen to capture a particularly powerful approach not only to tragedy as an art form, but to a proper understanding of our own most basic physiological and psychological needs. Broadly speaking, against the backdrop of a fundamentally pessimistic view of existence, tragedy offers a paradoxical form of redemption. But, as
Ridley points out, providing a sustainable interpretation of Nietzsche’s vision is rather difficult, perhaps even impossible, regardless of how fascinating some of the details may be and however much it may be true that there is at least something seductive about its main vision. But it is an elusive one and Ridley offers a remarkably clear summary worth offering here in order to help us identify the kinds of philosophical commitment that can be attributed to young Nietzsche.28
The effect of tragedy is essentially to allow us a glimpse of the truth that lies at the heart of the drama, while at the same time shielding us from the full impact that this
28 Ridley, 2007, pp. 13
30 truth would have upon us without filtering and mirroring devices of the art form.
Unshielded, Nietzsche thinks, we would be destroyed. So the drama conceals and softens the truth even as it reveals it. Nietzsche associates the truth at the heart of the tragedy with the god Dionysus, who in Greek mythology was dismembered by the
Titans, and calls the state induced in the spectator by his glimpse of that truth the
‘Dionysian’, a state of intoxicated ecstasy. The other aspect of the tragedy, which is responsible for shielding us from the full impact of the truth, Nietzsche associates with the god Apollo. Apollo sustains the illusion of individuality, of the intelligibility and, indeed, of the beauty of things, including human beings, and induces in us the
‘Apollonian’ state that Nietzsche often describes as ‘dream-like’. Thus both the
Dionysian and the Apollonian principles are therefore essential to tragedy as Nietzsche conceives it in BT. Without Dionysus the drama would merely sustain and reinforce the illusion, while without Apollo, it would destroy us, at any rate psychologically.
Apollo maintains the illusion of individuality necessary in order that we be able to act and function in the world. It not only makes it possible for us to experience ourselves as numerically and qualitatively distinct, but also to experience the world as relatively orderly, as patterned in the various ways that our actions presuppose. Thus, because of Apollo the world is experienced as intelligible, capable of rational interpretation and, at least in principle, as amenable to our purposes. This, however, is only an appearance. The world is, in some sense, not really like that, and to live in it as if it were is to range over a merely artificial surface. It is, moreover, to lose touch with something deeper and more primordial about life, and from which life itself draws its
31 most fundamental energies - above all the energy to go on living. The Apollonian world is orderly and beautiful, but ultimately quite pointless: individual success is transient, happiness rare and fragile, suffering and death unavoidable. The wisdom of Silenus that
- “what is best of all is…not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best…is to die soon’ – expresses a powerful and terrifying insight, what Nietzsche calls the
‘terrible truth’ (BT 3). To be able to live with this knowledge, life must touch base with an energy that is blind to it and oblivious to the final futility of human existence. This is the energy of Dionysus. It lies at the level that is somehow beneath that at which we exist as distinct selves and so undercuts the kinds of pessimistic reflections about individual lives that lends Silenus’ wisdom its seductive force. Just touching base with it refreshes our appetite for life and returns us reinvigorated to the world of Apollo.
So life itself, in Nietzsche’s account, requires both, the Apollonian and the
Dionysian principle. And Greek tragedy, according to Nietzsche, sustained the culture that produced it precisely because it answered to this requirement in a particularly adequate way. The mechanisms by which it is supposed to have done this, however, are complicated and Nietzsche does not always offer much help in sorting them out. But, the following at least can be hazarded without too much violence to the text. The tragedy consists, among other things, of character and plot, and the spectator recognizes the protagonist of the drama as an individual like herself, and understand the unfolding of her story as an intelligible account of what might happen to someone like that under circumstances like these; here we are firmly in the realm of Apollo. But there is also a chorus which chants in unison and the chorus sets up a sort of hyper-reality
32 which, according to Nietzsche, has the effect of nullifying the ordinary world of everyday experience, ‘as lamplight is nullified by the light of day’ (BT 7), and hence of undermining the spectator’s easy identification with the events and characters portrayed on stage. Then we meet the music, which Nietzsche says, following
Schopenhauer, is the primordial art. It operates beneath the level of individual human selves and articulates directly the irrational energy that is, in some sense, at the heart of things. It therefore brings the spectator not merely to see herself as an epiphenomenon of what humanity collectively is, but to recognize this collective as itself no more than epiphenomenon of the energy of Dionysus. And the destruction (dismemberment) of the tragic hero is as close to the heart of things as one can intelligibly get. Here, the hero is simply ripped apart, or is finally revealed as no more than ‘the froth on a wave that has everything to do with life, but nothing, in the end, to do with him’. And this is the news, the paradoxical energizing news, that the spectator intuits through the workings of music, chorus, plot and ultimately the central character in whom, illusory though he may have turned out to be, the spectator finds himself reflected.
But tragedy was soon to meet its end. In the person of Socrates, the Greeks came to understand and value life solely in terms of reason and order, to the exclusion of the darker, irrational side of things symbolized by the dismembered Dionysus. Life in this newly ‘real’ Socratic world was made livable – was inoculated against the wisdom of
Silenus – by a new equation of reason with goodness, so that the rational life could be held to be valuable in itself, without recourse to intoxicating supplements. And tragedy, which had been the expression of, and an antidote to, a fundamentally pessimistic take
33 on existence, was therefore replaced by what Nietzsche terms ‘Socratic optimism’ which, in its rejection of some fundamental Dionysian truths about life, eventually produced Christianity. For more than two millennia this tendency held sway but, in modern times, Nietzsche suggests, it has begun to lose its grip, and the conditions are once again present for Dionysus to take the stage, and for the irrational, primordial forces associated with him to make their potency felt. The greatness of the Greeks had been sustained by a synthesis of the Apollonian and the Dionysian that turned their underlying pessimism to paradoxical account, and the rebirth of tragedy is now possible, indeed it has been achieved through re-entwining of those fundamental principles in the works of Wagner.
The Apollonian and the Dionysian
As the above summary makes clear, the relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian is central to the argument of BT. These two artistic impulses, the
Apollonian of appearance, dream, individuation, and healing, and the Dionysian of music, ecstasy, collectivity and intoxication, when united, according to Nietzsche, bring about the birth of Greek tragedy (BT 1). However, as I have suggested earlier, this union or the reconciliation of the two impulses, is hard won, if at all, since the nature of the
Apollonian and its status as an equal partner in this union are rather problematic.
Nietzsche maintains that the two principles are diametrically opposed to one another and goes to great lengths to emphasize the distance between them, perhaps in
34 order to give their apparent union a sufficiently primordial basis and to show that it is indeed an extraordinary one. In doing so, however, Nietzsche makes the reconciliation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in Greek tragedy seem somewhat inexplicable, if not entirely impossible. Nietzsche writes, for instance, that the Apollonian and the
Dionysian are in a ‘perpetual strife’ and in a ‘tremendous opposition’. They remain
‘openly at variance’, and furthermore that the ‘metaphysical miracle’ of their reconciliation is such that we come to wonder how, on the face of it, the Dionysian can ever be revealed in Apollonian dream images at all (BT 2).29 When discussing the early
Greeks’ resistance to the ‘feverish excitement of Dionysian festivals’, Nietzsche adds that the opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian became ‘more hazardous and even impossible’, and their union a ‘mystery’. And while he mentions ‘the periodic exchange of gifts’ between the deities, which later culminate in their ‘reconciliation’ in tragedy, at bottom however, ‘the chasm’ between the two ‘was not bridged over’ (BT
2).
While emphasizing the distance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian,
Nietzsche must also narrow the gap between them sufficiently in order to account for their reconciliation, since this is the very purpose of the work itself. To this end
Nietzsche appeals to intuition, for instance, an appeal which even in the work thoroughly imbued with an intuitive, imaginative, even poetic spirit, nevertheless still
29 In Nachlass Nietzsche writes of this unity that it was in fact ‘an antagonism only superficially reconciled by the common term “art”’, an antagonism which the ‘common term art only seemingly bridges’. On this point Salis writes that the opposition is not one between species to be united under a generic term but rather is such as to threaten the very unity of the word art, leaving its operation in suspense in such a way as to jeopardize the very coherence of the identification of Apollonian and Dionysian as art impulses (pp. 18). He later remarks: “How to think this abysmal unity without reducing whether the monstrosity of the opposition or the abysmal crossing in which and as which tragedy arises’ (pp.20).
35 appears somewhat inexplicable, if not incredible. In section 2, Nietzsche speaks of the
‘astonishment’ with which the Apollonian Greek must have beheld the terrible and terrifying Dionysian. And this astonishment was made even greater by the ‘shuddering suspicion’ that the Dionysian ‘was actually not so very alien to him’. Echoing this point
Nietzsche later writes:
The effects wrought by the Dionysian also seemed ‘titanic’ and ‘barbaric’ to the Apollonian Greek; while at the same time he could not conceal from himself that he, too, was inwardly related to those overthrown Titans and heroes. Indeed he had to recognize even more that this: despite all its beauty and moderation, his entire existence rested on a hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge, revealed to him by the Dionysian. And behold: Apollo could not live without Dionysus (BT, 4).
Here again Nietzsche reaffirms the significance of both the Apollonian and the
Dionysian, but he also seems to suggest that there is a certain overlapping of the two impulses. Here, even before the moment of their momentous reconciliation, the
Apollonian is already counted in with the Dionysian. The recognition of a certain relationship between the Apollonian Greek and the Dionysian suffering and knowledge precedes their reconciliation in tragedy. In other words, the future reconciliation of the two is dependent, it would seem, on this recognition since the passage clearly implies the necessity of this Apollonian ‘self-knowledge’.
And the overlapping of the two impulses, which Nietzsche insists, are ‘in tremendous opposition’, happens elsewhere too, for instance in the following passage:
Apollo…appears to us as the apotheosis of the principium individuationis, in which alone is consummated the perpetually attained goal of the primal unity, its redemption through mere appearance. With this
36 sublime gesture, he shows us how necessary is the entire world of suffering, that by means of it the individual may be impelled to realize the redeeming vision (BT, 4).
The necessity of redemption and suffering, which will later be unequivocally given over to the Dionysian, are here placed firmly on the side of the Apollonian. And most crucially the culmination of the process in the primal unity comes about, it would seem, as the result of the principle of individuation and not any reference to Dionysian Rausch30.
Furthermore, when Nietzsche points to degrees of refinement in pre-tragedy Dionysian rituals, saying that the Dionysian festivals bear the same relation to the Greek festivals as ‘the bearded satyr who borrowed his name and attributes from the goat, bears to the
Dionysus himself’ (BT, 2), he is, perhaps, pointing to the fact that the Dionysian too must contain elements of the Apollonian. But if each impulse contains enough of the other to moderate it to a certain extent, it is not entirely clear how Nietzsche could insist that they are entirely alien to one another and how such conjunctions differ from the final and momentous union of the two impulses in tragedy. In a note from 1870-71 Nietzsche writes: ‘That nature attached the origination of tragedy to those two basic impulses, the
Apollonian and the Dionysian, we should as much consider an abyss of reason, as the arrangement through which nature attaches propagation to the duality of the sexes […]
The common mystery is, in particular, how from two principles alien to one another
30 There are other instances where the distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian becomes at times blurred so that each can in fact be seen as, so to speak, generating the other. In section 8 for instance Nietzsche argues that the ‘chorus arises by means of a transformation of a group of spectators, which then produces, out of itself, the drama proper’. But this vision generated by the chorus must be internal to it, since ‘the chorus is itself the product of a vision’. As Kline suggests the drama produced by the chorus must be seen as ‘a reflection of the images produced by the self-transformation, which is a necessary condition of the production of the chorus’ (Kline 1997, pp 124). In WP 799 Nietzsche also writes: “In the Dionysian intoxication there is sexuality and voluptuousness: they are not lacking in the Apollonian”.
37 something new can arise in which those conflicting impulses appear as unity’.31 Perhaps the suggestion that one impulse contains the elements of the other is meant to imply that the difference between the Apollonian and the Dionysian is one of degree, yet
Nietzsche cannot say this for the simple reason that he seems strongly committed to the idea that the difference is quite defiantly one of kind.
The ambiguity at the heart of the relationship between the two principles is, it would seem, entirely necessary. As already stated, Nietzsche must, at one and the same time, lay open the basis of their reconciliation by, as we have seen above, pointing to a certain thematic and conceptual species-likeness, while also maintaining that the two impulses represent an opposition, and one that only very rarely finds itself resolved in union. This difficulty then creates a tension in the text, already noted: on the one hand,
Nietzsche must attempt to provide a plausible explanation of the mechanism of the reconciliation of Apollo and the Dionysus and on the other, while doing so, he must not compromise or diminish the wonder and the astonishment that such an extraordinary union could take place at all.
In a passage that speaks of the overpowering influence of the Dionysian,
Nietzsche seems to voice his own doubts concerning both, the possibility of any genuine union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and the status of the Apollonian as a supposed equal partner in this union. Nietzsche asks: ‘what the psalmodizing artist of
Apollo…could mean in the face of this demonic folk song. The muses of the arts of
‘illusion’ paled before an art that, in its intoxication spoke the truth’ (BT 4). Where
31 Cited in Sallis 1991, pp. 20 (from Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, KGW, III 3:187).
38 Apollo did withstand the onslaught of Dionysus, Nietzsche claims, ‘the authority and the majesty of the Delphic god exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever’. The passage perhaps implies that where these two impulses met, the reaction was one of repulsion rather than one of attraction of opposites. Whether this is the case or not, the
Doric art, it seems, is the best example of the Apollonian principle, an art ‘so defiantly prim and so encompassed with bulwarks’ (BT 4), that is, art born out of defiance of the
Dionysian rather than an augmentation with it. Later, however, when the Dionysian is seen to overcome the Apollonian, their opposition is stated in an uncompromising manner:
accordingly we recognize in tragedy a sweeping opposition of styles; the language, color, nobility, and dynamics of speech fall apart into the Dionysian lyrics of the chorus and, on the other hand, the Apollonian dream world, and become two utterly different spheres of expression (BT 8).
While Nietzsche here makes the opposition of the two spheres perfectly clear, the Dionysian, however, emerges as the true hero of tragedy. The drama of individuation appears now to have shifted to the side of the Dionysian from its earlier focus in the Apollonian. Nietzsche writes:
That he (Dionysus) appears at all with such epic precision and clarity is the work of the dream-interpreter, Apollo, who through his symbolic appearance interprets to the chorus its Dionysian state. In truth however, the hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, the god experiencing in himself the agonies of individuation (BT, 10).
The above passage indicates the shift in the dynamic of the Dionysian and the
Apollonian where the former takes over the role of the latter. More importantly, it clearly indicates the supreme and indeed at times overwhelming importance of the
39 Dionysian to Nietzsche’s argument in BT.32 First, it is the Dionysian drama in which
Dionysus becomes dismembered that, for Nietzsche, corresponds to the catastrophe of individuation, an event he sees as ‘the origin and primal cause of all suffering’ (BT 10) which then tragedy and art must redeem. And second, this redemption once again corresponds to the Dionysian drama, but this time to the god’s rebirth, which Nietzsche conceived of ‘as the end of individuation’.
It is then no exaggeration to say that Dionysian indeed carries an overwhelming significance in Nietzsche’s thought, one that is carried over to Nietzsche’s later works.
The concept of the Dionysian – what it stands for in Nietzsche’s thought – changes after
BT and comes to be considered more forcefully as the principle of ‘life’ in the largely unspecified sense in which later Nietzsche often uses it, but which can be seen as a ground of the instinctual, primordial and non-moral imperative central to his later works. As we can see from the above discussion, the grounds for this development have been laid in early on – in its conception of Dionysus as representative of the most basic, primordial energies of life, in its significance in Nietzsche’s argument and in the
32 Some commentators, Sloterdijk for instance, give supremacy to the Apollonian. In his case, it is because he sees Nietzsche as a ‘thinker on stage’ who both describes and enacts the reconciliation at the hearth of tragedy’. ‘There is never any danger of the orgiastic element breaking through the Apollonian barriers, for the stage itself, the tragic space – as Nietzsche conceives it – is, in keeping with his overall plan, nothing other than a sort of Apollonian catch mechanism that ensures that no orgy will result from the orgiastic song of the chorus’ (pp. 24). Kaufmann on the other hand takes the Apollonian to be more significant, perhaps because of his desire to rescue Nietzsche from those interpretations that see in his thought a glorification of the destructive and anarchistic elements. Kaufmann argues that if Nietzsche favored one of the gods, it would be the Apollo. Both Apollo and Dionysus were needed to make possible the birth of tragedy and if Nietzsche emphasizes the Dionysus it is only because he believed that the genius of the Greeks could not be fully understood without it (pp. 128). Thus Kaufmann, it seems, gives the Dionysian an almost purely explanatory function, merely being the means of highlighting the Apollonian, which on the other hand stands apart. Putz maintains that the Dionysian is dominant but that both impulses in principle enjoy equal status (pp. 20). Few would disagree with the fact that, in principle, the Apollonian and the Dionysian enjoy equal status, but the issue here is rather the unequal status that Nietzsche’s argument betrays in practice.
40 compromised relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. This, as well as the questionable nature of the Apollonian to which I will turn my attention shortly, will later come to generate two possible solutions to the Dionysian knowledge and suffering
– one that is genuine (Dionysian), and the other entirely superficial and life stifling.
Nietzsche’s own preference will, in the later texts, come to rest firmly on the side of the
Dionysian.
The secondary literature on BT largely explores the themes outlined above.
Regarding what appears to be the impossibility, or at best, unlikelihood of any genuine union between the Dionysian and the Apollonian, the way Nietzsche conceived of them in BT, Sallis has argued that ‘what Dionysian revelation reveals is not a ground of determination but the dissolution of ground and determination. What is revealed is not ground but abyss.33 Thus for Sallis, Dionysian ecstasy, as the negation of ground, as negativity, necessarily excludes Apollonian individuation, which would necessarily require a ground as well as the possibility of determination for its revelation. Others have, in different ways, made a similar argument pointing to a fundamental incompatibility between madness, as one aspect of the Dionysian, and the work of art - between the formlessness and chaos of the one and the form and ‘thingliness’ of the other.34
33 Sallis 1991, pp. 58. 34 A number of readings of Nietzsche have given priority to the question of Nietzsche’s madness and therefore to the question of Nietzsche’s place in the history of philosophy, weather as the occasion for a discussion of the subject in that history, or of the nature of reason and its other, the question of authorship, of the figure of ‘Nietzsche’ and what it represents, as well as Nietzsche’s relationship to metaphysical tradition. The notion of the intrusion of madness into the work attaches a sense of urgency and fascination that has guided and colored many interpretations. Heidegger also is central to this discourse because for Heidegger, Nietzsche’s madness carries none of the exemplarity that it does to
41 It has been suggested that the tension in Nietzsche’s account of the union of
Apollo and Dionysus outlined above could perhaps be resolved by looking at the explanation of the relationship between music and image that Nietzsche proposes in BT.
Lacoue-Labarthe sees this problematic relationship of the two principles as deeply connected to Nietzsche’s interest in language and rhetoric between 1872 and 1875. He argues that the problem of language’s failure to signify adequately, which Nietzsche’s
Nachlass of the time explores and demonstrates, reverses the direction of the causal sequence of BT.35 Thus Lacoue-Labarthe claims that, while in BT music had engendered image, in the notes and lectures on language and rhetoric, however, Apollo is seen to precede Dionysus, who, it is said, is ‘henceforth without identity’.36 Moreover, Dionysus is seen to die, not in tragedy, but rather in rhetoric. Therefore on Lacoue-Labarthe’s view, the difficulty involved in Nietzsche’s account is one of confusion or at least of
many others. For Heidegger, Nietzsche’s EH refers not to a crazed destiny of an individual, nor his oeuvre, but rather to a destiny of metaphysics and of the history of Western philosophy (Heidegger 1991, III 3-4). Acknowledging Heidegger’s influence and the fact that ‘today there is no access to Nietzsche that does not oblige one to follow the itinerary of Heidegger’s interpretation, Lacoue-Labarthe argues that ‘we must go through Heidegger’ (Lacoue-Labarthe 1993, pp.63) and that all of Nietzsche’s text must be given over to madness because the questions it addresses are those same ones that Nietzsche’s text as a whole does, and which Nietzsche as a figure of thought represents. In his Nietzsche Bataille sees in Nietzsche’s madness an exemplarity, the truth of a new and peculiar mode of discourse in which reason’s ‘other’ sees itself extolled as being for the first time of primary importance. To go beyond good and evil is, for Bataille, to be free to embrace what has hitherto been considered to be ‘evil’ and if necessary to accept its dictates but now through free will rather than compulsions and sanctions of morality. He calls the acceptance of this new outlook “entirety‘. Bataille says he writes in order to prevent himself from going mad, The artist, apparently must choose between madness and the work of art, as stark choice as there seems to be no way in which to accommodate madness within the work. Madness indeed, as the principle of ‘entirety’ cannot accommodate he object known as a work of art without annulling itself, even though madness and ‘entirety’ are characterized as the plentitude of subjectivity.
35 Lacoue-Labarthe 1993, pp. 31-3. 36 Ibid.
42 ‘profound equivocation’, something that his ‘detour’ into language and rhetoric subsequent to the publication of BT resolves.37
For de Man, the problem is how, within ‘the system of valorization that privileges Dionysus as the truth of the Apollonian appearance’, Dionysus can become appearance and yet still remain Dionysus. While Lacoue-Labarthe argues that by 1871
Nietzsche had already rejected Schopenhauer’s conception of music, de Man does not.
On his account, the difficulties involved in Nietzsche’s position arise because of
Nietzsche’s uncritical adoption of Schopenhauer’s definition of music as being an
‘unmediated image of the will’. Thus de Man maintains that Nietzsche’s allegiances to
Schopenhauer’s account of music requires him to account for such a thing as an
‘unmediated representation’ of the will, which according to de Man is a ‘logical absurdity’.38
Staten criticizes these readings claiming that they betray the programmatic orientation that fails to do full justice to Nietzsche’s complex attitude towards
Schopenhauer in BT, and to the intricacies and, indeed, terminological difficulties of
BT.39 But while admitting that there are certain ‘contradictions’ in Nietzsche’s account and acknowledging too that Nietzsche’s terms are ‘highly mobile’, Staten leaves unanswered the specific contention concerning the possibility of transposition of
Dionysian music into Apollonian dream images, something that Nietzsche is himself at pains to explain. For Kline too, Nietzsche’s argument runs up against an insurmountable
37 Lacoue-Labarthe 1993, pp. 26. 38 De Man 1979, pp. 96. 39 Staten 1990, pp. 189.
43 problem, for it requires Nietzsche to account for the union of a principle of measure and restraint on the one hand, and Dionysian excess, as the exceeding of every measure and standard, on the other. When the Dionysian becomes image, when it is stamped with form and ‘domesticated’, something, Klein state, would necessarily be lost, for how could the Dionysian, which resists form and every attempt at control, ‘not remain outside, as remainder and excess, as that other to the Apollonian law’.40 Klein however, also suggests that what Nietzsche offers in BT is a ‘figurative translation’ of music into image, and an account of their relationship that is couched in the language interdependence; ‘music and image must be conceived of exchangeable tropes’, Kline argues, ‘not binary opposites’.41 Viewed this way the relationship between music and image is governed by the logic of ‘supplementarity’; on the one hand music and image are both separated by an unbridgeable abyss, and on the other, inculcated one with another.42
Klein’s suggestion seems instructive for it accords well with the observation made earlier that the demands of Nietzsche’s position in BT are such that he must almost simultaneously emphasize the ‘hazardous and even impossible’ gulf between the
Apollonian and the Dionysian, but also incorporate certain basic characteristics of one with the other in order to explain how they might come together and finally forge a union. Furthermore, Klein’s suggestion also accords with Nietzsche’s stated aims in the opening lines of BT that an appeal to a certain ‘vision’ as opposed to ‘logical inference’
40 Klein 1997, pp. 119-200. 41 ibid pp. 124. 42 Ibid pp.125
44 might be more suitable to an understanding of the duality of Apollo and the Dionysus.
While Nietzsche’s suggestion need not be decisive in determining our approach to the text, there is nevertheless a certain hermeneutical appropriateness in our laying ourselves open, at the least, to this appeal to intuition. Sloterdijk has written of the
‘eternal polarity’ of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, that their forms are ‘comparable to a sculpture in stone of two superhuman wrestlers whose potential for violence is immediately apparent to anyone without their having to move’.43 This attempt to see the duality in terms of one ‘frozen in a vision of struggling moment’ accords too, with the attempt to see the reconciliation of deities as both, miraculous, even impossible, and yet intuitable and somehow actual.
However, the union between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, as Nietzsche conceived of them in BT, remains deeply suspect. The tensions involved in his account render this union unlikely if not impossible. This is what Nietzsche could not openly admit, for the success of his whole argument depends on the very possibility of a genuine union of the two impulses. But these tensions are nevertheless inscribed everywhere in the text and Nietzsche himself must have been aware of them; perhaps that is why he describes tragedy as a ‘miracle’ of the Hellenic will. It is not just that
Nietzsche’s argument and his appeal to intuition fail to persuade. As I have pointed out, the appeal to intuition carries indeed certain appropriateness in rendering the union of the two impulses conceivable. But Nietzsche himself seems not to have been finally convinced by his own argument. The supposed ‘duality’ of the two most fundamental
43 Sloterdijk 1988, pp. 25.
45 principles, a duality responsible for the flourishing of Greek culture, is one Nietzsche will put aside just as readily as he will repudiate the reverence for a composer and mentor with which the book is overburdened. Ultimately what renders the arguments unconvincing, as I will argue shortly, is Nietzsche’s conception of the Apollonian that comes dangerously close to the very impulse that brought about the death of tragedy.
The proximity of the Apollonian and the Socratic will expose this artistic impulse as too closely affiliated with the anti-artistic Socratic principles of rationality and morality diametrically opposed to the irrational and amoral nature of the Dionysian. This will explain why the Dionysian carries so much significance in Nietzsche’s argument, and why the Dionysian and the Apollonian had to stand in such a dramatic opposition one to another. And the fact that the Apollonian turns out to be conceptually related to the
Socratic will later create a split between ‘life’ and what in BT was celebrated as the life- sustaining power of art that will have the most profound consequences for Nietzsche’s philosophy of art.
The Apollonian and the Socratic
As I have already pointed out, Nietzsche himself came to have serious reservations about BT. The difficulties involved in his portrayal of the relationship
46 between the Dionysian and the Apollonian discussed above, are echoed in some important respects in his own retrospective account of BT. In the ASC Nietzsche refers to the work not only as ‘badly written, ponderous, embarrassing’, but also as ‘image-mad, and image confused’. With this he perhaps wishes to signal his own recognition not only that certain symbolic associations dominate the work, but also that he poured into them too much meaning and significance. Most prominent among these, we might safely say, are those of Apollo and Dionysus. In EH Nietzsche also complains that the book ‘smells offensively Hegelian’, indicating, it would seem, an irritation with the book’s over- insistence on an Aufhebung of antithetical standpoints. But Nietzsche is not so specific in ASC or in EH, his concerns seem far more general and primarily focused on the pessimistic and Romantic outlook that could have produced such a work. What is noticeable however, is the complete absence in ASC, as well as in his later works, of any mention of the Apollonian.
I have already argued how the birth of tragedy rested in large part on an unmistakable bias towards the Dionysian over the Apollonian. Nietzsche emphasizes this point further in discussing the demise of Greek tragedy; it was, he claims, Euripides who abandoned the Dionysus and thereby caused tragedy to founder and finally die.
‘Tragedy perishes with the evanescence of the spirit of music’ (BT 16). More precisely,
Nietzsche claims, tragedy ‘died by suicide’ (BT 11). According to Nietzsche, Euripides wrote tragedies on the basis of ‘aesthetic Socratism’ whose axiom was that everything must be intelligible if it is to be considered beautiful. He followed Socrates’ claim that reason is the true source of all enjoyment and creativity and on the basis of this
47 principle he came to think that the tragic dramas of preceding generations were non- rational and incommensurable in that they had ‘a certain deceptive precision and at the same time an enigmatic depth, an infinite background’ (BT 11). For Euripides, there was simply too much uncertainty and ambiguity in the early tragedies - they were not tales of right and wrong; good people often made out poorly and the ‘evil’ often triumphed.
This fact was what made them tragic, but as Nietzsche thinks, it troubled Euripides to a great extent; the irregular distribution of fortune and misfortune was a violation of what
Euripides thought to be a moral universe. In short, for Euripides, the Dionysian moral ambiguity could not be taken as a mark of the true nature of reality. Thus he attempted to improve the art form and with his ‘aesthetic Socratism’ he ‘measured all the separate elements of the drama…and corrected them according to this principle’ (BT 12).
To be sure, Euripides was not wrong in understanding the earlier tragedies as amoral and irrational, but where he did go wrong, Nietzsche argues, is in his contention that ultimate reality is neither amoral nor Dionysian. Euripides sought to eradicate the
Dionysian elements and in doing so he eliminated that which made tragedy incommensurable with what he took to be reality. The chief elements of Socratic wisdom that Euripides sought to implement within his own form of tragedy were the beliefs that virtue is knowledge, that all the sins are result of ignorance and that the virtuous man is the happy man. ‘In these three basic formulae’, Nietzsche writes, ‘lies the death of tragedy’ (BT 14). With Euripides tragedy lost its dark, irrational, but powerful Dionysian core and thus became only a vehicle for a moral lesson necessary to overcome the ignorance.
48 The deity, Nietzsche says, that spoke through Euripides with a ‘demonic power’ was ‘neither Dionysus not Apollo, but an altogether newborn demon, called Socrates’
(BT 12). Thus, the new opposition is born: ‘the Dionysian and the Socratic’ which wrecked the art of Greek tragedy (ibid). What is interesting in Nietzsche’s account of the death of tragedy however, is the relationship between the Apollonian and the Socratic and what it may say about the nature of the former. If the Apollonian is seen in some sense to have been fatally superseded by the Socratic, Nietzsche is entirely aware how it might appear as if the Apollonian were a proto-Socratic principle of reason – a possibility that would firmly invalidate not only Nietzsche’s argument that the
Apollonian was central to the tragic myth, but also his claim that it was Socrates who was a destructive influence on art precisely because he represented a ‘new and specifically anti-artistic’ principle of reason.
Having established that it was Dionysus whom Euripides abandoned, Nietzsche asks: ‘What form of drama still remained, if it was not to be born of the womb of music, in the mysterious twilight of the Dionysian? Only the dramatized epos – but in this
Apollonian domain of art the tragic effect is certainly unattainable’. Now Nietzsche must answer the question that seems to be threatening to expose Apollo as having been something of a forerunner of Socrates: ‘How is the Euripidean play related to the ideal of the Apollonian drama?’ (BT 12). The new Euripidean drama, according to Nietzsche, cannot attain the ‘Apollonian effect of the epos’ on the one hand, and on the other, it has ‘alienated from itself, as much as possible, the Dionysian elements’ (ibid). Thus to be effective at all, it requires new stimulants – ‘cool paradoxical thought’. As such,
49 Nietzsche claims, Euripidean tragedy can ‘no longer lie within the sphere of the only two art impulses, the Apollonian and the Dionysian’ (ibid). But having suggested that the
Apollonian and the Socratic are to be seen as quite distinct, Nietzsche goes on to say;
‘So we see that Euripides did not succeed in basing the drama exclusively on the
Apollonian, and his un-Dionysian tendency actually went astray and became naturalistic and inartistic’ (ibid). The implication here is clear enough; if Euripidean drama was not based ‘exclusively’ on the Apollonian, then it was so at least in part. The Apollonian
‘calm measure and restraint’ might conceivably be at least sufficiently akin to Euripidean distance and detachment for significant doubts to be raised about its more precise nature.
In an essay entitled “Socrates and Tragedy” written in 1870, which contributed to the ideas later developed in BT, Nietzsche claims that Euripides represented the death struggle of tragedy. It is with Sophocles that the ‘whole gradual decay begins’
Nietzsche claims, until Euripides with his ‘conscious reaction to the Aeschylean tragedy, brings about the end with the violence of a storm’.44 However, Socrates was in reality the architect of this decline: he is driven by one side of Hellenic spirit – ‘Apollonian clarity’ – which as a principle of reason stands as the harbinger and herald of science’.
And as Nietzsche says ‘Socratism despised instinct and, with it, art’.45 This suggests not only that science and art come to exclude each other, but more importantly, that it is
Apollo who is seen as directly contributing to the decline of tragic art through a direct relationship to ‘Socratism’. Thus here, the Apollonian as the driving force behind
44 KGW III 1:41 45 KGW III 1:25.
50 ‘Socratism’ stands in a direct opposition to the Dionysian, but one that simply does not allow of that fusing together which will later be so central to Nietzsche’s argument in
BT.
This further suggests that the Dionysian and the Socratic impulses pre-date the
Apollonian in Nietzsche’s thinking, certainly as such central impulses. Once Nietzsche identified the cause of tragedy’s demise in Socrates and the principle of reason, he found that he needed to establish the birth of tragedy on grounds that recognized in its birth more than the formless conception of Dionysian ecstasy. He needed, in other words, a principle of image, representation, form and thingliness. He was then required to establish that principle as conceptually distinct from both the Dionysian and especially the Socratic, in order to rescue it from what might otherwise have been a fatal formalism and rationality. Nietzsche does not do so with absolute conviction, for the Apollonian calm measure and restraint are uncomfortably close to the Socratic cool distance and detachment. And indeed Nietzsche cannot do so; after claiming that
Euripides fashioned his dramas on the basis of Socratism, Nietzsche goes on to say:
‘Here philosophic thought overgrows art and compels it to cling close to the tree of dialectic. The Apollonian tendency has withdrawn into the cocoon of logical schematism’ (BT 14). So the Apollonian has ‘withdrawn’ into a ‘logical schematism’, and quite obviously, the implication here may be that ‘logical schematism’ is in fact the logical home of the Apollonian, or at the very least, something it clearly does not reject.
This means, in other words, that, far from being conceptually distinct, the Apollonian and the Socratic are perhaps fatally connected. But Nietzsche, for sure, cannot have it
51 so, for the whole weight of the argument in BT militates against even the hint of such an association. Nevertheless, the implication is clear and once again enough to raise the concerns regarding relationship between the Apollonian and the Socratic, and the precise nature of the former.
An objection may be raised at this point that Nietzsche could be seen to be making the above suggestions only in the most implicit manner. But these and similar suggestions are repeated at various points throughout BT, sometimes as straightforward and sometimes as barely discernable counter-currents to the ‘official’ argument of BT.
For example, in section 8 Nietzsche proposes an important distinction, suggested by his reading of Schiller, between the ‘unvarnished expression of the truth’ as expressed by the chorus and the sphere of presumably lyric poetry, and the ‘alleged reality of the man of culture’. Nietzsche continues:
The contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the whole world of appearance: just as tragedy, with its metaphysical comfort, points to the eternal life of this core of existence which abides through the perpetual destruction of appearances, the symbolism of the satyr chorus proclaims the primordial relationship between the thing-in-itself and appearance’( BT 8).
What is striking in this passage is that Nietzsche points to something that will later, as we will see in the following chapters, become central to his treatment of art. This is something that lies to some extent submerged in 1872, but which will come to the surface as soon as Nietzsche begins more forcefully to loosen the grip of both Kant and
Schopenhauer on his thought, namely his identification of appearance, illusion and
52 semblance as ‘lies’, and not in the ‘non-moral sense’ but as a pejorative term for the way the artist misleads through representation and dissembling.
Something of this identification of appearance with lies is evident in the passage above, in the initial and stark contrast between truth and lie, although the association becomes obscured or partially nullified by the ‘symbolism of the satyr chorus’ which maintains the connection between the thing-in-itself and appearance. The implication appears to be however, that where this connection is severed, culture inevitably ‘lies’.
One might say that, if not yet expressing a concept of ‘bad’ representation, passages like these certainly foreshadow the direction that Nietzsche’s critique of art will take.
Indeed, it is not difficult to see how such a concept arises in Nietzsche’s thought; it merely requires that Nietzsche should grow increasingly unconvinced by the Kantian epistemological apparatus that underpins the text of BT which posits a separation between the realms of phenomena and the thing-in-itself, but with the added
Schopenhauerian insistence that both realms are somehow intuitable. Furthermore, while condemning him for having ‘abandoned Dionysus’ Nietzsche criticizes Euripides for the ‘copied masked myth’ he peddled, and for the ‘copied masked passions’ it betrayed (BT 10). Nietzsche’s deep suspicion concerning such ‘copies’ or ‘lies’ needs, once more, only the further suspicion concerning the philosophical underpinnings of the
Kantian phenomenon and its apparent dependence on the thing-in-itself, a suspicion that Nietzsche is already voicing in the Nachlass of the time, in order for this association to become more explicit as well as deeply questionable.46
46 See Sallis 1991, pp. 64-7.
53 As I have tried to suggest in the above discussion, what is at stake in Nietzsche’s account is that an ostensibly equal partner in the union responsible for the flowering of
Attic tragedy can also be seen to have perhaps fatal affinities with the very impulse that brought tragedy’s end. If Nietzsche can claim that the tragic vision compares with
Socratic optimism, virtue and dialectic like ‘day and night, music and mathematics’, and that the tragic hero now stands transformed into a dialectician and ‘herald of moral triviality and philistinism’ we may wonder how was such a transformation possible at all.
Is it not perhaps because the Apollonian indeed shares some fatal affinities with the
Socratic, even against Nietzsche’s greatest efforts to isolate them conceptually? In a fragment from 1875, Nietzsche states that the Apollonian dictum ‘know thyself’, which in BT as a principle of ‘measure’ and ethical restraint stood ‘side by side with the aesthetic necessity for beauty’, have been misunderstood by the post-Socratics, resulting in a ‘detestable pretension to happiness’ and a preoccupation with the
‘condition of their souls’ (PT 132). Whether the Apollonian is here correctly or incorrectly interpreted as a Socratic principle of self-knowledge and virtue by the post-
Socratics is, perhaps, less important than the fact that it could lend itself so readily to this Socratic appropriation. And Nietzsche himself points to the ‘frightening quickness’ with which this appropriation struck and laid low the Greeks, possibly suggesting rather that this ‘misunderstanding’ was more an acknowledgment of an already existing association than a sudden, capricious, or inaccurate reinterpretation.
54 Nietzsche takes this connection a step further. Speaking of this end of Hellenic genius, and of Apollo as the god of sculpture and the plastic arts, to which he had also referred in BT, Nietzsche writes:
One single powerful crank like Socrates and the break was irreparable. The self-destruction of the Greeks is accomplished in Socrates. I consider it significant that he was the son of a sculptor. If for once the plastic arts could speak, they would seem to us superficial. In Socrates, the son of a sculptor, their superficiality emerged (PT 136).
Here the associations first made in the essay on Socrates and tragedy, and somewhat submerged in the (official) argument of BT are made explicit. Perhaps Socrates is, after all, the son of Apollo, or at least, a son of the Apollonian. Certainly, as we have seen, there are some important suggestions that point to the fact that, at the very least,
Nietzsche originally conceived of them as being connected at some deep and significant level, and that this can be seen to have been carried over into BT and Nietzsche’s subsequent development.
This insight ought to cause us to reread the nature and the role of the Apollonian in BT. Indeed, it should cause us reevaluate the generally accepted view that BT simply glorifies art, and to allow for a more complex reading than Nietzsche’s argument seems to call for. More significantly, it should allow us to raise deeper questions regarding the nature of Nietzsche’s attitude towards art. The questionable nature of the Apollonian and the unlikelihood of any genuine union of the two fundamental impulses undermine
Nietzsche’s conception of art and Greek tragedy as presented in BT. And the tension involved in his account signals that Nietzsche himself was not quite convinced by it. The suspicion that permeates his discussion is that an artistic principle so central to the flourishing of Greek culture has turned out to be fatally related to the forces that
55 brought about its demise. And this is not simply a suspicion about the mechanism of tragedy, but one that involves the very nature of art and its ability to maintain a healthy relationship to ‘life’. Given Nietzsche’s life-long conviction, expressed already in BT, that the value of something is measured by its value for life, it is not difficult to see how these early suspicions will have enormous consequences for Nietzsche’s later relationship towards art.
56 Chapter II
Epistemological Challenge
Here I wish to turn my attention to Nietzsche’s involvement with the question of truth and knowledge, a topic that may initially appear to have very little to do with the issue of art. However, historically art has always been conceived as standing in some sort of relationship with truth and this relationship, however varied in detail and structure, from Plato to Hegel and to Nietzsche, has been deemed important and even crucial for the life of an individual or even a whole culture. As the official argument of BT clearly shows, for Nietzsche the relationship between truth and art is one of highest significance. After BT Nietzsche’s estimate of art changed dramatically, but this is not to say that the sense of significance of the relationship between the two has diminished.
Quite the contrary, how one conceives of both truth and art, and the relationship between them may just be of the highest existential import. And how Nietzsche conceives of truth and all knowledge claims bears directly on his view of art and of what can legitimately be said art can do. Thus to understand Nietzsche’s critique of art and aesthetic tradition, which I discuss in the next chapter, it is necessary to understand the basis or the underlying motivation of his attacks. These have to do with Nietzsche’ critique of the epistemological tradition and the development of Nietzsche’s much more
57 fluid and radical notion of perspectivism, interpretation and will to power. These views are also essential for making clear the meaning of Nietzsche’s more positive remarks on art, and for understanding how they can be reconciled with his rather severe critique – issues to which I turn in Chapter IV.
Truth and language
Nietzsche approached all forms of philosophical discourse and claims to knowledge with radical skepticism.47 He did so from the perspective of a philologist and a cultural critic, and this is an important point to keep in mind when dealing with
47 On this account Nietzsche is often compared to Hume for instance. Both showed mistrust in the limitations of human knowledge and science, but the similarities between them cannot go very far, simply because the basis from which they launch their attacks on knowledge is fundamentally different. While Hume maintains his skeptical regard towards the rational, he is nevertheless still firmly planted within the circumscribed boundaries of metaphysical discourse. His distrust of the notion of causality, for instance, is motivated by the suspicion that it constitutes a misrepresentation of what actually is the case. Hume’s contention is that, since our knowledge of the world is derived from the mere succession of sense stimuli from without, all attempts to organize those stimuli into a meaningful whole are synthetic acts, revealing little or nothing about the reality underlying those stimuli, unable even to predict whether those stimuli will be the same tomorrow. His claim in A Treatise of Human Nature that ‘all reasoning concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom’ draws its force from the sense of distance between the picture of the world based on habit, and what might really be true of it. Nietzsche’s skepticism however is of entirely different order and his critique of metaphysics is not guided by a conviction of some other truth. Rather, his critique is motivated by what he sees as a misunderstanding and a misconception of philosophy as a rational, discursive practice whose main task is the pursuit of truth.
58 Nietzsche’s thought. If it is assumed that Nietzsche is ‘writing philosophy’ when he is discussing Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and others, disappointment will inevitably follow, judged against the canonical standards of philosophical argument. Nietzsche’s re- evaluation of all values may come across as a tired repetition of overly familiar Humean and Kantian themes and he may be accused of doing little else than repeating, or stating more boldly, conclusions implicit in Kant and Hume. This view is reinforced by the fact that Nietzsche himself, most especially in his notebooks, often displays a somewhat vulgarized understanding of Kant, and more generally of the history of metaphysics, giving the frequent impression that he is attacking the straw man.48
But to interpret Nietzsche in this manner is to ignore those two central factors noted above that have shaped Nietzsche’s thought throughout. First, Nietzsche’s chosen profession, however short, was as a classical philologist and regardless of how much he disliked the ponderous, myopic practices of the ‘Altertumswissenschaft’ or classical scholarship of the late nineteenth century, his training to understand classical texts in a certain way dominated his understanding of texts in general, and more specifically those of philosophy. Second, Nietzsche’s early work is most often concerned with culture and
48 There are numerous instances where Nietzsche, mocking the notion of thing-in-itself, meaning-in-itself and such, implicitly assumes that Kant, who is the obvious target, unequivocally maintained the existence of things-in-themselves, meanings-in-themselves and so forth. Although Kant may personally have been reluctant to admit as much, a merely cursory reading of The Critique of Pure Reason will establish that his critical project must implicitly be in agreement with Nietzsche’s own. In the second edition Kant replaces the passage devoted to establishing the objective reality of noumena with a lengthy discussion of the nature of the noumenon itself as a construct of human thought (Kant 1989 B 306ff). Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Hegel seems equally cursory. Even Bataille recognized that Nietzsche’s knowledge of Hegel was more or less based on a routine popularized version of his thought and his criticisms are often targeted at a crude caricaturized image of Hegel (Bataille 1988, pp. 109). Furthermore, it has been pointed out that there is a remarkable absence in Nietzsche’s personal library of any works by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza or Leibniz, all of whom are central to the metaphysical tradition that Nietzsche attacks (See Holub 1995).
59 language, whether it is the problem of language in “On Truth and Lies in Non Moral
Sense” (OTL), the relation of language and music in tragedy and Wagnerian opera in BT, or the cultural meaning of historiography in “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” in Untimely Meditations (UM II). As such, Nietzsche’s philological training and his concern with culture and language provide the basis for the greater part of his subsequent working over of the problems of metaphysics.
These points have not gone unrecognized and Nietzsche’ thematisation of philosophical language became a driving force of many interpretations of Nietzsche work during the 1970’s, particularly those of Sara Kofman (1972), Bernard Pautrar
(1971) and Jacques Derrida (1979). These interpretations, in different ways, focus their examination on the functional role of metaphor in Nietzsche’s ‘deconstruction’ of metaphysics. I wish to suggest however, that Nietzsche’s concern with language is strategic; Nietzsche aims to discredit metaphysical discourse by using language as a means to undermine its values, most notably the notion of truth. These concerns can be traced back to Nietzsche’s early, unpublished essay OTL written around the time of BT where he aims to unravel the intertwining of truth and language, metaphor and concept.
In these early works Nietzsche is responding to the epistemological tradition that has conceived knowledge as mirroring of reality by means of language, that is, by means of concepts or words which are taken to be representative of that reality. Nietzsche however aims to discredit this view because he believes it embodies the philosophical pretension of truth and knowledge. He specifically claims that knowledge is grounded in
60 the “fundamental human drive towards the formation of metaphor” (OTL 2), which essentially means that while knowledge is possible only by means of language, language itself springs from our capacity for the creation of metaphor. This alone Nietzsche believes, should discredit our faith in concepts and the representational nature of language.
Nietzsche states that “the intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation”
(OTL, 1) and singles out philosophy as a primary example of this process of naming –
‘philosophy itself begins with the legislation of nomenclature’ (PTAG, 3). Concepts,
Nietzsche then argues, arise from the process of naming and thus they should be properly understood as a result of an artificial process of differentiation, classification, and designation. In naming, Nietzsche says, what is at best similar is designated as identical by virtue of bestowing upon it the same name (PHT, 47). This is why Nietzsche claims knowledge appears as a ‘rapid classification of things that are similar to each other’ (P, 131) and why the formation of concepts is the equation of things which are not equal (OTL, 1). It is an error to believe that language is an instrument of representation, since there is ultimately nothing to be represented. ‘All presence’
Nietzsche argues, ‘is two-fold representation: first as image, then as image of the image. Life is the incessant procreation of this double representation… The empirical world only appears and becomes. In becoming, the representative nature of the thing shows itself: it gives nothing, it is nothing, everything becomes, i.e., is representation’.49
This is to say that language is a sum of concepts which are themselves the artistic
49 KGW III, 3:203.
61 imposition of an image or a hieroglyphic sign upon other images.50 There is no originary presence at the inception of language. Rather, at the origin of language stands the primal force of the artist whose creative power is recognized in the primal process of world production as an infinite regress of images.51
At the heart of this view of language lies metaphor which Nietzsche takes to mean ‘to treat something as identical which has been recognized as similar in one point’.52 So here the metaphor names the process of identification, through words, of things which are not the same. It is also ‘the carrying over of a word whose usual meaning is something else, either from the genus to the species, from the species to the genus, from species to species, or according to proportion’ (RH, p.317), a meaning derived from Nietzsche’s reading of Aristotle’s Poetics.53 But Nietzsche goes beyond
Aristotle’s restriction so that metaphor comes to stand for any transference from one sphere to another. Thus for Nietzsche, concepts with which knowledge operates result from multiple stage metaphorical translations; ‘nerve stimulus is translated into an image – a first metaphor. Then image is translated into sound, second metaphor’ (OTL,
1). And from the sound, that is the word, comes a concept – third metaphor (P, 55).
Each of these translations involves transference through different spheres in which there is a selective, creative carrying over from one ‘language’ to another.
Nietzsche further states:
50 KGW III, 3:41 51 KGW III, 3:175 52 KGW III, 4:249. 53 See also notes translated by Carol Blair in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language.
62 between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue – for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force” (OTL, 1).
Thus Nietzsche explicitly denies any possibility of establishing a ‘proper relation’ or literal translation between spheres. Our metaphor creating capacity, ‘the mediating force’, operates in the ‘inventive intermediate sphere’ so essentially all the claims of knowledge belong properly within the realm of human affairs. And because of the obtrusiveness of this metaphorical capacity, the conclusions derived from concepts are thoroughly anthropomorphic. For instance;
The concept of Being! as if this concept did not indicate the most miserable empirical origin already in the etymology of the word. For esse at bottom means “to breath”; if man uses it of all other things then he transfers the conviction that he himself breaths and leaves by means of metaphor, that is, by means of something illogical to other things and conceives of their existence as a breathing according to human analogy. Now the original meaning of the word soon becomes effaced; so much however still remains that man conceives of existence of other things according to the analogy of his own existence, therefore anthropomorphically. And in any case by means of illogical transference (PTAG, 11).54
For Nietzsche, the concept is only ‘the residue of metaphor’, that is, merely a word which is abstracted and generalized and ‘simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases’ (OTL, 1). Although we may believe and behave as if concepts were
‘something factual’, this is in fact not the case. Nietzsche says concepts are surely only something which we have constructed through a process of ignoring all individual features. We presuppose that nature behaves in accordance with such a concept. But in this case first nature and then the concept are anthropomorphic. The omitting of what is individual provides us with a concept, and with this our knowledge begins: in categorizing, in the establishment of classes. But the essence of things does not correspond to this: it is a process of knowledge which does not touch upon the essence of things (P, 150).
54 See also P 41, 64, 77, 78, 80, PCP, 171, 174, PTAG, 11, OTL, passim.
63 Thus it clearly seems hopeless to believe in knowledge as a possession of true facts about reality and to then imagine language as accurately representing that reality.
As it is evident from the above, metaphors are already operating even at the level of so- called pure perception (OTL, 1, P 144) This certainly seems to undermine the traditional conception of knowledge and language, leading to Nietzsche’s famous claim about truth:
What then is the truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relation which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins (OTL 1).
Far from corresponding to any reality, what we call truth is simply a thoroughgoing anthropomorphism, the application of the usual, conventional metaphors. On
Nietzsche’s analysis, what we call knowledge is possible only through forgetting its metaphorical origins and by means of congealing the metaphor into a ‘concept’.
Nietzsche’s point here is not so much to criticize our inclination to forget, since he firmly believes that a certain amount of forgetfulness is essential for our well being. The point is however to attempt to restrain our arrogant and equally erroneous claims to knowledge which Nietzsche thinks are motivated by what he calls the ‘pathos of truth’.
This pathos of truth strives for fixity, for static conceptual points of reference around which to organize a systematic body of beliefs. Truth then comes to be fixed and generalized by means of concepts and therefore, as something static it is also capable of being possessed. It is for this reason Nietzsche says that philosophy and religion can be
64 seen ‘as longing for property’ (PHT, 60). The security that is gained by possessing such
‘fixed’ and ‘certain’ truths however comes at the price; it is attained at the expense of human creative power:
Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of petrifaction and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency (OTL, 1).
While acknowledging the necessity of ‘truth’, that is, the necessity of forgetting its creative metaphorical origins, Nietzsche nevertheless rejects the manner in which the value of truth is customarily judged. Philosophy has become dominated by an uncontrolled ‘knowledge drive which judges more and more according to the degree of certainty’ rather than accepting that ‘the only criterion which counts for us is the aesthetic criterion’ (P, 41). This is problematic because judging truth in accordance to the degree of certainty simply meant to judge on moral grounds. This came about as a consequence of human beings entering into a community whose harmony requires that these ‘truths’ be ‘uniformly valid and binding designations’ (OTL, 1). One is no longer truthful when one abuses the ‘linguistic conventions’, or simply fails to adhere to them.
At a deeper level, the level of truth and lies in non-moral sense, truths are themselves
‘lies’, they are ‘illusions which we have forgotten are illusions’ and to be truthful is merely ‘to lie according to a fixed convention’ (ibid).
It is here that Nietzsche seeks to replace the criterion of certainty with one drawn from aesthetics: ‘the beauty and grandeur of an interpretation of the world (alias
65 philosophy) is what is now decisive for its value, i.e. it is judged as art’ (P, 49). The choice of aesthetic criterion is not arbitrary but one of necessity, as the criteria of correctness and certainty are simply not available:
“the correct perception” – which would mean “the adequate expression of an object in the subject” – is a contradictory impossibility. For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation (OTL, 1).
Because language is a human creation which expresses only anthropomorphic relations, all the results drawn from the linguistic use, all truths, are merely opinions, illusions and not knowledge at all. On Nietzsche’s view, it is simply impossible to escape from within the nets of language, go outside of it, and while Nietzsche does want to stress the degree to which the dictates of language determine our knowledge his primary concern is again to limit the authority of epistemology. It is to show that the hope of a literal designation and an adequate, natural relation between words and things is unreasonable, and consequently that philosophers’ claims to knowledge are not really that at all. As Nietzsche says, BG, ‘they don’t know what they think they “know”’.
These early insights have lead Nietzsche to a rhetorical model of language. It is not possible to devote much attention to it here but I do want to make clear however that for Nietzsche, at least early on, the idea that language provides no information about reality or things-in-themselves, and the notion that truth is nothing but a forgotten congealed metaphor simply means that the questions about knowledge are more appropriately seen as questions of rhetoric. Language as a human creation is
66 essentially separate from ‘reality’, and therefore Nietzsche rejects the cornerstones of traditional epistemological doctrines - the correspondence theory of truth and the referential theory of meaning. He rejects the claim that language, by virtue of its powers of representation stands in some sort of privileged relation, one of correspondence, to an extralinguistic referent of meaning (‘reality’), as well as the belief that ‘truth’ is that which stands in this relation of correspondence to reality.
Nietzsche moves away from the strictly rhetorical account of language in his later works but he nevertheless remains committed to uncovering and exposing the epistemological illusions inherent in words and grammar. He continually holds to the view that language, as an anthropomorphic creation, cannot provide the ‘correct’ view of that which lies outside of it – that is, there is an unbridgeable gap between ‘words’ and ‘things’ (Z “The Convalescent” 2). With language one creates another world, one which misleads us into ‘imagining things as being simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself’, and into thinking that ‘with words and concepts we not only “designate things” but rather that “through them we grasp the true in things”’ (WS 11). The mistake lies not in language but in the belief that with language we actually possess the knowledge of the world. ‘The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things’
(HATH 11). But the belief that ‘words’ refer to ‘things’ is a ‘philosophical mythology’ that
‘lies concealed in language’ (WS 11). Because language expresses merely anthropomorphic relations it is rather pointless to inquire as to its referential accuracy.
67 Language is, as Nietzsche states, ‘mere semiotics’ and therefore our ‘demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless’ (WP 625).
With the belief that there is an objective referent outside of the relationship with that which refers to it comes the idea of ‘in-itself’, of things-in-themselves, which
Nietzsche maintains is presupposed by the correspondence theory of truth. But again
‘the concept “truth” is nonsensical. The entire domain of “true-false” applies only to relations, not to an “in-itself”’ (WP 625). To be in a possession of ‘truth’ one would first have to know what the thing is in-itself in order to be able to determine whether or not one’s linguistic representation adequately corresponds to it. But, we are not privy to that knowledge, and we cannot have it simply because, as Nietzsche says, ‘we lack any organ for knowledge’ (GS 354). As much as language determines thought and inasmuch as ‘we cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language’ (WP
522), our intellect cannot help but miscarry in its attempt to give birth to knowledge and truth.
Logic is a good example of this error; originally intended as an aid to communication, it became a means of truth. ‘Communication is necessary’ Nietzsche says, and for there to be communication something has to be firm, simplified, capable of precision (above all in the identical case). For it to be communicable, however, it must be experienced as adapted, as “recognizable”. The material of the senses adapted by the understanding, reduced to rough outlines, made similar, subsumed under related matters. Thus the fuzziness and the chaos of sense impressions are, as it were, logicized (WP 569).
This creation of ‘identical cases’ is analogous to what Nietzsche had earlier referred to as the ‘making equal what is unequal’ that stands at the origin of language. Logic, like
68 language, is essentially a falsification; ‘the will to logical truth can be carried through only after a fundamental falsification of all events is assumed…logic does not spring from will to truth’ (WP 512). It is thus ‘owing to the requirement of logic’ that
‘thingness’ is invented, because ‘logic handles only formulas for what remains the same’
(WP 558, 517). Logic must in each case presuppose the ‘thing’, ‘being’, ‘self-identical A’ but the question remains ‘are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they means and measure for us to create reality, the concept “reality” for ourselves?’ (WP 516).
Nietzsche’s answer parallels his judgment on language: ‘Logic is the attempt to comprehend the actual world by means of a scheme of being posited by ourselves; more correctly, to make it formulatable and calculable for us’ (ibid). Logic, like language,
‘depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds’ (HATH
11). Propositions of logic contain ‘no criterion of truth’ but posit ‘an imperative concerning that which should count as true’ (WP 516). What both logic and language, as instruments of man’s desire for knowledge presuppose, are conditions which are completely lacking in the actual world: fixity, enduring consistency, stasis, identity; in a word, Being. Thus at the core of Nietzsche’s criticism of traditional epistemology stands one of his basic tenets: ‘Knowledge and becoming exclude one another’ (WP 517).
While we may think that our conceptual knowledge provides essential definitions of the world in-itself, this world in fact entirely eludes definition. Nietzsche says ‘only that which has no history is definable’ (GM II, 13), and insofar as all aspects of the world are engaged in the eternal process of becoming our words and concepts are falsifications. Conceptual knowledge is therefore a consequence of inattention to
69 becoming and a lack of ‘historical sense’ which is, for Nietzsche, one of the central idiosyncrasies of philosophers. ‘They think they are doing a thing honor when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni – when they make a mummy of it. All that philosophers have handled for millennia have been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive’ (TI, “Reason in Philosophy”, 1). This dehistoricizing, which results from our inability to express becoming is essential to all our claims to knowledge and is, in part, why Nietzsche continues to claim throughout his writings that all our ‘knowledge’, all our ‘truth’ is ‘false’.
In his later works the view that knowledge is an anthropomorphic creation which corresponds to nothing in the world is grounded on two claims; first is that consciousness and language, which together give rise to various claims of knowledge, are ‘surface phenomena’, and second, that knowledge amounts to nothing more than the translation of what is strange and novel into what is old and familiar. The superficiality of consciousness comes to be articulated in terms of the relation between thinking and knowledge – ‘we think only in the form of language’ (WP 522) – and the social origin of both consciousness and language. Outlining his project in the winter
1883-84 Nietzsche writes
It must be shown to what extent everything conscious remains on the surface; how an action and an image of an action differ; how little one knows of what precedes an action; how fantastic are our feelings of “freedom of will”, “cause and effect”,; how thoughts and images are, like words, only signs of thought; the inexplicability of every action; the superficiality of all praise and blame; how essential fiction and conceit are in which we dwell consciously; how all our words refer to fictions (our affects too), and how the bond between the man and man depends on the transmission and elaboration of these fictions (WP 676).
70 In GS section 354 Nietzsche offers his clearest statement of the outcome of his investigation into the superficiality of consciousness. Consciousness, Nietzsche says, is
‘superfluous’ mirror of our life which develops in proportion to human beings’ capacity and need for communication: ‘Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings – it is only as such that it had to develop: a solitary human being who lived like a bird of pray would not have needed it’. Consciousness thus does not belong to our individual existence at all, but is rather a consequence of our ‘social and herd nature’. Conscious thinking is only a small part of our cognitive life, ‘the most superficial and worst part’, which ‘takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication’. This harsh judgment is a consequence of Nietzsche’s view that only what is ‘average’ and ‘common’ in a person can be communicated; our actions which are ‘incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual’ cease to be such as soon as they are ‘translated into consciousness’. Thus the value of consciousness is strictly instrumental. As members of the social community, the ‘herd’, each of us must be able to engage and take part in it, we must know how to express ourselves and be understood, and we do so by becoming self-conscious, that is by making what is unique and individual to our experience ‘average’ and capable of being communicated . Thus
Nietzsche says
The essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: owing to the nature of animal consciousness the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface and sign-world, a world that Is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal: all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization (GS 354).
71 This view expressed here parallels Nietzsche’s belief that knowledge is a turning of what is strange and new into what is familiar. What we really want when we want
‘knowledge’, Nietzsche says in the following section of GS, is ‘nothing more than this: something strange is to be reduced to something familiar’. Consciousness and knowledge, insofar as they are possible only in and through language, are equally reductive. Both operate by means of incorporating what is new into a systematic framework of familiar categories (see WP 499).
Isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that buds us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of the sense of security? (GS 355, see also D 26).
Tracing the genealogy of knowledge back to the desire for security, Nietzsche links this critique of knowledge with his critique of consciousness; the security which is gained by reducing the strange and questionable to what is familiar is a sign of the herd. Not strong enough to confront the world of novelty, one seeks to translate all that is new into the conventional wisdom of community which one is a part of and through which one is nurtured and preserved. Nietzsche’s judgment regarding the linguistic reductionism at the origin of consciousness and language is essentially the same
We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous…In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average, medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking (TI, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man”, 26).
72 From the above it is clear that Nietzsche’s reflection on language functions as an essential component of his later thinking. Insofar as language is a ‘mere semiotic’, a simplified, falsified, human-created sign-system, and insofar as all thinking is possible only in and through the means provided by language, ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ derived from language, for Nietzsche, fail to do the job which they are believed to perform.
What should be fairly obvious from Nietzsche’s view by now, is that all the philosophical articles of faith – ‘thinking’ (WP 477, 510), ‘thing’ (WP 551, 634, 715), ‘will’ (BGE 19, WP
46) ‘cause and effect’ (WP 551, TI “The Four Great Errors” 1, 2, 3), ‘subject’, ‘soul’ (BGE
54) ‘reason’, ‘ego’, ‘Being’, ‘substance’ (TI, “Reason in Philosophy”, 5) - to name a few, are nothing more than mere words, mere linguistic ‘fetishes’ which correspond to
‘nothing real’. And therefore, in order for there to be any movement away from the oppressive hold of metaphysics and the crises of nihilism which it brought about, ‘we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words’ (BGE 16).
Perspectivism and Interpretation
Nietzsche turns to perspectivism and the notion of interpretation as an alternative to the epistemological tradition which he believed falls far too short of its own goal. There are countless references in Nietzsche’s text to both the process and the
73 product of interpretation but any attempt at a systematic exposition of Nietzsche’s conception of interpretation faces considerable difficulties. Nietzsche nowhere provides anything even approximating a set of methodological guidelines for judging between competing interpretations. 55 In addition, the scarcity of Nietzsche’s references to the
‘doctrine’ of perspectivism further complicates any attempt at reconstructing what this
‘doctrine’ is actually meant to convey, and also in justifying the claim that perspectivism is in fact a doctrine at all, let alone one central to Nietzsche’s thought.
The term perspectivism appears only once in Nietzsche’s published works in the section 354 of GS already quoted above, and only twice in the epistemological notes collected in WP. Nevertheless, the term has been used since 1906 to this day, first by
Nietzsche’s German editors, then Heidegger, and by virtually every European and Anglo-
American commentator. More importantly, while Nietzsche rarely refers to
‘perspectivism’ as a doctrine, the terms ‘perspective’, ‘perspectival’, and ‘perspectivity’ appear with considerable frequency, and they appear in contexts that clearly articulate something central and unique in Nietzsche’s thought – the notion that all human beings are inextricably caught up within a nexus of competing worldviews, each with its origin
55 Schrift points out that Nietzsche’s scattered remarks locate the notion of interpretation within the frameworks and practices which, as conceived by Nietzsche, place different and conflicting demands on the process of interpretation, and consequently seem to give rise to different conceptions of truth. More specifically, the issue is one of the coherence or compatibility between Nietzsche’s philology and his perspectivism. Nietzsche’s early conception of philology as a discipline that seeks to establish a rigorous exegetical method appears incompatible with the perspectival denial of truth. But Shrift offers a resolution to this problem by arguing for the ‘transvalued’ conception of both text and philology, which as ‘the art of reading well’, does not stand in opposition to perspectivism but rather to ‘bad philological methods’. As Schrift states, “transvalued text which is to be read well, while distinct from any particular interpretation, itself remains nothing other than interpretation. This is to say, while no single interpretation will be coextensive with the text, nor will any one interpretation “get the text right”, our only access to the text, our only means of apprehending it, will be through an act of interpretation Schrift 1990, pp. 168.
74 in particular physiological, psychological, historical, cultural, and other needs, desires, beliefs and values.
In the most concise form Nietzsche’s ‘doctrine’ of perspectivism can be stated as asserting that there are no un-interpreted ‘facts’ or ‘truths’. What this simple assertion means is often misunderstood and Nietzsche’s position is described as nihilistic and paradoxical, even solipsistic, based on the assumption that perspectivism is put forth as an ontological position.56 This, however, is a misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s position which should more appropriately be seen as epistemic, not in a restricted sense of being a ‘theory of knowledge’ but instead as offering a perspectival account of what we can
‘know’ rather than what there is.57 That is to say, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is not a theory of knowledge at all, not in the strict sense but rather a rhetorical strategy that offers an alternative to the traditional epistemological conception of knowledge as a possession of some stable, eternal unchanging entities, whether they be called ‘truths’,
‘facts’, ‘meaning’, ‘propositions’ or whatever else. Nietzsche regards these ‘entities’ as beyond the limits of human comprehension, calls them ‘idle hypotheses’ and whether or not they exist is inconsequential as we are surely incapable of comprehending them.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism then is based partly on the ‘empirical’ conclusion regarding the human condition and human finitude. Because human beings are situated physically at a particular point in space, time, and history, their capacity for ‘knowledge’ is inevitably limited. Thus being so situated, and contrary to what was assumed and
56 See for instance, Arthur Danto 1965 pp. 68-99; David C. Hoy 1981 and George Stack 1981, pp 221-241. 57 Schrift (1990) makes this point rather clearly and my own presentation of Nietzsche’s position is in agreement with the principle lines of his argument .
75 demanded of them by the traditional epistemology, human beings are not capable of
‘objective’, ‘disinterested’ observation of ‘reality’. The most we are entitled to are just evaluations made from a particular perspective, a particular point of view. Section 117 of D entitled “in Prison” speaks to precisely this nature of human condition and the limits it places on our capacity to ‘know’. Elsewhere Nietzsche writes that ‘we have senses for only a selection of perceptions – those with which we have to concern ourselves in order to preserve ourselves’. ‘Consciousness’, Nietzsche says, ‘is present only to the extent that it is useful. It cannot be doubted that all sense perceptions are permeated with value judgments’ (WP 505). Because ‘perception’ is essentially a
‘taking-as-true’ we cannot escape the evaluative dimension through some recourse to physiology. Nor can we separate our more explicit ‘evaluative’ judgments from our physiological limitations as Nietzsche makes clear in GS when, speaking of the changes in taste regarding questions of aesthetics and morality, he writes that: ‘aesthetic and moral judgments are among these ‘subtle nuances’ of the physis’ (GS 39). The consequence of this interpretation for the traditional account of knowledge is clear
Never to be able to see into things out of any other eyes but these? And what uncountable kinds of beings may there not be whose organs are better equipped for knowledge. What will mankind have come to know at the end of all their knowledge? – their organs! And that perhaps means: the impossibility of knowledge!’ (D 483).
Because it is restricted to our physiological and sensory capabilities, our apprehension of the world can provide us with nothing more or other than very limited perspectives of the world. The conclusion Nietzsche draws from his various expressions of
76 physiological perspectivism and in relation to the status of knowledge remains the same: we simply lack any organ for knowledge or truth about the world (see GS 354).
In addition, our impulses, drives, needs, and affects as well as the instincts proper, all play an important role in determining what we ‘know’. For Nietzsche all our judgments have a prehistory in our instincts, ‘likes, dislikes, experiences and lack of experiences’ (GS 335). Whereas knowledge has traditionally been opposed to the instinctual impulses, Nietzsche sees knowledge as ‘actually nothing but a certain behavior of the instincts toward one another’ (GS 333). Ultimately, every behavior is the struggle for mastery: each instinct has its own perspective which it seeks to establish as a norm for conceptual judgment. Nietzsche states that ‘it is our needs that interpret the world: our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule: each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm’
(WP 481). At the center of this struggle for power stands the instinct for self- preservation. Cognizant of the existential conditions necessary for preservation our instincts adopt the perspective that will facilitate it. ‘Our empirical world would be determined by the instincts of self-preservation even as regards the limits of its knowledge: we would regard as true, good, valuable that which serves the preservation of species’ (WP 583).
What we ‘know’ is equally determined by our personal history as well as the socio-historical context in which we are situated. This is to say that the scope of what we can know is limited by our individual experiences along with historically conditioned and socially accepted standards of what is to count as ‘true’ or ‘real’. For Nietzsche,
77 what we know and understand is conditioned by our experience to such an extent that
‘ultimately nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows.
For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear’ (EH III, 1; EH I, 1; D
119). Because our experiences are ultimately individual and unique our knowledge of the world must reflect this inevitable limitation (see HATH I 286). Thus, ‘The task of painting the picture of life’, Nietzsche says, ‘however often poets and philosophers may pose it, is nonetheless senseless: even under the hands of the greatest of painter- thinkers all that has ever eventuated is pictures and miniatures out of one life, namely their own – and nothing else is even possible…’ (HATH II, 19). We are all, in Nietzsche’s view, ‘always in our own company’ and can see and hear only what we have eyes and ears for. ‘Whatever in nature and in history is of my own kind speaks to me, spurs me on, and comforts me -: the rest I do not hear or forget right away’ (GS 166).
While our perspectives are uniquely our own, they do not take precedence over the social and historical influences. Rather, as Nietzsche states, we are ‘still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries’ (GS 57). And Nietzsche insists, only historically limited perspectives are possible (see also HATH I, 2, Family failing of philosophers), and this is to say, not only are there no fixed and stable truths that are to be extract from the process of becoming, but that by virtue of being situated within this process, we must adopt a limited and historically circumscribed perspective on the process itself. What philosophers have called human ‘instincts’ are themselves just these valuating structures, historically sedimented and incorporated into ‘man’ as a part of his ‘essence’.
78 Thus perspectivism comes about as a response to the overly simplistic concept of knowledge that has animated the philosophical tradition. Because of the limitations that come with being a type of organism that we are, be they physiological, instinctual, or historical perspectives are inescapable; we simply cannot avoid adopting a particular and to certain extent idiosyncratic perspective on the world. ‘How far the perspectival character of existence extedns…it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellect and perspectives there might be…’(GS 374). In addition perspectives are what makes the world manageable, and the ones we adopt are those that are necessary for our preservation. But this indispensability of any given perspective cannot be taken as the criterion of its truth. Nietzsche writes, ‘however habitual and indispensible’ a belief ‘may have become by now – that in itself proves nothing against its imaginary origin: a belief can be a condition of life and nonetheless be false’ (WP
483). Thus while this leads the dogmatic/metaphysical philosopher to nihilistic despair
Nietzsche accepts and affirms this necessity and falsity in the cheerful spirit of the gaya scienca:
The falseness of judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment: in this respect our language may sound the strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. And we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments a priori) are the most indispensible for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means numbers, man could not live – that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life – that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil (BGE 4, cf. WP 602).
79 So for Nietzsche, the question of the perspective’s being ‘true’ or ‘false’ is supplanted by that of its value for life as a criterion of evaluation. Abandoning the pursuit of truth and adopting this stance clears the way for the task of overcoming the nihilistic modern, metaphysical culture and for Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values. Thus perspectivism on the one hand serves to dismantle traditionally privileged objects of epistemology and on the other it prepares the ground for the creative play of interpretation.
Thus, perspectivism undermines the status of the fundamental fixtures of the traditional epistemological universe – ‘fact’, ‘meaning’, ‘reality’, etc. Throughout
Nietzsche’s writings we find statements such as ‘there are no facts’ (WP 604), ‘Is meaning not necessarily relative meaning and perspective’ (WP 509), ‘there is no reality’
(GS 57), and so on. In each case Nietzsche rejects the privileged status of the ‘given’ epistemic objects on the grounds of the pervasiveness of perspective and interpretation
– they are already at work prior to the judgment that something is a ‘fact’ or ‘meaning’ or ‘real’. So for instance Nietzsche states, ‘”There are only facts” – I would say: No, facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any “fact in- itself”: perhaps it is a folly to want to do such a thing’ (WP 481). Designation of something as a fact already involves an imposition of value, that is, an evaluation from a particular perspective, in a word, interpretation. ‘There are no facts ‘in-themselves’, for a sense must always be projected into them before they can be facts’ WP 556). Fact is simply a name, a label for a group of a set of perspectives taken from the ‘continuous stream’ of becoming (see WS 11). As such facts are not given but invented.
80 Similarly, what we call reality is psychologically determined by our sensory apparatus dictated by the perspectives of our needs
One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws (“a world of identical cases”) as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible: - we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, etc., for us. This same compulsion exists in the sense activities that support reason – by simplification, coarsening, emphasizing, and elaborating, upon which all “recognition”, all ability to make oneself intelligible rests. Our needs have made our senses so precise that the “same apparent world” always reappears and has thus acquired the semblance of reality (WP 521).
The attribution of ‘reality’ to something is another human contribution to the world of becoming. To the ‘sober realists’ whose ‘love of ‘reality’ has led them to proclaim that
‘the world really is as it appears’ Nietzsche says
Every feeling and sensation contains a piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and ever so much else has contributed to it and worked on it. That mountain there! That cloud there! What is “real” in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forger your descent, your past, your training – all of your humanity and animality. There is no “reality” for us – not for you either my sober friends (GS 57).
Similarly, ‘meaning’ appears as an anthropomorphic contribution, as an artificial limit imposed upon the world so as to make it more manageable. ‘In so far as the word
‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings – ‘Perspectivism’’ (WP 481). The search for the univocal meaning is another of the dogmatic philosopher’s dreams because there is no meaning in-itself. Rather, ‘meaning’ is one of the values we interpret into things (WP 59). As such, all meaning is relative and perspectival, which for
81 Nietzsche means that it is nothing more than a manifestation of will to power as the creative force of interpretive imposition (see WP 589, 590).
What stands behind these philosophical articles of fate is ‘truth’ and Nietzsche argues that the ‘will to truth’ and the faith in the ‘true world’ have led to the imposition of these values upon becoming. ‘Truth’ is the epistemic designation of ultimate privilege, the highest sanction to be bestowed upon a belief, and having been baptized as ‘true’ a belief is no longer subject to question, revision, or reinterpretation.
Therefore, for Nietzsche, to open the field of ‘knowledge’ to creative interpretive play, it is of the utmost importance to dethrone the notion of ‘truth’. And so in GM, concluding his polemic against the ascetic ideal, Nietzsche raises a ‘new problem: that of the value of truth’. This polemic targets not so much the particular truths affirmed by the ascetic ideal as he the privileged status accorded to them, the ‘overestimation’ of the value of truth itself (GM III, 25). The constraints of asceticism, Nietzsche says, or this
‘unconditional will to truth’ comes from the ‘faith in the ascetic ideal itself’ which is the
‘faith in the metaphysical value, the absolute value of truth” (GM III, 24).
Upon questioning the faith in truth reveals itself to be a sign of weakness, a drive in search of necessary conditions for the preservation of the decadent will to power.
‘Will to truth is a making firm, a making true and durable, an abolition of the false character of things, a reinterpretation of it into beings’ (WP 552). What is privileged as
‘truth’ is, for Nietzsche, a name for ‘the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live’ (WP 493). This idea that truth is an error links Nietzsche’s denial of the privileged status of truth and his perspectivism:
82
The value of the world lies in our interpretation (- that other interpretations than merely human are ones are perhaps somewhere possible -); that previous interpretations have been perspective valuations by virtue of which we can survive in life, i.e. in the will to power, for the growth of power: that every elevation of man brings with it the overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every strengthening and increase of power opens up new perspectives and means believing in new horizons – this idea permeates my writings. The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not a fact but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is “in flux”, as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for – there is no “truth” (WP 616).
This link is relevant for understanding an important ambiguity concerning Nietzsche’s account of truth, more specifically, Nietzsche’s simultaneous denial of truth and affirmation of the multiplicity of truths. To understand this ambiguity in a way that does not fall victim to the charge of self-reference one must pay attention to the rhetorical strategies that guide Nietzsche’s use of ‘truth’ in his texts. Sometimes truth designates the privileged object of epistemology, and sometimes a perspective necessary for survival. And Nietzsche frequently uses the latter to justify the former. ‘There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes- and consequently there are many kinds of
‘truths’, and consequently there is no truth” (WP 540). Also, when Nietzsche speaks of
Truth in the singular, he is referring to the Platonic – Kantian tradition’s view of truth as a single, univocal, eternal, immutable relation of correspondence. Thus, in saying
‘perspectives are necessarily false’ Nietzsche indicated that if we retain the epistemological criteria of truth as adequate correspondence, we must conclude that everything we apprehend perspectivally, i.e. all our knowledge, is false according to these epistemological criteria. The strategy in proclaiming the falsity of perspectives is clear – it is to reject the traditional epistemological conception of truth, and Nietzsche
83 makes this move by pointing to a paradox. If we accept the epistemological standard of truth than we must provisionally assert that all these ‘truths’ are errors: ‘”Truth”, this according to my way of thinking, does not necessarily denote the antithesis of error, but in the most fundamental cases only the posture of various errors in relation to one another’ (WP 535). Similarly, affirmation of the multiplicity of truths leads to the conclusion that there is no ‘Truth’, it effectively dismantles the epistemological standard of truth as a single and univocal. Thus, while Nietzsche on the one hand ultimately wants to remove the ideal of truth from his perspectival account, on the other he aims to wake us up to the joys of creative, interpretive play
“Truth” is therefore not something there that might be found of discovered – but something that must be created and that gives name to a process, or rather to will to overcome that has in-itself no end – introducing truth, as a processus in infinitum, an active determining – not as becoming conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined, it is a word for the “will to power” (WP 552).
Thus at the hearth of Nietzsche’s ‘doctrine’ of perspectivism there is an opposition between truth and interpretation. That is to say, there is an opposition between week, decadent will to power’s acceptance of the ‘given’ as ‘true’, and the strong, masterful will to power’s interpretive creativity. Nietzsche’s strategy is to show that in each case the privileged status of the epistemic object rests upon an already effected interpretation. What things are like before our interpretive appropriation, that is, what things are like in-themselves, is an ‘idle hypothesis’ insofar as it presupposes that interpretation and perspective are not essential (WP 560).
A “thing-in-itself” just as perverse as a “sense-in-itself”. There are no “facts-in-themselves”, for a sense must always be projected into them before there can be “facts”
84 The question “what is that?” is an imposition of meaning from some other viewpoint. “Essence”, “the essential nature”, is something perspective and already presupposes multiplicity. At bottom of it there always lies “what is that for me?” (for us, for all that lives etc.) (WP 556).
In other word, there is no ‘in-itself’ that is given to disinterested appropriation, as the dogmatic Platonic-Kantian-Christian metaphysical and epistemological tradition has presupposed. What is there however, are only perspectivally informed interpretations of limited scope and value. Removing the privileged status of the given (‘truth’, ‘thing-in- itself’) clears the way for the creative play of interpretation. Whereas truth stood as a limit which discouraged individuals from moving beyond its borders, the absence of truth’s limitations invites us to explore new domains of creative possibilities.
Man seeks “the truth”: a world that is not self-contradictory, not deceptive, does not change, a true world – a world in which one does not suffer; contradiction, deception, change – causes of suffering! He does not doubt that a world as it ought to be exists; he would like to seek out the road to it… The belief that the world as it ought to be is, really exists, is a belief of the unproductive who do not desire to create a world as it ought to be, they posit it as already available, they seek ways and means of reaching it, “Will to truth” – as the impotence of the will to create (WP 585 A).
For Nietzsche, therefore, the dogmatic ‘will to truth’ and ‘desire for certainty’ are harmful symptoms of decadence; they rob existence of the ‘marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity’ (GS 2) which permit the production of fresh interpretations. In this respect Nietzsche recommends cultivating a ‘profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any one total view of the world’ and refusing to be ‘deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic’ (WP 470). Thus perspectivism is, in part, directed towards restoring the stimulating enigma and ambiguity of existence. The world holds no single, univocal truth, and our cognitive methods should reflect this (cf. WP 600).
85 The ability to restore the world’s enigmatic character and to commandeer a multiplicity of perspectives are, for Nietzsche, signs of strength, as his discussion of the positive consequences of nihilism makes clear. The presupposition of the hypothesis of nihilism is ‘that there is no truth, that there is no absolute nature of things nor a “thing- in-itself”’ (WP 13). Because values and the capacity for change are symptoms or signs of the level of power of those positing the values, nihilism stands as ‘partly destructive, partly ironic’ ideal of the highest degree of ‘powerfulness and over-richness of life’ (WP
14). Nietzsche says
The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false because there simply is no true world. Thus: a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us (in so far as we continually need a narrower, abbreviated simplified world). -That it is the measure of strength to what extent we can admit to ourselves, without perishing, the merely apparent character, the necessity of lies. To that extent, nihilism, as the denial of truthful world, of being, might be a divine way of thinking (WP 15).
Nietzsche concludes that ‘it is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organizes a small portion of it oneself ‘(WP 585 A).
How one organizes or interprets a small portion of the world is judged according to whether those interpretations prematurely foreclose and impoverish life’s ‘rich ambiguity’ or creatively enhance it. ‘The greater the impulse towards unity, the more firmly may one conclude that weakness is present; the greater the impulse towards variety, differentiation, inner decay, the more force is present’ (WP 655).
86 If there is a criterion by which to judge perspectives, it is not their truth, insofar as ‘the concepts true and false have no meaning in optics’ (CW Epilogue). Nietzsche’s metaphor of optics serves to reinforce the necessity and value of the multiplicity of perspectives. As ways of seeing, morality and Christianity are ‘diseases of the eye, immune to reasons and refutations’ (ibid). They are in need of a critique because of their denial of perspectival multiplicity and their impoverishment of the will to power as interpretive force. ‘That every evaluation of man brings with it the overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every strengthening and increase of power opens up new perspectives and means believing in new horizons – this idea permeates my writing’
(WP 616). Insofar as there is ‘no limit to the ways in which the world can be interpreted…the plurality of interpretations is a sign of strength’ (WP 600).
The immediate consequence of affirming the multiplicity of perspectives is a transvaluation of the concept of objectivity. For Nietzsche, the myth of objectivity, of objects that ‘paint or photograph themselves by their own activity on a purely passive medium’ is an illusion. It is ‘only a superstition to say that the picture given to such a man by the object really shows the truth of things’ (UM II, 6). The objective apprehension of truth is not only a myth, but a ‘bad’ myth for one forgets that the moment of apprehension is a creative moment, a moment of spontaneous artistic
‘composition’. To overcome the inhibiting consequence of this bad myth Nietzsche suggests a new myth of objectivity. This ‘concept’ is no longer to be understood as “contemplating without interest” (which is nonsensical absurdity) but as the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a
87 variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge (GM III,
12). Nietzsche adds, ‘there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”: and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our
“objectivity” be (GM III, 12). In opposition to Kantian disinterested spectator as the paradigm of objective judgment, Nietzsche posits Argos, a hundred-eyed monster who has mastered his pro and con and raised himself to ‘justice’. As a ‘genius of justice’, the master of interpretation ‘sets every thing in the best light and observes it carefully from all sides’ (HATH I, 636). This interpretive genius of justice has learned ‘to grasp the sense of perspective in every value judgment’ (HATH, Preface. 6) and refuses to restrict its proliferative play. The call to this future ‘objectivity’ thus calls us to combat the injustice perpetrated in the name of truth.
You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display first one and then the otherin accordance with your higher goal…You shall learn to grasp the necessary injustice in every For and Against, injustice as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the sense of perspective and its injustice. You shall above all see with your own eyes where injustice is always at its greatest: where life has developed at its smallest, narrowest, neediest, most insipient and yet cannot avoid taking itself as the goal and measure of things and for the sake of its own preservation secretly and meanly and ceaselessly crumbling away and calling into question the higher, greater, richer – you shall see with your own eyes the problem of order of rank, and how power and right and spaciousness of perspective grow into the heights together (HATH Preface 6).
The process of interpretation involves the establishment of the order of rank among the multiplicity of competing perspectives. The order of rank gives form to the chaos of a potentially infinite number of possible perspectives, and the value of interpretation is decided on the grounds of the order of rank so imposed and the life-
88 enhancing or life-negating interests that such an imposition serves for an individual or a group who imposes it. This capacity to create order where non exists, to legislate the anarchy of one’s competing and contradictory perspectives, ‘to become master of the chaos one is; to compel one’s chaos to become form’ is what Nietzsche calls the ‘grand style’ (WP 842). As such, ‘grand style’ also embodies the notion of self-legislation and self-mastery over the ‘greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured’ (WP 966). It is Nietzsche’s hope that the transvaluation of all values will result in this new type of person, an individual possessed of grand style who will view themselves as an artist views his or her material; who will represent the antithetical character of existence most strongly and courageously; who will allow themselves the greatest multiplicity of contradictory perspectives, while maintaining the formative power of self-dominion and the ability to discipline themselves to wholeness
(see e.g. TI, “Expeditions of an Untimely” Man 49, WP 899, 900, 933, 957, 960, 972,
976).
Nietzsche’s metaphor for this new type of person who has mastered the problem of the order of rank is Dionysus. But this is not the Dionysus of BT, but rather a concept that is transformed in the progression of Nietzsche’s thinking and which appears in Nietzsche’s later works. In BT the Dionysian, as the world of chaos and frenzied rapture is opposed to the Apollonian world of order, image, and dreams. In the works from Z onward the Apollonian impulse to order is incorporated into Nietzsche’s conception of Dionysus, which no longer opposes Apollo but is now opposed to the
Pauline interpretation of Christ. The Christian imposition of an order of rank hostile to
89 life negates our ambiguous and transitory world by affirming a ‘better’, ‘simpler’ less threatening ‘true’ world beyond this one. Dionysus as the grand stylist, as Nietzsche’s image of controlled superabundance, affirms the rich ambiguity and conflicting nature of the world through his imposition of life-enhancing order of rank. Dionysus, eternally in danger of being torn to pieces by his own tremendous multiplicity of perspectives, returns eternally to wholeness through his mastering of this multiplicity.
Insofar as Nietzsche insists on the multiplicity of perspectives and plurality of interpretation, the scope of interpretive activity is universal. This insight is reflected in
Nietzsche’s conception of language as anthropomorphic and metaphysical as well as his view of the perspectival character of existence, and it is brought to bear upon all those fields of inquiry which were traditionally though to escape the interpretive character of existence. One by one they are each revealed to be nothing other than interpretations: metaphysics is only a ‘bad interpretation’, morality is ‘an exegesis, a way of interpreting’
(WP 254, 258), physics (BGE 14), religion (GS 353), reason (WP 522), all appear in
Nietzsche’s text as modes of interpretation. Similarly, the privileged objects of these fields of inquiry are themselves revealed to be ‘merely’ interpretations. ‘Events’, ‘facts’
(WP 481), ‘meanings’ (WP 604), ‘truths’ (WP 616), ‘necessity’ (WP 552), ‘beings’ (WP
715), ‘consciousness’ (WP 477) are all interpretive in character. There simply are no privileged objects that can escape the field of interpretive activity, nor is there anything that can bring the process of interpretation to a close.
At this point we may consider the frequent objection that seeks to reduce
Nietzsche’s position to a paradox. If everything is interpretation than all of the major
90 themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy, for instance the will to power, the Übermensch, and perspectivism itself are also only interpretations. Nietzsche does not provide an ultimate standard for judging the truth of his own interpretation and therefore we are free to reject them. The objection, however, begs the question against Nietzsche’s critics in an important sense, for while it must be granted that one is free to reject Nietzsche’s interpretations, one cannot base this rejection, as it is often done, on the grounds that his philosophy fails to satisfy some standard (‘truth’, ‘facts’, ‘reality’) whose legitimacy as a standard Nietzsche explicitly criticizes. Thus to accuse Nietzsche’s interpretations of not being ‘true’ is to accuse them of being precisely what he claims they are – interpretations and not truths, facts, or anything else that purports to be an unambiguous representation of reality.58 Nietzsche explicitly acknowledges that
Dionysus is a myth, that Übermensch is a metaphor, that will to power is only an interpretation. In the section from BGE where everything is revealed to be will to power,
Nietzsche concludes his discussion with the following remark: ‘Supposing that this also is only interpretation – and you will be eager enough to make this objection? – well, so
58 Danto raises this charge when he considered the “paradox” of perspectivism: “Does perspectivism entail that perspectivism itself is but a perspective so that the truth of this doctrine entails that it is false” (Danto 1965, pp. 80). Kaufmann also addresses this point of Nietzsche’s possible self-refutation and offers a somewhat weaker solution then one offered here. Kaufmann points to the will to power, which basically drives our quest for knowledge, as a ‘universal feature of human constitution whose fictions must be considered necessary because they are not subjective (Kaufmann 1974, pp. 204-207). See also Nehamas 1983, pp. 473-490 and 1985 pp. 46-57. Nehamas offers a stronger solution than Kaufmann arguing that Nietzsche falls victim to the problem of self-reference only if we accept the presupposition that ‘considering something to be an interpretation is to concede that it is false’ (pp. 66). In other words, Nietzsche’s critics draw from his admission that perspectivism might be false the illegitimate inference that it is false. For other perspectives on this issue see Bernard Magnus’ discussion in “Nietzsche Today: A View from America”, pp 99-101, and Ruediger H. Grimm, “Circularity and Self-Reference in Nietzsche”, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 10 no 3-4 (1978): 289-305. For general review of this literature see Willard Mittelman, “Perspectivism, Being and Truth”, International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 16, no 2 (1984): 3- 22.
91 much the better’ (BGE 22). In affirming the possibility that will to power is itself only interpretation Nietzsche makes the only response to this objection which his position permits. In other words, advocating a position which calls for multiple interpretations precludes Nietzsche’s offering his interpretation as universally true and binding to all interpreters.
What is revealing about Nietzsche’s response is not just that he is more consistent than many of his commentators have supposed, but how he actually conceives of will to power, and this is a crucial point. If the ‘world is will to power – and nothing besides!’ (WP 1067), and if the world displays the universality of interpretation, then we can conclude that will to power is another name for the activity of interpretation. That is to say, what Nietzsche names ‘will to power’ is his interpretation of the activity of interpretation, at once an interpretation and a process of interpreting itself. If the will to power is ignored, Nietzsche says, ‘one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions’. In the same section of GM Nietzsche says
whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed and redirected by some power superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous “meaning” and “purpose” are necessarily obscured or even obliterated (GM II, 12).
Will to power operates through interpretive imposition of meaning and is, in Nietzsche’s view, nothing other than a name for the active process of interpretation itself. Rather than subjecting himself to self-refutation, Nietzsche further strengthens his claim to the
92 universal scope of interpretative activity by acknowledging will to power as an interpretation and a name for the interpretive process. In that respect, for Nietzsche, knowledge is merely a collection of perspectival illusions which, while necessary for the preservation of human species, stand as a function not of truth but of power (see WP
480)
While the perspective and interpretation are intimately connected, there is a difference between the multiplicity of perspectives and the proliferation of interpretation. Interpretation is the ordering of a chaotic aggregate of perspectival viewpoints into meaningful wholes. Thus the multiplication of perspectives facilitates the proliferation of interpretations; one brings new points of view to what is to be interpreted and these new points of view (perspectives) occasion new bestowals of meaning (interpretations). Because, as Nietzsche puts it, there are ‘no eternal horizons or perspectives’ (GS 143), the way should be open for our interpretation to reflect our individual differences. This affirmation of difference is made possible through experimenting with a variety of perspectives and actively creating new interpretations that avoid the overly hasty and unjust circumscription of the world’s rich ambiguity and multi- dimensionality.
This interpretive pluralism is both necessary and desirable. It is necessary because the more we experiment with other perspectives and impose alternative interpretations, the greater will be the riches commandeered from the world’s infinite reserve, and desirable because it is through our willingness to experiment with new perspectives that we avoid stagnation (cf. GS 143) and show our individuality and
93 partnership in the co-creation of meaning. Nietzsche’s position thus affirms the value of adopting the multiplicity of perspectives from which the plurality of interpretations can be generated and it rejects privileging of any single perspective or interpretation as the correct one. For Nietzsche, there may be many ‘right’ interpretations, in fact as he suggests there may be an infinite number insofar as there are an infinite number of possible perspectives to adopt, but not the right one. That is, not one of these interpretations can be asserted as ‘correct’ for all possible perspectives, all possible interpreters, and all possible ends.
It is in this context of Nietzsche’s rejection of privileging any single perspective as a ‘correct’ one that the charge of relativism may be raised. The objection to Nietzsche’s position states that in the absence of a ‘correct’ interpretation, all other interpretations are equally justified. In other words, advocating a multiplicity of perspectives that are necessarily individual appears to leave itself open to the charge of being relativistic or subjectivist. However, even though Nietzsche does not rule out the possibility that any particular interpretation can be shown to ‘work’, he nevertheless does not maintain that all other interpretations are of equal value. I have already pointed to the adjudicating function of style and stylistic mastery that is involved in the interpretive process. Grand style is marked by life-enhancing interpretations while life-negating ones mark decadent style, and Wagner is the perfect example of the latter. Interpretations that enhance life/world and open it up to further interpretive activity are ‘better’ than those interpretations which aim to preclude the imposition of alternative interpretations by presenting themselves as the ‘truth’, or as the ‘essential meaning’ or the ‘totality’.
94 Simply put, the assertion of truth puts an end to the activity of interpretation and therefore metaphysical and religious interpretations are, in this sense, ‘bad’. A ‘good’ interpretation as well as ‘good’ interpretive method will acknowledge that ‘truth’ does not exist as an absolute in things. Rather, if truth exists at all it will exists as a function of the relationships between the objects of interpretation and the interpretive perspectives brought to bear on those interpretations.
Apart from this, the objections raised against Nietzsche on this point looses its critical force when one applies to it Nietzsche’s own strategy. That is to say, relativism is a genuine problem only when it is compared to a judgment made according to some absolute dogmatic standard. When not operating from within the context framed by a false disjunction ‘either one truth/meaning or every interpretation is as good as every other’, however, the threat of relativism is removed and Nietzsche’s position no longer appears as a crime against reason as philosophers have often thought it to be. Likewise, regarding the charge of subjectivism, the subject as a centre of judgment is criticized only in terms of its failing to satisfy standards of objectivity. If one denies, as Nietzsche does, the subject/object schema (see e.g., GS 346) if both subject and object are themselves interpretations then the critical force of subjectivism is obviated. When
Nietzsche writes, for example that ‘one may not ask: “who then interprets?”’ (WP 556) it is because such question already miss-locates the interpretive process. Likewise, one may not ask: ‘”what then is interpreted?”” (ibid). Interpretation is not grounded in either subject or object; it exists in the between, in the space that separates them.
95 Attempt to focus the interpretive process in the direction of either the subject or the object will only serve to obscure the dynamics of this process.
To make this last point clear, Nietzsche maintains that the human subject is a multiplicity that is constantly being achieved, accomplished, produced, and constructed.
Moreover, the subject does not have these various perspectives and interpretations, but rather they are what the subject is. The subject is nothing over and above the various physical/spiritual affective perspectives and interpretations – the complexes of belief, desire, action, perception, and thought that compose it – and the relationship between these perspectives and interpretations. Simply, there is nothing beyond the sum and arrangement of the affective perspectives and interpretations, which may and may not be homogenous. In fact, the more heterogeneous they are, provided that they maintain some coherence, the richer and more flexible the whole will be. Nietzsche says
No subject “atoms”. The sphere of a subject constantly growing or decreasing, the center of the system constantly shifting; in cases where it cannot organize the appropriate mass, it break into two parts. On the other hand, it can transform a weaker subject into its functionary without destroying it, and to a certain degree form a new unity with it. No “substance”, rather something that in itself strives after greater strength, and that wants to “preserve” itself only indirectly (it wants to surpass itself –) WP 488.
Given a rather universalized account of interpretation that reveals its indispensability and pervasiveness, Nietzsche concludes that there is no subject which stands outside and behind interpretations it fabricates. It is itself a fabrication produced by an interpretive process.
96 Thus the interpretive process is a web of relations, as Nietzsche himself says: ‘if I remove all the relationships, all the properties, all the activities of a thing, the thing does not remain over; because thingness has only been invented by us’ (WP 558). However, this metaphor does not express forcibly enough the constitutive role of interpretation. It is not that the web of interpretive relationships exists in the space between the subject and object, but it creates that space, and also the subject and object between which the space exists. In BGE for example, Nietzsche asks ‘Why couldn’t the world which concerns us – be a fiction? And if somebody asked, “but to a fiction there surely belongs the author?” – couldn’t one answer simply: why? Doesn’t this “belongs” perhaps belong to the fiction too? (BGE 34). Hence the interpretive fiction which constitutes the world also constitutes the subject of interpretation, and it is in this sense that Nietzsche asserts that ‘One cannot ask, ‘who is interpreting’. The interpreter, just as much as the object of interpretation is produced by a subjectless process. Nietzsche continues,
‘interpretation itself, as a form of will to power, has existence (not as “being” however, but as a process, a becoming) as an affect’ (WP 556). Interpretation is thus a fictive process, and in formulating the issue in these terms, Nietzsche is pushing to an extreme the constructivist epistemology of Kant, stripping it of its residual metaphysical attachments, such as the transcendence of the representing subject and all the accompanying humanist trappings of Kant’s moral theory.
One can see this view apparent in a note where Nietzsche states, ‘A thing would be described once all beings had asked “what is that?” and had their question answered. Supposing one single creature, with its own relationship and perspectives for
97 all things, were missing, then the thing would not yet be “defined”’ (WP 556). I take
Nietzsche to be asserting here too that the character of a thing is determined by the character of the being who is interpreting, that its existence is dependent upon the interpreting beings and the uses they have for it. Yet this description does not amount to a ‘definition’ of the thing, and Nietzsche’s use of the quotation marks indicates the distance he wishes to retain towards this most Socratic concern. For Nietzsche, a thing will always take on new characteristics according to the possibility of its being interpreted anew, hence there never can be some final, exhaustive definition. This is not to suggest merely that the complexity of the world is such as never to be exhausted by interpretative theories, but rather it is that new interpretations can always be produced.
It is partly to avoid this falsely framed context – one truth or anything goes - that
Nietzsche chooses the multiplicity of perspectives and interpretations. This pluralistic approach can respond to the demands of ‘knowledge’ as an occasion for a creative play, but in such a way that it refrains from positing any end point to the interpretive process while at the same time refusing to sanction all those interpretations which do arise as equally meritorious. In Nietzsche’s case this was accomplished by replacing the criteria of truth and falsity of interpretations with the criteria of healthy and decadent styles of interpretation. Those interpretations which are healthy, which enhance the creative and procreative impulses of life (will to power) are justifiable, while those decadent interpretations which impoverish will to power are illegitimate. If health or life enhancement is situation specific and variable standard, as Nietzsche clearly thinks it is
(‘there is no health as such… all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched
98 failures’ (GS 120)), then there can be no single correct interpretation which will enhance life and promote health for all interpreters and for all times. While we might all affirm health as a standard, what we each regard as ‘healthy’ will be determined as a function of the perspectives from which we are operating. Nietzsche can thus affirm health as a standard without thereby specifying a universally applicable criterion of what is to count as healthy or life-enhancing; this allows for the proliferation of acceptable interpretations, as opposed to a single ‘correct’ or ‘true’ one, while retaining a standard by which to distinguish ‘better’ from ‘worse’ interpretations (thus avoiding an empty relativism in which all interpretations are of equal value).
Interpretation and Will to Power
Although will to power is one of Nietzsche’s best known ideas, it also remains one of the most problematic. It has been interpreted in a number of different ways, ranging from Heidegger’s idea of will to power as an ontological doctrine, to Kaufmann’s idea that it is a doctrine of psychological motivation.59 The difficulty of interpreting
Nietzsche’s position is rendered all the more acute first by the fact that there are only two references to will to power in Nietzsche’s published work, and second, his unpublished notes that refer to it seem more speculative in character than anything else. Yet its importance is indicated by the numerous plans drawn up for a book on will
59 See Heidegger 1991, Vol. III pp. 212; Kaufmann 1974. Kaufmann ‘writes ‘Nietzsche’s central concern is with man, and power is to him above all a state of human being’ (pg 420).
99 to power, even though they remain at the very early stage of development. In his notebooks from 1887 and 1888 there are numerous ‘plans’ for the ‘Will to Power’, most of which singularly fail to concur with each other. Hence it is difficult to treat will to power as a fully articulated doctrine. Rather, it has a character of a large number of often contradictory and uncoordinated ideas and jottings, never fully worked out, which lurk in the background to much of his work, both published and unpublished.
A good example of the difficulty in discussing the ‘doctrine’ of the will to power can be seen in a passage from the spring of 1888 where Nietzsche writes of ‘The will to the accumulation of power as peculiar to the phenomenon of life…could we not accept this will as the motivating force in Chemistry too? And in the cosmic order?’ (WP 689).
By the end of the passage one is quite unsure how to interpret the will to power. Is it a feature of organic life, as Nietzsche seems to be at first suggesting, or is it a more basic ontological constitutive feature of all matter? Nietzsche leaves the matter unresolved, ending instead with a number of unanswered questions. As I have already suggested, although it often sounds a fundamental, quasi-metaphysical doctrine, it is in fact a less ambitious view of the character and function of interpretation and knowledge.
An important first step is to recognize that only rarely is the will to power referred to as the will to power.60 Admittedly, Nietzsche speaks of the will in the early works written under the influence of Schopenhauer, however this precedes by a number of years the development of his speculative ideas on will to power. The grounds for the above assertion are several. The first derives from Nietzsche’s own statement
60 This point has been made by Wolfgang Muller-Lauter in “Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht” Nietzsche Studien 3: 1-60, 1974.
100 that all notions of unity as the irreducible essence of beings are illusory, in the sense that numbers are themselves useful fictions. It is important to recall Nietzsche’s comment that ‘the unity of the word is no guarantee of the unity of the thing’ (HATH I,
14). Significantly, while will to power represents a striving to increase the quantum of power, Nietzsche tends to prefer quality to quantity as a determining factor in his interpretive strategy. This inclination forms one of the main reasons for his critique of mechanistic worldviews. For example, in 1886 he writes, ‘mechanistic conception: desires nothing but quantities: but power lies in quality: mechanism can only describe processes, not explain them’ (WP 660), while later that year he comments that ‘we cannot help experiencing quantitative differences as something fundamentally different from quantity, namely as qualities (WP 565).
The second ground for dismissing the ideas of the will to power is that Nietzsche rarely speaks of it in those terms. He writes of will to power, wills to power, but seldom of the will to power. From this one concludes that will to power appears to be a motivation directing dynamic processes, both organic and inorganic, although this is not to claim that it is a metaphysical essence, or that it is governed by a specific set of intentions. On a dynamic scale Nietzsche links will to power with a cosmic vision of the world as ‘a monster of energy, without beginning, without end’ a ‘Dionysian world of eternal self-creation, eternal self-destruction’ (WP 1067), in which the force motivating destruction and creation is will to power. However, it is important to note that
Nietzsche prefaces this description with a comment that this is how ‘the world appears reflected in his mirror’. It is simply an image, and therefore Nietzsche is not putting
101 forward a metaphysical theory but rather offering a possibility of thinking of the world in alternative terms to the metaphysical obsession with being. The purpose of this counter image is clear: in conceiving of the world itself as a perpetually shifting series of force relations, the way is prepared for rethinking the question of knowledge. For interpretation is now no longer governed by the concern for ‘truth’, but by the strategic effort to establish a certain position within a field of dynamic energies, and the means to maintain that position is through the attainment of power. As Nietzsche points out,
‘In truth, interpretation is itself a means of becoming a master of something’ (WP 643).
Interpretation is thus presented as a dynamic process and this is reflected in the idea that it is always possible to produce new interpretations: ‘The same text permits countless interpretations: there is no “correct” interpretation’ (WP 481, see also GS 374 and GM II; 12-13).
As already noted, one of the important innovations in Nietzsche’s thought is to deprive the subject of its transcendent role in the process of interpretation. As a subjectless process, interpretation is also a function of instinct, of the body. ‘Behind your thought and feelings stands…an unknown sage – he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body’ proclaims Zarathustra, adding that ‘there is more reason in your body than in your greatest wisdom’ (Z I, “Of the Despises of the Body”). With this
Nietzsche is first challenging the privilege accorded to the conscious intellect in the metaphysical tradition from Plato onwards. Second, he is allowing for the possibility of intentional activity taking place in spheres where it has traditionally been denied. We see this taking place early in Nietzsche’s work, in HATH where he writes, ‘To the plant all
102 things are usually in repose, eternal, everything is identical with itself. It is from the period of lower organisms that man has inherited the belief that there are identical things’. Later in the same aphorism he adds, ‘the belief in unconditioned substances and in identical things is likewise a primary, ancient error committed by everything organic’
(HATH I, 18), an argument that recalls his later notion of philosophy as a form of atavism. Elsewhere he even suggests rethinking the relation between the organic and inorganic, noting that ‘The connection between the inorganic and organic must lie in the repelling forces exercised by every atom of force’ (WP 642). Rather than espousing a vitalist philosophy, Nietzsche is grounding intentional activity in a non-intentional process of maximizing of forces, which looks forward to the notion of will to power.
Here he is rethinking the notion of intentional or purposeful activity, such that it need not necessarily be guided by a rational intellect: ‘We shall be on our guard against explaining purposiveness in terms of intellect: there is no ground whatever for ascribing to the intellect the properties of organization and systematization’ (WP 526).
As I have pointed out earlier, and the above discussion serves to confirm it,
Nietzsche’s will to power is presented as an interpretation but also as a name for the interpretive process itself. His attribution of intentional activity to all forms of organic life and to inorganic matter strengthens the case for the equation of interpretation and will to power as a coherent thesis explaining the motivation of interpretive activity.
Nietzsche’s view of interpretation as a subjectless process parallels his notion of will to power as a goal driven activity, yet one which need not be tied to a specific subjective intention. Plainly put, Nietzsche offers precisely same description of the same
103 phenomena under the two different names. Opposing Schopenhauer’s ‘will to live’ and
Darwin’s ‘struggle for existence’ Nietzsche uses the terms of will to power and interpretation to name the fundamental activity or a process of all things. Will to power
‘interprets’, while ‘interpretation itself is a means of becoming master of something’
(WP 643). In GM Nietzsche remarks that interpretation ‘essentially’ involves ‘forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, [and] falsifying’ (GM, III 24). 61 In an already cited passage he maintains that all aspects of world and life are essentially involved in the process of interpretation; there is interpretation ‘whenever something is taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it’ and there is will to power whenever something has ‘become a master of something less powerful and imposed upon it the character of a function’. Also, the ‘essence of life, its will to power’ is revealed in those ‘spontaneous, aggressive, expansive form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions’ (GM II, 24).
61 For Nietzsche, interpretive knowledge is also power. The significance of this equation can be interpreted in various ways. Michael Foucault has followed through one reading in particular, outlining the implication of the one in the other to such an extent that the notion of power, or knowledge-power, itself becomes highly abstracted and almost drained of meaning. The extreme formulation of this notion is Foucault’s claim that ‘there is no power without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time relations of power,61 and Foucault privileges the ‘popular knowledge’ which disturbs institutionalized discourses and their link with power. Quite clearly, Foucault is drawing on an important element in Nietzsche’s thinking. At he heart of his equation of ‘knowledge’ and power is an instrumental notion of interpretation. This is apparent, for example, in Nietzsche’s emphasis on the perspectival basis of interpretation, in which ‘knowledge’ is constructed according to the interests and capacities of a specific being. One example would be the knowledge of physics. Although extrinsic ideological interests have frequently determined the direction of much research in physics, the history of physical sciences can be characterized as an increasing degree of technical mastery. This feature has been the object of many critiques of the logic of the physical sciences, and one might here cite Heidegger’s dismay at the conflation of science and technological mastery.61 Nietzsche himself acknowledges that science is driven by technological power; he refers to it as ‘the transformation of nature into concepts for the purpose of mastering nature’ (WP 610), while in another note he derives the construction of concepts from ‘a power in us to order, simplify, falsify’ (WP 517). This notion finds numerous parallels throughout Nietzsche’s writing.
104 Nietzsche’s notion of interpretation therefore extends well beyond its ordinary domain; its scope is as broad as that of will to power. Just as ‘all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power and one could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment’ so too all these function, ‘all events in the organic world are said to involve interpretation’ (GM II, 12). The ‘organic process’
Nietzsche writes ‘constantly presupposes interpreting’ and thus for example, ‘it is a question of interpretation when an organ is constructed’ (WP 643). And because
Nietzsche extends will to power over inanimate nature, for instance ‘all efficient force is determined as will to power’ (BGE 36), and ‘in all events will to power is operating’ (GM
II, 12), we can view even inorganic events and entities as interpretation. This may strike one as an unusual and idiosyncratic move, yet I believe that it is polemical strategy intended to make a serious point. If the essence of life and nature is will to power, and if will to power essentially involves interpretation, than ‘the general renunciation of all interpretation’, that is metaphysics and religion, would signify an ascetic rejection and the denial of life and nature. Conversely, if will to power is reflective of the natural world and if it involves interpretation, than one must assert the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation – of interpretive will to power – as Nietzsche does.
From the above discussion it is clear that these developments in Nietzsche’s thought – his simultaneous negation of the metaphysical foundations on which our beliefs about knowledge and truth rest, and his affirmation of perspectivism and interpretive will to power – serve not only to expose our beliefs as ‘erroneous’ but to allow us to see that the values behind them are ultimately life-negating and therefore
105 dangerous. They work to suppress the very ‘essence’ of life by imposing on it the categories of being – stability, fixity, permanence and security – in the guise of ‘truth’,
‘facts’, ‘meaning’, ‘subject’ and alike. In this respect Nietzsche’s involvement with issues of truth and knowledge bears directly on his critique of art, to which I will now turn, as it shows art to be thoroughly corrupted by the values of metaphysics which have transformed it from the ecstasies of the Dionysian intoxication to being one of the essential elements of the mechanism by which modernity was slowly but surely going to self-destruct. Art, as Nietzsche came to see it, is a symptom of a rather serious disease that was threatening to engulf the modern culture and whose roots can be found in the particular efforts of the ‘improvement moralities’ –the Socratic optimism and its cousin,
Christian moral worldview – to secure the sense of meaning and value of human existence.
106 Chapter III
The Crisis
As we have seen, in the years following the publication of BT there have been some dramatic developments in Nietzsche’s thought. He became altogether more skeptical than he had been about philosophical discourse and in particular about the value of Kant and Schopenhauer’s philosophy. And perhaps more significantly, Nietzsche turned away from Wagner. The intensity of his attachment to Wagner had already lessened to some extent by the time Nietzsche came to write ‘Richard Wagner in
Bayreuth’ (1878), the fourth of his Untimely Meditations. Although the essay still officially runs a Wagnerian line, it nevertheless seems strained and never really rings true. Nietzsche’s disillusionment with Wagner as well as his detachment from the philosophical figures who exerted a significant influence on his thought, moved
Nietzsche to develop new and radically more skeptical view of art. Nietzsche’s interest and concern however remained the same; the possibility of a post-Christian regeneration of culture, of finding new ways of living now that God is dead. Thus what has changed since the publication of BT, and it is a big change, is simply that Kant’s and
Schopenhauer’s philosophy no longer have a tight grip on Nietzsche’s thought, and he no longer has a Wagnerian blue-print to offer.
107 Nietzsche’s new task became, essentially, to show that every human phenomenon previously or traditionally thought to require supernatural and metaphysical explanation, such as religion, morality or art, is in fact explicable in purely naturalistic terms. At the root of these allegedly transcendent phenomena lie nothing more than the entirely this-worldly needs and impulses of the human, all-too-human, animal. Thus, from HATH onwards, nothing is beyond suspicion, and art, alongside religion and metaphysics, is subjected to ruthless criticism. And this criticism is undertaken not simply for the sake of undermining art’s pretensions to the transcendent, but also for the sake of discrediting certain notions hitherto central to the philosophical aesthetic tradition, notions which, in Nietzsche’s eyes, have lead to trivialization and castration of art.
From HATH onwards Nietzsche is no longer interested in accounting for the work of art or tragedy as such, as he was in BT, but rather in judging art and all other phenomena in terms of their health or otherwise, or according to their strength-effects.
In BT Nietzsche had praised art for its ability to justify life, to shield us from the truth that we have no strength to face, by laying over it the veil of beautiful illusions. Now however, it is precisely the idea that life is in need of exoneration or justification that
Nietzsche condemns as pessimistic, decadent, and life denying, given the suggestion that what is needed is some panacea, some principle beyond life that might serve to redeem it. As long as art pretends to offer redemption from life, in one form or another, it stands, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, in direct opposition to it. Thus in Nietzsche’s new attitude towards art one can detect a strong sense of the condemnation of what
108 Nietzsche sees as a reversal of the existential priorities of life and art. What he had valued about the early Greeks was the fact that art was conceived of as living praxis, inextricably linked to the energies of life, and tragedy itself was celebrated as an art form capable of sustaining the life and health of a culture. Now, however, art as a living praxis has been supplanted by the modern phenomena – ‘art of works of art’ - a ‘mere appendage’, art emptied of all affirmative and life enhancing energies, answering to needs that are ‘small and cheap to satisfy’ (HATH ll, 169). And already in 1875 Nietzsche had asked:
“What if Plato were right! What if man were only a pretty toy in the hands of the gods! What if life could be arranged as a sequence of games and festivities!...Whether we would then have such a thing as art? Whether the artist would ever have originated if man himself were a work of art? Whether the very existence of art does not prove that existence is an unaesthetic, evil, and serious phenomenon? Let us consider what the real thinker, Leopardi, says: It would truly be desirable for man not to need art? (RL, 245).
Here Nietzsche raises a number of questions the most important of which appears to concern the dichotomy he sets up between art and life: since existence is an ‘evil’ and
‘unaesthetic’ phenomenon, we have art, and indeed have a need for art. But here
Nietzsche implicitly asks whether, if we did not have need of art, and did not have art, we might have then been forced to view existence as aesthetic and ourselves as works of art. The existence of art points to the failure of human creativity, it suggests and constantly reminds us that we have fatally chosen art over life, that an ‘art of works of art’ (HATH II, 174, 175) has triumphed once and for all over art conceived of as a living praxis. The choice set up here between life on the one hand and the art on the other is a stark one, and it sets out the full implications of the conflict between the two, laying foundations for the view that the demise or the death of art might be a relatively small
109 price to pay for the strength-effect of a belief in life as an aesthetic phenomenon, and for the overturning of art’s hegemony and ‘mastery over life’ (OTL 90).
While Nietzsche’s hope for, and belief in, a rebirth of tragedy is often regarded as exemplifying and justifying the general consensus behind the picture of an
‘aestheticist’ Nietzsche – however that picture might be more precisely drawn – his later sharp turn away from Wagner is rarely considered evidence of the wider philosophical objections which Nietzsche will later make concerning art and its pretentions. Nietzsche himself, writing in 1886, detects in the romanticism of BT something that puts into question his hope for the cultural rebirth championed by Wagner: ‘Even the usual romantic finale is sounded – break, break-down, return and collapse before an old faith, before the old God’ (ASC, 7). More than this, Nietzsche’s earlier hopes for Wagner were expressed in the face of evidence that ought to have prompted the very opposite conclusion: ‘That I have appended hopes where there was no ground for hope, where everything pointed all too plainly to an end!’ (ASC, 6). Thus, apart from the fact that he regretted corrupting the Dionysian by forcing it into the straitjacket of Schopenhauer and Hegel, Nietzsche bemoaned the fact that, as he says ‘I spoiled the grandiose Greek problem, as it had arisen before my eyes, by introducing the most modern problems’
(ibid). Yet this introduction of the most modern things is of crucial significance, for it is his subsequent disillusionment with Wagner, whom Nietzsche comes to see as the epitome of modern decadence, that compels him to reassess his general views of art and to question art’s place in a culture of decadence.
110 For Nietzsche, decadence is a historical fact and it begins when this life and this world as it is are negated in favor of the realm or the world of perfection which, according to Nietzsche, is a figment of the fanatical moralistic imagination. The roots of this history go all the way back to Euripides and Socrates and find their culmination in
Plato and subsequent “Platonism”. In the course of the development of Greek tragedy,
Euripides brought the spectator, that is, consciousness, on stage and in doing so removed the living Dionysian reality of the tragic chorus. His artistic creation was, according to Nietzsche, the literal-minded taste of the public for whom everything had to be plausible, comprehensible, and well within the confines of the commonplace.
Therefore Nietzsche can say that Greek tragedy died by suicide, its greatness and its creativity were strangled. As we have seen, along with Euripides, Nietzsche discovers
‘that other spectator’, Socrates, as the true culprit and opponent of art. Euripides turns out to be only a mask for that other deity, Socrates. The old artistically fruitful duality of the Apollonian world of dream and the Dionysian world of intoxication becomes the mutually exclusive antithesis of the Socratic and the Dionysian. The Socratic, or consciousness, becomes the supposedly ‘creative’ principle while the Dionysian, or instinct, becomes the ‘critical’ principle. Thus not only are the elements of the antithesis changed from the Apollonian and the Dionysian to the Dionysian and the Socratic, and thus the nature of the antithesis, but the roles they play are also reversed. As
Stambaugh says, the whole mysterious and awesome quality of these mythical principles degenerates into a kind of sterile anthropomorphisized psychology.62 As we
62 Stambaugh 1994, pp. 12.
111 have seen, Apollonian intuitions are replaced by ‘cool paradoxical thoughts’ and the
Dionysian ecstasy is replaced by ‘fiery passions’. The Dionysian becomes emotion and the Apollonian becomes a shell of logical schematism.
From here it does not take Nietzsche long to go from Socrates, and what he is made to represent, to Plato, and to subsequent philosophical blind faith in logic at the expense of art. Not only is Plato not interested in art, but he fears its effects and bans most of it from his state. Plato is searching for true, immutable reality, and not finding it in this world of becoming, he posits it in the world of being and proclaims it accessible only to reason. Here lies the origin of what Nietzsche will consistently attack under the name of decadence, and especially under the more philosophical, comprehensive, and ominous term nihilism. All of his polemic against morality, Christianity, and art goes back to these roots. Thus decadence ( nihilism) is a fact of history, and it is, in a literal sense of the word, ‘falling away from’ the energies of ‘life as it really is’.63 This rather vague phrase refers to the concept of will to power, ‘This world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides!’
(WP 1067). Thus what decadence ‘falls away from’ is precisely the will to power, the striving for self-increase that characterizes the nature of everything living.64
63 Stambaugh 1993, pp. 19 64 Will to power as ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘the will to self-preservation’ make no sense for Nietzsche. Survival, as mere self-maintenance is already decline and decadence. Nor can the basic nature of things be found in ‘the will to live (Schopenhauer) because what is alive already does not need to will to live and what is not alive cannot will at all. Furthermore, Nietzsche does not understand power as a domination over other beings and certainly least of all as some kind of Machiavellian political power. The highest power is power over oneself and this points to the basic meaning of power as ‘being able’.
112 So it is not the self-increase but decadence that characterizes the modern age and, as Nietzsche argues in EH, it has been the state of humankind ever since it adopted, or rather, since it imposed on itself the moral standpoint. Nietzsche’s description of decadence, rich with metaphors of health and sickness, is one of neurosis, paralysis, symptomatology, and decay, all pointing to a body for whom instinct and drive have become separate; instincts have been turned against the body, set against its natural functioning, imposing on it an organization that speaks of denial, asceticism, and the reactivity of the moral worldview. ‘To have to combat one’s instincts’ Nietzsche writes in
TI, ‘that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instincts are one’ (TI, “The Problem of Socrates” 11). As Nietzsche argues, the decadent character of the modern age is a consequence of the all-too-human nature that has invented whole systems of beliefs and values in an attempt to ‘improve’ the basic conditions of human existence. And this ‘improvement’ was meant to achieve the release from the contingency of misfortune, to articulate a sense of truth and human value immune from the vagaries of chance and change, and to provide a locus of moral and spiritual value which is not undone by the way of the world, but reliable, independent, and self- sufficient. The result was the birth of the ‘true world’ and ‘the kingdom of God’ where all that is worthwhile about human existence can be insulated from the ravages of time, fortune, change, and the inflictions of our bare instincts. Our salvation has been achieved either through the security of reason and its successful eradication of all that is subject to the fleetingness of desire, or by means of the ‘moral world view’ and obedience to the will of God. But as Nietzsche argues in GS and GM, it is precisely this
113 commitment to reason and truth, the idea that everything can be made intelligible, that all the causes can be identified and solutions provided, this ‘Socratic’ or ‘theoretical optimism’ inherited by modern science, that has undermined those very systems of belief and our highest values and, in fact, rendered them no longer believable. And so for Nietzsche, modernity might live in the time of the death of God, the time when our
‘highest values devalue themselves’, but the danger is that it cannot understand this fact sufficiently to be able to overcome it, to become anything other than a twilight age, an age of disbelief, but nevertheless one still marked by the same yearning for certainty and redemption, and therefore ultimately one that must remain fundamentally at odds with itself.
The possibility of overcoming this fundamental weakness of modernity, that is, of overcoming the crisis of nihilism inherent in the culture of modernity, and of articulating the means by which an individual, as well as culture, can avoid the path of nihilism and reconcile the acknowledgement of the contingency of all values with continuing commitment to their necessity, becomes the main focus of Nietzsche’s thought. His relentless tirades against religious and metaphysical worldviews, and their respective conceptions of self and its place in the world, are not only meant to expose these views as errors. Nietzsche also wants to show them as unworthy of belief and ultimately dangerous, and not simply because they are dubious fictions but more importantly because, once exposed as hollow, they lead to the state of absolute passive unbelief in which no values are legitimate, least of all those of the discredited metaphysical tradition. Thus the main problem of modernity, and one that Nietzsche’s
114 philosophical project attempts both to bring to prominence and resolve is one of establishing a ground for cultural values in an age in which the notion of any certitude seems highly problematic. This is precisely where art once played a crucial role, but which, it is becoming increasingly more clear to Nietzsche, it cannot fulfill any longer.
His writing after BT is dominated by the overwhelming sense that contemporary artistic practice is decadent, and moreover, that this decadence is all the more deplorable given that Nietzsche still, and sometimes almost against himself, accords to art a potential for functioning as the counter-movement to general nihilism. Where art was once celebrated for its ability to transfigure life’s horrors, and to regenerate our thirst for life, one of the central problems for Nietzsche is the recognition that art may very well be coming to its end in the culture of modernity; what he laments is the fact that art is thoroughly implicated in the ‘metaphysical and religious errors of mankind’, that we still need metaphysical consolations as means of escape, and that now art, as an heir of religion and metaphysics, answers to those needs and in a decadent, superficial and trivial manner rather than overcoming them.
Thus Nietzsche’s writings after BT is marked by a severe critique of art and a strong sense of urgency and need for aesthetic reform that stems from a wider sense of cultural crisis; aesthetic renewal is necessary not only because the inherited forms of aesthetic practice bear no meaningful relation to contemporary culture, but also because the modernity is to be overcome. In this respect Nietzsche seems to continue the tradition stemming from Schiller in which aesthetic reform opens the way for cultural revolution. There is, however, an important difference. For Schiller and for the
115 early romantics such as Novalis and the Schlegel brothers, aesthetic and cultural innovation was to be carried out in the name of a transcendent value. There always remains an exterior norm of which art can function as the preeminent cultural expression. For Nietzsche, the crisis is of an entirely different order; it stems not only from the questionable worth of contemporary cultural practices and institutions, but also from the recognition that the possibility of adhering to external norms has vanished.
The crisis of modernity, for Nietzsche, represents a decisive moment in the history of Western culture when its values are revealed as hollow illusions and thereby lose all legitimacy. Modernity is thus constantly threatened with the lapse into a decadent nihilism, a state of absolute disbelief in which no values are legitimate.
Nietzsche says that ‘time has come when we have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years: we are losing the centre of gravity by virtue of which we have lived’
(WP, 30). Here ‘Christians’ serves as a shorthand for a cluster of values associated with
Christianity, including the metaphysical values of Platonism. But the particular nature of the crisis stems from the contradiction between the loss of the ‘centre of gravity’ and the continued yearning for one, and Nietzsche sees a number of contemporary phenomena as symptoms of this: ‘the vehemence with which our most intelligent contemporaries lose themselves in wretched nooks and crannies, for example, into patriotism…or into aesthetic creeds after the manner of French naturalisme…or into nihilism a la Petersburg…always manifests above all the need for faith, a support, backbone, something to fall back on’ (GS, 347).
116 Nietzsche’s description of the loss in modernity of the centre of gravity invites obvious comparisons with other contemporary writers, perhaps most obviously Karl
Marx’s observation of nineteenth century bourgeois society, in which, famously, ‘All fixed fast-frozen relations…are swept away…All that is solid melts into air’.65 Nietzsche’s characterization of modernity, in which ‘restlessness, haste and hustling grow continually’ (WP, 33), is strongly reminiscent of Marx’s account of the experience of modern culture. However, there is again an important, in fact, crucial difference; Marx views the root of modernity in specific changes in the economic material conditions of life. For Nietzsche, in contrast, the crisis of modernity – nihilism – is a crisis of values:
‘The “meaninglessness of all that occurs”: the belief therein is the consequence of an insight into the falsity of interpretations hitherto, a generalization of despondency and weakness – no necessary belief (WP, 599). Moreover, he specifically rules out the idea of a material cause of nihilism, noting that ‘it is an error to consider “social distress” or
“physiological degeneration” or worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism’ (WP, 1). For
Nietzsche, what are often read as causes of the loss of fixity of values, are to be seen in fact only as symptoms.
Thus in modernity, the expectation of absolute values is disappointed, leading to a refusal to accept the legitimacy of any values. Consequently, as Nietzsche notes in the opening of The Antichrist (A), modern man is plunged into a state of neurosis. ‘”I know not which way to turn; I am everything that knows not which way to turn” sighs modern man’ (A I). Nihilism, this sense of loss and confusion, threatens to plunge Western
65 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto” in Marx 1977, pp. 224.
117 society into an abyss of passivity. Reactive nihilism is the pessimism of the weak, those who still cling to the ideal of some transcendent, unchanging truth, and who condemn all existence for not meeting that expectation.66 The sense of mourning at the loss of such certain truth is accompanied by the conviction of the worthlessness of all existence, since it cannot be justified by some higher authority. It produces the desire for revenge and for destruction. And here Nietzsche’s typological classification of romanticism in GS is right to the point – it is a destructive condition characterized by precisely that feeling of lack: ‘The desire for destruction, change and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future…;but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, outrages and provokes them’ (GS
370).67 This latter form in which the problem of modernity is confronted, according to
Nietzsche, is nowhere more easily detected than it is in art. In fact for Nietzsche contemporary art is deeply entangled in the crisis of nihilism and is symptomatic of the decease and neurosis of the modern age that suffers from itself. So if Nietzsche is saying that God is dead and that we must now struggle to comprehend this fact with all
66 Thus there is an important distinction in Nietzsche’s thought between active and reactive nihilism, where the active nihilist is one who does not suffer the absence of meaning, Truth, value, and purpose that are no longer inscribed into the fabric of reality, but embraces it as a sing of strength and as a means to the creation of new post-metafphysical way of being. 67 Although it may seem that the reactive nihilism has turned against the order and hierarchy of tradition, it is however, for Nietzsche, still bound closely to it, and to metaphysics in general, by the spirit of resentment and by the desire to wreak revenge. It is merely a modern form of the same spirit that motivated Christianity. In the GM Nietzsche cites Thomas Aquinas’ obvious relish when imagining the future sufferings of non-believers (GM, I 15). In the case of metaphysics the mark is the constant rancor of philosophers against the inconstant and that which resists logical analysis. In reactive nihilism, and Nietzsche regards the growing anarchist movement of his own time as an example of this (GS 370), energies are turned against cultural order and tradition. Nietzsche complains that Bakunin, in his hatred for the present, intended to destroy history and the past.
118 its consequences, it may also be the case that art too is struggling in its death throes, consigned to a slow but unmistakable end. And if there is a danger that modernity may never be sufficiently strong to find a way out of its predicament, to overcome its own corruption and shortcomings, what can be said of art, or rather, of Nietzsche’s vision of the fate of art? Is it to remain stuck in the dead end, only a symptom of the disease of the modern age, or is there some possibility, however remote, that it still may in fact constitute its cure? Whatever the answer may turn out to be, it is clear that if Nietzsche still held any hope that art after all may come to serve as a countermovement to general nihilism, he was quite convinced that it would have to be a practice that diverges considerably from the actual artistic responses of modernism and its bogus popular culture.
The Aesthetic Tradition
Before examining Nietzsche’s analysis of the ‘debased’ and decadent artistic and cultural practices of modernity, it is worth looking at his critique of the philosophical aesthetic tradition, for it constitutes an integral part of his critique of art and his overall effort to uncover the underlying causes for the dwindling of modern aesthetic sensibilities. Nietzsche’s critique centers on a number of important concepts within the aesthetic traditions that he believes have, on the one hand, led to the severing of the
119 links between art and life by leading directly or indirectly to the conception of art as an entirely autonomous sphere of activity. On the other hand, they have been responsible for solidifying the metaphysical conception of art by imposing a picture of art as a vehicle of truth and of the artist as an individual with a rare and miraculous ability to transcend purely human limitations.
One of the prominent targets in Nietzsche’s critique of aesthetic tradition is the formalist aesthetics of Kant, which he sees as responsible for the movement towards autonomization of art and for an ever-growing belief in art for art’s sake, (l’art pour l’art’). The aesthetic theory Nietzsche formulated in BT was already one in which art was intimately connected with human affective existential concerns, and in that respect it had already departed significantly from Schopenhauer’s. Schopenhauer believed that the experience of art is one of the few opportunities for the affective desires of the Will to be suspended and for a higher level of cognition to occur. For Nietzsche, however, any notion of artistic detachment from desire is entirely alien. Yet, while one would assume that Nietzsche here takes issue with Schopenhauer’s position, the ultimate target of Nietzsche’s critique is the aesthetic tradition to which Schopenhauer belongs, but of which Kant was the founder. So in addition to the cultural pessimism of
Schopenhauer, Kant frequently serves as a polemical target in Nietzsche’s discussions of art and aesthetics. For Nietzsche, Kant embodies some of the worst aspects in the history of philosophical aesthetics. In GM Kant is accused of possessing the ‘naivite of a country parson’ regarding aesthetic experience (GM, III 6). In A Nietzsche observes that
‘Kant became an idiot’ adding that Kant represents an ‘erring instinct in all and
120 everything, anti-naturalness as instinct, German decadence as philosophy’ (A 11).
Elsewhere Kant is an exemplar of ‘clumsy pedantry and petty bourgeois manner’, guilty of ‘a lack of taste’.68 Thus, despite his considerable intellectual debt to Kant, Nietzsche presents a series of virulent denunciations of Kant’s philosophy, and specifically his aesthetic theory.
Undoubtedly, Nietzsche’s reading of Kant is problematic for, as Heidegger has pointed out for example, Nietzsche’s interpretation and hence his criticism of Kant is largely based on an image of Kant formed by Schopenhauer, which is itself a highly partial reading of Kantian aesthetics.69 Others have put forward similar arguments, that the majority of Nietzsche’s criticisms are more relevant to the aesthetics of
Schopenhauer than to those of Kant himself.70 These criticisms notwithstanding, one could argue that, although the ostensible target of Nietzsche’s critique is Kant, his name in many respects performs a metonymic function, standing as an abbreviated sign for what Nietzsche perceives as the tradition of aesthetics from Kant onwards. As we will see, one can find a parallel in Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner; although it is motivated by disaffection with the meaning of Wagner’s oeuvre, Wagner stands as a symptom of the decadence of modernity. So in this sense ‘Kant’ too is for Nietzsche the exemplar of modern aesthetic thought, symptomatic of everything that is in need of overcoming.
Kant transformed the tradition of aesthetics from Wolf and Baumgarten; prior to his Critique of Judgment aesthetics as a discipline was subordinate to the more
68 KSA II: 26 (96), WP 444. 69 See Heidegger 1991, Vol. I, 15. “Kant’s Doctrine of the Beautiful: Its Misinterpretation by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche”, pp 107-114. 70 See Djuric 1985, pp 209-222 and Heftrich 1991.
121 ‘masculine’ rigor of logic; aesthetic ideas were regarded simply as unclear logical ideas.
In contrast, Kant raised it to the core element within the architectonic of his critical project, giving aesthetic experience a cognitive significance previously denied it. Rightly considered the founder of modern aesthetics, Kant relocated the discipline at the heart of philosophical thinking and in many respects shaped the course of all subsequent inquiry into the subject up to the present day. Thus, by naming Kant as the target of his polemic, Nietzsche is in effect conducting a genealogy of aesthetics, bringing to prominence those elements within Kant that were to be central to subsequent thinking in the realm of aesthetics. Hence, by reading Kant through Schopenhauer Nietzsche need not be seen as simply misreading him, but rather as focusing on precisely those aspects of Kant’s thinking which were important to Schopenhauer and hence to
Wagner, as well as to the aesthetics of l’art pour l’art.
The significant focus of Nietzsche’s polemic is the notion of disinterestedness.
For reasons I will explore in more detail in the next chapter, including Nietzsche’s interest in the psychology and physiology of the human organism, more concretely will to power, his position is hostile to any theory of art that separates questions of beauty from those of desire. Suffice it for now to say that in the place of disinterestedness
Nietzsche posits aesthetic rapture, a specific case of the more general experience of pleasure occasioned by the discharge of will to power. But with regard to the aesthetic tradition and specifically the notion of disinterestedness that Nietzsche now brings under scrutiny it is necessary to distinguish between its initial formulation in Kant and subsequent interpretation of Schopenhauer and early romantics such as the Schlegel
122 brothers and Schelling. Linking the aesthetic experience and disinterested states Kant claims simply that ‘taste is the faculty of estimating an object apart from any interest’.71
The argument that it is a delight ‘apart from any interest’ is slightly misleading, for Kant is concerned with a specific type of interest; at the core of his argument is the notion that the experience of the aesthetic object is not based on an interest in whether or not it actually exists. In other words, Kant is not claiming that we do not have any interest per se in the beautiful object, for he indicates the presence of a kind of interest which he terms ‘intellectual’.72 This interest, however, does not focus on the existence of the object, which would be a province of desire, but rather on its purely formal properties.
This aspect of the judgment of taste is central to Kant’s project, since it is linked to his contention, first, that the beauty of an object is not related to an end, and second, that the beautiful object pleases apart from any concept of what it is or should be.73 Both of these claims, together with the notion of disinterestedness, serve to disassociate the aesthetic object from considerations of its identity and possible functions. As a symbol of morality, beauty does engage the spectator’s interests on one level, yet this
‘intellectual’ interest is to be distinguished from the interest in the object as a means to self-preservation or advancement. This distinction between ‘practical’ and ‘intellectual’ interest functions as the basis of the experience of the sublime in Kant; if the experience
71 Kant, 1952, Section 5. 72 Ibid, Section 42. 73 Third and Forth Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, respectively
123 were genuinely threatening to the subject, its sublime quality would be displaced by the concern for self-preservation.74
For all its nuances, however, Kant’s distinction between, on the one hand, the aesthetic object (and this is increasingly equated with the work of art in writers after
Kant), and the realm of the practical (i.e. of desire) on the other, is susceptible to a variety of forms of simplification and it is precisely such a simplification that
Schopenhauer undertakes when appropriating Kantian notions and fitting them into his own philosophical schema in which desire, or the Will, has been transformed into a metaphysical principle. The subtle distinction between intellectual interest and desire is ignored in favor of a much more simple opposition between willing and non-willing. In
Schopenhauer aesthetic experience is devoid of all volition or interest. Moreover, it is given a metaphysical significance in his system that it does not possess in Kant. The aesthetic experience produces a suspension of desire with two consequences. First, it facilitates the knowledge of the Idea. What Schopenhauer seems to be asserting is that, when caught within the dialectics of the Will, the subject is so concerned with satisfying desires, impulses, and needs that it attends only to immediate particulars. The higher cognition of a particular and consideration of its Idea is engendered by the will-less
74 There is an important exception to this, namely Kant’s recognition of the sublime in case of self-sacrifice by soldiers on behalf of some higher moral ideal. Kant could be criticized for inconsistency in this particular example since it appears to contradict the link between sublimity and representation. However, the fact that the soldiers defending a moral ideal actively disregard threats to their own existence lands it a quality comparable to the aesthetic experience. Kant’s distinction allows us to understand why we can allow fictional events or objects to affect us while we know they do not actually exist, without having to resort to contemporary theories of make-believe, such as Kendall Walton, who proposes the curious notion that fiction is a game of make-believe into which the spectator knowingly enters and that emotional responses to what are known to be fictional events are in fact ‘pretend’ responses. See Walton 1990.
124 aesthetic experience in which ‘we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and whither in things, but simply and solely…we let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present’75 Second, it produces a state of resignation, since the principle of individuation to which willing is so intimately bound loses its force: ‘The motives that were previously so powerful now lose their force, and instead of them, the complete knowledge of the real nature of the world, acting as a quieter of the will, produces resignation, the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will-to-live itself’.76 The experience thus reveals the truth of both the subject and the objective nature of the reality, and this is nowhere more the case than in music, which Schopenhauer argues, is an objectification of the Will itself.77 Such notions are alien to the rather more limited role of art and aesthetic experience envisaged by Kant, but they represent a logical development and simplification of Kant’s argument.
A similar emphasis on the non-utilitarian nature of art underpins the aesthetic writings of the early German romantics. For example, August Schlegel’s Lectures on Fine
Literature and Art pour scorn on the equation of beauty and utility by the English philosopher Lord Henry Home with the remark that ‘the beautiful should also perform economic services, and God is already supposed to have worried about the blossoming of English manufacturing at the time of creation’.78 By virtue of the fact that it belongs to a sphere independent of the realm of utility and economics, the aesthetic object, in other words the work of art, appeals to the romantics as a site of resistance to the
75 Schopenhauer, WWR I, 34. 76 Ibid, Vol. I pp. 253. 77 Ibid, pp. 259. 78 Quated in Schulte-Sasse, 1985, pp. 87.
125 encroachment of conceptually bound utilitarian values, an aesthetic theory which stands at the origin of the modernist resistance to the abstracting process of modernity, and which finds its culmination, perhaps, in the stress on the formal autonomy of the work of art in the writings of, for example, Clive Bell, Roger Fry or Clement Greenberg.79
If we restrict our analysis of this development to the nineteenth century, that is, to the tradition known to Nietzsche, the idea of the autonomy of art is pursued to its most extreme conclusion in the formalist writings of Eduard Hanslick, particular his study On the Beautiful in Music, and in the French critic Theophile Gautier, who, in order to empty art of all its stifling Victorian content transformed it into an autonomous, self- referential sphere of activity.80 Attempting to free art of morality, and in general, attempting to free art of any transformative power or influence, such writers have, for
Nietzsche, trivialized art, and it is Kant he criticizes for essentially proposing the idea of aesthetic experience without interest. In GM, having placed Kant in opposition to
Stendhal’s famous dictum that art contains “une promesse de bonheur”, Nietzsche mocks the contemporary belief in disinterestedness, asserting that ‘if our aestheticians never weary of asserting, in Kant’s favor, that under the spell of beauty, one can even view undraped female statues “without interest”, one can laugh a little at their expense…Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily an “unaesthetic man”(GM III, 6).
Although the names of Kant and Schopenhauer figure prominently, an early note from
1873 includes Hanslick in a list of those ‘to be attacked’, a list which also includes neo-
79 See for example Bell 1981, Fry 1920, or Greenberg 1939 and 1940. 80 Gautier’s classic statement of the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’ occurs in the preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin: “Nothing is really beautiful except that which cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need” (Gautier, 155, pp. 23). For most recent and comprehensive account of Gautier and criticism see Snell 1982.
126 Kantian philosophers such as Kuno Fischer and Hermann Lotze.81 In the same section of
GM Nietzsche notes Schopenhauer’s indebtedness to the same Kantian idea, challenging the notion of will-less aesthetic experience with the observation that far from displaying no interest in the aesthetic experience, Schopenhauer was greatly interested in it, indeed, positively craved it as a release from the blind mechanism of the Will. In
Nietzsche’s eyes, Schopenhauer’s subscription to the idea of a will-less aesthetic experience is self-defeating; the aesthetic is invested with a particular function or use value which enmeshes it within the system of means and ends, in short, the economy of desire, and thus brings it close to Stendhal’s idea of ‘arousal of will (”of interest”) by beauty’ (ibid).
Ultimately for Nietzsche, the ideal of the formalist aesthetic is one more manifestation of asceticism and will towards self-denial. As Nietzsche points out in the same essay, asceticism is driven by will to power, albeit will to power that has been misdirected. Hence, although Nietzsche does not state it in such terms, the achievement of will-less aesthetic experience would in fact be the result of an exercise of the will, rather than its suspension. To think otherwise is a form of delusion or, in any case, failure to understand the fundamental principles and functions of human organism.
Thus the fundamental weakness in the entire notion of disinterested aesthetic experience leads Nietzsche to demand that ‘the aesthetics of “contemplation devoid of any interest” which is used today as a seductive guise for the emasculation of art’, an
81 KSA 8:5 (134). For other references to Hanslick see also KSA 7:9 (8) and KSA 7:9 (98). Nietzsche also refers to Gautier number of times, including WP 103, KSA 13:11 (296) and WP 815. Nietzsche’s interest in Hanslick in the early 1870s derives from his interest in music while his comments on Gautier are much more set within the context of French literary and artistic culture.
127 aesthetics he equates with the Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, ‘be questioned mercilessly and taken to court’ (BGE 33).
In TI Nietzsche devotes a substantial passage to a critique of the modernism of art for art’s sake. He counters the desire to free art from morality, a desire that only betrays the fact that the ‘moral prejudice is still dominant’, or from any affirmative or transformative content, and hence render it ‘purposeless, goalless, meaningless’ with the series of rhetorical questions: ‘what does all art do? does it not praise? does it not glorify? does it not select? does it not highlight? By doing all this it strengthen or weakens certain valuations…Is this no more than an incidental? an accident?’ In the same passage he adds: ‘Bravery and composure in the face of a powerful enemy, great hardship, a problem that arouses aversion – it is this victorious condition which the tragic artist singles out, which he glorifies’ (TI, Expeditions of an Untimely Man, 24).
Thus, far from being ‘purposeless, goalless, meaningless’, art is in fact, Nietzsche says, a
‘great stimulus to life’. I will explore what Nietzsche specifically means by this in the following chapter, but it should be clear by now that the formalist notion of the autonomy of art and the notion of art for art’s sake has no place in Nietzsche’s thinking, other than being a target of his polemic. Such views are, for Nietzsche, misunderstandings and delusions rooted in the weakened powers and degenerated instinct that seek escape from life rather then its enhancement and/or transfiguration.
It is worth clarifying an important point at this time; Nietzsche here, in one of his last works, calls art a ‘great stimulus to life’ which may seem to suggest that he still accords art the same significance he saw in it at the very beginning in BT. Such
128 suggestions however should be seen as deeply suspect, or at any rate, not taken at their face value. First, here Nietzsche is not praising art for its ability to provide metaphysical comfort as he had done in BT; quite the contrary, it is precisely because of this feature, as we will see shortly, that art now comes under the gravest suspicion and criticism.
Second, Nietzsche here asserts that art always ‘strengthens or weakens certain valuations’ which means that, keeping in mind Nietzsche’s analysis of the state of modernity as characterized by neurosis, sense of loss, yearning, and confusion, modernity’s art embodies the very same features. This is far from ‘bravery and composure’ in the face of a powerful enemy’, that is, in the face of the loss of the
‘centre of gravity’, and even further from the ‘victorious condition which the tragic artist singles out’. Thus, that ‘art is a great stimulus to life’, Nietzsche might have thought true of the pre-Socratic Greeks. Whether there is a possibility that it may be true again, if the right conditions prevail, remains to be seen, but as far as Nietzsche is concerned, it is certainly not true of the modern age.
Similarly, Nietzsche opposes any conception of art wedded to the metaphysical- scientific concern with truth, and here again he takes issue with the tradition of philosophical aesthetics. The object of Nietzsche’s criticism is a constellation of aesthetic notions that find their origins in Kant and Hegel. This, again, is hardly surprising since it has been suggested that the entire discourse of aesthetic theory up to the present is largely framed by Kant and Hegel, who constitute two dominant poles of aesthetic
129 thought.82 On the one hand, Hegel sees art as inextricably linked to the historical evolution of consciousness, functioning as a symbolic expression of that evolution. Art functions as a vehicle of truth, ‘the configuration as a concrete reality’ of the Idea’.83 On the other hand, Kant explicitly disassociates the aesthetic experience from the contingencies of historical consciousness, arguing for an ahistorical aesthetic experience irreducible to conceptual cognition. Aesthetic experience functions as a site of resistance to logic and truth. Nietzsche diverges from both tendencies; he attacks Kant and the formalist tradition for holding a naïve and unrealistic view of production and reception of art, and rejects Hegel’s conception of art as a sensuous embodiment of truth (it is worth adding too that Hegel’s linear idea of time rules out the productive appropriation of the past central to Nietzsche’s project of overcoming of modernity).
Undoubtedly, the most important aspect of Hegel’s legacy, for Nietzsche’s aesthetic thought, is Hegel’s notion of art as the sensuous embodiment of truth. But this claim needs to be qualified: Hegel argues that only in Greek and Roman culture was art the perfect vehicle of truth, whereas in the succeeding ‘romantic’ epoch its place is usurped by philosophy. The question of transcendence is significant too for Hegel and even more so for the romantic philosophers such as Schelling who bestow on art the status of a transcendent revelation of truth. For Hegel this conception of art is at least restricted, since the congruence of the two is, in his system, historically limited. In the
System of Transcendental Idealism however Schelling makes a much bolder claim that
82 See Jacques Taminiaux, “Between the Aesthetic Attitude and the Death of Art” in Taminiaux 1993, pp.. 55-72. 83 Hegel 1975a, Vol. I pp.. 73.
130 art is at all times a moment of revelation. Schelling argues that ‘art is paramount to the philosopher, precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart’.84
For Schelling, it is the semantic indeterminacy of the aesthetic object, a notion derived from Kant, which leads him to posit art as a revelation of the absolute.
Philosophy itself, reliant on the limitations of conceptual logic, cannot articulate this.
This position is paralleled in Friedrich Schlegel’s conception of ‘Transcendental Poetry’, in which poetic irony, through a perpetual process of self-reflection, tends towards the infinite. It does not manage to reach the infinite, but the reflexivity of the ironic work of art nevertheless symbolizes the absolute.85 Beginning with the same recognition of the insufficiency of conceptual logic, Nietzsche also contrasts the artistic with the conceptual. He writes of the ‘free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of “inspiration”’ according to laws that ‘defy all formulation through concepts’
(BGE 188). But Nietzsche is, however, leading towards entirely different conclusion, namely that the reason discursive concepts cannot convey the real is because the real does not exist. While Nietzsche may be positively inclined towards art because of its semantic indeterminacy, he nevertheless thinks that art, if it should be promoted at all,
84 See Schelling 1978, pp. 231. On the role of Schelling as an intermediary between Kant and Hegel see Wick 1994, pp. 57-69. See also Bowie 1993, especially pp. 45-54. 85 For succinct account of Schlegel’s conception of poetry see Behler 1992, pp. 131-180.
131 it should not be done in the name of a higher transcendent truth, but in the name of preventing cultural degeneration.
In a fragment from 1886, Nietzsche makes the following comment concerning patterns of thinking in aesthetics hitherto:
NB 1) Attempting to bring aesthetics closer to unegoistic Ethics (as a preparation for it) through the elimination of the “I” 2) 2)Attempt to bring it closer to knowledge (pure subject, “pure reflection of the object”) – against this: the object, when viewed aesthetically, falsified through and through “pure, will-less, painless timeless subject of knowing” - by no means “knowledge”!
The object of Nietzsche’s criticism in this note is Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Kant.
As I have argued earlier, the notion of disinterestedness, which in Kant, though prerequisite of any aesthetic judgment, laid no claim to truth content, becomes in
Schopenhauer a means to overcoming the limitations of the principle of sufficient reason. In other words, will-less aesthetic contemplation offers a disclosure of the noumenal reality of the world beyond the reach of everyday rational cognition.
Schopenhauer has thus overturned the Platonic notion of art, in which art, as the mere imitation of the material world, itself a copy of the true world of the forms, stands twice removed from reality. In this overturning of Platonism, Schopenhauer goes further than either Kant or the early romantics were prepared to in their delineation of the capacities and limits of aesthetic judgment. To be sure, for Friedrich Schlegel or Schelling the beautiful can symbolize the absolute, and even for Kant, the beautiful is a symbol of the good, in which the semantic indeterminacy of the aesthetic object allows the imagination an unrestricted freedom. Additionally, Kant insists that the judgment of taste, though subjective, is also universal, thereby creating a parallelism between
132 knowing and judging, but these assertions are far less ambitious than the claims made on behalf of the aesthetic state and the aesthetic object by Schopenhauer. Music counts as a direct reflection of the Will. As Schopenhauer notes, ‘music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the Will itself: the objectivity of which are Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence’.86 This stands in opposition to the romantic notion that art symbolizes the absolute only indirectly through its temporal self-reflective unfolding.87
Schopenhauer’s theory gives no room to ideas of a mediated presentation of the Will.
This particular development of Kant’s aesthetics is not, however, merely limited to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Heidegger too, though critical of
Schopenhauer, interprets Kant’s theory of beauty as in some sense world-disclosive. In the first volume of Nietzsche he writes, ‘in order to find something beautiful, we must let what encounters us, purely as it is itself, come before us in its own stature and worth…Comportment toward the beautiful as such, says Kant, is unconstrained favoring.
We must release what encounters us as such to its way to be; we must allow and grant in what belongs to it and what it brings to us’.88 This reading of Kant harmonizes with the alethic function Heidegger himself allots to art, but is just as much an appropriation as that undertaken by Schopenhauer.
86 Schopenhauer, WWR, I, 56. 87 The role of reflection in romanticism has been explored by Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” in Benjamin 1996, pg 116-200. In the reflective unfolding of the work, criticism played a vital role in completing the process. For romantics such as Schlegel brothers, therefore, criticism was not extrinsic to the work, a notion subsequently taken up by Derrida, Barthes and Lacan. 88 Heidegger 1991, vol. I pp. 109.
133 According to Heidegger’s analysis of ‘the raging discord between art and truth’, the difference between art and truth consists in their relation to the problem of becoming and being. Returning repeatedly to Nietzsche’s comment that ‘to stamp becoming with the mark of being – that is the supreme will to power’ (WP 617),
Heidegger characterizes Nietzsche’s understanding of truth as a function of the desire for permanence. As such, Heidegger notes, ‘truth is any given fixed apparition that allows life to rest firmly on a particular perspective and to preserve itself, as such fixation, “truth” is an immobilizing of life, and hence its inhibition and dissolution.’89 In contrast, art allows reality, that is, becoming, to reveal itself as becoming, without being fixed in one perspective: ‘in order for the real to remain real, it must on the other hand simultaneously transfigure itself by going out beyond itself, surpassing itself in the scintillation of what is created in art.’90 Consequently, art consists of a dynamic process of perpetual self-overcoming which thereby reveals the ‘reality’ of the world as becoming.
Heidegger’s interpretation, though persuasive, runs the risk of assimilating
Nietzsche to the early romantic project, in which the self-overcoming of the Nietzschean artwork parallels the perpetual self-reflective irony of the romantic transcendental poetry. In his analysis of the notion of truth in Nietzsche, Heidegger seems to be imputing to Nietzsche two notions of truth. The first, which we might term ‘truth’ is the idea of truth as the construct of a particular perspective. In Nietzsche’s terms it is the kind of ‘falsehood’ without which human life would not be possible. The second,
89 Ibid, pp. 216. 90 Ibid, pp. 217.
134 undeclared notion, which we may capitalize as ‘Truth’, assumes there to be a higher, objective reality, transcending the limitation of any particular perspective. In
Heidegger’s reading, Nietzsche regards art as worth more than ‘truth’ because it reveals the higher ‘Truth’ of reality, namely becoming as the foundation of the world.
Thus, according to Heidegger’s reading, Nietzsche views art as world-disclosive in a manner similar to Schopenhauer and the romantics, for it is not limited to the fixed representation of being from a particular perspective. Its fluidity is the mirror of fundamental becoming. However, sensitivity to Nietzsche’s anti-foundationalism makes such a reading problematic. ‘Truth’ cannot have any place in Nietzsche’s project, except as a target of polemic. Nietzsche’s polemic has two kinds of misunderstandings as its targets. The first is when ‘truth’ is taken to be identical to ‘Truth’, and, broadly speaking, it is the realist assumption of the sciences together with that brand of ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics that even Kant had criticized which make this mistake. The second misconception arises when ‘truth’ is accepted to be a peculiarly human construct but yet is seen as nevertheless concealing the higher ‘Truth’, and Nietzsche’s target in this regard is the dualism of Kant and the Idealists. Heidegger is attempting to assimilate
Nietzsche’s thinking to this view despite Nietzsche’s objections to any such form of dualist thinking.91
At first sight, it might be possible to read Nietzsche’s early work such as BT as supporting such dualist tendencies, with its appropriation of Kantian and
Schopenhauerian vocabulary. However, there are strong reasons for emphasizing the
91 Most obviously in Twilight of the Idols, “How the “true world” eventually became a fible”.
135 thematic continuity between Nietzsche’s early and later work. Already in BT and various jottings from the same period, Nietzsche distances himself from the Schopenhauerian idea that Dionysian music is an unmediated presentation of the primal chaos. Indeed, the idea of reality as a Dionysian abyss of meaning is for Nietzsche only a ‘form of appearing’ and thus always already enmeshed within the web of discursive meaning. In
Nietzsche’s other writings concerning art, the lingering ambiguities of BT have all been erased. The pages of both volumes of HATH, for example, are strewn with aphorisms that strive to dissociate art from truth. Moreover, Nietzsche is not attempting to pit art against empirical ‘truth’ in the name of some higher, transcendent ‘Truth’. Rather, he seeks to avoid any and every suggestion that art discloses some prior state of affairs, whether that is imagined as a merely empirical world or as a noumenal realm normally concealed from the limited categories of conceptual thinking. Any art that displays a concern with truth, and especially the truth of the ‘beyond’, Nietzsche regards as a corruption of art and a symptom of contemporary nihilism.
In his attempt to dissociate art from truth Nietzsche is paradoxically employing the theme that originates in Plato, frequently equating art and falsity. He is not, however, criticizing the belief in art as a vehicle of truth in order to reinstate a Platonic distinction between the true and its copy. In Nietzsche’s thinking it is the desire for truthfulness that inevitably leads to nihilism, thus his use of the Platonic equation of art and falsity is designed both to discredit contemporary art and aesthetic tradition and to add weight to his general argument that brings into question the belief in truthfulness
136 per see. Art is mendacious not simply because it inadequately portrays the truth, but because there is no truth of which it could be the mimesis.
Here again we may come back to the question of the nature of aesthetic experience, and in particular Nietzsche’s critique of the fundamental assumption that the key to aesthetic experience is to be found in the experience of the spectator. In the third essay of GM Nietzsche remarks that Kant, ‘like all philosophers, in stead of gauging the aesthetic problem on the basis of the experience of the artist (the creator), pondered art and the beautiful solely from the point of view of the spectator, and thereby imperceptibly let the “spectator” in to the concept “beautiful” itself (GM III, 6).
Nietzsche seems to be making two related points. The first is that Kant neglects the artist, while the second is that consequently questions of beauty, sublimity, and even ugliness have meaning only when related to the passive experience of the aesthetic viewer, listener, reader, and others. Regarding the first claim, Nietzsche seems to neglect extensive passages in the Critique of Judgment that Kant devotes to the creativity of the artist. Part of Nietzsche’s critique here is motivated by the belief that
Kant’s concept of genius is conceived from the perspective of the spectator. But far from submitting to the contemporary cult of genius inherited from the Strum und Drang movement of the 1770s and 1780s, Kant is attempting to counterbalance such notions by stressing the extent to which creative genius is guided by technique and rules of artistic production. Hence his disdain for what he terms ‘original nonsense’, in other words, artistic creativity determined solely by the inner subjective feeling of the artist.92
92 See especially sections 46 and 46of The Critique of Judgment on the relation of genius to rules.
137 Nietzsche’s criticism is therefore rather misleading. Although the large part of Kant’s account of aesthetic experience analyses the subjective perception of the spectator, his discussion of artistic production is also a central element of his argument.
With regard to Nietzsche’s second criticism, he is partially correct when he sees the Kantian spectator as the determining ground of any judgment of beauty; partially correct because Kant resists any conclusion that taste is just a matter of subjective preference through his recourse to the notion of subjective universality, and in this he is working against the tradition of the eighteenth century aesthetic criticism, in which personal, subjective responses are the sole basis of passing judgment.93 In addition,
Kant suggests that certain kinds of formal, objective qualities, for example the use of ornamentation or color, may be inappropriate objects of any judgment of taste, with the implication that the aesthetic judgment consists of a complex relation between subjective and non-subjective elements. Furthermore, Nietzsche is only partially correct since the ‘subjectification’ of the aesthetic in Kant does not occur ‘imperceptibly’ but quite consciously, since it occupies a central place in the architectonic of his critical project.
One can therefore defend Kant from Nietzsche’s criticism, but the more important question to explore here is why Nietzsche considers the putative ‘subjective turn’ in Kant’s aesthetic theory so problematic, or rather, what is the virtue of an aesthetic of the artist, one who ‘gives’, over and against the ‘womanly aesthetics’ of the spectator who ‘receives’. In answer to this question it should be noted that Nietzsche’s
93 An informative contrast can be made between for example Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Burke 1987.
138 critique is motivated less by an interest in countering the imbalance of Kant’s perspectives, and more by Nietzsche’s wider strategic aim to dissociate art and truth.
Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction with the ‘womanly aesthetics’ practiced hitherto is not guided primarily by an objection to the orientation of aesthetics per se, since Nietzsche himself devotes considerable time and space to the exploration of the constitutive role of the spectator in the determination of the beautiful. Rather, it is motivated by a rejection of the way in which such a ‘passive’ aesthetics serves to fortify the delusory belief in art as a truth-disclosive praxis. It is motivated by the desire to counter the reification of art embedded in the aesthetic tradition. Although I have noted, against
Nietzsche’s criticism, that Kant in fact devotes considerable attention to the genesis of the work of art, Nietzsche is nevertheless correct when he asserts that the experience of the artist is neglected. Kant gives much attention to the discussion of artist’s use of rules and precedents, yet the account of the aesthetic experience itself is discussed exclusively with reference to the reaction of the spectator to the reified aesthetic object, whether it is an object in nature or the finished product of human artifice.
Thus, the cognitive ‘quickening’ which, for Kant, is the central element of aesthetic experience, is induced by the finished aesthetic object that, in the case of art, presents the world in a certain way. In the case of beauty as the symbol of morality in
Kant, transcendental poetry as the symbol of the absolute in Friedrich Schlegel, or music as the unmediated image of the Will in Schopenhauer, the aesthetic object is seen as a specific mode of representation which facilitates a cognition that exceeds the normal bounds of conceptual experience. Thus any orientation towards the experience of the
139 spectator cannot help but tend to view art as a form of revelation or disclosure, occasioned by a specific object. Nietzsche does not deny the power of the aesthetic object over the spectator. Indeed, his tirades against Wagner are partly motivated by the recognition of the power of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk over the audience. Thus like Kant, Nietzsche emphasizes the ‘quickening’ effect of such experience, but it is rather more psychological than cognitive, claiming for example, that ‘art works tonically’
(WP 809). In HATH he describes the manner in which art brings about a restructuring of experience, claiming that it aims to ‘alter one’s sensibilities, partly by modifying our judgments on our experience…partly by arousing a desire for pain, for emotion in general’ (HATH I, 108), and a significant portion of his critique of Wagener, as we will see, focuses on the way in which the emotional hysteria of his operas appeals to and exacerbates the degraded sensibilities of the modern audience. Thus fully cognizant of the effects of art on the spectator, Nietzsche nevertheless criticizes the notion of aesthetic experience conceived primarily from the perspective of the spectator, for it inevitably leads to understanding of art as a truth-disclosing praxis.
Another reason why Nietzsche privileges the perspective of the artist to that of the spectator is that, for him, art should not be understood as an assembly of objects that can collectively be termed ‘works’ of art, but primarily conceived as an activity, and more specifically, world-creating rather than world-disclosing one. I will discuss this aspect of Nietzsche’s treatment of art in the following chapter, but it is worth noting here that part of Nietzsche’s motivation for privileging the artist’s viewpoint lies in the fact that he is less interested in finished artwork than in the way it functions as a sign or
140 symptom of varying attitudes towards the world. This does not mean that Nietzsche ceases to refer to the works of art or that he denies their existence as objects. Such claims would be absurd since Nietzsche discusses individual works throughout his productive life. What it does mean however, is that the significance of works of art lies less in the effect they have on the spectator as finished static totalities, than in their shaping of human affectivity as dynamic creations or achievements of the artist. As he states in HATH, ‘so-called art proper, that of artworks is only an appendage’ and continues, ‘we usually start with art where we should end with it, cling hold of it by its tail, and believe that the art of the work of art is true art out of which life is to be improved and transformed – fools that we are’ (HATH II, 174).
In shifting our orientation away from the experience of the spectator to that of the artist, and in placing the emphasis not on works of art but on the activity of art making (claiming in effect that the process is more important than the material product), Nietzsche relocates the discussion of art firmly within the realm of human physiology. ‘The phenomenon “artist”’ Nietzsche writes, ‘is still the most transparent: - to see through it to the basic instinct of power, nature etc. Religion and morality too’
(WP 797). The artist, important though he is, is in many respects only a cipher, a channel through which a particular configuration of interests, drives, impulses and ways of seeing finds an expression. By conceiving of the artist in such terms and by placing the origin of artistic creativity within the realm of the physiological, rather than the metaphysical, Nietzsche may appear to be denying the importance of the conscious activity of the artist. Although he does indeed think that consciousness is only the latest
141 and most undeveloped feature of human organism, he does not whish to deny its role in the artistic process. What he is doing however is attempting to rule out any idealist notion of artistic vision and to counter the metaphysical cult of genius.
In arguing for the naturalistic account of genius and artistic production,
Nietzsche attempts not only to reduce it from an elevated status that the tradition had confirmed on it, but also to disrupt a particular kind of dynamic that has formed in the relationship between the artist and the spectator in which the artist is seen as one who is somehow able to transcend the purely human limitations and who therefore becomes invested with the power which comes to convince us that the artist must speak from a vantage point somewhere beyond, consequently leading to the veneration of the artist that is not unlike religious veneration.
Where in BT Nietzsche had espoused a notion of genius in which it was seen to originate out of the ‘primal unity’ (BT 5), or Schopenhauerian World-Will, and moreover, had specifically identified Wagner as the highest exemplar of such a state, Nietzsche now begins to question the very basis on which the notion of genius rests, going against a tradition which had seen in the idea a means of reconciling the individual and the exceptional with the basic presuppositions of universality that, in the German philosophical tradition, had grounded the unity of reason, nature, and man. For Kant, genius was ‘the innate mental predisposition through which nature gives the rule to art’, indicating a common ground for both nature and subjectivity through the rule-creating work of the genius.94 Kant goes on to give the etymology of the word genius, from which
94 Kant, 1952, pp. 189.
142 he derives important aspects of his account, as ‘the guardian and guiding spirit that each person is given as his own at birth’. For his part, Hegel emphasizes certain naturalistic aspects of the work of the genius, rescuing the notion from what he perceives to be a
Kantian dependence on certain unconscious motivations.95 And yet Hegel still gives an account of genius that nevertheless establishes it as of a different order to mere talent, through the ‘inspiration’ that is available to the genius, as well as the genius’ ‘being the instrument and the living activation of his subjective conception conceived of as being the unity of universality and concrete particularization’.96 For Schelling, more than any other, this conjunction of subject and object, of the universal and the particular, was fundamental to his aesthetic theory as a whole and indeed was something demonstrated by his conception of genius. Homer’s authorship, says Schiller, through
Wolf’s earlier discoveries about its collective nature, shows how a whole people can constitute an individual.97 Indeed he says later that ‘Shakespeare is so all-consuming in his genius that one could easily consider him, like Homer, to be a collective man and, as has already occurred, to attribute his work to different authors’.98 Furthermore, as with
Nietzsche in BT, the chorus of Greek tragedy represents an example of this principle of the collective nature of aesthetic productivity. Schopenhauer too writes that ‘the real object of genius is only the essential nature of things in general, the universal in them, the totality’, while Wagner in A Communication to My Friends calls this principle of
95 Hegel 1975a, pp. 283-7. 96 Ibid, pp. 287-288. 97 Schelling 1995, pp. 215. 98 Ibid, pp. 272.
143 collectivity behind the works of genius ‘communistic’ and is unable to account for such works outside the principle of ‘sheer human individuality in general’.99
But Nietzsche now attempts to counter such ideas and indeed this entire tradition and its common presuppositions with a determinedly naturalistic account of the capacities of genius, indicating in particular that the genius is not to be thought of as being somehow of a different kind to other perhaps merely talented artists, something that had been a fundamental assumption of the foremost theorists from Kant to
Wagner. And yet at the same time Nietzsche had no wish to deny that the genius as a higher individual did in fact exist; on the contrary, it was perhaps the most constant among all his convictions throughout his life that ‘what matters in all things is the higher’ (PTAG 30). Even during the years of his so-called ‘positivism’, it is the individual who is still privileged as the instigator of progress. Thus, although ‘genius’ is a key concept in his thought, Nietzsche gives it a completely different meaning from that given it by the aesthetic tradition and his contemporaries. And Nietzsche believes that it is the cult of genius, and specifically that of the artistic genius that is enshrined in
German aesthetic philosophy, that leads not only to a false conception of what the genius is and does, but therefore also, of what art can legitimately be said to do.
Nietzsche’s analysis of the notion of genius therefore concentrates on those thoroughly prosaic aspects of the genius’ gifts that leave the reader in no doubt that the genius is simply to be thought of as a better deceiver than the less gifted artists. In an aphorism from HATH entitled ‘The hidden barrel-organ’ he says ‘Geniuses know better
99 Wagner 1993, pp. 288-189.
144 than the talented how to hide the barrel-organ, by virtue of their more abundant drapery; but at bottom they can do no more than repeat the same old tunes (HATH II,
155). He compares the genius with the ‘inventor of machines, the scholar of astronomy or history’ suggesting that genius is better explained as a product of a certain single- mindedness, perhaps as a superior bricklayer. But the more serious point that Nietzsche whishes to make is that the cult of genius relies largely on a metaphysical notion of subjectivity, in which the artist, having little to do with the hard labor of production, is imagined as somehow in a state where temporality is suspended, producing a work that is a perfect totality. Nietzsche’s stress on the genius as a type of workman is therefore intended to shift the orientation of thinking about art and its production away from the metaphysical and romantic ideas of transcendence.
There is, Nietzsche admits, a particular temptation to think of artistic production in terms of the metaphysical and the romantic myth of genius ‘since no one can see in the work of the artist how it has become, that is its advantage, for wherever one can see the act of becoming one grows somewhat cool. The finished and perfect art of representation repulses all thinking as to how it has become’. The deceptions of geniuses are so thorough and plausible, their aura of other-worldliness so persuasive that, Nietzsche says, ‘one ascribes to them…a direct view of the nature of the world’, by virtue of which ‘they are able to communicate something conclusive and decisive about man and the world without the toil and rigorousness required by science’ (HATH I, 164).
And reference to science is important in that it is science’s methodology, its paradigm of truth which must be earned, that is being contrasted here with the artistic ‘inspiration’,
145 the spurious effortlessness evinced by the cult of genius. Thus Nietzsche is clear that crediting the artist as genius, while the scientist is regarded merely as a workman, is nothing other that a ‘piece of childishness in the realm of reason’. In reality Nietzsche says
The imagination of a good artist or thinker is productive continually, of good, mediocre and bad things, but his power of judgment, sharpened and practiced to the highest degree rejects, selects, knots together; as we can now see from Beethoven’s notebooks how the most glorious melodies were put together gradually and as it were culled from many beginnings (HATH I, 155).
There are echoes of Kant, Hegel and others in this and other passages where Nietzsche emphasizes the ‘organizational’ aspect of creating a work of art, where the implication is, as in Kant’s and Hegel’s accounts, that it is reason as much as invention that is responsible for the greatest of them. But the difference is that for Nietzsche, apart from hard work through which one’s power of judgment is continually exercised and sharpened, there is no other explanation that is to account for the appearance of the work of the genius as a blessing and wonder.
We may be reminded here of Nietzsche’s dismissal of the cult of saints and oracular priests as the misinterpretation of a pathological condition and his somewhat facetious claim that Socrates’ diamon may have been only an ear infection (HATH I,
126). In parallel, Nietzsche asserts that the cult of genius, and the eagerness to subscribe to it stem from vanity, a way of explaining away the ability of others to produce the works of art we ourselves feel incapable of. Those who are not artists thus also participate in this cult of the genius, for in order for such a belief or a set of beliefs to be sustained, it is necessary not only that artists themselves subscribe to them, but that those who enjoy art should actively uphold them too. Nietzsche says:
146 Because we think well of ourselves, but nonetheless never suppose ourselves capable of producing a painting like one of Raphael’s or a dramatic scene like one of Shakespeare’s, we convince ourselves that the capacity to do so is quite extraordinarily marvelous, a wholly uncommon accident, or, if we are still religiously inclined, a mercy from on high (HATH I, 162).
Only by thinking of the genius as remote from us, in fact, of a different kind to us, can we not feel aggrieved by him or her. There is, in a parallel relationship that Nietzsche delineates in BGE and GM, a similar dynamic in the relationship between a Christian or the person of faith on the one hand and the saint or the ascetic on the other: the saint is necessary for the Christian as one who symbolizes the impossible tensions between the demands of the body and spiritual desires, and who achieves a kind of victory for the latter.100 Those people of faith, who have no wish to deny themselves beyond a certain inescapable minimum, thus however, see this conflict as, in principle, resolvable in favor of the demands of faith. In the same way, the genius is necessary for the ‘art-lover’ because the former is able apparently to transcend human limitations, and in doing so produce an object which the latter is able to encounter and enjoy, an object that is both the product of human agency and seemingly the product of something beyond (see especially WP 95). There is a strong element of sublimation in this relationship,
Nietzsche implies, but the connection with the psychology of resentment is wider than this, it would seem, for the belief in the cult of the genius is also attributable to a wish not to compete with the genius: ‘It is clear people speak of genius only where the effects of the great intellect are most pleasant to them and where they have no desire to feel envious. To call something ‘divine’ means: here is no need for us to compete’
100 In Daybreak Nietzsche seeks also to demystify talent itself. It is, he says, nothing but ‘a name for an older piece of learning, experience, practice, appropriation, incorporation’ (D 540).
147 (HATH I, 162). Likewise the person of faith has no need to envy the saint because of the beneficence of the latter in assuaging the former’s thirst for faith without undue sacrifice. As for the artists themselves, Nietzsche says,
The artist knows that his work produces its fullest effect when it excites a belief in an improvisation, a belief that it came into being with a miraculous suddenness; and so he may assist this illusion and introduce those elements of rapturous restlessness, of blindly groping disorder, of attentive reverie that attend the beginning of creation into his art as means of deceiving the soul of the spectator or auditor into a mood in which he believes that the complete and perfect has suddenly emerged instantaneously (HATH I, 145).
Artists thus make calculated moves and consciously strive to produce certain effects that will make their work appear miraculous, coming into existence as it were out of nowhere. Nietzsche’s reference to ‘rapturous restlessness’ and ‘blindly groping disorder’ may have been inspired by the emotional hyperbola of Wagner’s music, but it is here used to emphasize the means by which artists nurture their own vanity. The impression, or rather belief that ‘complete and perfect has suddenly emerged’ feeds the narcissism of the artist who whishes to gain the label of genius or maintain the perception of being one.
As far as his relationship to the aesthetic tradition is concerned, which Nietzsche both follows on from and, it might be said, attempts to escape, his analysis of genius is a crucial one. The Kantian genius expressed himself both as a product of nature that ‘gives the rule to art’ and who is therefore, in Bernstein’s phrase, a ‘model for succession’.101
As something of an exemplar, but also as one who, in the first instance, stands outside of the constraints of ordinary norms and rule-governed behavior, genius is one who
101 Bernstein 1992, pp. 92,
148 must indeed create these very rules. 102 There is then a certain tension in the Kantian account, between the capacities of the genius as exemplar of a natural potential of productivity and subjectivity, and also as one who in acts of creation violates the norms of the ‘collective formation’.103 Nietzsche can be seen to exploit this very tension in order to effect a radical split between the work of the individual and the collectivity that the work of art had earlier been seen, in some sense, to represent. For Nietzsche, the loosening and breaking of this connection by means of an entirely naturalistic account of the nature and the capacities of genius has a significant consequence. The work no longer stands as sufficient onto itself, corresponding innately somehow to the collective audience and indeed collective authorship. Genius is now entirely bereft of that connection with nature and the subjectivity that had underpinned the work’s claim to universality and stripped of the inordinate dignity the tradition had conferred on him or her. And with this, Nietzsche thinks it should be recognized that the ‘moving and ludicrous pathos’ of the artistic genius stands elevated for no better reason than that it is how it has always been (HATH I, 157).
I have indicated earlier that despite Nietzsche’s critique, genius remains one of the key concepts in his thinking, although it acquires an entirely different meaning.
Nietzschean geniuses are individuals who prescribe their own rules, not in order to exemplify them to others, but rather for the furtherance of their own goals, their own happiness, the betterment of themselves and against the claims of others – the ‘herd’ – who will be happy enough with the universalist activities and aspirations of art, religion
102 Bowie 1993, pp. 33-34 103 Ibid, pp. 34
149 and democracy. More specifically, Nietzsche speaks of the ‘genius of life’ – an individual who embraces becoming and the relativity of our beliefs and ‘facts’ (WS 11), and thus represents an absorption in the exigencies and joys of ‘life’. This genius stands diametrically opposed to the artistic genius of the tradition, whom Nietzsche sees as indulging merely in a production of art object for cultural consumption, and who in doing so, perpetuates the metaphysical commitment to otherworldliness. Thus
Nietzsche’s thoroughgoing and consistent valorization of the idea of becoming, as well as its fundamental priority over any conception of being provides perhaps one of the most important reason why art and artist, most especially those we are inclined to label geniuses, are institutions now considered urgently to need revaluation. For, far from reflecting the ‘basically aesthetic perception of cosmic play’, the artist is now said to fix everything, to give the appearance of necessity where everything is in fact subject to flux and change. The artist, Nietzsche says, employs his or her work in order that it should ‘tyrannize as pleasant completeness and perfection (HATH I, 162). And it is not just that art in some sense falsifies reality, but also that, in presenting that reality as fixed, stable and unchanging, it gives an impression of the artist as being able to capture the truth, the essence that normally stands hidden behind the ‘illusory’ and ‘transitory’ world of appearances. Thus, it should be clear that Nietzsche’s critique centers not simply on a particular period or style of art but rather on the work of art per se, and this puts into question more than the idea of art as representation. Nietzsche brings into doubt the artwork in its intrinsic nature, in its stabilization and necessary finality which depends on the statically conceived notion of presence and the present – it transforms
150 becoming into being, subsumes it under the quality of being that it necessarily and categorically represents under the metaphysical realm – being as pure presence/present, above and beyond the realm of becoming.
For Nietzsche, this will to presence, fixity, and stability represents the
‘overleaping of this world’ into a sphere from which one ‘condemns this world wholesale’. Art, growing out of this will is, Nietzsche thinks, akin to religion and metaphysics. Thus, in its very nature, art perpetuates religious and metaphysical commitment to otherworldliness and furthermore, in doing so, it gives the impression that it can disclose a higher truth by transcending merely ‘illusory’, transitory nature of reality. Furthermore, by denying the centrality of becoming, art prevents us from viewing life and our place in it without otherworldly consolations and thus also constitutes a hindrance to human progress and improvement. It answers to our yearning for security and stability, it ‘soothes and heals’ but it does so ‘only provisionally, only for a moment’ and therefore, as Nietzsche says, it prevents ‘men from working for a real improvement in their condition by suspending and discharging in a palliative way the very passion which impels the discontent to action’ (HATH I, 148).
This is his most urgent charge against the artwork in general, that it denies the centrality of becoming and therefore prevents both artists and the ‘recipients of art’ from viewing life and their place in it without what Nietzsche considers to be blandishments and consolations of metaphysical fictions. And Nietzsche is also clear that the artistic outlook, as expressed in the production of works of art, precludes those very
151 qualities that might allow the instincts and the passions to find expression. Nietzsche says:
A true writer only bestows words on the emotions and experiences of others, he is an artist so as to divine much from the little he has felt. Artists are by no means men of passion but they often pretend to be…One has only to let oneself go, to abandon self-control, to give reign to one’s anger or desires: at once all the world cries: how passionate he is! But deep-rooted passion, passion which gnaws at the individual and often consumes him, is a thing of some consequence: he who experiences such passions certainly does not describe it in dramas, music, and novellas. Artists are often unbridled individuals to the extent that they are not artists: but that is something else (HATH I, 211).
Artists and their works fail to portray anything other than the reality severely circumscribed by limitations imposed by the very nature of the production of works, which like language and the prejudices upon which language is based, reveal merely a captured moment rather than the flux of genuine experience. In addition, the attempt by an artist to portray something as fixed and stable is only ever an attempt on the part of artists to portray themselves as fixed and stable, and since both are ‘in course of becoming’, works of art both represent a denial of what is central to that reality and twice removed from the reality they purport to reflect. In the aphorism ‘The picture of life’ Nietzsche writes:
The task of painting the picture of life, however often poets and philosophers may pose it, is nevertheless senseless: even under the hands of the greatest painter-thinkers all that has ever eventuated is pictures and miniatures out of one life, namely their own – and nothing else is even possible. Something in course of becoming cannot be reflected as a firm and lasting image, as a ‘the’, in something else in course of becoming (HATH II, 19).
The work of art, like the self of traditional metaphysics, may represent a comforting fiction but it is one that fails to appreciate and harness the ever-present reality of becoming.
Unlike the artists, Nietzsche seems to think, scientist seeks knowledge of the world from the world, without recourse to fictional embellishments and with no motive
152 beyond the need to understand the world and to convey this understanding. In addition, in the expectation that his account of ‘reality’ will, in fact, be superseded in time by a more accurate account scientists can be said to have a knowledge about their knowledge that is specifically denied the artist. The scientist, unlike the artist, gives full weight to the idea of becoming and to the implications that our beliefs about our beliefs have for our practical life. The artist on the other hand suppresses the instinct of becoming as well as reinforces those forces of necessity and reification that are more commonly associated with religion and morality. Nietzsche writes:
The artist possesses a weaker morality than the thinker; he does not wish to be deprived of the glittering, profound interpretations of life and guards against simple and sober methods and results. He appears to be fighting on behalf of the greater dignity and significance of man; in reality he refuses to give up the presuppositions which are most efficacious for his art, that is to say the fantastic, mythical, uncertain extreme (HATH I, 146).
While there are many passages in which Nietzsche does speak in terms of the specifically moral effects of art, his point here is not so much that art makes us less moral, although he does believe that it threatens the forces of reason and truth, but rather that it makes us in some ways more moral, that is to say, more compliant, uncritical and herd-like (GS 366). We are duped into various falsehoods that follow from the belief in the artist and the work of art, just as we are deceived into any number of similar beliefs by our own all-too-human weakness and susceptibility. Indeed, there is a strong social element in our belief in art: ‘it restrains us and keeps us in bounds, creates social forms, imposes on the unmannerly rules of decency, cleanliness, politeness, of speaking and staying silent at the proper time’ (HATH II, 174). In keeping with this
Nietzsche asks whether art is, in fact, of too little consequence to have effects that are anything like as unfortunate as Plato envisaged: ‘What right has our age to offer an
153 answer to Plato’s great question concerning the moral influence of art at all? Even if we possessed art – what influence of any kind does art exercise among us? (HATH I, 212).
Yet Nietzsche himself seems to have been preoccupied with art, with Wagner and the entire culture of his time, and more importantly with the forces that shaped and governed it.
Wagner, Art and Modernity
Nietzsche observes that ‘all the modern arts have until now been gradually debased, either as narrow and atrophied or as luxury items. Even the uncertain disconnected memories we moderns have inherited from the Greeks of true art may come to rest (UM IV, 1). Accompanying this debasement of aesthetic sensibility are, on the one hand, a calculating exploitation of art as a cultural ‘good’, and on the other, a heightened neurotic demand for emotional stimulation. The first is a consequence of the dominance of economic values. Nietzsche notes that ‘In former times one looked down with honest nobility on people who dealt in money as a business…one admitted to oneself that every society had to have intestines. Now, as the most covetous of its religions, they are the ruling power in the soul of modern humanity’ (UM IV, 6). Allying himself with the ‘enemy of art’, Nietzsche criticizes the ‘squandering of money on the construction of [the art’s lover’s] theatre and public monuments’, for, as he says, ‘there
154 is no hunger, no satisfaction, but always a tired playing with the appearances of both, for the purpose of the most vain kind of display’ (UM IV, 59). The second is the consequence of the heightened demand for emotional stimulation stemming from continuously frustrated need for certainty and redemption. As noted earlier, Nietzsche sees modernity as caught in a contradiction between the loss of certainty, the loss of the
‘centre of gravity’, and the continued yearning for one. Thus contemporary popular art,
Nietzsche thinks, fulfils the same function as Christianity or metaphysics, namely, the offering of some form of refuge. Nietzsche’s mistake, as he came to admit, was to see a counter-movement to this degraded art in the work of Wagner.
Charles Baudelaire is often thought of as the first figure for whom modernity was experienced as an acute problem. Indeed, the meaning of ‘modernity’ has been interpreted entirely through the prism of Baudelaire.104 And Nietzsche himself shows interest in Baudelaire, seeing in him a symptom of the decadent modern soul that had lapsed into nihilistic pessimism. Yet, while Baudelaire stands as one well-known manifestation of the decadence of modernity, the exemplary case, as far as Nietzsche is concerned, is to be found in Richard Wagner. Thus Nietzsche’s rhetoric is constantly directed at the modernism of Wagner and its incipient forms of romanticism and realism, which Nietzsche sees as microcosms of the larger problem of nihilism. The increasing unraveling of musical structure, the reliance on spectacle, the dissolution of resolving cadence through the use of perpetually modulating ‘endless melody’ are all, as
104 The most obvious example is the work of Walter Benjamin whose writings repeatedly return to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. See especially Benjamin 1983.
155 hallmarks of Wagner’s music, symptomatic of the passive will to destruction that, for
Nietzsche, was the consequence of the implosion of metaphysical culture.
An indication of his recognition that he has misread the significance of Wagner first appears in the second volume of HATH, in which Nietzsche warns of the dangers of
Wagner’s music, and in particular the dangers of its lack of measure and structure: ‘His famous artistic means…the “endless melody”, endeavors to break up all mathematical symmetry of tempo and force…is inventive in production of effects which to the ear of earlier times sound like rhythmical paradoxes and blasphemies’. (HATH II, 134).
Nietzsche notes,
‘What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole – the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time the anarchy of atoms, disaggregation of the will’ (CW, 7).
In literary terms Nietzsche’s comment may be directed against the fetishism of the fragment and the atomization of poetic style, but the reference is made specifically to
Wagner’s reduction of melodic structure to the single tonal unit. The organization of melody around periodic punctuations, cadences, and repetitive motifs is replaced by a system in which every individual note is of equal significance, and it is this which explains the ‘wandering tonality’ of Wagner. In Wagner’s music, the distinctions in the hierarchy of tones, where some are essential and others are inessential, not belonging to the musical key of the composition, are eroded.105 Wagner’s use of the leitmotif as the basis of a new musical form, endlessly developed and repeated, leads to the dissolution of traditional musical structure. As Nietzsche notes, Wagner is ‘our greatest
105 See Ripley 2000, pp. 120.
156 miniaturist…who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of meaning’ (CW,7). This shrinking of the musical period in Wagner’s music Nietzsche links to the notion of will to power, in which ‘endless melody’ is read as a weakness of will, a collapse in the organizing power of will to power, so that Wagner becomes, for Nietzsche, the
‘expression of physiological degeneration’ (ibid).
The result is that the listener finds himself ‘swimming, floating, no longer walking, dancing’, caught up in a ‘complete degeneration of the feeling for rhythm, chaos in place of rhythm…(NCW, ‘Wagner as a Danger’). And chaos, for Nietzsche, is endemic of Wagner’s music - not only is there an ‘anarchy of atoms,’ and a
‘disaggregation of the will’ , but there is also ‘everywhere paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and chaos’, so that ‘the whole no longer lives at all’. Wagner,
Nietzsche says, ‘gains small units’, animates them and makes them visible but ‘he has no capacity for giving organic form’ (CW 7).106
106 Nietzsche’s hostility is focused primarily on Wagner’s use of the minimal leitmotif in the unfolding of the ‘endless melody’, The term suggests a continuously flowing melodic structure but it is rather based on the notion that every element of the melody is of equal significance. The structure of the melodic period in which certain elements have a priority over others and in which much of the material consists of ornamentation and ‘filling out’ is shrunken to minimal motifs. Wagner’s use of the leitmotif as the basis of the new musical form endlessly developed and repeated leads to the dissolution of the traditional musical structure (see Dahlhaus 1980, pp. 52-64). Wagner’s music is characterized by a chromatic tonality, which stretches tonal structure to the limit and this is a consequence of the dissolution of the inherent melodic structure. If the tonal structure is no longer governed by the hierarchies of the melodic period, then tonality itself loses its function in the punctuation of melodic form. thus there arises what is often refer to as the ‘wandering tonality’ of Wagnerian music dramas, which prefigures the complete emancipation of dissonance in the music of Arnold Schoenberg. Although technically and theoretically incorrect, the notion that endless melody comprises a continuously flowing melody nevertheless contains a certain truth about the phenomenology of musical listening, for it gives rise to the perception that the melody, unpunctuated by the periodic structures or harmonic cadences, flows continuously. This perception lies at the root of Nietzsche’s criticism of Wagner’s music. And furthermore, Nietzsche’s comments on the loss of structure, the critique of Wagner’s ‘style’, or lack of it, and Wagner’s ‘anarchy of atoms’ and ‘disaggregation of the will’ in moral terms means ‘freedom of the individual,’ and expanded into a political theory, “equal rights for all”’ (CW 7)). In ‘endless melody’ larger structures are dissolved in the promotion of the microstructure
157 Thus Nietzsche thinks Wagner ‘abused the traditional methods without the capacity to furnish any justification’ for this abuse. But apart from the fact that
Wagner’s organizing energies were in decline, and the fact that he was a ‘miniaturist’ and ‘counterfeiter in duplicating great forms’, what attracted Nietzsche’s fire most of all was the content of Wagner’s ‘small infinities’. As Nietzsche states, each one of them has been drawn from the ‘drained cup’ of ‘human happiness’ where ‘the most bitter and repulsive drops have merged…with the sweetest ones’ (NCW ‘Where I admire Wagner’).
Nietzsche writes of Wagner that
The problems he presents on the stage – all of them problems of hysterics – the convulsive nature of his affects, his overexcited sensibility, his taste that required ever stronger spices, his instability which he dressed up as principles, not least of all the choice of his heroes and heroines – consider them as physiological types (a pathological gallery)! – all this taken together represents a profile of sickness that permits no further doubt (CW 5).
Physiological degeneration, Nietzsche thinks, has here concealed itself in art. Wagner’s states are uniformly pathological; his art satisfies, in the most seductive manner, ‘the three great stimulantia of the exhausted – the brutal, the artificial, and the innocent
(idiotic)’ (CW 5). Thus Wagner’s art results not in style but in a nervous condition.
Wagner, Nietzsche says, ‘est une nevrose’ (CW 5). His ‘miniaturism’ is symptomatic of a nervous and ‘pathological degeneration (a form of hystericism to be precise)’ (CW 7).
‘His art is sick’ and it is a sign of ‘declining life’, of life that lacks the energy for itself; it is, in a word, decadent. And Nietzsche warns: ‘Nowhere will you find a more agreeable way of enervating your spirits, of forgetting your manhood under a rosebush’ than in
Wagner’s art (CW Postscript).
of the motif, a technique which Nietzsche views as chaotic, and which could lead to dangerous social consequences.
158 Nietzsche sees Wagner as being ‘the modern artist par excellence’ because, as he states, ‘nothing is more modern that this total sickness, this overexcitement of the nervous system’ (CW 5). Here Nietzsche’s critique of the emotional hyperbole of
Wagner takes on another facet; It is not simply that Wagner’s art is decadent, but the modern audience as well; the artificially heightened rapture of Wagner’s music dramas perfectly soothes and satisfies the longing of the debased audience of the inartistic modernity. Nietzsche observes
‘Whenever I look at the thousands of people in the populous cities as they go by with an expression of stupidity or in haste, I always say to myself they must be in poor spirits. And yet for all of them art is merely there to put them in worse spirits…they are mounted and drilled remorselessly by improper feelings, and they are not allowed to confess their own sorrow to themselves; if they want to speak, convention whispers something in their ear such that they forget what they originally wanted to say’ (ibid).
Modern art, Wagner’s in particular, provides the mass public with an artificially heightened, but completely false set of emotional responses which verge on a kind of mass hysteria. At the root of this is the problem of the ‘guilty conscience’ of the modern soul, and modern art has taken up the task of inducing either ‘stupefaction or delirium!
To put to sleep or to intoxicate! To silence the conscience by one means or the other’
(UM IV, 6).
‘Wagnerians’, Nietzsche observes, as well as the ‘culture cretins, the petty snobs, the eternally feminine, those with happy digestions, in sum, the people’ - hunger for something that will call them ‘back to life’, for something ‘sublime, profound, overwhelming’ (CW 5, 6). The person who whishes to see God’s greatness everywhere at work has no interest and finds no value in the scientific explanations of natural phenomena. Thinking perhaps along these lines, Nietzsche says of the modern audience
159 that they do ‘not want to gain clarity about themselves’. For them, ‘clarity is an objection, logic a refutation’. Instead they want only allusions and hints. The only thing they take seriously, Nietzsche notes, is ‘“the idea” which is to say, something that is obscure, uncertain, full of intimations’ (CW 10). And Wagner’s art seems perfectly suited to satisfy them: ‘it throws them, elevates them and leads them to have intimations’
(ibid). ‘Chaos induces intimations’ says Nietzsche, and turns the audience into ‘moon- calves’, into ‘idealists’. Wagner, Nietzsche says, ‘became the heir of Hegel. – Music as
“idea” (ibid). For Wagner, music was never ‘mere music’, but it had meaning, ‘infinite meaning’, and Nietzsche says of Wagner that he was ‘his life long the commentator of the “idea”. Thus, Nietzsche notes, ‘it is not just with music that Wagner conquered the audience, it was the ‘idea’ that lead and lured them, the enigmatic character of his art that plays hide and seek behind a hundred symbols’(ibid). He says of Wagner that
He is distinguished by every ambiguity, every double sense, everything quite generally that persuades those who are uncertain without making them aware of what they have been persuaded. Wagner is a seducer on a large scale. There is nothing weary, nothing decrepit, nothing fatal and hostile to life in matters of the spirit that his art does not secretly safeguard: it is the blackest obscuritanism that he conceals in the ideal’s shrouds of light. He flatters every nihilistic instinct and disguises it in music; he flatters every Christian, every religious expression of decadence. Open your ears: everything that ever grew on the soil of impoverished life, all of the counterfeiting of transcendence and beyond, has found its most sublime advocate in Wagner’s art – not by means of formulas: Wagner is too shrewd for formulas – but by means of a persuasion of sensuousness which in turn makes the spirit weary and worn-out’ (CW Postscript).
Nietzsche recognized in Wagner’s work the aspirations to totality of vision, to an all-encompassing interpretation whose authority was to be grounded on the primacy of feeling, and it seemed to him to be symptomatic less of an artistic impulse than of a religious one. And indeed, in a century in which religion proper had started to lose its grip, art was increasingly seen as its natural successor and of this new cult, which counted Berlioz and Liszt among its early adepts, few, including Wagner, seriously
160 doubted that Wagner was to be the high priest. ‘Where religion becomes artificial’
Wagner wrote, ‘it is the duty of art to save religion’s essential core’, and when he opened the Festival in Bayreuth, its character as a temple and a place of worship was widely acknowledged.107 Religion and metaphysics, Nietzsche held, set out to combat the suffering engendered by the immanent, contingent nature of human life and they did so by means of ‘idealism’ – the invention of complete, and therefore transcendent interpretations of existence, interpretations which, because they offered to account for everything, remove that ‘illusion’ of contingency suffering is caused by and feeds off.
And they also exploited the passions of the masses in order to force those interpretations on them or, at any rate, to render them irresistible. In this sense,
Wagner’s aesthetic turns out to be a kind of substitute theology expressly designed to comfort the afflicted, the decadent who suffer from themselves, and to foreclose the possibility of living in an honest acknowledgement of immanence and contingency that
Nietzsche associates with love of fate and with becoming who one is. Wagner’s acceptance of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, itself an ‘idealism’ – a totalizing interpretation of existence – which Nietzsche believed was driven by the acutest feeling of dissatisfaction, thus makes Wagner’s aesthetic a quasi-religious one.
Significantly, Nietzsche uses almost any word available for Wagner except that of artist. Wagner is accused of being a charlatan, a decadent, a seducer, a womanizer, and his music is a kind of ‘underhand’ Christianity, but it is not ‘authentic art’, since ‘music
107 Wagner 1994, pp. 213.
161 has lost its world-transfigurative, affirmative character – it is music of decadence, and no longer the flute of Dionysus’ (EH, The Case of Wagner, 1). ‘Perhaps’, Nietzsche says,
Wagner is ‘a musician’, but most of all he is a ‘first-rate actor’ (CW 8). What Nietzsche here means is that Wagner wanted ‘effect, nothing but effect’ (ibid). Wagner is an actor with respect to his art because he produces an effect of art, but not in its substance.
And when Nietzsche says that Wagner counterfeits style he is claiming that Wagner only mimics drama and that his characters are forgeries. ‘Wagner’s music’, Nietzsche says, is never true’ (ibid). But more importantly, Wagner is an actor with respect to life. He is made for modern age: ‘in declining cultures…authenticity becomes superfluous, disadvantageous, a liability. Only an actor still arouses great enthusiasm. Thus, the golden age dawns for the actor’ (CW 11). In other words, in a robust, healthy culture where art is conceived as living-praxis, the instincts are in good shape and people can be seen to have ‘turned out well’ when they have become the creators and masters of themselves. In a declining culture, by contrast, where the ‘instincts are weakened’ the resources required for self-creation are largely absent. Hence the importance and timeliness of the actor; with him, one gets the effect of personality, of substance, even though the substance is entirely lacking. ‘Is it any wonder’, Nietzsche asks, ‘that falseness has become flesh and even genius in precisely our age? And the use of the epithet ‘actor’ in fact has a deeper significance than a simple characterization of Wagner and his art. It represents the centrality of the problem of the reversal of the existential priorities of life and art for Nietzsche – the relegation of art from a ‘living praxis’ to that
162 of a donning of masks and assuming of roles which might imitate and replicate but cannot command, far less transform.
Nietzsche’s critique is not reserved for Wagner’s art only. While in BT he had seen the aesthetic impulse as fundamentally unlike the Socratism of modernity, or at least had attempted to account for the greatness of Greek tragedy in a way that precludes any connection to the Socratic impulse, however problematically, he now sees a frequent continuity between religious sentiment and artistic practice in general.
He observes for example that ‘however much one believed one has weaned oneself from religion, the weaning has not been so complete that one does not enjoy encountering religious moods and sentiments without conceptual content, for example in music’ (HATH I, 131). The same claim is repeated in a later aphorism where Nietzsche notes that ‘art raises its head where religions relax their hold. It takes over a host of moods and feelings engendered by religion’ (HATH I, 150). Even for the free spirit,
Nietzsche says, who has overcome all metaphysical impulses ‘the highest effects of art can easily set the metaphysical strings, which have long been silent or indeed snapped apart, vibrating in sympathy’ and ‘make him feel he is hovering above the earth in a dome of stars with the dream of immortality in his heart’ (HATH I, 153). Nietzsche thus thinks that art can act like a narcotic; rather than confronting the cause of suffering, for example, it reinterprets the experience ‘through awakening a pleasure in pain, in emotion in general’ HATH I, 108), and thus function as a kind of anesthetic.
That Nietzsche often singles out Wagner in his critique is not surprising, given the nature, intensity, and history of their relationship. But Wagner is by no means the
163 only artist for whom Nietzsche reserves all his scorn. Nietzsche was absolutely clear that, rather than being seen as an artist of considerable stature, Wagner had to be understood as a cultural phenomenon. Even after the break with Wagner, Nietzsche continued to believe that Wagner had a far-reaching significance as a uniquely rich symbol of the deepest malaises of the culture that had made him possible. ‘Wagner is indispensible’ Nietzsche thought, for those who want really to understand the nature of modernity and its crisis. “Through Wagner modernity speaks most intimately, concealing neither its good nor its evil – having forgotten all sense of shame. And conversely: one has almost completed an account of the value of what is modern once one has gained clarity about…Wagner’ (CW Preface). Wagner’s name in many ways stands for a variety of artistic practices that Nietzsche found appalling. And as Nietzsche himself is eager to point out, his focus on Wagner by no means signals his readiness to celebrate any other artist (CW Second Postscript). Wagner is only a symbol, a representative, albeit the most seductive and successful, of the generally degenerate state of modernity and its art. For Nietzsche, the mass appeal of Wagnerian theatre only reveals the bogus character of popular culture still bound to the demands of slave morality. Nietzsche says that ‘Wagner gives his name to the ruin of music, as Bernini does to the ruin of sculpture’ but, ‘things are bad generally. Decay is universal. The sickness goes deep’. Wagner wholeheartedly and fully embraced decadence with all its logical conclusions, while others simply hesitated; that is what differentiates them,
Nietzsche says, and nothing else (ibid).
164 In his critique of Wagner, and more generally, in his analysis of the sickness and decadence of modern culture, Nietzsche frequently uses the term romanticism. In ‘The
Wanderer and his Shadow’, pointing to the opposition between the classical and the romantic, Nietzsche says: ‘both those spirits of a classical and of a romantic bent – these two species exist at all times – entertain a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness’ (WS, 217). In Daybreak the romantics are seen as ‘resurrectors of the dead’, whose impulse to repeat the past is driven by vanity (D, 157). The distinction between the two aesthetic impulses is spelled out more forcefully in GS, which in many respects represents Nietzsche’s most articulate statement of his mature aesthetic evaluation. Having equated romanticism with philosophical pessimism, of which the most prominent exponent is Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche goes on to ask
What is romanticism? Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aide in the service of growing and struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fullness of life…and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life, and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia and madness. All romanticism in art and insight corresponds to the dual needs of the latter type (GS 370).
Romanticism is thus rooted in an impoverished life, driven by a lack or hunger.
Nietzsche identifies specific artists and writers, including Wagner, Schopenhauer,
Delacroix, Brahms and others, as romantic, and uses the term to refer to the general persistence, indeed increase, of the demand for redemption in modernity whether it is by means of some form of transcendence or through the metaphysical search for absolute certainty. And Wagner again, with his concern with the problem of redemption
165 and transcendence is a prime example.108 Wagner’s ideal is of redemption through complete disillusionment of self-consciousness, from Tristan and Isolde, with its notion of the lovers’ redemption through death and negation, to Parsifal, where the eponymous hero redeems everything and everyone through his ignorant mumbling.109
This complete disillusionment of self-consciousness may manifest itself in death, sheer idiocy or amnesia as in the case of Siegfried, the redemptive hero of the Ring, whose inability to recall his own past signifies the selfsame disillusion of subjectivity. The origin of such ideas is clear for they repeat Schopenhauer’s understanding of the redemptive function of asceticism and all forms of negation of the will to live. Thus Nietzsche takes issue with the values underpinning Wagner’s work, and romanticism in general. His disaffection with his former mentor is part of a wider recognition that much contemporary art embodies the very same values Nietzsche believed were an essential part of metaphysical, Socratic culture. In his search for transcendence Wagner enacts the same denial of life sustaining metaphysics, and his music dramas produce in the audience a similar metaphysical yearning. But again, Wagner is by no means the only artist to whom this criticism applies; for Nietzsche, even Brahms who is usually thought of as Wagner’s antithesis, shares the same weakness characteristic of Wagner’s art. The supposed contrast between the two is, Nietzsche argues, only illusory. Despite its classicism, the music of Brahms is motivated by the same metaphysical yearning as that of Wagner: ‘He has the melancholy borne of impotence; he does not create out of fullness, but thirsts after fullness. If one discounts what he imitates, what he borrows
108 On this issue in Wagner see Strong 1975, pp 228. 109 For an account of Tristan and Isolde see the chapter devoted to it in Dahlhaus 1979.
166 from stylistic forms of either the great past or the exotically modern – he is a master of copying – what is most particular to him is longing’ (CW Second Postscript).
Thus, Nietzsche sees modern art as corrupted by a dominance of metaphysics, such that the present is faced with a paradox of both a hegemonic drive to scientific rationality and an ever increasing craving for redemption through heightened emotional expression. He notes that
‘dissoluteness and indifference, burning desire, cooling of the heart – this repulsive juxtaposition is to be found in the higher society of Europe of the present day. The artist believes he has done a great deal if through his art he has for once set the heart aflame besides these burning desires: and likewise the philosopher if, given the coolness of the heart he has in common with his age, he succeeds through his world-denying judgments in cooling the heat of the desire in himself and in this society (HATH II, 182).
In the place of giving human affectivity its proper place within the hierarchy of the soul there emerges the artificial sentimentality of romanticism, which stands for the hysteria of modernity per se. This recalls Nietzsche’s criticism of Wagner for creating mass hysteria in the audience, itself a microcosm of the more general condition of cultural modernism.
Underlying Nietzsche’s judgment is a recognition that modernity is marked by the proliferation of ‘false’ art, art of ‘effects’, or ‘degenerate’ art. It is art that is both in
‘search of repose and excited and agitated’. (HATH II, 115). Paradoxically, the craving for repose and the fascination with agitation and excitement go hand in hand – the one is the consequence of the failure of the other. Thus romanticism, driven by the hunger for
‘calm seas’, degenerates into an overexcited, uncontrolled hyper affective state.
The analysis Nietzsche now offers of the art of his day is not as something that might, as in BT, represent a return to the tragic outlook of the Greeks, as something
167 perhaps deserving of a faith in genius, but rather as something of an escape, a diversion from boredom, an entertainment. The contrast is a striking one between, on the one hand the Greeks who ‘loved to view their perfection repeated outside themselves’ as an aspect of their health and well-being (HATH II, 169), and the ‘bombastic and inflated’, impoverished and superficial, art of modernity on the other. In an aphorism entitled ‘Art in the Age of Work’ Nietzsche argues that the most important aspect of the changed nature of the relationship between art and life is precisely the relegation of art to leisure activity; ‘art of works of art’ has become the focus of artistic creativity but it nevertheless represents merely an ‘appendage’ to what had once been the ‘immense task of art’ (HATH II, 170, 174). More than this, the indolence encouraged by this state of affairs on the part of the ‘recipients of art’ has reduced even what Nietzsche calls
‘grand art’ to the level of the ‘conscienceless and lazy’. Indeed, Nietzsche writes:
It may therefore be that grand art is facing its end from lack of air and room to breathe it: unless, that is, the grand art tries, through a kind of coursing and disguising, to become at home in (or at least endure) that other air which is in reality the natural element only of petty art, of the art of recreation and distraction. And this is now happening everywhere (WS, 170).
It might be thought that the distinction Nietzsche makes here between ‘grand’ and
‘petty’ art might be seen to perpetuate a distinction between the art of the genius and that of mere talent that Nietzsche is elsewhere keen to dismiss, but this would be, I think, to misread this particular passage. For what Nietzsche means to do here, is to reinforce his claim or his diagnosis concerning the art of his day as being merely a leisure activity, and to suggest that where art does attempt to transcend such obvious and self-imposed limitations, as it will do from time to tome, it too must fail in spite of its best efforts due to the fact that modernity has no use, and has lost the need, for
168 ‘grand art’. As he remarks at the end of this passage after suggesting that we should be grateful that such efforts are, on occasion made: ‘but let us also admit that an age which shall one day bring back the festivals of joy and freedom will have no use for our art’. In the meantime, however, Nietzsche writes: ‘The people no doubt possess something that might be called an artistic need but it is small and cheap to satisfy’ (HATH II, 169), indicating that, like the flock of sparrows that disappears at the sound of a cannon, the audience, the herd, the ‘recipients of art’, would be moved to respond just as readily to a stimulus far less momentous than the highest expression of ‘grand art’ or the miracle of the genius.
Regarding the principle features of romanticism, namely its status as a neurotic condition, Nietzsche quotes the passage from Manette Salomon which observes that
Delacroix ‘is the…image of the decadence of our time, the spoilt one, confusion…the passions, the nerves, the faiblesses of our time, modern torment’ adding a further comment at the end that ‘Delacroix is a kind of Wagner’.110 A second note in the
Nachlass quotes another passage from the same novel, once again regarding Delacroix;
‘Delacroix – he promised everything, announced everything. His pictures? Aborted masterpieces; the person who, après tout, will arouse the passions comme tout grand incomplet, a feverish life in all he creates, une agitation de lunettes, un dessin fou’.111
For all his admiration for Beethoven, Nietzsche is also aware of the composer’s shortcomings: ‘merely imagine Beethoven as he appears beside Goethe…as semi- barbarism beside culture, as the people beside nobility’ (GS 103). This reservation about
110 KSA II:25 (141). 111 KSA II:25 (142).
169 Beethoven appears elsewhere too. For instance in D Nietzsche compares, by juxtaposition, the ‘coarse, obstinate, impatient tone’ of Beethoven’s music with the
‘convulsive and importunate restlessness’ of Wagner’s (D 218). Beethoven is ‘the first great romantic, in the sense of the French conception of romanticism, as Wagner is the last great romantic – both instinctive opponents of classical taste, of severe style – to say nothing of “grand” style’ (WP 842). In BGE Nietzsche devotes a lengthy aphorism to the discussion of Wagner and French Wagnerianism. He writes all of them were fanatics of expression “at any price” - I should stress Delacroix, who was most closely related to Wagner – all of them great discoverers in the realm of the sublime…and still greater discoverers concerning effects, display, and the art of display windows…born enemies of logic and straight lines, lusting after the foreign, the exotic, the tremendous, the crooked, the self-contradictory; as human beings, Tantaluses of the will, successful plebeians who knew themselves to be incapable, both in their lives and work, of a noble tempo, a lento…unbridled workers, almost self-destroyers through work, antinomians and rebels against custom, ambitious and insatiable without balance and enjoyment, all of them broke and collapsed in the end before the Christian cross (with right and reason: for who among them would have been profound and original enough for a philosophy of the Antichrist?) (BGE 256).
In this and similar passages one can see how the reaction against the bankruptcy of traditional cultural norms has lead to the unleashing of self-destructive energies.
Nervous condition permeated by confusion, as a hallmark of romanticism, is accompanied by a prolonged introspection, with the emphasis constantly on subjective expression ‘at any price’. This extreme self-absorption parallels the birth of asceticism
Nietzsche outlines in GM; asceticism was seen to be a dangerous cultural manifestation because it represents a turning of energies, more specifically will to power, against themselves, rather than directing them outwards, the process which first generated subjectivity, and the ascetic spirit that informs the pessimistic neurosis of modernity represents the triumph of that particular direction in the will to power. The state of repressive self-absorption characteristic of romanticism, for Nietzsche, stems from the
170 fact that, while the logic of metaphysics and hence the entire edifice of Western culture is in the process of collapsing, the transcendent foundation of their authority still remains as an object of desire. As Nietzsche says all romantics eventually sink down
‘before the cross’ suggesting that behind their antinomian production there still lies the hope for redemption through some form of restoration of transcendent values, a hope whose lack of fulfillment leads inevitably to despair. The example of Wagner is of importance here, in particular Parsifal, which for Nietzsche signifies Wagner’s ultimate weakness: ‘For Parsifal is a work of spite, of vengefulness, of secret poison against the preconditions of life, a bad work. The sermon on poverty remains a stimulant to the unnatural, I despise everyone who does not feel Parsifal as an assassination of morality’
(NCW Wagner as the Apostle of Chastity). In his final analyses of Wagner, Nietzsche goes even further. Wagner does not aim merely to rebel against tradition and custom, rather he panders to the weak: ‘Revenge against life itself – the most voluptuous kind of rapture for such impoverished ones!...Wagner just as much as Schopenhauer answers the double requirement of these latter – they deny life, they defame it, thus they are my antipodes’ (NCW, We Antipodeans).
As I have mentioned earlier, alongside romanticism, realism features prominently in Nietzsche’s critique of art. We may recall Nietzsche’s scorn against any suggestion of art’s connection to truth, that is, against the claim that art performs a truth-disclosing function, and it is against the background of this critique and
Nietzsche’s frequent assertions that art is a form of falsehood, a rhetorical strategy employed to aggravate the discord between art and truth, that one should read
171 Nietzsche’s criticism of realism and its positivist assumptions. It is significant that in his middle works, supposedly more sympathetic to the sciences, Nietzsche is nevertheless critical of the realist movement in art, which would function as an artistic analogue to the scientific positivism of the nineteenth century. Among the verses of ‘Jest, Cunning and Revenge’ preceding the main text of GS Nietzsche writes the following:
The realistic painters “True to nature, all the truth: that’s art This hallowed notion is a threadbare fable, Infinite is nature’s smallest part. They paint what happens to delight their heart. And what delights them? What to paint they’re able.
On the basis of this, one can observe that Nietzsche’s work of the so-called middle period consists of more than a mere overturning of the super-sensualism of Plato into purely sensualist positivism. For not only does Nietzsche challenge the idea that nature can simply be ‘reproduced’ in its entirety through art, but he is also challenging the idea of nature as a simple given. Referring implicitly to perspectivism, nature is instead seen as an infinity that cannot be depicted as an empirical totality. This criticism is repeated in notes from 1884, where the object this time is Flaubert and photography. Here
Nietzsche observes that ‘the “will-to-be-objective” e.g. in Flaubert is a modern misunderstanding…Gentleman, there is no “thing-in-itself”! What they achieve is scientism or photography, i.e. description without perspective, a type of Chinese painting, pure foreground and everything full to bursting’.112 His unpublished notes from mid and late 1880s include a variety of references to authors such as Zola, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, all of which are critical of the realist and naturalist project.
112KSA II: 25 (164).
172 One note from early 1884 complains of ‘the lack of powerful souls’ of which an example is ‘objectivity as a modern means to lose oneself through low self-estimation
(as in Flaubert)’.113 This criticism reiterates a point made in the previous note cited, in which Nietzsche argues that ‘Greatness of form, undistracted by individual stimuli, is the expression of greatness of character…it is an act of self-hatred on the part of the moderns when, like Schopenhauer, they would like to ‘lose themselves’ in art – to take refuge in the object, to ‘deny themselves.’114 Through the espousal of a notion of authorial self-erasure Flaubert counts for Nietzsche as an example again of Kantian disinterest. The attempt at self-transcendence on the part of the author or painter is, quite simply, a delusion. The desire by the author to efface himself, to submerse himself completely into the objective world being disclosed, is to ignore the role of the author in constituting that world, in having access to only certain perspectives on the world and not others.
As if continuing this criticism of the same delusion, Nietzsche writes some three years later, ‘It is not possible to remain objective or to suspend interpretive, additive, supplementing, poetizing power (-which latter forges the claim that affirms the beautiful)’ (WP 804). Naturalism is driven by the same will to truth that motivates metaphysics and thus, alongside romanticism, is to be seen as a symptom of modern condition. One fragment of the ‘Will to Truth’ which explores the ‘longing for belief’ also includes contemporary naturalism; Nietzsche asks, ‘what does the will to truth mean in
113 KSA II: 25 (216). 114 KSA II: 25 (164). Nietzsche’s comments on the erasure of authorial subjectivity are also part of a response to Burckhardt who equates grand style with ‘impersonality’ (see Burckhardt, Jakob. Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens, Basel: Schweighauser, 1855).
173 the Goncourts? among naturalists?’. The context of these rhetorical questions suggests the answer to be supplied. The Goncourt brothers count amongst the ‘Modern pessimists as decadents’, alongside Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Leopardi, and Philip
Mainlander.115 A fragment from 1887 develops this at much greater length. Beginning with the title ‘The descriptive, the picturesque as symptoms of nihilism in the art and psychology’, Nietzsche comments, ‘Never observe in order to observe. That produces a false optic, a squinting, something forced and exaggerated’.116 Later he adds, ‘”Nature” in the artistic sense is never “true”; it exaggerates, it consumes, it leaves gaps. The
“study after nature” is a sign of submission, of weakness, a kind of fatalism unworthy of the artist. To see what is – that belongs to another specific kind of spirit, those who are factual, who make sure: if this sense is developed to the full, one is inartistic’.117 A similar diagnosis is presented in NCW where Nietzsche singles out Flaubert for criticism:
With regard to artists of every kind I now make use of this principal distinction: has hatred towards life or the superabundance of life been creative here? In Goethe, for example, superabundance became creative, in Flaubert hatred: Flaubert, a repeat version of Pascal, but in the form of an artist, with the instinctual judgment on the basis of that: ‘Flaubert est toujours haissable, l’homme n’est rien, l’oeuvre est tout’…he tortured himself whenever he wrote just as Pascal tortured himself when he thought – both had unegoistic sensibilities…’selflessness’ – the principle of decadence, the will to termination in art as in morality (NCW We Antipodeans).
Although realism and romanticism appear to be opposed, for Nietzsche they are both symptoms of the same nihilist problem, both seek the erasure of the artist in the name of either a transcendental truth or the objective truth of factual observation. The self- erasure of the author in the name of objectivity is a central element in the nihilist orientation of realism. Nietzsche is quite clear about the impossibility of an author’s
115 KSA 13: 14 (222). 116 KSA 12: 9 (110). 117KSA 12: 9 (110).
174 transcending his own subjective perspective: ‘People have regarded as “impersonal” what was the expression of the most powerful persons…But the gentlemen would love to hide and be rid of themselves, e.g. Flaubert’.118 Moreover, he interprets such putative self-transcendence on the part of the artist as an expression of decadence, a denigration of the self that mirrors the romantic denigration of he objective. Like Flaubert, Zola counts as a prime case of such decadence. With his ‘delight in stinking’, Zola is ranked alongside Victor Hugo, Kant, List, and others as one of the ‘impossibles’. Significantly,
Zola is accused of producing the same type of disorientation as romanticism, and
Nietzsche thus mentions him alongside Wagner: ‘a wild multiplicity, an overwhelming mass, before which the senses become confused; brutality in color, material, desires.
Examples: Zola, Wagner (WP 827). Like Wagner, Hugo and Hyppolyte Taine, Zola is guilty of an ‘inability to tyrannize over oneself concerning the main thing – namely in regard to the work itself (omitting, shortening, clarifying, simplifying)’ (WP 849).
Akin to romanticism, realism thus also turns out to be a reactive response to the loss of tradition and legitimacy of traditional values. This time, however, unlike romanticism, it does not resort to a destructive and self-destructive resentment against the world, but rather takes refuge in an ‘objective’ order of things, at the same time wiping out the subject that might put the legitimacy of that order in doubt once again. It is a rejection of tradition in the name of a higher objective truth, uncritically re- inscribing those values which sustained tradition into a new scheme of values. The intimate connection between realism and romanticism becomes apparent again in
118 KSA 11: 25 (117).
175 Wagner’s operas in which redemption is achieved through the negation of consciousness. Paradoxically, therefore, self-denial functions as the basis for both the romanticism of Wagner and the realism of Flaubert or Zola.
The Death of Art
It is clear from the foregoing discussion that Nietzsche’s attitude towards art underwent some seismic changes after the publication of BT. The view of art that now emerges from Nietzsche’s writings is much more critical and much more radical then generally acknowledged and perhaps to such a degree that he comes close to, or perhaps surpasses Hegel in proclaiming the death of art. Although Nietzsche never subscribed to Hegel’s system building or the idea of Absolute Knowledge, to say the least, the parallel nevertheless seems appropriate because both see art as having lost something essential. What that is in both cases of course differs; for Hegel it is the fact that the Absolute no longer reveals itself through art, and for Nietzsche it is the fact that art has lost touch with life. But while claiming art to be a thing of the past Hegel nevertheless strives to show that there is still a place for art as a vehicle for our inner life, and for imagination as the means by which the mind can transform the external reality according to its own vision. Nietzsche’s position, by comparison, may appear to
176 be more radical because it undermines and negates the traditional or metaphysical conception of art - the way art has been understood thus far - as well as the contemporary artistic practices because of their decadent and misguided commitment to truth and the notion of transcendence. In Hegel’s dialectical progression towards self- realization of the Absolute, the departure from art is a necessary one. In Nietzsche’s account however, the loss of the connection between life and art is a contingent matter, which leaves open the possibility of their reconnection. Whether or not, and in what way, this possibility can turn into actuality is a crucial question that Nietzsche’s aesthetic project has to answer, for his severe critique of both aesthetic tradition and contemporary artistic practices seems to contradict his tendency to see in art a ‘great stimulus to life’ or, at the very least, a potential for overcoming the crisis of modernity.
I will turn to the question of the consistency of Nietzsche’s thought on art in the following chapter, but now I whish only to point to what seems an inevitable consequence of his critique of art. It is far-reaching, and it seems indeed to spell out the death of art, since for Nietzsche, all those elements hitherto considered central to art no longer have any legitimacy; it is the end of the metaphysical conception of art as truth- disclosing practice, the death of the autonomy of the work of art, its universality, disinterestedness of our experience of it, and the end of the authority and the myth of artistic genius. And more than this, Nietzsche’s critique involves systematic attempts to undermine, negate, and expose as self-defeating or life-denying not only the conception of art and artistic production conceived by the aesthetic tradition, but also modern artistic practices, the consumption of art as a cultural good, the mass appeal of popular
177 theatre, romanticism, naturalism, and realism. What follows from Nietzsche’s analysis of modernity’s decadence and its relation to art, is that Nietzsche sees art in a direct opposition to life and life-affirming practices, stating that ‘it would be truly desirable for man not to need art’. ‘Our art’ is decadent, superficial, and trivial and it perpetuates and satisfies our demands for metaphysical comfort and our need for distraction, rather than overcoming them. Nietzsche’s position then may appear quite radical. Having placed art in a direct opposition to the demands of a healthy life and culture, and having diagnosed that the instincts behind art now cut off from the wholeness of life have become decadent, unworthy, and trivial, Nietzsche may be left with the view that art is something that ought to be allowed to perish. Having condemned the traditional metaphysical conception of art as well as contemporary artistic practices, Nietzsche may have little choice but to declare art dead.
But Nietzsche never announces the death of art with the same force and a sense of urgency with which he pronounces the death of God. It might be argued that it is because he no longer grants art a high degree of importance as he may have done early on, in The Birth of Tragedy. From Nietzsche’s perspective, as we have seen, art has become relegated to leisure and entertainment, satisfying ‘petty and small needs’, and serving as a means of distraction and escape from boredom. As such it may at this point be irrelevant and simply not deserving of that kind of attention. The death of art is not a tremendous ‘recent event’, ‘far too great for the multitude’s capacity for comprehension’ that Nietzsche would have reason to give it weight in his rhetoric.
Rather, after the loss of Greek tragedy due to the infusion of the Socratic theoretical
178 optimism into the art form, art has begun to lose its affirmative content and slowly to wither away. And it may very well be the case that for Nietzsche this process should be left to play itself out, because as he says ‘many vital discoveries can be made’ once we recognize art and artists for what they are (HATH I, 188).
CHAPTER IV
179 Art Re-Imagined
It is clear that Nietzsche saw art as deeply implicated in the crisis of modernity, and that his concern and treatment of art (metaphysics and much else) was not motivated by simple philosophical curiosity. Nietzsche approached the problem of art primarily as a cultural critic; the tone and urgency of his critique are motivated by the conviction that modernity was caught in a dead end, that its cultural forms have become exhausted and self-defeating. That he was so critical of art and of modern culture in general does not mean, however, that Nietzsche did not try to imagine how they might be led out of this dead end, and how their decadence might be overcome. As I have noted earlier, this is precisely the central preoccupation of Nietzsche’s thought; the possibility of overcoming of modernity and the crisis of nihilism while at the same time allowing for the possibility of some anti- or post-metaphysical form of normative framework.
As can be gleaned from the discussion in Chapter II, this search for a post- metaphysical normative discourse must be worked out with the model of the artist and the artistic creation of meaning through an interpretive practice that refuses the lure of transcendence but whose interpretive criteria are immanent to its practice. Thus the new reconstructed and more affirmative view of art too must be grounded in the insights gained from the larger perspective of Nietzsche’s philosophical project – that is, art must be conceived as interpretive will to power. In what follows I will attempt to reconstruct what this conception of art and the artistic may be in Nietzsche and in view
180 of the dual purpose it is meant to serve – as a means of critiquing modern culture and aesthetic tradition, and as a model of a normative framework that provides immanent rather than transcendent grounds for values and judgment. Finally, with the view of this development in Nietzsche’s thought I will return to the issue of the death of art.
Interpretive Dialectics
I have already pointed out that my reading of Nietzsche suggests that the notion of contradiction plays an important role in Nietzsche’s interpretive project, being a locus around which much of Nietzsche’s thought is organized. We may recall that the contradiction of modernity that Nietzsche thinks must be overcome stems from the loss of a center of gravity and the continued yearning for one. It has been suggested that this tension between the denial of metaphysical certitude and a continued search for some non-metaphysical grounding is precisely and only that, a tension.119 In other words, since Nietzsche denies the notion of any transcendent value and affirms the notion of an immanent one - that is, simply denies one thing and affirms another - there is no real dialectic to speak of in Nietzsche’s thought. However, it could also be argued that what is actually going on here is recognition of the necessity of some grounding of
119 Cox 1999, pp. 24 .
181 our values and claims, and that the affirmation of non-transcendent value is already that which has overcome the contradiction between the attempts to establish a metaphysical certitude and their continual failure. And Nietzsche indeed draws on the real contradiction since the crisis of modernity involves at the same time the loss of metaphysical grounding and a continued need for one. This, as I have argued, is best exemplified by art that continually attempts to provide a refuge or metaphysical consolation through some sense or experience of transcendence. Thus, Nietzsche is not only diagnosing the real contradiction here but also attempting to work through it by formulating a non-metaphysical interpretive framework which incorporates both the necessity for some sort of grounding of our values and the denial of their metaphysical origin.
This suggests reconciliation or resolutions of contradictions and indeed they can be found everywhere in Nietzsche’s corpus. Nietzsche’s conception of tragedy for instance combines negation and affirmation, Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos, lack of meaning and meaningfulness, horror of existence and the joy of becoming. To be clear, however, the notion of reconciliation in Nietzsche’s interpretive project is only partial because Nietzsche does not subscribe to anything like the idea that there is final moment when all contradictions are resolved in the consummation of absolute knowledge, as Hegel does. Nietzsche’s interpretive practice of overcoming is one in which interpretations are posited and negated, supplemented by other perspectives, but this process is not carried out towards absolute knowledge. Rather, it proceeds in recognition of the provisional and incomplete nature of all interpretation. As I have
182 argued, Nietzsche’s interpretive project is dedicated to ‘cultivation and preparation of the intellect’ to ‘employ the variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge’ (GM III, 12), yet this knowledge has no clearly defined telos.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism overcomes the limited and impoverished metaphysical understanding and allows for the possibility of constructing a countless number of perspectives. It does so by means of interpretation conceived along the lines of will to power, as a dynamic dialectical process of assimilating, shaping, inventing, appropriating and seeking resistance or contradiction, as a means of ‘becoming a master of something’, of acquiring more power and of interpreting more in a constant expansion of perspectives. Thus, this interpretive process, which as I have already argued is synonymous with the notion of will to power, facilitates both overcoming involved in acquisition of ‘knowledge’ as well as overcoming that works through the contradiction between the denial of metaphysical foundational certitude and a possibility of some non-metaphysical grounding.
Apart from the notion of reconciliation, a recurrent motif in Nietzsche’s description of will to power and interpretation that speaks to its dialectical character is the notion of simplification, organization and negation. For example, Nietzsche says
‘there is a will to power in the organic process by virtue of which dominant shaping commanding forces continually extend the sphere of their power and within this always simplify’ (WP 644). Elsewhere he declares, ‘one should value more than truth the force that forms, simplifies, shapes, invents’ (WP 602). This notion is reaffirmed in the claim that ‘The degree of resistance and the degree of superior power – that is the question in
183 every event’ (WP 634). A fuller expression of these ideas and their connection is provided in a note from 1887 in which Nietzsche asserts that ‘the will to power can manifest itself against resistance, therefore it seeks that which resists it…Appropriation and assimilation are above all a desire to overwhelm, a forming, shaping and reshaping…If this incorporation is not successful than the form probably falls into pieces’
(WP 656).
Nietzsche’s reference to simplification, and to disintegration as its opposite in the case of failure, recalls his characterization of passive nihilism that is marked by both
‘weariness’, that is, a loss of power, and by a loss of gravity. His interpretation of cosmopolitanism was as a symptom of weary indifference. This can now be reformulated, for Nietzsche’s critique is aimed specifically at the lack of appropriation, of will to power, that underpins cosmopolitan taste: ‘Our Europe of today, being the arena of absurdly sudden attempt at radical mixture of classes and hence races…is merely dressed-up skepticism and paralysis of the will: for this diagnosis of the
European sickness I vouch’ (BGE 208). The passive nihilism of modernity, its decadence, is the sign of exhausted will, and here the nature of the configuration of will, modernity, and interpretation becomes clearer. Nietzsche’s original diagnosis of modern nihilism was based on the notion of the highest values devaluing themselves. In particular, the promise of truth was seen as hollow. The notion of will to power adds to this diagnosis the dimension of power, for ‘knowledge’, in the sense of the metaphysical search for certitude, contradicts the motivation of will to power. Whereas will to power seeks resistance, metaphysics seeks stability. ‘That which comes to standstill…is laziness’ (WP
184 575), Nietzsche says, while urging ‘against peaceableness and the desire for reconciliation’ (WP 601).
The question now is what Nietzsche is referring to with the notion of resistance.
When he talks about protoplasm overcoming its neighbor, for example, it is quite clear, but less so when will to power is abstracted into a functional explanation of interpretation. Returning to the question of plurality of interpretations provides a way into this issue. I have noted earlier that Nietzsche’s critique of the traditional conception of truth and meaning involves recognition of the constant possibility of construing new perspectives, new forms of ‘knowledge’. It is this, I would argue, that offers the resistance that will to power seeks, for the world, in this conception of interpretation, remains an enigma that will always elude the attempt to grasp it conceptually. Nietzsche states that ‘there are no facts, everything is in flux, incomprehensible, elusive’ (WP 604).
The crucial issue, then, is how to respond to this resistance. Nietzsche offers the most succinct formulation of the matter when he writes, ‘No limits to the ways in which the world can be interpreted; every interpretation a symptom of growth or decline…plurality of interpretations a sign of strength. No desire to deprive the world of its disturbing, and enigmatic character’ (WP 600). Nietzsche is thus setting up an opposition between a passivity that remains caught within a specific interpretation and an active pursuit of new perspectives. Significantly, failure to seek new perspectives is not regarded simply as the preservation of the status quo but as already a process of decay. In contrast, the active nihilist must always seek new interpretations, which indicates the structural parallelism of interpretation and will to power. Against this,
185 Nietzsche notes that much of European culture consists of ‘grand struggle against the feeling of displeasure,’ a goal achieved ‘by means that reduce the feeling of life in general to its lowest point. If possible, will and desire are abolished altogether’ (GM III,
17).
The link between will to power and interpretation thus functions as a strategic device for critiquing what Nietzsche perceived to be the decadence of a culture approaching the crisis of limited, self-negating values. Asceticism offers the most potent embodiment of this process, for the ascetic ideal, manifest in the philosophical distrust of the senses, or in the Christian denigration of mundane transience, ‘springs from the protective instinct of a denigrating life…a partial physiological obstruction and exhaustion’ (GM III, 13). And yet while asceticism denies the search for resistance that is essential to active nihilism and, ultimately, that underlies the logic of will to power, the ascetic ideal, like all forms of knowledge is also driven by will to power. The difference is that here the negation that drives the ideal is no longer the inadequacy of individual perspectives, but rather the pessimistic self-denial resulting from the failure of the highest metaphysical ideals. As Nietzsche surmises,
To renounce the belief in one’s ego, to deny one’s own “reality”- what a triumph, not merely over the senses, over appearances, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violation and cruelty against reason…when the ascetic self-contempt and self-mockery of reason declares: “there is a realm of truth and being, but reason is excluded from it!”’ (GM III, 12).
As pointed out earlier, tolerance of plurality per se is a symptom of pessimistic indifference, specifically through the absence of resistance. Resistance or negation thus
186 figures as a crucial element in Nietzsche’s thinking, and it allows one to speak of a
Nietzschean dialectic of interpretation, which permits the application of judgments of value to individual interpretations. As we have seen, it also prevents pluralism from lapsing into relativism. Specifically, the equation of power and interpretation offers interpretation-immanent criteria for judging interpretations. This means that, if the notion of will to power, as will to more power, is translated into language of interpretation and perspectivism, the character of interpretation is always one of wanting to interpret more, in a constant expansion of perspectives. Thus Nietzsche’s model is a hermeneutic practice of overcoming, in which specific interpretations are posited and simultaneously negated, supplemented with other perspectives. Unlike
Hegel however, the negation of interpretation is not carried out along the path to absolute knowledge, but in recognition of the provisional and incomplete nature of interpretations. Nietzsche’s interpretive project of overcoming emphasize the productive function of negation, but in a dialectic whose completion is indefinitely deferred, yet posited as a regulative ideal. It is this paradoxical model that can address or answer the challenge of radical skepticism but without lapsing into the crisis of pessimism of modernity.
In GM Nietzsche writes, “Precisely because we seek knowledge, let us not be ungrateful to such resolute reversals of customary perspectives and values…to see differently…to want to see differently is no small cultivation and preparation of the intellect for its “objectivity” – the latter not to be understood as disinterested contemplation…but rather as the ability to control and dispose of one’s Pro’s and Con’s,
187 such that one can employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge” (GM III, 12). His aim is thus to establish ‘objective’ knowledge, no matter how provisional that objectivity may be, and with the sense that there can be no clearly defined goal for knowledge. In order to express this conception Nietzsche uses a number of metaphors that overturn the traditional images used to describe the philosophical activity. For example, the philosopher is a voyager at sea, uncertain of his or her destination, in contrast with Kant’s notion of the philosopher as the surveyor of the clearly demarcated territory of human cognition.120 Similarly, Nietzsche exhibits sympathy for Don Quixote, wandering apparently aimlessly across the Iberian landscape. Such metaphors, however, do not entitle us to claim that Nietzsche abandons all pretentions to knowing. Instead, they indicate the provisional nature of any such interpreting, inasmuch as any stage in the activity of interpreting bears within it the imprint of the negation of previous perspectives. Certainly there are moments when Nietzsche seems aware of the paradoxical status of his own claims concerning the
‘truth’ of knowledge. However, these self-mocking remarks do not detract from the far more serious project that gives his work its driving force. Nietzsche’s own thought cannot pretend, under the terms of his own argument, to be the ‘truth’. Yet it can pretend to offer a more complete (pluralistic) and therefore better interpretation of reality than the ‘metaphysical’ one. ‘The power of knowledge lies not in its degree of truth but in…its character as a condition of life’ (GS 110) and the more resistance a specific interpretation stage seeks and overcomes, the more life-enhancing it is.
120 This point has been made by Karsten Harries, in Harries 1988, pp.33.
188 Drawing similarities between the expansion of perspectives and dialectical thought as I have done here, stands in paradoxical contrast to Nietzsche’s many criticisms of Socrates, Plato, Hegel and dialectics in general. Admittedly, Hegel’s dialectic constitutes a logically inevitable unfolding of consciousness on the path towards
Absolute Knowledge, but it is the parallel in the productive function of negation in Hegel and Nietzsche that is of greater importance.121 Negation, in Hegel, is the means to overcome one-sidedness, just as in Nietzsche the project of interpretation is to overcome the narrowness of prior perspectives. Nietzsche ridicules the metaphysical ideal of a perspectiveless knowledge, and likewise Hegel claims that ‘Being, pure being, without any further determination…is in fact nothing, and neither more not less than nothing’.122 For Nietzsche, although the perspective functions as negativity - that is, as a limitation which renders obsolete the metaphysical ideal of pure knowledge - it is also what facilitates interpretation. With perspectivism there can be no knowledge; without perspectives there can be no interpretations. It is a position fully permeated by the spirit of Hegel where negation is that which rescues being from pure nothingness. If, as Hegel says, ‘on the other hand, reality is taken in its determinateness, then since it essentially contains the moment of the negative, the sum-total of all realities becomes just as much a sum-total of all negations, the sum-total of all contradictions’.123 The proximity of their positions can also be seen in Nietzsche’s well known assertion in GM that ‘There is only
121 As Josef Simon notes, the difference between Nietzsche and Enlightenment thinkers is that whereas all share a recognition of the historicity of knowledge, Nietzsche thereby affirms the process of enlightenment without end, as the activity itself, whereas other thinkers such as Kant and Hegel see humanity as being on the path toward some goal of complete enlightened being. See Simon 1989. 122 Hegel 1969, pp. 82. 123 Ibid, pp. 113.
189 a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing’ (GM III, 12). Taken out of context the passage might seem to demonstrate just the contrary, namely, that the cumulative workings of the dialectic are quite alien to Nietzsche’s thinking. However, the remainder of the passage in question runs: ‘ and the more affects we allow to speak about an object, the more eyes, different eyes we know to employ for the same thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be’. This is certainly an endorsement of some form of objective understanding, some form of normativity by which judgments can be made. Yet it does not appeal to some order of things antecedent and exterior to the discourse of interpretation. Rather, it grounds the interpretive criteria in the demands of the particular form of life that does the interpreting. Of course, while the stress on the dialectical structure of interpretation points to an obvious connection with Hegel, it is important not to assimilate the one to the other. Hegel’s dialectic constitutes the framework of a systematic metaphysical structure that is completely alien to Nietzsche’s thinking. Instead, in Nietzsche the notion of a dialectical interpretive history has to be seen in terms of micrological events, which, while always moving beyond themselves towards a ‘more’, nevertheless lack wider legitimacy.
An instructive parallel can be made with Theodor Adorno, whose negative dialectics, reworking Hegel, lay an equal stress on the lack of final closure proper to the concept of the dialectic. Indeed, Adorno’s ‘negative dialectic’ arguably offers the link mediating the thought of Nietzsche and Hegel, so often viewed as complete antithesis.
Critical of Hegel’s placing of a positive as the culmination of the dialectical movement,
190 Adorno argues that ‘To proceed dialectically means to think in contradictions’, and consequently, ‘positivity must be denied’.124 Hegel’s error, for Adorno, was to assume that while the dynamic of the movement of thought is the unfolding of contradictions, the activity of the whole can be gathered together in a totalizing moment. As such,
Hegel, paradoxically, was only a partial dialectician: ‘To use identity as a palliative for dialectical contradiction, for the expression of the insolubly non-identical, is to ignore what the contradiction means…The thesis that the negation of a negation is something positive can only be upheld by one who presupposes positivity – at all-conceptuality – from the beginning’.125 And yet, while Adorno consistently critiques the notion of a positivity that would bring the movement of the dialectic to a close, his thinking is profoundly imbued with a sense of its necessity as a regulative ideal.
Physiology, Art, and Truth
As I have suggested earlier, part of Nietzsche’s strategy in countering the effects of metaphysical and religious thinking is to rescue the body from the oblivion into which it was cast ever since Socrates, and to give it a proper place in the human story. Thus apart from highlighting the dialectical nature of the interpretive process, Nietzsche also ties it firmly to the realm of human physiology and in doing so provides a viable
124 Adorno 1990, pp. 144-145 125 Ibid
191 alternative to the metaphysical orientation towards the transcendent grounding of values and judgments. Contrary to the tradition, Nietzsche sees the body as a determinant of thinking and we have already seen how his understanding of the relationship between will to power and the interpretive process deprives the subject of its transcendent origin and puts into question the privilege traditionally given to the conscious intellect. Nietzsche’s reinstating of the body within philosophical discourse not only allows for the possibility of acknowledging intentional activity in the spheres where it was traditionally denied but also subverts all efforts to conceive of art in metaphysical terms. It also, and rather importantly for Nietzsche’s critical project, allows for the recourse to physiology as an evaluative and diagnostic tool.
It is generally acknowledged that Nietzsche’s interest in the body was informed to some extent by his reading of Friedrich Lang’s History of Materialism in 1866 as well as some of Schopenhauer’s pronouncements on the body.126 In The World as Will and
Representation, Schopenhauer frequently expounds a view of physiology so crass that it appears as if he is satirizing contemporary biological and medical science. To give just an example, he argues that those engaged in an intellectual argument are frequently incapable of movement, since ‘as soon as their brain has to link a few ideas together, it no longer has as much force left over as it is required to keep the legs in motion through the motor nerves’.127 At the more fundamental level, it is the body that serves as the basis for Schopenhauer’s attempt to equate the Kantian thing-in-itself with the Will. In particular, he distinguishes between the body as a perceptual object and the body as
126 On Nietzsche’s relation to Lange see Stack 1983. 127 Schopenhauer 1958, vol. II pp. 284.
192 the locus of agency. In the case of the former, the body is as much an illusion as the rest of the phenomenal world, whereas in the latter it is an objectification of the Will. As
Schopenhauer notes, ‘The act of will and the action of the body are not two different states objectively known, connected by the bond of causality…but are one and the same thing, though given in two entirely different ways, first quite directly and then in perception for the understanding’ (WWR I, 18). It is this possibility of experiencing the body in a non-phenomenal manner that leads Schopenhauer to conclude that willing must be intimately related to the metaphysical essence of things. Hence the body and its actions are ‘nothing but the phenomenal appearance of the will, its becoming visible, the objectivity of the will’ (WWR I, 20).
Ultimately then, for Schopenhauer the body as a phenomenal representation is a problem to be overcome, as a part of the general process of unraveling the principium of individuationis. Nevertheless, his comments endow it with a significance that
Nietzsche later comes to incorporate. Nietzsche exhorts the reader in EH to ‘sit as little as possible; give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors while one moved about freely – in which the muscles are not celebrating a feast, too. All prejudices come from the intestines’ (EH, Why I Am So Clever, 1). Shortly afterwards
Nietzsche adds that ‘genius is determined by dry air, by clear skies – that is by rapid metabolism, by the possibility of drawing again and again on great, even tremendous quantities of strength’ (EH Why I Am So Clever, 2), a sentiment that is prefigured in the more pithy claim in GM that, ‘The abdomen is the reason why a person does not take himself too seriously for good’ (BGE 141).
193 The comparison between Nietzsche’s interest in physiology and Schopenhauer’s thinking on the body should not lead one to overlook the far more significant differences between the two. While Schopenhauer acknowledges the body’s potency, he is still concerned to free the mind from its effects, taking it to be a hindrance to true thought. In contrast, for Nietzsche the two are inseparable and as such the body gives thought its form, indeed, facilitates it. Although Nietzsche’s discussions of the body are frequently playful and mischievous, designed perhaps to deflate the solemnity of philosophical thinking this flippancy should not mislead us into doubting their significance in Nietzsche’s position.
Nietzsche suggests in GS that ‘the whole philosophy thus far’ has been nothing else than a ‘misunderstanding of the body’ (GS Preface 2), and this is both a critique of the tradition as well as the recognition of the importance of the body and of the physiological for conceptual thought. As early as the first volume of HATH Nietzsche claims that historical philosophy ‘can no longer be separated from natural science’ adding that ‘All we require…is a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations’ (HATH I, 1).128 This already anticipates his deliberate conflation of biology, chemistry and psychology in the notion of will to power. And thus the terminology of the body becomes a central weapon in Nietzsche’s cultural criticism in which all cultural phenomena are described in physiological and neurological terms.
These include, as we have seen, his view of Wagnerian theatre as a product of
128 In Nietzsche’s unpublished notes we find references to Willhelm Wundt, commonly regarded as the founder of experimental psychology, Charles Fere, the neurologist student of Charcot, together with other figures in the medical and physiological sciences such as Ernst Weber, Willhelm Roux, and Claude Bernard
194 ‘physiological degeneration’ (CW 7), his definition of modernity as a ‘physiological contradiction’ (TI Expeditions, 41), and his claim that ascetic priests are ‘physiologically inhibited’ (GM III, 18). More provocatively, and one assumes with a certain degree of levity, Nietzsche claims that ‘the spread of Buddhism (not its origin) depends heavily on the excessive and almost exclusive reliance of the Indians on rice’ (GS 134), producing a general state of slackness.129 Nietzsche concludes the aphorism with the speculation that the nihilism of the present day may originate in excessive alcoholism in the Middle
Ages.
We have seen already how nihilism results from the misunderstanding of the nature of language but now, with Nietzsche’s turn to physiology, his assessment of modern crisis gains another important dimension. The genealogy of nihilism can move further back, past the point of the simple recognition of the failure to identify the nature of language, to an analysis of the physiology of the organism which seems to have so easily taken the semiotic universe for something more. And Nietzsche’s genealogical analysis of Christian morality and the ascetic ideal is employed precisely for the purpose of uncovering a decadent form of life that has bestowed a particular meaning on the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’. And so in the GM Nietzsche treats morality as a symptom, or a
‘sign language’ of a specific physiological condition. As early as D Nietzsche claims moral judgments to be derived from feelings of pleasure and displeasure when he writes, ‘Is not the origin of all moral judgments to be found in heinous little conclusions:
129 There is also Nietzsche’s reference to ‘physiological purification and strengthening’ (WP 953); ‘physiological well-being’ (GM III 12); physiological exhaustion (WP 230); and ‘physiological decadence’ (WP 851).
195 “whatever harms me is something evil (harmful in itself); whatever aids me is something good (beneficial and useful in itself)”’ (D 102). In GS he makes the connection between morality and physiology all the more explicit by saying that ‘Whoever now intends to conduct a study of moral affairs is opening up for themselves an immense field of work.
All kinds of passion will have to be individually considered…Are we acquainted with the moral effects of means of nourishment? is there a philosophy of nutrition?’ (GS, 7).
This kind of understanding of the origins of value pervades Nietzsche’s thought until his last unpublished notes. In BGE he states that ‘morals are merely a sign language of the affects’ (BGE 187), and the list from the summer of 1888 includes as ‘Inartistic conditions: consumption, impoverishment, evacuation – will to nothing. Christian,
Buddhist, nihilist. Impoverished body’.130 Hence Nietzsche’s summation, ‘My attempt to understand moral judgments as symptoms and sign languages, where the process of physiological success or decline…betray themselves’ (WP 258). Ultimately too, it is possible to trace this path of thought back to its origins in BT where Nietzsche pointedly explains Socrates’ behavior as the product of a certain instinct, paradoxically contradicting the goal of Plato to eliminate instinct and the passions from cognition and judgment.
Thus physiology plays an essential role in Nietzsche’s critique of modernity insofar as it shows that modern man is somehow physiologically defective (and this will be couched in terms of the decline in will to power). Nietzsche therefore claims that contemporary cynicism should properly be called “nihilism”, that the question whether
130 KSA 13: 17 (9).
196 non-being is better than being is itself a disease, a sign of decline, an idiosyncrasy, and the nihilistic movement is merely the expression of physiological decadence’ (WP 38).
Nihilism is the function of a ‘weakness of the will’ (WP 46), and consequently, ‘what is inherited is not the sickness but sickliness: the lack of strength to resist the dangers of infections’ (WP 47). Hence Nietzsche’s treatment of Wagner as a case study of the wider physiological and psychological disorder of the modern age. In CW Nietzsche observes that ‘Unknowingly, against our will, we all have values, words, formulae, morals of contradictory bodily origins – considered physiologically, we are false…A diagnosis of the modern soul – where would it begin?...with a vivisection conducted on its most instructive case’ (CW Epilogue). The formal qualities of Wagner’s work are now interpreted in physiological terms. When in HATH Nietzsche had referred to Wagnerian excess as baroque, in a late fragment from 1888 he draws on the French physiologist
Claude Bernard saying that ‘Health and sickness are not essentially different…there are only differences of degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the non-harmony of normal phenomena constitute the pathological state’ (WP 250).
Physiological imagery thus forms a central component of Nietzsche’s critique of art and the discourse on physiology becomes central to Nietzsche’s re-orientation of aesthetics, specifically in his assault on the aesthetic tradition from Kant onwards.
Perhaps the most graphic example of this might be found in Nietzsche’s claim that ‘a
Raphael is unthinkable without a certain overheating of the sexual system’ (WP 800).
The choice of Raphael is of course deliberate and provocative; most frequently
197 associated with the Catholic Church of the Renaissance, Nietzsche is trying to prize apart
Raphael’s from the spiritual values of Catholicism in order to explore the physiological, affective, erotic motivation of art.
Thus the notion of art as rooted in human physiology and motivated by interpretive will to power is the result of Nietzsche’s rethinking of not only the problem of art but also those of metaphysics in general. It therefore involves an entirely different understanding of artistic process and the rethinking of the relationship between art and beauty, and art and truth. Although this notion of ‘physiology of art,’ to use Rampley’s term, is usually associated with his later writing, an attempt to reformulate aesthetic experience and artistic production in terms of physiological, affective state can be traced back to BT where the emphasis on the dependence of the aesthetic drive on instinct is central to the way Nietzsche distances himself from Schopenhauer.131
Nietzsche refers to both, the Dionysian and the Apollonian as ‘drives’, and the effect of the Dionysian is said to be a state of ‘intoxication’ similar to the ‘influence of a narcotic drink’ (BT, 1). Thus even in BT aesthetic experience is a physiological state, and this explains why both the Dionysian and the Apollonian are seen as expression of overwhelming instinct of the human organism. This image is carried over into
Nietzsche’s subsequent work and HATH for instance Nietzsche argues that art teaches us ‘to take pleasure in life and to regard the human life as a piece of nature’ (HATH I,
222). In GS this understanding is further integrated into his approach to art and aesthetics where, describing his own response to music, Nietzsche notes that ‘my foot
131 This point is made by Nussbaum1998.
198 feels the need for rhythm, dance, march; it demands of music first of all those delights that are found in good walking, striding, leaping and dancing…What is it that my whole body really expects of music? I believe its own ease: as if all animal functions should be quickened by easy, bold, exuberant, self-assured rhythms’ (GS 368). Elsewhere he draws a parallel between art and love (GS 59).
The connection between art and physiology finds its boldest expression in his writings from the late 1880s. Art is now, as I have pointed out earlier, the ‘great stimulant to life’ (WP 853), and ‘Aesthetics is irredeemably bound to…biological presuppositions’ (CW Epilogue). As Nietzsche notes, ‘Aesthetics is nothing but applied physiology’ (NCW Where I raise Objections). One note entitled “Aesthetica’ lists the sexual drive and intoxication as ‘states in which we infuse a transfiguration and fullness into things and poetize about them’ arguing that the sexual drive, intoxication and violence were ‘all predominant in the original artist’ (WP 801). Later in the same note he adds that ‘Art reminds [us] of states of animal vigor: it is on the one hand an excess and overflow of blooming physicality into the world of images and desires: on the other, an excitation of the animal functions through the images and desires of intensified life’ (WP
802).132
This last passage indicates the extent to which Nietzsche conceives the physiology of art in terms of both reception and production; animal excitation is produced by, and it produces, representations of ‘intensified life’. At the same time,
132 On Nietzsche’s physiological aesthetics see also Gerhardt 1984. Gerhardt argues that Nietzsche comes to a physiology only late in his career, whereas I believe that it is a result of a development of the same theme.
199 however, an important thread in Nietzsche’s thought on art is to attempt to shift the orientation of aesthetics towards the consideration of the producer, the artist, rather than the passive and ‘feminine’ position of the spectator. The urgency of this re- orientation has to be understood within the broader context of Nietzsche’s physiology or art, in particular its strategic role in critiquing the aesthetic tradition. Nietzsche mobilizes the metaphor of the body and the vocabulary of medicine in an attempt to critique both the formalist aesthetics of Kant and the ‘decadent’ modernism of Wagner, together with the ever-growing belief in the art for art’s sake, which, in Nietzsche’s
‘system’ is subsumed under the notion of romanticism. But most importantly, this new orientation of art functions as a link between Nietzsche’s concern with contemporary artistic practice and theory, on the one hand, and his reliance on will to power as both interpretive and a diagnostic concept on the other – disintegration of style into theatricality and sentimentality, orientation towards the transcendent, and the general neurosis of modernity are all reflective of the inability to impose control and a sense of calm measure, and of declining organizational powers of decadent physiological types.
The notion of art for art’s sake, which I have discussed earlier, stemming from the Kantian idea of disinterestedness, functions as a corollary to ‘that dangerous old conceptual fable, which has posited a “pure will-less, painless, atemporal subject of cognition’ (GM III, 12). Naturally, Nietzsche’s understanding of selfhood rules out accepting either the Kantian aesthetic subject or the derivate notion of artistic autonomy. His grounding of all acts of cognition or interpretation in will to power and perspectivism of human physiology cannot permit the formulation of aesthetic
200 experience on Kantian lines. The physiology of art plays a crucial function in this regard, for it serves to bind the notion of art, artistic creativity, and aesthetic experience firmly to human physiology, to desire and willing. In other words, the relation between art and will to power is made explicit through their common grounding in physiology.
Nietzsche’s notebooks and later works such as TI and the essays on Wagner are abundant with references to beauty as a purely physiological phenomenon: the pleasure in beautiful objects is a sexual pleasure, artistic creativity is a process of procreation, ‘all art…inflames desire’ (WP 809). Also, ‘art reminds us of states of animal vigor …through pictures and desire for intensified life (WP 802). Although sexuality is more commonly associated with Dionysus, Nietzsche is keen to emphasize that it is just as central to
Apollo, as he notes, ‘In the Dionysian intoxication there is sexuality and voluptuousness: they are not lacking in the Apollonian’. The main distinction between the two impulses is a ‘difference in tempo’ where ‘the extreme calm in certain sensations of intoxication…likes to be reflected in a vision of the calmest gestures’ (WP 799). It is notable too that while Nietzsche frequently restricts himself to the traditional framework of aesthetics in discussing merely the role of beauty, he also explores the aesthetic function of ugliness in relation to sexuality and power. He continues, ‘To what extent can even ugliness also have this power? Inasmuch as it still communicates something to the victorious energy of the artist who has become master over the ugly and the frightful; or inasmuch as it gently excites in us the pleasure of cruelty’ (ibid). On the one hand, ‘ugliness signifies the decadence of a type’ (WP 800), but on the other, the confrontation with it can become a source of excitement, and hence one can see
201 here an aesthetic counterpart to Nietzsche’s emphasis on the necessity of resistance for will to power.
The link to will to power becomes even clearer when we recall that the notion of interpretive will to power is not limited in Nietzsche to the activity of just human subjects attempting to construct a horizon of meaning. A crucial element of Nietzsche’s thinking is the project of outlining the extent to which cognitive functions are shaped by the organic processes of the body. As Nietzsche says, ‘It seems to me that what is generally attributed to the mind characterizes the being of the organic: and in the highest functions of the mind I find merely a sublime type of organic function’.133
Additionally, however, interpretive will to power can be seen, for Nietzsche, to be functioning at even the lowest level of organic life. As early as the first volume of HATH,
Nietzsche discusses the manner in which the plant interprets its environment in order to enhance its own life (HATH I, 18). As I have demonstrated earlier, Nietzsche views conscious interpretation as a merely sophisticated variety of precisely this basic organic interpretive will to power. Organisms, no matter how primitive, organize themselves and their environment, such that Nietzsche can claim that, ‘propagation amongst amoebae seems to be throwing off ballast, a pure advantage. The excretion of useless material’ (WP 635).
On the basis of such an understanding of the organic as always already interpreting, organizing in order to further their will to power, it is clear that art, as a physiological activity, is motivated not only by desire, but also by interpretive desire for
133 KSA 11: 25 (356).
202 power. The beautiful then is quite simply that which enhances the feeling of power, as that which best interprets and organizes the world. Nietzsche writes, ‘”Beauty” is for the artist something outside all orders of rank, because in beauty opposites are tamed: the highest sign of power, namely power over opposites: moreover, without tension: - that violence is no longer needed; that everything follows, obeys, so easily and so pleasantly
– that is what delights the artist’s will to power’ (WP 803). Here we find cashed out in concrete terms how it is that the beautiful promotes, or delights will to power. It is because the beautiful represents a supreme mastery of organization and control over its elements, an act of mastery driven by will to mastery. This capacity is what Nietzsche will call ‘grand style’ and it is not simply the mark of the artist. Nietzsche notes, “The artwork, where it appears without the artist, e.g. as body, as organization (Prussian officer corps, Jesuit order)” (WP 796) and it is the organizational perfection of both of these bodies that inspires the goal of interpretive process to gain ever increasing control and organization. But here, and in keeping with his general idea of will to power as subjectless process, Nietzsche sees the mastery characteristic of beauty as not that of the artist but of the aesthetic process: ‘art appears in man like a force of nature and disposes of him whether he will or not’ (WP 798). Again the role of the ugly comes into consideration in this context, for the confrontation with ugliness is a supreme example of aesthetic will to power. Nietzsche notes, ‘The ugly suggests ugly things; one can use one’s state of health to test how variously an indisposition increases the capacity for imagining ugly things’ (WP 809).
203 Nietzsche’s emphasis on physiology of art might tempt one to interpret him as implying that artistic production is driven by a natural spontaneous expressivity. This impression is fortified by his repeated reference to the role of instinct in aesthetic judgment. A note from 1887 declares that “Judgments concerning beauty and ugliness are short-sighted (- they are always opposed by the understanding -) but persuasive in the highest degree; they appeal to your instincts where they decide most quickly and pronounce their Yes and No before the understanding can speak” (WP 804). In particular, the opposition between understanding and the aesthetic instinct seems to employ a familiar philosopheme, which fits easily into his stress on the physiological basis of art. However, this has to be contrasted with his assertion that ‘Every mature art has a host of conventions as its basis – in so far as it is a language. Convention is the condition of great art, not an obstacle’ (WP 809). This brief comment repeats the argument Nietzsche puts forward at greater length in GS on the necessity of untruthfulness. Beginning with recognition of the importance of artifice in Greek tragedy, Nietzsche asserts that,
Deviation from nature is perhaps the most agreeable repast for human pride: for its sake man loves art as the expression of a lofty, heroic unnaturalness and convention. We rightly reproach a dramatic poet if he does not transmute everything into reason and words…just as we are dissatisfied with the operatic composer who cannot find melodies for the highest sentiments but only a sentimental ‘natural’ stammering and screaming, at this point nature is supposed to be contradicted (GS 80).
At the root of this is the idea that art should consist in transfiguration, rather than mimesis, and it is motivated by the association of art and will to power. It also
204 inspires criticism of Aristotle’s interpretation of tragedy as the catharsis of fear and pity.
In contrast, Nietzsche argues tragedy’s unnaturalness, the reduction of the actor to a
‘solemn, stiff, masked bogey’ implies quite the opposite. The Greeks ‘deprived passion itself of any deep background and dictated to it a law of beautiful speeches. Indeed, they did everything to counteract the elementary effect of images that arouse fear and pity’ (ibid). This reading of tragedy displays Nietzsche’s understanding of art as an achievement of will to power rather than a simple mimesis of suffering, and it also points towards Nietzsche’s Dionysian classicism, in which the essence of art is a kind of ordering and idealization, albeit motivated by physiological impulses.
This understanding of art as an exemplification of interpretive will to power is encapsulated in Nietzsche’s preference for classicism and antipathy for romanticism.
The latter, a lack of organization and discipline, is a product of feeble spirits unable to exercise control over either themselves or their material, or both, whereas the classical
(and by this Nietzsche frequently means the neo-classicism of Poussin or of the eighteenth century rather than just classical antiquity) is a product of a strong organizational drive.
Thus in contrast to the excess of romanticism and decadence of all forms of modern art, Nietzsche recommends the employment of ‘biting coldness’ as a mark of the ‘grand style’. ‘All modern writing’ Nietzsche says is characterized by
“exaggeratedness and even when it is written simply the words it contains are felt too eccentrically. Rigorous reflection, terseness, coldness, simplicity, deliberately pursued even to their limit, self-containment of the feelings and silence in general – that alone
205 can help us” (HATH I, 195). In the second volume of HATH Nietzsche returns to this theme, noting that “All great art…likes to arrest the feelings on their course and not allow them to run quiet to their conclusion” (HATH II, 136). Nietzsche recommends therefore the same kind of dialectical rigor in reference to art which he brings to bear to the question of interpretation in general.
Great artistic representation, Nietzsche thinks, consists of a selective image of the world, displaying the ability to constrain creative impulses that the baroque and the romantic were unable to do; “the good poet of the future will depict only reality and completely ignore all those fantastic, superstitious, half-mendacious, faded subjects upon which earlier poets demonstrated their powers. Only reality, but by no means every reality! – he will depict a selected reality” (HATH II, 114). Although Nietzsche does not overtly describe this practice as classicism in Human All Too Human, it clearly prefigures what he will later come to term ‘Dionysian classicism’, and the inclusion of the Dionysian in the term alerts us to the nuances of what he is implying. While
Nietzsche’s opposition to romanticism and preference for a certain aesthetic austerity could easily lead one into reading Nietzsche as a late nineteenth century conservative, his critique of romantic modernity is nevertheless not undertaken in the name of a timeless classicism, even if he still sees the Greeks as an exemplary culture. This can be gleaned from his comments on Lawrence Sterne; praising Sterne as a truly free spirit in comparison with whom all his contemporaries seem stiff and crude, Nietzsche writes,
“What is to be praised in him is not the closed and transparent but the “endless melody”: if with this expression we may designate an artistic style in which the fixed
206 form is constantly being broken up, displaced, transposed back into indefiniteness so that it signifies one thing and at the same time another” (HATH II, 113). Hence
Nietzsche’s classicism has a significantly modern tone, for despite the central importance of a controlling structure, that structure is always subject to displacement and dissolution. A parallel with the larger notion of dialectic in perpetual flux is suggested here, as well as one with Wagner and romanticism, but the important difference is that, in the case of Sterne, the artistic free spirit is able to manipulate the negation of meaning consciously, whereas the modern artist seems to be a victim of a nihilistic loss of meaning.
In the second volume of HATH Nietzsche makes a distinction between classicism and romanticism with the idea of strength as a distinguishing criterion and thus points to the merging of will to power and physiology in the conception of art, when he writes that “Both classically and romantically minded spirits…contemplate a vision of the future: but the former do it on the basis of the strength of their time, and the latter on the basis of its weakness” (WS 217). In the fifth book of GS Nietzsche offers a fuller distinction between an active and reactive creative principle, once again on the basis of whether an enfeebled reactive desire for absolution motivates the artistic drive, or whether it is instead animated by an active superabundant power. It is worth citing again, every art, every philosophy can be seen as a means to healing and help in the service of growing struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. Yet there are two kinds of sufferers, on the one hand those who suffer from super-abundance of life…and on the other those who suffer from an impoverishment of life…who seek peace, calm…redemption from themselves through art’ (GS 370).
207 In declining types art can serve as a means of revenge against life, and hence the mimesis of suffering goes only towards strengthening romantic pessimism. But in strong types it can represent suffering in order to overcome it and subsequently to affirm suffering and the world in general, as is the case with Greek tragedy. Hence the artistic representation of suffering is an ambivalent praxis, which, like nihilism, can be employed in both an active and reactive sense. As active it can be the work of ‘the forward striving spirit’ (WP 848), where will to power interprets and gathers up ever more, where ‘opposites are tamed’ in the grand style of Dionysian Classicism, and yet where the contingent nature of that interpretation is recognized and in addition celebrated. As reactive, it can be the product of the ‘disinherited’ spirit whose faith in the ‘tree of knowledge’ (BGE 152) has been shattered, yet who refuses to face up to the task of accepting responsibility for the creation of new values, either clinging to a residual faith in the notion of an autonomous, objective truth to the world, or seeking to annihilate all values. In these responses art can be used either to confirm the belief in an objective ‘order of things’ or as a means to transcend the ‘real’.
In his later notes Nietzsche explicitly equates the difference between active and reactive with the difference between the classical and romantic styles with the organizing and ordering element of will to power acting as the criterion for distinguishing the two. Nietzsche asks whether ‘the opposition between active and reactive does not lie hidden behind the opposition of classical and romantic’ (WP 847) and also writes: ‘In order to be classical one must possess all the strong, apparently contradictory gifts and desires: but such that they go together beneath the one yoke’
208 (WP 848). In contrast, one of Nietzsche’s main criticisms of romanticism in his symptomatological analysis of modernity is its lack of organizing power. In romanticism he observes ‘the will to unity…but the inability to let it exercise tyranny in the most important thing, namely with regard to the work itself’ (WP 849).
This is a criticism which, as we have seen, Nietzsche repeats in his attack on
Wagner in CW, claiming that Wagner displays ‘the decline in organizational power’ and diagnosing his music as an ‘anarchy of atoms…hostility and chaos’. In other words, romanticism is a sign of enfeebled will to power, and this becomes manifest in other ways too. For example, the romantic fascination with the erotic, including “Victor
Hugo’s orientals, Wagner’s Edda characters, Walter Scott’s Englishmen of the thirteenth century” (WP 830), is the symptom of a ‘weariness of will’, resulting in ‘all the greater excesses in the desire to feel, imagine, and dream new things’ (WP 829). This weakness of will has become endemic in contemporary art; for Nietzsche, in contrast, ‘the highest feeling of power is concentrated in the classical type’ (WP 799). In addition to his critique of disintegration of style in the art of modernity, Nietzsche makes the more general point that ‘We lack in music an aesthetic that would impose laws on musicians and give them a conscience; we lack, as a consequence, a genuine conflict over
“principles”…we no longer know on what basis to found the concepts “model”,
“mastery”, “perfection”’ (WP 838). And yet Nietzsche’s classicism is not to be regarded simply as a conservative call to order; his repeated emphasis on ambiguity, polysemy, and negation as signs of strength, together with his valorization of Dionysus, are all evidence of this. Although the disintegration of style characteristic of modernity is
209 deplorable, the disruption of form in itself is not so much, as it is an essential part of the healthy artistic process. Thus it is the uncontrolled disruption of form, its disintegration into anarchy that Nietzsche interprets as the expression of modern neurosis.
The point made earlier in reference to Nietzsche’s remarks on Lawrence Stern, that the free spirit consciously manipulates meaning, develops the theme suggested early on in HATH that art is a matter of simple falsity and therefore brings into focus the issue of the relationship between art and truth. It is clear that for Nietzsche art does not, and in fact cannot, have the truth disclosing capacity. Assigning such a role to art necessarily subsumes art within the larger project of the ideology of the given, and of truth as something out there waiting to be discovered, while on the dictates of perspectivism and interpretative will to power there simply is no such ‘given’ to begin with.
The Birth of Tragedy offers a view of art as a complex process of deception and truth; the artistic impulse to Apollonian fiction is matched by the Dionysian vision of the abyss. This picture changes however and in HATH Nietzsche treats art as a matter of straight falsity imbued with a sense of playfulness designed to counter the more depressing view of human condition. In an aphorism entitled ‘Playing with Life’,
Nietzsche notes the importance of frivolity in Greek culture beginning with Homer and he writes, “Simonides advised his compatriots to take life as a game; they were only too familiar with its painful seriousness…and they knew that every misery could become a source of enjoyment solely through art” (HATH I, 154). This idea is generalized in a slightly later aphorism in which the artist is seen as retarded “inasmuch as he has halted
210 at games that pertain to youth and childhood” (HATH I, 159). It is important not to read into these comments an affirmation of the idea that art offers a metaphysical consolation for suffering by regression to Wagnerian romanticism. The artistic lying of the Greeks is not connected with a metaphysical hunger; it does not aim at the final redemptive stasis. Rather, it stems from insight into the levity of existence.
The nature of the difference between the self-conscious deception of the Greeks and the hunger driven myths of modernity is made clear when Nietzsche writes that
The man of the world of antiquity knew better how to rejoice: we how to suffer less; the former employed all their abundance of ingenuity and capacity to reflect for the continual creation of new occasions for happiness and celebration: whereas we employ our minds towards the amelioration of suffering and the removal of sources of pain (HATH II, 187).
The deception of the Greeks functions as a prophylactic in contrast to that of modernity in which it serves as palliative. In this respect, and also reflective of Nietzsche’s general attitude towards the questions of the value of truth, he is less concerned with the opposition of falsehood and truth and more interested in the different uses to which falsehood is put. His critique is aimed not at the fact that the metaphysical and modern
‘myths’ are in some manner ‘false’, but rather at the fact that their productive functions have become entirely exhausted and self-defeating. Nietzsche’s comments on the different kinds of deception can thus be compared with his well-known assertion that
‘the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age…on its character as a condition of life’ (GS 110).
211 Nietzsche’s embracing of the notion of art as essentially involved in falsehood serves as a strategic move; it celebrates the very aspect of art which had led Plato to exclude it from the ideal state and is also adding to Nietzsche’s general project of overturning the cultural legacy of Platonism and, accordingly, metaphysics. Thus, in reworking the question of art Nietzsche is placing it at the core of his wider critique of metaphysical tradition. This is clear from the way in which Nietzsche repeatedly places the notion of the artistic as lying at the service of a more general overcoming of metaphysical seriousness:
In Greece the profound, thorough, serious spirits were the exceptions: the instinct of the people was inclined, rather, to regard seriousness as a kind of distortion. Not to create forms, but to borrow them from abroad and transform them into the fairest appearances of beauty – that is Greek: imitation not for use but for the end of artistic deception, repeated defeating of an imposed seriousness, ordering beautifying, making shallow and superficial (HATH II, 221).
The emphasis on the mendacity of art is stressed further when Nietzsche notes that the art of the Greeks preserved the simultaneous logic of showing and concealing that had underpinned the art of the more primitive cultic features: ‘The oldest image of the god is supposed to harbor and at the same time conceal the god – to intimate his presence but not expose it to view. No Greek ever beheld his Apollo as a wooden obelisk, his Eros as a lump of stone; they were symbols whose purpose was precisely to excite fear of beholding him’ (HATH II, 222). One can see in this passage an echo of the dual artistic function of concealing and revealing that had been argued in BT, although on the whole the account of art in HATH tends to expose the more univocal view of falsity. Apart from suggesting that art is not a locus of transcendence, therefore, this passage also shows it to be a site of ambiguity and the frustration of meaning. Again,
212 the function of art as both revealing and concealing recalls the wider dialectic of immanence and transcendence central to Nietzsche’s engagement with modern culture and its projected supersession; as Nietzsche says, ‘In regard to knowledge of truths the artist possesses a weaker morality than the thinker’ (HATH I, 146), and the morality of truthfulness is one of the central problems of the modernity he wished to overcome.
Art conceived as an interpretive and transformative practice rather than a truth disclosing one can facilitate this overcoming because its criteria are immanent to its practice and because its goal is enhancement of life and expenditure of life’s energies rather than attainment of either transcendent or objective truth. Because of this, and because of Nietzsche’s belief that beauty (as much as knowledge) is a matter of strength rather than truth, he can also say that the artist ‘considers the perpetuation of his mode of creation more important than scientific devotion to the true in any form’ (HATH I,
146). This notion of the artistic lack of truth and its importance in Nietzsche’s thought is confirmed at the end of Nietzsche’s productive life when he notes that ‘falsity, indifference to truth and utility may be signs of youth, of “childishness” in an artist’ which becomes manifest in their ‘lack of dignity; buffoon and god side by side; saint and scoundrel’ (WP 816). Consequently, writers such as Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopard, Kleist,
Gogol…are and perhaps must be men of fleeting moments, enthusiastic, sensual, childish, frivolous’ (BGE 269). Art in this conception therefore serves as an antidote to scientific sobriety, and indeed to our general obsession with truthfulness.
Part of the ability of art to overcome truthfulness is its creation of ‘artistic distance’, which enables us not to take ourselves too seriously. As Nietzsche says,
213 ‘Precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings…we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish and blissful art, lest we lose the freedom above things’ (ibid). In drawing on this motif of distance Nietzsche brings into play the question of the relation of woman and art. In an aphorism from GS Nietzsche writes his celebrated account of ‘Women and their action at a distance’ (GS 60), in which he concludes that ‘the magic and the most powerful effect of women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, action in distans’ (ibid). Art and woman therefore, are intimately linked through their reliance on distance; art through its willful playing above things, woman through her veiling dissimulation.134 In addition, like the artist and the skeptic, women have no sympathies with the metaphysical search for truth: ‘they consider the superficiality of existence to be its essence, and all virtue and profundity is for them merely a veiling of this “truth”’ (GS 64). As Nietzsche later states, ‘nothing has been more alien, repugnant and hostile to woman than truth – her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty’ (BGE 232). Hence, too, the antithesis of woman and science. Nietzsche argues that ‘When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality’ (BGE 144), a claim which complements his suggestion: ‘Reflect on the whole history of women: do they not have to be first of all and above else actresses?...Woman is so artistic’ (GS 361).
It must be noted however that Nietzsche’s use of the configuration of woman, art and truth is rather problematic. On numerous occasions Nietzsche explicitly
134 On the configuration of woman, distance and veiled dissimulation see Derrida 1979, pp. 37-63. See also, more recently, Vasseleu 1993, Vasseleu attends particularly to the metaphor of the sea in Nietzsche which functions as a figure for the perpetual dissimulation if identity.
214 disassociates woman from ‘proper’ artistic creativity. He poses the rhetorical question
“Would any link at all be missing in the chain of art and science if woman, if the works of women, were missing?” (WP 817). Woman is always spoken for from the perspective of man; she is an enigma for Nietzsche because she is not permitted to speak for herself.
Moreover, Nietzsche’s attitude is itself contradictory for, while he draws a parallel between art and woman he also talks of romanticism as feminine and enfeebled, of the effects of Wagnerian theatre as feminizing the audience, and most strikingly, of the consummately artistic culture of the Greeks as essentially masculine. In Human All Too
Human Nietzsche notes that in classical Greece ‘the women had no other task than to bring forth handsome powerful bodies in which the character of the father lived on as uninterruptedly as possible’ (HATH I 259).
The historical accuracy of Nietzsche’s observation is not in question, but the consistency of Nietzsche’s comments on the shared suspicion between the Greeks and woman of anything but surface most definitely is. Furthermore, this is not an individual aberration. Elsewhere Nietzsche speaks of the sickly ‘feminine dissatisfaction and romanticism’ that are ‘superabundant’ in Europe (GS 24), while the romantic composer
Robert Schumann is dismissed as ‘a noble tender-heart who wallowed in all sorts anonymous bliss and woe, a kind of girl’ (BGE 245). A contrast is made in D between masculine virtues of Greek tragedy and the implicitly feminine qualities of contemporary music, when he speculates,
For music, too, there may perhaps again come a better time…when artists have to make it appeal to men strong in themselves, severe, dominated by the dark seriousness of their own passion: but of what use is music to the little souls of this vanishing age, souls too easily moved, undeveloped, half-selves, inquisitive, lusting after everything (D, 172).
215
Wagner, especially, is responsible for the feminizing of modernity. Nietzsche notes that
‘he appealed to “beautiful things” and “heaving bosoms” like all artists of the theatre – and with all this he won over the women and even those in need of culture: but what is music to women and those in need of culture!’ (WP 838). Amongst the spectators of
Wagnerian theatre ‘one is audience, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting cattle, democrat, neighbor, fellow man’ (GS 368), a complaint Nietzsche repeats when he observes amongst Wagnerian audience ‘the eternal feminine…in short the common people’ (CW
6).
Nietzsche is of course making use of a widespread equation between hysterical mass audience and woman, but within his thought it is doubly problematic.135 In addition to his troubling use of a misogynistic notion of woman, Nietzsche is caught in the contradiction that art is feminine in its disregard for truth but at the same time the debased metaphysical art of modernity is also feminine on account of its neurotic hysteria and lack of severity. In mitigation, it is also the case that Nietzsche is critical of misogyny as well. In Daybreak, for example, he notes that ‘”Woman is our enemy” – out of the man who says that to other men there speaks an immoderate drive which hates not only itself but its means of satisfaction as well’ (D 346). Consequently misogyny is read as a specific example of the self-hatred of modernity. The difficulties in Nietzsche’s account of woman, truth and art may thus constitute one more case of his general
135 The general difficulties of Nietzsche’s account of woman have been explored in Irigaray 1991 and Ansell-Pearson 1993. Ansell-Pearson is particularly critical of Derrida for his unquestioning affirmation of Nietzsche even when the latter is most hostile to feminism and patronizing to women.
216 reliance on contradiction, paradox, and irony. In any event, the association between art and woman – a shared affinity for dissimulation, falsity, and superficiality –reinforces and brings together Nietzsche’s belief in the untruth of artistic practice, his attempt to discredit contemporary art and aesthetic tradition, and it adds weight to his general argument that brings into question the belief in truthfulness per see. Art is mendacious not simply because it inadequately portrays the truth, but because there is no truth of which it could be the mimesis.
But Nietzsche also calls for a shift in our orientation in art towards the
‘masculine’ aesthetics. What is significant about Nietzsche’s suggestion is that it is a plea for the re-orientation to the aesthetics of the artist, that is the producer, and using such gender-specific terms should alert us to the role of both physiology as well as will to power in Nietzsche’s understanding of art. The artist adopts, so Nietzsche has argued, a masculine standpoint of giving, whereas by implication, that of the woman, the feminine position is one of passive acceptance. As Derrida has pointed out, Nietzsche is here ‘dealing with a very old philosopheme of production’,136 whereby masculinity has always been regarded as the productive gender against the sterility of the feminine. It is notable too that Nietzsche sees the relation between the sexes as based on the process of giving and taking which is seen in his claim that the foundation of all love is desire for appropriation (GS 14), and his comparison of feminine and masculine love where the former is characterized as a desire ‘to be taken, to be accepted as a possession’ and the
136 Derrida 1979, pp. 77.
217 latter as a desire to possess: ‘the woman gives herself away, the man appropriates’ (GS
363).
In this move to the masculine aesthetics of the artist Nietzsche is undertaking a number of things. First, he is drawing attention to the long tradition within metaphysics of comparing the relation of certain oppositional pairs to that between the sexes. One could point to the tradition within the sphere of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, of seeing aesthetics as a feminine discipline in contrast to the masculine rigors of logic. In addition, the sublime and the beautiful were distinguished in terms of gender.137
Nietzsche’s turn to the ‘masculine’ aesthetics of the artist is not an attempt to assimilate or repeat the tradition by making use of gender roles because it is in the name of this new attention to ‘masculine’ art, as I have already argued, that the traditional aesthetics is being criticized.
In the aphorism on love from GS cited above however, the relation between the two sexes, while still based on the paradigm of appropriation and giving, has inverted the usual relation, inasmuch as it is the woman who gives herself and the man who receives or even reaches out and seizes for himself, a relation repeated in BGE where
Nietzsche writes that ‘Man…has to conceive of woman as possession, a property which can be locked away’ (BGE 238). This inversion would not be so significant except for the fact that Nietzsche also sees woman as closer to the artistic temperament than man.
Nietzsche’s use of well-established aesthetic themes thus consists of more than merely replicating the inherited aesthetic discourse. Rather, by deliberately playing with such
137 See Burke 1987 or Kant 1960 which devotes a whole section to the analogy between the relation of the sexes and that of the beautiful and the sublime.
218 inherited themes Nietzsche is bringing together the aesthetic and the erotic, a move clearly stated in his claim that aesthetic and sexual pleasure are synonymous, and that
‘making music is another way of making children’ (WP 800). The intertwining of erotic and aesthetic serves, as a strategy, further to disassociate the question of art from that of truth - that is, to sever the link between the question of art and artistic production and the belief in its truth-disclosing function.
Second, Nietzsche’s reorientation to the ‘masculine’ aesthetics of the artist explicitly pits the artist against truthfulness, insofar as the artist is frequently described as a woman in Nietzsche. It is a further example of Nietzsche exacerbating the discord between truth and art by occasionally casting their relation in terms of the opposition of the genders. What paradoxically unites the masculine aesthetics of the artist with the woman is their common predisposition to giving. Nietzsche writes that we ‘should not demand of the artist who gives, that he becomes a woman – that he “receives”’ (WP
111). Yet as I have already suggested, he seems less concerned with the femininity of the aesthetics than with its passivity, for which the woman, on this occasion, stands as a cipher, following the traditional discourse of production.
As Derrida points out, Nietzsche’s use of the metaphor of appropriation and donation is far from being one of pure contingency, for the metaphysical conception of truth has always been based on the paradigm of appropriation.138 Truth is always something to be ‘attained’ or ‘grasped’. This notion of truth as something to be possessed, of appropriation as prior to truth, is a recurrent feature of metaphysical
138 Derrida 1979, pp, 79.
219 thinking and contrasts with Nietzsche’s metaphor of truth as a woman, who, hiding behind a veil of dissimulation, always resists that masculine desire to be her master and possessor. It is a desire for mastery that will never be satisfied, and here we see the parallel with the inability of will to power to exhausts its possibilities.
Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been inexpert about women? That the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have hitherto usually approached truth were awkward and very improper means of wining over a woman for oneself?’ (BGE Preface).
With this speculation Nietzsche is not merely engaging in a whimsical play with ideas which are also related to his claim that, spawned by the ascetic ideal, metaphysicians avoid women and the body, and that Socrates married only out of a wicked sense of irony. He is also challenging once more the ideology of the given, the notion of truth as something waiting to be appropriated, which brings us back to his turn to the aesthetics of the artist as the one who gives.
By stressing the idea of the artist who gives, like the woman who gives herself,
Nietzsche is aiming to disassociate aesthetics even further from metaphysics by overturning the topos of artistic representation as appropriation; with this, of course,
Nietzsche is moving further away from the notion of art as either concealing or revealing the truth. Thus art creates not discloses, it is closely bound up with creation and destruction, with the notion of appropriation and production, one which brings us into proximity with Nietzsche’s theory of interpretation as a transformational activity.
Significantly, the notion of gift giving plays a notable role in Nietzsche, and it again
220 contradicts the metaphysical model of truth as possession.139 As Zarathustra declares, ‘I love him whose soul squanders itself, who neither wants nor returns thanks; for he always gives’ (Z Prologue, 4). This is not only an economic metaphor of exchange and expenditure, but also one of production and creation. Nietzsche notes, ‘It is more than a matter of giving: it is one of creating, one of violence’.140
Hence we can see how Nietzsche is attempting to bridge the gap which he sees as having sprung up separating art from life, beauty from the interests it serves, a gap which originates in the sundering of interest in artistic form from the more general interest in furthering interpretive will to power. Nietzsche’s reformulation of the question of art primarily from the perspective of production with its emphasis on creating therefore shifts attention away from the idea of art as revealing or as disclosing some pre-existing truth, and towards recognition of art as a world-constitutive activity.
In Nietzsche’s later writings, and especially in his unpublished notes of the late
1880’s, the question of beauty and the question of art become synonymous. This is not because Nietzsche is conforming to the traditional identification of art and beauty, but because he sees the activity of perceiving beauty and that of producing art as joined at their root by a shared way of seeing the world. Of beauty he writes, ‘In beauty man sets himself up as the measure of perfection’ adding later that ‘His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride – that falls with the ugly, that grows with the beautiful’
(TI Expeditions, 19). Of art he claims that it is a ‘compulsion-to-transform to perfection’ adding further that ‘Man enjoys himself in art as perfection’ (TI Expeditions, 9). As will to
139 On this theme see Shapiro 1991. 140 KSA 10: 16 (40).
221 power art represents a mode of seeing-as, of seeing the world as perfect, as simplified, as organized in a certain way. It is driven by a compulsion to transform the world, and as such Nietzsche is interested more in the figure that puts this seeing-as into artistic praxis, namely the artist himself. Although Nietzsche can admire the artistic qualities of something as impersonal as the Jesuit order or the Prussian officer corps, it is also the case that on the whole, for Nietzsche, art is dependant on a specific kind of individual, but only insofar as he or she is an instance of a particular configuration of will to power.
The work of art is only the culmination of a process, and the process is more important than the material product; this perception again reflects Nietzsche’s wider position, in which the process of interpretation cannot be allowed to congeal into a set of specific results of perspective.
Although for Nietzsche an artist is an important figure, he or she is only a channel for the activity, an artistic creativity located firmly within the realm of the physiological and governed by the interpretive will to power. And consequently,
Nietzsche attempts to perceive culture as a whole in terms of physiology (hence
Nietzsche’s discussion of the ‘case’ of Wagner, a discussion couched in physiological and medical terms), and his attempt to resist any idealist, genius-oriented notions of artistic creativity. As Nietzsche writes in NCW, ‘My objections to Wagner are physiological objections. Why should I still disguise them in aesthetic formulations?’ (NCW Where I raise Objections). The artistic vision of beauty, the ‘making perfect’ so characteristic of artistic praxis, is not guided by some transcendental ideal. Rather it should be seen in terms of a transformative immanence that opposes any tendency to ‘desensualisation’.
222 ‘As regards the main thing I agree more with the artist than with any philosopher hitherto: they have not lost the great track life goes along, they have loved the things
“of this world”…it is a sign of having turned out well when one, like Goethe, clings with ever more joy and warm-heartedness to “the things of the world”’ (WP 820). And
Nietzsche’s conception of art, which refuses to seek the source of the work beyond the immediately apparent but is inextricably bound to human physiology and motivated by the interpretive will to power, is therefore thoroughly concerned with things of ‘of the world’.
But again, this concern with things of this world should not be interpreted as suggesting some sort of commitment to truth. The combination of Nietzsche’s perspectivism and his resistance to ideas of transcendence, in short, his ‘immanent perspectivism’ to borrow Nehamas’ phrase, rules out the possibility of art being a form of world disclosure.141 Nietzsche compels us to rule out any talk of art either as a revelation of some higher, super-sensuous truth or as a reproduction of the objective visible world. In other words for Nietzsche, art ‘discloses’ neither the truth of the factual, ‘objective’ world nor that of some super-sensuous realm. In fact it ‘discloses’ nothing at all. Art creates a world; it carries out a selective, world-constitutive operation in a manner analogous to the interpretive process of will to power. Thus Nietzsche can speak of the ‘states in which we plant a transfiguration and plentitude into things…until they reflect back our own plentitude and joy in life’ (WP 801). Beauty and art are less a matter of truth than one of strength. As Nietzsche says, ‘it is a question of power (of an
141 Nehamas 1983, pp. 454.
223 individual or of a people) whether and where [the] judgment “beautiful” is applied…the feeling of power applies the judgment “beautiful” even to things and conditions that the instinct of impotence could only find hateful and “ugly”’(WP 852). With this assertion of the unity of the question of beauty and that of power, we see too the unity of
Nietzsche’s critique of aesthetic tradition in the name of physiology, and the critique of metaphysical and artistic truth in the name of lying, and both reveal the status of art as a form of interpretive will to power.
Death of Art – Revisited
I have attempted to present in some detail the varied dimensions of Nietzsche’s thought on art and its place within the larger problematic of Nietzsche’s philosophical project – his diagnosis and treatment of the crisis of modernity. I have also attempted to gather together Nietzsche’s various criticisms otherwise scattered throughout his works and to illuminate the lines of communication between various strands of Nietzsche’s thought. As I suggested at the outset, that there is a critique of art, and a rather severe one, seems often overlooked or simply ignored by the majority of Nietzsche commentators. This is perhaps not surprising because BT seized the question of art with
224 such exuberance and enthusiasm. In grandiose gestures, it cast art in a role of being the one and only cultural redeemer. The effect of this conception of art, it seems, is difficult to put into perspective, even though Nietzsche clearly stopped adhering to the views and the sentiment he expressed in BT (if indeed he ever sincerely held them). One could say that the tone of Nietzsche’s glorification of art, the intensity of feeling and the conviction of the voice with which he attempted to persuade us, as well as himself, of the greatness of Wagner’s art was such that it deafened a vast majority of those interested in Nietzsche’s philosophy. It was difficult to hear those ’second, and third thoughts’ about art over the high pitch of Nietzsche’s earlier praise.
Such absence of recognition of this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, and therefore absence of a sustained dialogue regarding the nature and import of Nietzsche’s critique of art, is perhaps understandable for other reasons. Nietzsche’s talk about art in the works after BT, perhaps with the exception of HATH, is itself rather sporadic and the theme of art is often embedded in the discussion of other major themes. As can be gleaned from the above discussion of art’s place and relation to the notion of will to power and interpretation, it is clear that Nietzsche’s interest regarding art lies firmly on the side of the artistic process, which is itself a form of the interpretive will to power.
Given Nietzsche’s trivialization of objects of art, that is, his treatment of artworks only as signs or symptoms of the general state of health of the organism responsible for its production, and given his lamentation of the general ‘sickliness’ of modernity and a need to overcome its decadent and life-stifling cultural forms, many commentators have latched onto Nietzsche recognition of the necessity of cultivating a kind of individual
225 capable of creating himself and those values anew, and thus capable of bringing about cultural renewal. In this respect, most commentators have interpreted the significance of Nietzsche’s post BT engagement with art as lying in the so-called aesthetics of self, and therefore most of the discussions of Nietzsche’s treatment of art are focused on precisely this theme.
And to be sure, Nietzsche places an enormous importance on precisely this rather ambiguous and elusive kind of art – art of ‘life’ or deeds and of ‘giving style to one’s character’ (GS 290, also 283 299). It is what Ridley calls ‘an artistry of the soul’, a
‘counter-art’ to that of the ascetic priest, and its significance lies in the fact that it is meant to cure the damage done to the soul by thoroughgoing asceticism. 142 My reconstruction of what could be called Nietzsche’s positive view of art above, confirms, at least in the most basic sense, that this is precisely the direction of Nietzsche’ mature aesthetics. Casting art as a form of interpretive will to power couched in the vocabulary of human physiology clearly translates into a notion of art conceived as a particular kind of activity or process, and by implication draws attention to the character and nature of the energies involved and the effects they have in any given configuration. In other words, Nietzsche’s re-conceptualization of art as a dynamic process of ‘assimilating, shaping, inventing, appropriating and seeking resistance, overcoming contradiction and becoming a master over something’, which speaks of the general character of all existence, is a definition of self-creating by means of assimilating and mastering one’s own conflicting impulses and energies into a meaningful whole. And it is a crucial
142 Ridley 2007,pp. 36.
226 development in Nietzsche’s aesthetics because this is precisely how the Übermensch is and how decadence is to be overcome.
The upshot of Nietzsche’s recasting of art in these terms is that it makes it possible to close the gap which Nietzsche had seen opening up between life and art as early as BT. Art and life came to stand apart when art lost touch with the Dionysian energies of life and this estrangement was set in motion when art became fatally associated with Socratic values and practices. Now however, when all ties between art and the metaphysical thinking have been removed, Nietzsche is in a position to say that on the more fundamental level the connection between art and life is restored by means of locating the origin and nature of art (and directing all questioning of and about art) within the energies of life, in the vocabulary of physiology and terminology used to indicated the processes in the organic world. Not only that, but art can now also be understood as a conscious and purposeful engagement with the material of this world with a view to enhancing one’s energies and furthering the feeling of power. It would be possible therefore to argue that Nietzsche’s treatment of art succeeds at least with respect to resolving what he saw as the most pressing problem of art, its separation from the energies of life – separation which quite literally evacuated all affirmative content from art and thus made it entirely useless for any meaningful attempt at cultural reform.
Furthermore, one could also argue that the dialectical nature of interpretive activity in Nietzsche’s conception of interpretation precludes the possibility of ascribing to Nietzsche the thesis of death of art. In other words, not having some ultimate goal
227 towards which it moves, and always being motivated and moved by the desire to interpret more, Nietzsche’s notion of interpretation and of art as interpretation directly opposes the notion of the death of art. Being a moment of negation, the death of art is not the final position in which Nietzsche’s project can be allowed to remain – it does not amount to overcoming, and does not reflect the emphasis in Nietzsche’s work on the productive function of the negative. The death of art would simply mean that Nietzsche himself is caught in the reactivist position of the denial of values which he so vehemently criticized. Under the framework governing Nietzsche’s notion of interpretation, at least as I have constructed it here, the death of art is only a moment of negation in a dialectic always imbued with the affirmative spirit.
Thus the argument would be that while Nietzsche’s consistent and thorough critique does indeed spell out the death or the negation of art, it also facilitates its re- conceptualization as immanent and transformative – a reconceptualization that capitalize on the possibilities that have become available now that the influence and weight of the life-negating values associated with metaphysical conception of art have been overcome. The nature of Nietzsche’s interpretive project of overcoming shows that his critique is always permeated with an affirmative spirit and this is of crucial importance not only for Nietzsche’s treatment of art but also for his overall project of transvaluation of all values in which metaphysical concepts are negated and transformed. Nietzsche’s notion of interpretation does not deny all truth but makes it a function of all those aspects, be they linguistic, psychological, or even physiological which distinguish the human form of life from others. In the same fashion, the
228 metaphysical conception of art is negated and transformed into an interpretive one.
Mere destruction of these concepts, which would be a pure negation, does not amount to overcoming. Rather it leads to passivity, indifference and lack of power, which is precisely what characterizes ailing modern culture and its art. From the standpoint of
Nietzsche’s interpretive project of overcoming, the death of art thesis or Hegel’s assertion that art, as the highest cultural activity belongs to the past, is one more example of the aesthetic impoverishment of modernity in which art is relegated to the margins of social life. Thus, when viewed through his notion of dialectically motivated interpretation or will to power, Nietzsche must be seen as hostile to pure negativity and
Nietzsche’s criticism and destruction of art itself must be seen as a strategic moment of negation that is posited in order to make possible its reformulation.
But one must wonder nevertheless what all this means for Nietzsche’s account in a more practical sense and how it affects, if at all, our understanding of Nietzsche’s critique as a thesis on the death of art. Because Nietzsche conceives of art as interpretive will to power, terms used to describe art are drawn from the vocabulary of a dynamic process. Art is this very process, the artwork only its byproduct, one’s character included - one’s culture too, and the list could go on and include all sorts of things which we do not normally consider art. And this would not be saying very much, since on Nietzsche’s account simply everything is art, insofar as everything is will to power. Almost everything we do simply involves dynamic processes of will to power and therefore can be described as artistic. Everything we encounter is a product of a process; it has been fashioned in some way, molded into whatever form it appears in,
229 through the creative process of making and destroying, adding and taking away, assimilating, overpowering, reformulating, organizing and so on, and it all comes in various degrees of good or bad.143 One may wonder here, since everything is ‘art’, not just what we ordinarily call art, what is the basis on which to regard art itself with any special significance? Perhaps it is because art is the ‘supreme will to power’ insofar as it may be an expression of grand style, the ability to “impose upon becoming the character of being’ – of the ability to introduce order into chaos. But this, again, can be found in other places too, not just in art. In this respect, if what Nietzsche singles out is the transformative, creative, ordering process reflective (interpretive) of the nature of all existence, why still call it art at all? Why use the term taken from the practice which he himself has shown to be thoroughly contaminated and perhaps necessarily so by the values quite opposite of life-affirming? While Nietzsche may have come up with the conception of art as something that has overcome its decadent metaphysical and modern form, it certainly cannot be said that this is something he found to be the case in practice (and it is in practice, after all, rather than in theory that the effects of art are most felt, and most desired).
Perhaps in an attempt to eschew such criticism and provide some sort of grounding for a continued commitment to art’s superiority, Nietzsche makes a distinction between monological works of art, and those that are not. The term
143 By saying everything is a product of a process I am not excluding the claim that even an end product of a particular process is still part of a process in a different sense. Objects that populate our environment are not excluding from the continual interpretive project on a larger scale, they can always be reinterpreted over and over again, from different perspectives, with different aims and from different backgrounds. Keeping to the theme of art, object from everyday life are often taken over and reinterpreted in a different life, Duchamp’s famous Fountain is a good example.
230 monological appears only a handful of times in Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre but it is an important aspect of the new orientation in art. Monological art, Nietzsche says, is one that has ‘forgotten the world, it is art without witnesses’ (GS 367). If one assumes, as I believe one should, that by monological Nietzsche means works of art that are for no one but for the artist, works that eschew the audience and its appreciation (which in
Nietzsche mirrors metaphysical consolation) one must wonder as to the practical application of such a criterion. Given the fact that Nietzsche subtitles Zarathustra as A
Book For Everyone and No One, it appears that the distinction between monological and all other works of art is one Nietzsche takes seriously.
In the most basic sense of interpretive will to power, all art is monological. There are numerous instances where Nietzsche directly claims that the lives of artists are far more important, and come before their actual art (PT 109 for instance). In UM he says of art, “How tremendous it is as a cause, how paralyzed and hollow as an effect” (UM III,
7), indicating that our central concern is not to be the works produced by artists, but rather their lives, the perspectives and organizational powers which gave those artworks their material form. And we may recall Nietzsche’s claim in HATH that “so-called art proper, that of artworks is only an appendage” and that “we usually start with art where we should end with it, cling hold of it by its tail, and believe that the art of the work of art is true art out of which life is to be improved and transformed – fools that we are”
(HATH II, 174). All these point to Nietzsche’s devaluation of the status of objects of art and an elevation and the significance of the artistic, creative process which brought it about. And this is reflective of the conception of art as interpretive will to power and the
231 implicit suggestion that the process itself is something that occurs outside the reach of the public eye.
In D Nietzsche has character ‘A’ castigate his interlocutor for allowing himself to be deceived by music they are listening to, for his easy indulgence in every trick of the composer. He then points to a distinction between innocent and guilty music where by
Innocent he means “music which thinks wholly and solely of itself, believes in itself and has forgotten the world…the self-resounding of the profoundest solitude, which speaks to itself of itself and no longer knows that outside there are hearers, and listeners and effects and failures” (D 255). The section ends with ‘A’ confessing that the piece they had been listening to was indeed music which had ‘forgotten the world’ and that he had been lying out of wickedness. This clearly indicates a problem of how one could distinguish monological from other works of art and is reflective of Nietzsche’s indecision as to the final fate of art if we hold fast to such a radical principle of evaluation.
In the Preface to the second volume of HATH Nietzsche speaks of his own works and overcoming of his ‘romantic pessimism’, of finding his task, his ‘way to himself, to his task’ only when he ‘spoke without witnesses, or rather in indifference to witnesses’
(HATH II, Preface 1). This section and indeed the whole Preface speaks of the importance of turning away from the world, not out of asceticism or weary passivity but in order to overcome them and indeed overcome oneself. And similarly, much later
Nietzsche writes of the distinction between ‘courage in the face of people, courage in the face of things, and courage in the face of paper…I distinguish further between
232 courage before witnesses and courage without witnesses: the courage of the Christian, of a believer in God in general, can never be courage without witnesses – this fact alone degrades it’ (WP 841). These are but few among many passages in Nietzsche which collectively testify to the same emphasis and orientation in his treatment of art that suggest rather obviously that the only kind of art worth bother is a monological art or art without witnesses.
The pressing question then, as I already pointed out, is what this can possibly mean in a more practical sense. How do we make a distinction and properly identify such works or indeed, are we still allowed to call them monological if we are in fact in a position to make such judgments. In other words, once they have acquired an audience, should they not cease to be monological works of art and cease to carry the same significance Nietzsche attributes to them? In HATH Nietzsche says that he ‘intends never again to read an author of whom it is apparent that he wanted to produce a book: but only those whose thoughts unintentionally became a book’ (HATH II, 121). One can easily understand this sentiment since for Nietzsche great art is what is given away in an overflow, a seeping over of the overfullness of life, not something that is created and received because of a need for validation, relief, security or even beauty. But how can one rely on this principle and make a judgment as to what kind of a book or author, or generally art, one is confronted with, when one can be so easily deceived? And as his claims HATH often show Nietzsche is not blind to the fact that artists do precisely that, deceive and lie. And should it not be the case that even such great art, once it seeks the audience, however small it may be, ceases to be as ‘forgetful of the world’? Should not
233 the motivations behind a decision to let the work out into the world, however noble or ignoble they may be, and however big or small this ‘world’ is, spoil the kind of honesty, purity and authenticity that the artist and the work are said to embody? Are works of art immediately invalidated if they are works ‘for everyone’?
Nietzsche must have been aware of this dilemma and he must have struggled with this very possibility, as demonstrated by the fact of his enormous efforts to withdraw Zarathustra, (which he considered a work of poetry) from circulation and collect all copies he has given to his friends and to his publisher.144 As Zarathustra himself discovers in the marketplace, and as we are to infer from the episode of the madman in GS, the mob, the crowd, the herd or the audience is simply not the entity in which a genuine understanding takes place at all. That capacity, it seems, belongs solely to the individual. Thus the work seems doubly invalidated, first by the very fact that it has been given over to audience, for whatever reason, and secondly because of the inability of that audience to take it for what it is meant to be. Zarathustra’s subtitle, as well as Zarathustra himself, reflect Nietzsche’s constant struggle to reconcile the need for an audience to hear what he says and the fact that the audience will not, and cannot, hear him. If man is, as Nietzsche claims, “the as yet undetermined animal”, a work in progress, (BGE 62), and if Zarathustra is the teacher of the Übermensch, that which does not yet exist, there simply cannot be anyone yet worthy of his teaching. In this respect, Z challenges the very need for monological art and also the very value and need of audience for such art (and indeed the very possibility of such audience as well).
144 On this theme see Pothen 2004.
234 This tension I believe testifies to Nietzsche’s final uncertainty and indecision regarding art resulting from the conflict between Nietzsche’s deep affinity towards art on the one hand, and on the other, his deep suspicion and disappointment with it. He simply could not turn his back on art even though he recognized he was holding on to a relic. Nietzsche once said, ‘without music life would be a mistake,’ (TI Maxims and
Arrows 33) but he also believed that art stands in the way of life, and serves small needs
(HATH II, 169). Thus however much Nietzsche wanted to see art as something truly deserving of praise, this tendency is kept in check by means of a consistent critique, and an attempt to uncover the illusions, the presupposition, and the configurations of power he believed underpinned art and the work of art per se.
As I hope to have shown, Nietzsche’s critique of art is severe, so much so that it is difficult to see beyond the immediate effects of the devastation, and even harder to imagine ways in which Nietzsche could be seen as maintaining at least some degree of his former admiration and belief in art, at least in works of art. Notwithstanding
Nietzsche’s efforts to do just that, what is preserved of art in Nietzsche’s new conception of art is actually very little. Nietzsche’s critique, not only in terms of what we could possibly say art is, but also of what we could legitimately say art does, strips art of most if not all markers we generally associate with it, all in order to bring our understanding of art in correlation with the understanding of processes and dynamics that are now seen as reflective (interpretive) of all reality. In other words, if the ‘world is will to power and nothing besides’, and if will to power is a ‘discharge of strength’ not out of necessity but out of its opposite, luxury, out of superabundance, and if art is to be
235 understood along these lines, as life-affirmative, it must outgrow all constitutive forms which keep it tied to the life-negating values of metaphysics.
And this understanding then necessitates a negation of the truth-disclosing function of art regardless of the kind of truth it may be imagined to disclose. It is a negation of the myth of artistic genius (and of the elevated status of the artist in general) because neither his capacity nor his inspiration come from the realm transcending the limitations of the merely human but are reflective of hard work, determination, exercise of control, measure, and mastery of numerous and even conflicting forces. It is an absolute denial of the autonomy of the work of art since the artwork is a byproduct of particular configurations and dynamic processes of the interpretive will to power and as such inextricably connected and dependant on the forces, interests, impulses and desires which gave it its form. It is also a negation of the work of art per se because the finality of the work of art, its tendency to fix, stabilize, and eternalize is not reflective of becoming – of the constant flux and change perpetuated by the myriad macro and microscopic struggles and shifting configurations of power.
It is a negation of the work of art because admiration of works of art comes too close to religious veneration. Art objects are, after all, deposited in museums and galleries (most of it in fact in their basements) where they are enshrined awaiting in silence for those, increasingly smaller in number, to come and pay their respects, to be elevated, enlightened, moved, shocked, repulsed, who still feel a vague sense of art’s importance in their lives, even though they probably would not be able to fully
236 articulate what that means. Thus more importantly, it is a negation of the work of art per se because the work of art is tied to a need – to be moved, to be shocked, repulsed, and so on, even to admire, because even a need for beauty is still a need and therefore signals that something is lacking. To say nothing of the fact that such orientation allows institutionalization of art in which art becomes tied to particular discourse and comes to be treated as, and traded as, a commodity.
All of this seems unavoidable as long as there are still artworks – things which we call art. And all of this of course has nothing to do with life and cultivation of life- enhancing and life-affirming energies, which are, or should be, the sole purview of art, as Nietzsche understands it. Thus what Nietzsche’s critique of art achieves is in fact the death of art, a thoroughgoing negation of all the essential features by which we have understood art thus far and a re- conceptualization of art that removes all of the features that have allowed it to be treated as a cultural good and a means of affecting the masses. Art has nothing to do with the masses, Nietzsche would say, because good art, art possessed of the grand style is one that has forgotten the world, art ‘without witnesses’ (GS 367). That this does nothing to rescue art from the fate to which it has been consigned by Nietzsche’s critique testifies the fact that the notion of the monological art intensifies rather than resolves the tensions in Nietzsche’s thought. It is a tension between valorization of the traditional artistic orientations and an attempt to subvert them. It is a tension between, on the one hand, the need to pull art out of the world, to rescue it from the domain of culture, and on the other hand, the need to assert the life-affirming and transformative function of art by letting it out into the
237 world, thus affirming the very aspect of art Nietzsche explicitly wants to negate – the public orientation of art as its essential feature.
Thus it may be said that on the whole, Nietzsche’s version of the death of art is far more radical than Hegel’s. For Hegel, the Absolute has moved out of art, and so in the process of self-understanding we can never again relate to art in the same way our predecessors did. While for them art provided a satisfaction of a spiritual need, today art is only an object of intellectual consideration and not for the purpose of creating art but for knowing philosophically what art is. Art no longer satisfies, by itself, the deepest need of the spirit, so in a way we have outgrown it. Even so, art still has an important and welcomed role in our social and cultural life because, for Hegel, art is a means by which to engage the imagination, entertain and even to give pleasure. For Nietzsche however, art is a metaphysical trap and it always threatens to make one’s ‘hearth heavy’ to ‘set metaphysical strings vibrating in sympathy’ and make one ‘feel he is hovering above the earth in a dome of stars with the dream of immortality in his heart’ (HATH I,
153). It is precisely as a form of cultural good, as a means of entertainment and satisfaction of pleasure that art is condemned. And far from having overcome art, we are in fact positively craving it as a means of managing our modern neurosis.
The critique of Wagner is significant, not simply because Wagner happened to be the artist in whose works Nietzsche saw all that was wrong with art. It is significant precisely because it was Wagner’s art –art of the man whom Nietzsche loved and admired, a mentor, surrogate father, and a friend on whose artistic genius Nietzsche pined all his hopes for the renewal of modern culture – that embodied all of the
238 aesthetic and existential failings of modernity, to some extent Nietzsche’s own as well.
“One pays heavily for being one of Wagner’s disciples” (CW Postscript) Nietzsche says, and not just to indicated the tremendous power and the degree to which Wagner’s decadence seduced and corrupted already exhausted and wandering modern soul, but also to give expression to his own deep and painful experience of awakening from the spell of Wagner – Nietzsche’s own loss of innocence.
However much Wagner’ stood as a signpost, an exemplar of modern decadence in Nietzsche’s polemic, Wagner was also personal, and that loss cut deep leaving scars that never really fully healed. In hindsight Nietzsche could say that Wagner was his
‘sickness’ and that breaking away from Wagner was his greatest recovery, one however that came at a price. Wagner, it seems, has spoiled art for Nietzsche, or at least made him ‘have second thoughts about it’, and so to even ‘like anything at all’ after Wagner was ‘a triumph’ (CW Preface). This triumph, it should be obvious from the above discussion, is not a signal of the renewed enthusiasm and hope in the possibilities of art, but of a ‘cold sobering up‘, of a much more cautious and humble admission of the tremendous sacrifice, self-discipline and ‘estrangement from everything that is of this time’ that is required to finally see ‘art and artist for what they really are’ and be able to guard against their influence.
This is not to overstate the significance of the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, only to suggest that the relationship and the ensuing disappointment and a sense of betrayal Nietzsche felt towards Wagner provided an added morsel of personal motivation to dig deep and uncover the forces responsible for the phenomenon of
239 Wagner. That was never going to be for Nietzsche a matter of simple surveying the effects of Wagner on contemporary culture, but of looking at his own experience, and the significance he himself saw in and attached to Wagner. The result made Nietzsche weary and suspicious to the core, not only of Wagner’s art, but of artists and art in general, the motivations and the values embedded in it, suspicious of the ways art affects us and the manner in which we respond to it. And after Wagner no artist ever held a place of such high importance and esteem in Nietzsche’s thought, none possessed such influence and power, and however much Nietzsche may have been inclined to offer occasional praises of Goethe, Stendhal, Bizet and few others, he did so from a distance and without even a hint of the enthusiasm he once held towards
Wagner.
These few artists were, in Nietzsche’s view, exceptions and rare and happy accidents, but he seemed to have valued both their art and their characters. But the problem for Nietzsche is that these can only ever be ‘happy accidents’ since his critique, devastating as it is, centers not on a specific artist or a work of art but on the art and a work of art per se. These occasional praises of art and artists lead to the suspicion that what complicates the matter for Nietzsche and generates tension in his view are certain presuppositions which, knowingly or not, Nietzsche had allowed to inform his treatment of art. The prevailing tendency in the philosophical or aesthetic tradition, and one most of us carry with us too, is to see art as something of great and unquestionable importance, something in some sense central to our life, and even necessary. Thus behind our judgments stand these presuppositions which inevitably inform our attitudes
240 towards art. And it is certainly the case that precisely this presupposition of the significance of art in our lives is partly responsible for Nietzsche’s enthusiasm about
Wagner and for his continued belief, even against the evidence to the contrary, that art is the means to overcome our cultural crisis. In any case, we can assert with certainty that Nietzsche’s critique of art should cause us to question these very presuppositions we bring to our experience of art, and perhaps more importantly to question their misguided foundations, such as our need to worship, or wish to fix and make permanent in a world of flux and becoming.
Generally speaking the danger in interpreting Nietzsche’s thought is that the implications of it are at times so unthinkable that we begin to wonder whether he could possibly have meant what we fear he did mean. There is a consequent danger too that we may be compelled to anesthetize what is, to most minds, unpalatable and extreme.
Thus we may indeed hesitate to attribute to Nietzsche a position which may seem unthinkable given the importance of art in his thought. But as I have shown the question of art for Nietzsche, seen from the perspective of life, dissolves into either denigration of this life or into a glorification of an ambiguous, elusive kind of art, art of life or art of deeds of which only the genius of life is capable. Generally speaking we may not be compelled to accept Nietzsche’s views, far less to strive towards fulfilling the states of affairs they are designed to bring about. But I do hope to have shown that what is rather compelling is that Nietzsche might actually mean what he consistently and repeatedly says about art, that his critique of art is a thoroughgoing and deep-seated one, and that accounts which ignore this tendency might be reflecting the very presuppositions that
241 Nietzsche himself is driven to question. ‘In order to see a means of power in art’
Nietzsche says, ‘one really has to twist things or strive for the downfall of the existing!
How much disappointment!’145 Such disappointment may be the very mark of
Nietzsche’s thought on art from beginning to end; not only the disappointment that this should be the stark choice now open to him, but disappointment in Wagner too, disappointment that the tragic chorus should have ever stepped onto the stage, or indeed that there should ever have been a stage at all that could have reduced the great
Dionysian mysteries from a state of participation, intoxication and ecstasy to mere spectacle, representation and ultimately ‘art’, and finally a disappointment at that fate to which he must, as a consequence, consign all art.
If my analysis suggests a rather pessimistic conclusion to Nietzsche’s thought on art, it is because careful attention to his remarks indeed makes this reading possible.
Such a reading is also necessary in order to balance the lopsided picture of Nietzsche’s glorification of art that has become one of the hallmarks of Nietzsche literature, as I have attempted to do here. This pessimism is mitigated only by the possibility of art, by the belief in the heights art could be capable of reaching, and primarily by the belief that a human being, by adopting a particular artistic practice of self-fashioning, may be capable of overcoming the merely human. But there is a tension in Nietzsche’s thought nevertheless, between on the one the need to negate and overcome art and our need for art, and on the other hand the impossibility of there ever being a kind of higher art
Nietzsche aspires to. In the same sense that Nietzsche’s Übermensch is only a myth,
145 KGW V 7 (290)
242 something that does not exist except as a regulative idea, Nietzsche’s art may also be something that will always remain only within the realm of what we think is possible. On my reading of Nietzsche, we must recognize that, if we understand art as something actual, as more tangible than the aesthetics of life and self (i.e., the sense of ” art” with which we are all familiar), then Nietzsche’s desire to elevate the status of art and return it to the kind of glory it once possessed long ago will always remain frustrated. That is because, as I have shown, this desire is kept in check by a consistent, serious, and devastating critique which all but literally declares the death of art. But the advantage of my reading of Nietzsche is not only that it brings to the fore this often obscured aspect of Nietzsche’s treatment of art, but that by drawing attention to his interpretive project of overcoming, it integrates Nietzsche’s critique within the larger philosophical context in a manner that does not threaten the coherence and consistency of his account. If the tension in his account remains, perhaps as a lasting legacy of his thought on art, it is nevertheless not one that needs to be easily given over to contradiction and paradox.
But this tension should bring into serious doubt any suggestion of Nietzsche’s unqualified glorification of art.
243
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