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An Examination of Nietzsche's Critique of Art and Th 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. ii 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. iii 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 v 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).
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