c.4 Aesthetical Readings

One may refer to Nietzsche’s “own emotionally overpowering experience as an artist”⁷⁷⁴. Yet, even though it isn’t always remembered that Nietzsche composed music, wrote poetry, employed all kinds of artistic structuring and imagery in his books and came to exert formidable influence on a host of creative artists, his aesthetic importance is undeniable: “Throughout his creative life, Nietzsche seems to have been preoccupied with the elusive task of achieving a balance between his competing impulses, the artistic and the philosophical”⁷⁷⁵. It has been proposed that it was because, like Rousseau, Nietzsche did not find proper actualization for his musical aspirations, that these philosophers “expressed in the music of their prose what their music could not say”⁷⁷⁶. Gadamer, for instance, has confessed that Nietzsche’s is the “most beautiful, mature, rich German prose that I know”⁷⁷⁷.

Andrew Bowie has sought to sum up Nietzsche’s point of departure as follows: ”Art, in the form of music” is the incomparable force “because of its revelation of the divided nature of all phenomenal experience, which can only be overcome in art.” Music was, for Nietzsche, the irreducible and “wholly autonomous medium of aesthetic experience”. Its appreciation helped him, not only to think music as

“the materiality of notes” and rhythmic sequences as the paradigm of “differentiality”, but as well to think language as having noncognitive “tonal basis”. Bowie says that Nietzsche came to question this

“romantic” and “vitalist” setting later but its importance lies in its “illustration of the extremes” to which aesthetical and metaphysical thinking can go.⁷⁷⁸

Peter Bürger’s Zur Kritik der idealistischen Ästhetik (1983) shows how strongly Nietzsche is integrated in aesthetical debates. Reviewing contemporary discussion, including opinions as to Nietzsche’s

aestheticism and the Nietzschean inspiration of an avantgardist “aesthetics of “suddenness”“, Bürger places Nietzsche’s Geburt in the confines of an idealistic metaphysics of art.⁷⁷⁹ Eberhard Lämmert, for his part, calls Nietzsche as “the first to apply the modern aesthetic of genius also to philosophizing”⁷⁸⁰. Edward Halper, in turn, underlines Nietzsche’s detrimental influence on the contemporary art scene. He says that Nietzsche’s excessive emphasis on creativity and experimenting as distinct from rationality is

“directly responsible for a good deal of artistic anti-rationalism. The first paradox here lies, so Halper, in the way Nietzsche’s philosophy is accountable for “recent views of art”, while his conviction seems to be that no philosophy can determine art and no “art reflects views of art”. The other is that art does rely on

“the results of reason”, where artists, following Nietzsche, continue to talk about its insignificance.⁷⁸¹

It is Geburt’s phrase about the aesthetic as the sole option for justifying ’being-there’ that has aroused much controversy. M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern see the issue as follows: ”However we translate the phrase, the characteristic Nietzschean paradox remains. Nietzsche’s starting point is the aesthetic conceived as a sphere beyond all moral considerations, self-sufficient, an alternative form of existence. How is this to be brought into a meaningful relationship with the world in which we live? Evidently, only by some

vindication or justification of this world which cannot itself be aesthetic - that is, by some kind of

redemption. All his writings are marked by some attempt at an aesthetic re-casting of the world of human experience, yet any such attempt is foiled by the requirement that, if it is to be more than ’a

phantasmagoria’, it must be anchored to that activity of ours which endows the world with value. A redefinition of the word ’aesthetic’ to bring it closer to this valuegiving activity is implicit in BT [GT] -surely an admission of the dilemma.”⁷⁸²

Similarly, Ralph Driever’s thesis is that it is the “culturalistic aestheticism that is so extraordinarily important for Nietzsche’s writings”. What is at stake is the aestheticization of the Schopenhauerian notion of the will. Yet, Driever assures that it is not only the core of Geburt but the “basis, on which his later theory of culture, too, is to be developed”. The basic insight is, as he writes, that Kulturmensch is always an artist to whom Kultur is always a work of art. Driever’s conclusion reads: ”Nietzsche was never an aesthetician, that is, a theoretician who, in a coherent reflection, determines the productive [werkschaffende] form of action according to its lawlikenesses and creative factors.”⁷⁸³

One of the early assessments of Nietzsche from the point of view of the aesthetical and the artistic, is

included in Otto Kirn’s book Sittliche Lebensanschauungen der Gegenwart (1907). It speaks of his aesthetical Lebensauffassung and artistic Lebensgestaltung. In this way, Nietzsche stands close to Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel and Schopenhauer.⁷⁸⁴ More recently,

Nietzsche’s alleged aestheticism finds its most explicit and most forceful thematization in Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche. Life as Literature (1985): ”Nietzsche, I argue, looks at the world in general as if it was a literary text. And he arrives at many of his views of the world and the things within it, including his views of human beings, by generalizing to them ideas and principles that apply almost intuitively to the literary situation, to the creation and interpretation of literary texts and characters. Many of his very strange ideas appear significantly more plausible in this light. The most obvious connection, of course, is supplied by our common view that literary texts can be interpreted equally well in vastly different and deeply incompatible ways.” Nehamas adds that this “literary model” is the one motivating Nietzsche “to create what we may well call a literary product” and explains: ”Nietzsche’s positive thinking consists”, most importantly, “in the presentation, or exemplification, of a special character, recognizably literary”

making philosophical views “a way of life that is uniquely his”.⁷⁸⁵

Nehamas has been strongly criticized in a Nietzsche monograph written together by Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart and Jean-Pierre Mileur. They write as follows: ”In life, self-fashioning works sometimes against, sometimes in concert with, antecedent conditions of family, environment, personality, and so on.

Writing involves antecedent conditions of its own, having to do with the nature of the activity, the experience, origins, and place in the world of the writer as writer. Nehamas’s understanding of Nietzsche’s “aestheticism” has the effect of making his writerliness transparent to the concerns of philosophy; but it might be more helpful to say that by taking Nietzsche’s writerliness fully into account we actually “clarify” the problems posed by his ideas by showing that they are more deeply problematic than philosophers have yet recognized.” For the critical trio, “Nehamas’s rhetoric is the means by which the literary text is silently appropriated to aesthetics, the creation of a literary character is equated with the moral project of literal self-fashioning, and acts of interpretation are made to respond to the

preoccupations of epistemology.”⁷⁸⁶

Alan Megill, for his part, emphasizes Nietzsche’s aestheticism as the neglected key to his interpretative thinking. It is, for Megill, a counter-position against naturalistic thought.⁷⁸⁷ Another way to look at the matter can be found in Pauli Pylkkö’s article on the Nietzschean semantics. Pylkkö writes that it “may not be surprising” to hear that “Nietzsche’s philosophy of language and meaning is relativistic and that it conforms with the artistic theory” of naming and meaning, as distinct from logico-cognitivistic and eliminativist theories. Yet, as Pylkkö insists, “there is another line in Nietzsche’s thinking”, namely, that of a Humean “skepticism and naturalism” that sometimes comes close to “phenomenalism and even

behaviorism”. This calls for, so Pylkkö, an understanding of Nietzsche’s project, or at least of his so called middle period, as a complex combination of artistic and eliminative materialist views of signification.⁷⁸⁸

Haar is the most unequivocal opponent of any aestheticist reading of Nietzsche. He admits that some passages, in Nietzsche, may point to the possibility of art as a “refuge” but the “(future) primacy of art”

itself have to “rest on a double necessity”. On the one hand, there is a “forgotten primitive artistic creation” inherent in taking cognizance of anything and using language. This is a desperately

anthropomorphic procedure. On the other hand, art, in its utmost intensity, is the closest approximation of “the essence of the Will to Power as a permanent self-growth”. In both aspects, it is the servant of prior, nonaesthetical forces. This is why Haar concludes: ”There is no aestheticism in Nietzsche.”⁷⁸⁹