YOUNG, J. Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art

NIETZSCHE'S
P H I L O S O P H Y OF ART
JULIAN YOUNG
Department of Philosophy,
University of Auckland
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For
Michael Cherniavsky
Contents
Acknowledgments page xi
List of abbreviations xiii
Introduction
1 Schopenhauer 5
2 The Birth of Tragedy 25
3 Human, All-too-human 58
4 The Gay Science 92
5 Twilight of the Idols "7
Epilogue 148
Notes 153
Texts and translations 166
Index 167
IX
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the University of Mainz and the German Academic

Exchange Service for providing, respectively, the hospitality and the
finance that made possible the birth of the thoughts here recorded,
also to the students, too many to be named, at the Universities of
Auckland and Calgary who contributed to graduate seminars in
which these thoughts were tested and molded into shape. I should
like to thank friends and colleagues who have read the manuscript
or in other ways helped make this a better work than it would
otherwise have been: Rudolph Maker, Bob Solomon, Kathleen
Higgins, Stephen Davies, Chris Goj, Heath Lees, Peter Kraus, and
the (anonymous) readers for Cambridge University Press. And
finally I thank Jenny Diepraam and Maggie Kohl for laboring long
and hard with my appalling handwriting.
XI
Abbreviations
Nietzsche's works are abbreviated as follows (textual references are

to section numbers):
A The Anti-Christ
BGE Beyond Good and Evil
BT The Birth of Tragedy
CIV The Case of Wagner
D Dawn {Daybreak)
EH Ecce Homo
GM On the Genealogy of Morals
GS The Gay Science
HHi Human, All-too-human
HH ii a Assorted Opinions and Maxims
HH lib The Wanderer and his Shadow
NCW Nietzsche Contra Wagner
TI Twilight of the Idols
WB Richard Wagner at Bayreuth
WP The Will to Power
Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra
KG Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G.Colli and M.
Montinari in 30 vols.
And Schopenhauer's works as follows (textual references are to page

numbers)
WR 1, WR 11 The World as Will and Representation vols. 1 and 11
PP i, PP11 Parerga and Paralipomena vols. 1 and 11
Full bibliographical information can be found under "Texts and

translations" (p. 166).
xin
Introduction
i This, first of all, is a book about Nietzsche's philosophy of art,

about his view of the genesis of art, of what makes good art good and
bad art bad; about, above all, the relationship between art and life.
Or rather, it is a book about Nietzsche's p h i l o s o p h y of art for, so
runs a central thesis of the book, there is, in Nietzsche, no single view
of art (or of very much else). Rather, his career divides up into
different periods distinguished from each other by sharply con-
trasting attitudes to and about art. More specifically, I hold that
Nietzsche's thought about art divides into four main periods. I also
hold, however, that the fourth constitutes a return to the first. In the
end, so I argue, the path described by Nietzsche's thought is a
circular one.
Philosophy is distinguished by the fact that everything is connected
with everything else. Of Nietzsche's philosophy this is even more true
than usual. Thus this is not just a book about art. It is not just an
essay in " aesthetics," for it turns out that it is not possible to discuss
the development of Nietzsche's aesthetics without trying to under-
stand his metaphysics, his fluctuating beliefs concerning the scope of
human knowledge, concerning the nature and value of science
(roughly, the higher his valuation of science the lower his valuation
of art and vice versa) and concerning pessimism (roughly, the more
seriously he takes pessimism the more seriously he takes art and vice
versa). And when it comes to Nietzsche's later philosophy of art, it
turns out that that cannot be understood without confronting the
celebrated Nietzschean themes: the death of God, the eternal
recurrence, and the idea of the Übermensch ( " o v e r m a n " ) . (Interest-
ingly, though, the "will to power" turns out to be relatively
^ i m p o r t a n t - but that, it has always seemed to me, is a notion
which figures much more prominently in commentaries than in the
2 Nietzsche's philosophy of art
texts themselves.) Hence what the book offers is a particular
perspective on the development of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole.
The work is organized chronologically. (Chapters 2 to 5
correspond to the four periods into which I claim Nietzsche's career
falls.) It thus constitutes a kind of biography: not a biography in the
usual sense but rather a philosophical biography, a record of the twists
and turns taken by Nietzsche's philosophy viewed through the prism
of his philosophy of art. The model it follows is supplied by Nietzsche
himself; by his last book, Ecce Homo, the work which purports to be
his philosophical autobiography. As in Ecce Homo the matter of this
study is the life lived by Nietzsche in rather than outside of his
writings, and as in Ecce Homo that life is viewed as falling into sharply
separate phases, phases which nonetheless add up to a kind of unity,
an aesthetic unity. Unlike Ecce Homo, however - in many ways a
mendacious, deluded book - this study aims at truthfulness. In this
respect it aims to be an improvement over its often questionable
model.
Unlike Ecce Homo, too, this is a critical study of Nietzsche's thought.
This sets it apart from what seems to me a regrettable trend in recent
discussion of Nietzsche (at least in English), a trend to mere
interpretation. There are, it seems to me, at least two, more or less
conscious modes of thinking which underlie this trend. The first
consists in thinking that since, according to Nietzsche's "per-
spectivism" (in chapter 4 I reject this interpretation of the doctrine),
there are no truths but only interpretations, it follows that there is no
definitive text to criticize and that all one can do is to offer
interpretations that one finds appealing. The second and opposite
tendency (one which would have delighted the author of Thus Spake
Zarathustra) consists in elevating the texts to quasi-biblical status, in
treating them as unquestionable repositories of profound and
wonderful truth, the only task being that of recovering and
articulating this truth.
Both of these ways of thinking are, I believe, to be avoided. The
first because it is self-undermining - if there is no definitive text
because of perspectivism then perspectivism is true (and a definitive
part of the text) and there are, after all, some truths - and the second
because it is blind. Whatever Nietzsche may have come to believe,
ultimately, about his own infallibility (see the Epilogue below), the
fact is that the texts are by no means that but are, along with their
brilliance and insight, full of prejudice dressed up as philosophy,
Introduction 3
manipulative rhetoric, and, on occasion, atrociously poor argu-
mentation.
Criticism of Nietzsche is legitimate. There is definitive text, or
rather texts, and their character is not as difficult to discover as is
often pretended. And it is vital. Otherwise, having entered that
Nietzschean maze, one never finds one's way out again.
2 My first chapter is about Schopenhauer. It is well known that as

a young man Nietzsche was deeply impressed by the great pessimist
and that his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was written under his
influence. The general view is that after this relatively brief, youthful
infatuation Nietzsche turned in the direction of " h e a l t h " and away
from Schopenhauer's philosophy of "sickness": that thereafter
Schopenhauer figures in Nietzsche's thought only as the " a n t i p o d e "
of himself and his philosophy. And this, certainly, is the view put
about by Nietzsche himself: whereas the early writings refer to
Schopenhauer in terms of almost religious veneration, the later
writings refer to him almost always as an epitome of sickness,
"decadence," and error.
I oppose this view of things. The Birth of Tragedy, I shall argue (in
ch. 2), was (not just cosmetically but fundamentally) influenced by,
in particular, Schopenhauer's metaphysics and his philosophy of art.
And on the crucial question of pessimism, the Schopenhauerian
assessment of the worth of human existence is, I shall suggest,
endorsed. In the middle of his life Nietzsche turned against pessimism
and against Schopenhauer. But in the end, reluctantly and making
every rhetorical effort to disguise this from us and, more importantly,
from himself, he came back, I shall argue, to pessimism. Though
Schopenhauer's name is never rehabilitated - to do so would have
been to /admit to that which Nietzsche was trying so hard to
conceal - his essential spirit, his pessimism, lives as strongly in
Nietzsche's final works as in his first.
But even on the view that Schopenhauer really is the antipode of
Nietzsche's later philosophy he remains the crucial figure to an
understanding of Nietzsche (crucial, on this view, somewhat in the
way that Catholicism is crucial to the psychology of the lapsed
Catholic). From any point of view Schopenhauer is vital to the
understanding of Nietzsche. Except for the Greeks, there is no other
philosopher he knew with anything like the same intimacy. His
writings, all of them, are full not just of quotations and paraphrases
from Schopenhauer, but of phrases, allusions and rhythms both
conscious and unconscious. Nietzsche breathed Schopenhauer and
cannot be understood without him.
3 Any work on Nietzsche has to express a policy with respect to the

Nachlass, in particular with respect to that portion of it published
posthumously as The Will to Power. It has now been established 1 that
far from The Will to Power constituting, as Heidegger and many
others have held, his " philosophy proper," a philosophy he would
have eventually published had not madness and death intervened,
over three-quarters of the entries were, in fact, never intended for
publication at all. What follows is that (i) no interpretative thesis
must be based on The Will to Power alone, and (2) passages from that
work must never be given interpretative precedence over passages
from published works. Their sole legitimate use is as clarifications of,
and expansions upon, that which Nietzsche published. In general, it
seems to me, the distinction between the public and private is very
important with respect to Nietzsche. Like many people, he used
private notes to entertain (not affirm) a variety of positions with
respect to a given issue. The act of affirmation was the act of
publication. Nietzsche's celebrated self-contradictions are greatly
diminished if this is borne in mind (together with the fact that to
change one's mind over time is not to contradict oneself).
CHAPTER I
Schopenhauer
i Nietzsche's thought about art is, I suggested in the Introduction,

deeply rooted in the philosophy of Schopenhauer; in Schopenhauer's
philosophy of art but in his general philosophy too. Accordingly, in
this chapter, I provide a brief sketch of Schopenhauer's philosophy
as a whole, first a highly impressionistic account of his general
philosophy and then, in somewhat greater detail, an account of his
philosophy of art. In doing so I shall try to present him as Nietzsche
saw him, through his eyes and sometimes in his words. Of the several
images which might be offered ofthat clear yet ultimately ambiguous
structure which is Schopenhauer's philosophy, this chapter tries to
present the Nietzschean image.
2 Schopenhauer's metaphysics, propounded mainly in the first two

books of his main work, The World as Will and Representation (1819),
is a version of Kantian idealism. The everyday world, the world
given in sense-perception, is ideal, mere "representation," " p h e n o -
menon," or "appearance," a creation of the human mind quite
different in character from the reality, the world " i n itself" that
underlies it.
In the, main, Schopenhauer takes this, as simply a datum, as
something established beyond all doubt by Kant's great Critique of
Pure Reason (1781). Yet he does provide one original and quite un-
Kantian argument for (a kind of) idealism. This consists in an
elaboration of the observation that, as a survival mechanism, the
human brain can be expected to present the world to us in a useful
rather than - a by no means coincident notion - truthful manner
(see especially, WR 11, ch. xxn). 1 (Biological idealism, the idea that
we perceive the world in terms of "life-preserving errors" [GS n o ] ,
is central to Nietzsche's philosophy in all its phases, and even at his
most anti-Schopenhauerian he is prepared to acknowledge his debt
5
in this regard. In The Gay Science, for instance, he refers to
Schopenhauer's "immortal doctrine" of the "instrumental [i.e.
practical] character" of human thought and perception [GSgc)]).
Notice that the biological route to idealism modifies the character
of Kantian, strictly "transcendental," idealism. For, according to
Kant, it is not merely the world of common sense but, more
comprehensively, " n a t u r e , " the entire world of space and time, that
is ideal. Yet an argument to the ideality of the common-sense image
of the world that is grounded in an appeal to proto-Darwinian facts
concerning the biological function of the brain seems to presuppose
that a scientific, and hence natural, image of the world presents it as
it really, in itself, is. The non-natural an sich of Kant's metaphysics
is transposed into a natural, albeit esoteric, domain. 2
3 What is this metaphysical yet natural substratum upon which we

impose our near and orderly story of common-sense objects and
events? Schopenhauer calls it " w i l l " ; it is " T h e World as Will." He
arrives at this description on account of the conjunction of two main
lines of thought. The first consists in reflections upon the foundations
of natural science ("there is much science in Schopenhauer,"
Nietzsche remarks in Human, All-too-human), reflections concerning,
in particular, the inadequacy of the atomistic conception of matter.
This he describes as a "revolting absurdity" subscribed to mainly by
the French on account of " t h e backward state of [their]
metaphysics" (WR n, p. 302). Ultimate nature, he holds, cannot be
conceived as a collection of tiny, indestructible chunks of matter but
must, rather, be conceived as a flux of immaterial force or energy.
The only coherent conception of ultimate nature is a dynamic rather
than mechanistic one. 3
The second factor that leads Schopenhauer to use " w i l l " to
characterize the ultimate reality of nature is a particular version of
meaning-empiricism: his doctrine, taken over from Kant and
ultimately from Locke, that terms are meaningful only if their
meaning can be elucidated in terms of sense-experience. Schopen-
hauer chooses to satisfy his own metatheoretical constraint by
identifying the force that nature ultimately is with "will." 4 He
defends this extension of the concept beyond its normal restriction to
the human or at least sentient domain by inviting us to reflect upon
the analogies between the behavior of objects throughout n a t u r e -
the turning of the magnet towards the pole, the "striving" of the
stone for ever-closer union with the earth - and that behavior,
Schopenhauer 1
human behavior, which we know to be a manifestation of will (of
desiring, hoping, suffering, fearing, and so on). Satisfying the
constraints of concept-empiricism in the Schopenhauerian manner is
to be seen not as arbitrary but as provided with an epistemological,
that is analogical, warrant.
Schopenhauer conceives of the force, that is to say will, that nature
fundamentally is as a single quantum. This introduces into his
metaphysics a distinctive - and distinctly un-Kantian - contrast
between the one and the many. 5 The everyday, phenomenal world
is a world of individuals; it is subject, as Schopenhauer puts it, to the
principium individuationis. But the metaphysical reality beneath it is
"beyond plurality," is, that is to say, " O n e . " Plurality is therefore
an "illusion." (As we will see, Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of
Tragedy, combines both the substance and the terminology of
Schopenhauer's one-many contrast. He even emphasizes it by
referring to metaphysical reality not only as " t h e will" but also as
"the primal unity.")
4 The best-known fact about Schopenhauer is that he was a

pessimist. The world of the principium individuationis is a world of
terror and suffering, from which it follows, he holds, that its
membership is a curse not a blessing. And the will that is responsible
for, and expresses itself in, such a world - as it were, the "inner
character" that materializes itself in the horrors of nature - must be
concluded to be evil, morally repugnant, something that ought not
exist. Hence his vigorous insistence that, notwithstanding certain
similarities to the doctrine, he is no pantheist: nature he says, fitting
his own meaning to Aristotle's words, is not divine but demonic (WR
ii, p. 349). (Nietzsche accurately comments: "Against the theory
that the [in-itself of things must necessarily be good, blessed, true,
and one, Schopenhauer's interpretation of the ' in-itself as will was
an essential step; but he did not understand how to deify this will; he
remained entangled in the moral-Christian ideal...see[ing] it as
bad, stupid, and absolutely reprehensible" \WP 1005].)
What reason is there to regard the world of individuals as a world
of such horror? Schopenhauer has several distinct routes to
pessimism (one of these I shall touch on in sec. 5 below) but that
which has greatest relevance to our interest in Nietzsche is grounded
in the, in some respects, Darwinian character of Schopenhauer's
perception of nature.
From his proto-Darwinian perspective Schopenhauer saw that the
suffering of individuals is no accidental phenomenon but is, rather,
written into the system of nature. The means, that is, that nature, the
world-will, adopts to ensure the perpetuation of its system of species
is the massive overpopulation of the world by members of one species
so that there remains always a surplus to act as food for members of
another {WR n, p. 351). It follows that the pain and destruction of
individuals is part of the order of things decreed by a world-will
criminally indifferent to the fate of the individuals.
In the case of human beings, of course, the grosser of the ways in
which one individual preys upon another are eradicated by the state
(its sole function). Nonetheless, human life, too, is dominated by
rival egoisms, the satisfaction of the one necessarily entailing the
suffering of another. Thus nature as a whole, whether within or
outside of society, is essentially more or less open helium omnium contra
omnes, Hobbes' war, all against all. When we add that such
"contradiction" is the eternally repeated order of things - there is
no goal towards which the world is evolving and hence no possibility
of an ultimate redemption or justification of present horrors - we
understand the full bleakness of Schopenhauer's view of nature.
(And when we add that the ultimate bearer of the world's pain is
identical with its ultimate source we see a terrible "eternal justice"
in things: the world-will's pain exactly balances its guilt [WR 1, p.
352].)
5 H u m a n beings, we have seen, are compelled to cause suffering to

each other by the competitive character of existence. But, normally,
to do so causes them little compunction. The reasons for this are
epistemological: only one's own body is presented to one as
" i n h a b i t e d " by will, other human bodies being presented as mere
bodies. Only, that is, my body is presented to me as capable of desire
and frustration, as susceptible to pleasure and pain. Hence it is
entirely natural for me to treat other humans as inanimate things, to
dispose of them as mere means to the satisfaction of my own ends.
" E g o i s m " is the natural stance of one human being to another.
Virtue, that is to say altruism (the supreme principle of morality is
" h u r t no one: on the contrary help everyone as much as you c a n " ) ,
constitutes, therefore, a theoretical problem: how is it possible?
Schopenhauer answers that when it occurs - there are, he believes,
rare but genuine exceptions to the egoistic norm of human action - it
constitutes an occasion of extraordinary metaphysical insight, a
Schopenhauer 9
transcendence of the common-sense metaphysics of the principium
individuationis. The psychological basis of altruism is sympathy -
feeling the same kind of concern for the well-being of another that
one normally has for one's own - and the basis ofthat is the altruist's
penetration of the "veil of m a y a " ; her inarticulate, "intuitive"
realization that the principium individuationis is an illusion, that every
individual is as much an "objectification" of the primal unity as the
one she normally calls " m e . " The ultimate basis of altruism is, as we
may call it, "metaphysical solipsism": the realization that I am the
only being that exists but that every other individual is this " I " too:
" t a t tvam asi," "this art thou," in the formula from the Upanishads
that Schopenhauer often quotes.
What is the point, the justification, of altruism? A kind of point,
and as it were interim justification, is provided by the contrast
between the worlds inhabited by, respectively, the altruist and the
egoist. The latter inhabits (in terms of Ferdinand Tönnies' later
distinction) a Gesellschaft of individuals who stand to each other in
essentially competitive, hostile relations. Because the heart is
"contracted" by egoism, because it "concentrates our interest on
the particular phenomenon of our own individuality and then
knowledge always presents us with the innumerable perils that
continually threaten this phenomenon... anxiety and care become
the keynote of [our] disposition" {WRi> p. 373). The altruist, on the
other hand, inhabits a warm and friendly Gemeinschaft. Because the
heart is " e n l a r g e d " by altruism, because altruism "extends our
interest in all that lives," it follows that " t h e anxious care for...self
is attacked and restricted at the root: hence the calm and confident
serenity afforded by a virtuous disposition" {WR 1, p. 374).
But the real reward for altruism - here Schopenhauer's pessimism
comes into play - is knowledge. For as altruistic identification with
others becomes increasingly universal in scope, as occurs in the life
of the saint, the altruist comes to the increasingly vivid realization
that suffering is the dominant character not just of her own but of all
life, that life as such is suffering. She comes, that is, to an intuitive
realization of the truth of philosophical pessimism. This brings about
a "transition from virtue to asceticism" {WR 1, p. 380), a retreat
from action, even moral action, which is seen now to be futile. And
it brings about, too, a "denial of the will," a moral nausea at, and
consequent retreat from identification with, the will which is now
perceived to be the evil source of the world's pain. The ultimate
point, then, to altruism is that it is a " s t a g e " on the path to that
ultimate enlightenment which constitutes " s a l v a t i o n " ' the realiza-
tion that the will is to be denied.
Why should denial of the will constitute salvation? What does the
holy ascetic identify with after disassociation from the will? From the
rationalistic point of view demanded of philosophy, there is nothing
that can be said. The account of the world as will takes us to the
limits - limits imposed by concept-empiricism - of language. But we
only have to observe the tremendous unanimity in the (literally
meaningless) literature of the mystics concerning both the existence
and character of a domain beyond the natural - they all report its
wonder and oneness - to "banish the dark impression" that an
absolute "nothingness" "as the final goal hovers behind all virtue
and holiness" (WRi, p. 411). There is something "beyond the will"
(WR 11, pp. 197-8), something which though, for us, a know-not-
what is accessible, present, and wondrous to those in whom the will
has turned and denied itself.6
6 How, to come finally to the center of our concern, does

Schopenhauer's philosophy of art fit into the philosophical landscape
we have thus far described? Schopenhauer's discussion of art
occupies the third of the four books that constitute his main work
and falls into two halves: the first offers a theory of art in general;
the second develops out of it a special theory for each of the
particular arts.
The heart of the general theory is the idea that there is a special
kind of consciousness or perception which is uniquely aesthetic.
Anything which is a genuine work of art must be created out of this
state, created with the intention of prompting and aiding the re-
creation of a similar state in the mind of the spectator (WR 11, pp.
407-8). It is tempting, particularly given Schopenhauer's identi-
fication of the capacity to sustain and communicate the aesthetic
state with the rare phenomenon of genius (WR 1, p. 185), to protest
that it cannot be art as such but only good art that could be required
to be inspired by this special state: to suggest, in other words, that
Schopenhauer's requirement is not intended to distinguish art from
non-art but rather good from bad art. In fact, however, this
distinction is not one Schopenhauer acknowledges: to him bad art
counts as non-art. There are, that is, on the one hand authentic
artists whose works genuinely embody the aesthetic state, and on the
Schopenhauer
other "imitators," "mannerists," pretend-artists who "suck their
nourishment" from the work of the genuine artist but produce
nothing (save, presumably, expensive handicraft) themselves {WR i,
p. 235). Schopenhauer, in short, and very often Nietzsche too,
refuses to use the term " a r t " in anything but an evaluative sense.
Like altruism, Schopenhauer regards aesthetic vision as a rare and
extraordinary transcendence of our ordinary mode of perceiving the
world. This makes it natural for him to define the aesthetic state via
a contrast between it and the ordinary state.
Ordinarily, we identify ourselves with an empirical individual, an
"object among objects" in the spatio-temporal world. This is the
precondition of our ability to locate other objects in the world: I can
only locate an object in space or time by relating it, ultimately, to a
here and now, the reference of which is determined by the location of
my own body. Epistemologically, I am, in Wittgenstein's phrase,
"the centre of my world." Now, because one's essence is to will, the
question of what kinds of objects are located where and when is by
no means a matter of indifference. On the contrary, we find the
objects around us and the question of their relationships to ourselves
deeply "interesting." We view them "in relation to the will" {WR
i, p. 177) either as threats to our well-being or as potential satisfiers
of our desires. But this means (here we return to the theme of the
"instrumental" character of ordinary consciousness) that much
manipulation of perceptual data occurs in the interests of the will: to
the traveler in a hurry, for instance, the beautiful Rhine bridge may
appear as little more than a dash intersecting with a stroke (WR 11,
p. 381).
The final hallmark of ordinary consciousness (here another of
Schopenhauer's routes to pessimism presents itself) is suffering and
anxiety. Generally speaking, there is a disjunction between the will
and the world: the way the world is is rarely in all respects - and
then only briefly and, as we have seen, uncertainly - the way we
want it to be. And in those moments when it is we suffer the terrible
penalty of " b o r e d o m " : a frustrated "pressure" of the will which
lacks any object upon which to express itself {WR 1, p. 364).
Everyday life, if we are honest, we must admit to be, in the main, an
oscillating mixture of pain, anxiety, and boredom.
Ordinary consciousness, then, is marked by epistemological
egocentricity, interestedness, the manipulation of perceptual content
by the will - Schopenhauer speaks here of "subjectivity" - and by
pain and anxiety. Aesthetic consciousness is marked by the

disappearance of each of these features. How does this happen? It
happens, says Schopenhauer, when, " t o use a pregnant expression,"
we " l o s e " ourselves in the object of perception so that " w e are no
longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception but the
two have become one since the entire consciousness is filled and
occupied by a single image of perception" {WR i, pp. 118-19).
When this happens one ceases to be aware of oneself as one spatio-
temporal object among many and hence ceases to view objects in
relation to an individual will: perception becomes (here Schopen-
hauer adopts Kant's hallmark of aesthetic awareness) "disin-
terested." From this it follows that the "subjectivity" of ordinary
consciousness disappears - perception becomes "objective" - and
that its painful character disappears too: if my consciousness is
wholly absorbed by the object of perception, then I can be aware
neither of a disjunction between the will and the world nor of the will
as being objectless. This blessed disappearance of pain constitutes
one of the two forms of aesthetic pleasure (the other we will come to
shortly). Often, that is, when we describe an object as beautiful - a
landscape lit by evening light, glimpsed on one's first escape from the
city, perhaps - we simply express the subjective state the object helps
produce in us, " a painless state" in which for a brief moment we are
" delivered from the vile [schnöde] pressure of the will" and "celebrate
the sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion
stands still" {WR 1, p. 196). Schopenhauer regards this state as
pregnant with significance since it is a brief (and partial) indication
of the bliss of the ascetic, an intimation of " h o w blessed must be
the life of a man in whom the will is silenced not for a few
moments... but for ever" {WR 1, p. 390). The aesthetic state, in
short, is a signpost to the (permanent) solution to the problem of
pain.
7 In aesthetic consciousness there is, we have seen, a radical

transformation of its subject, a transformation into, as Schopenhauer
put it, " t h e pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"
{WR 1, p. 179). Inseparably connected with this, however, there
occurs also a transformation of the object. For since we cease to be
aware of ourselves as occupying a here and a now in the world and
since, as we saw, the locating of other objects in the space-time world
is dependent on such consciousness, it follows that we cease to be
Schopenhauer 13
aware of the object of perception as an inhabitant ofthat network of
relations which constitutes the space-time world. But that means
that we cease to perceive it as an individual, for individuality,
Schopenhauer holds, is constituted only by membership of that
network.
What then do we perceive? Schopenhauer's initially surprising
answer is that the objects of aesthetic perception are Plato's Forms,
the " Platonic Ideas." The everyday world, we saw, is an appearance
of the world as will. But the will appears, manifests, "objectifies"
itself at various " g r a d e s " which are higher or lower depending on
the clarity with which the will reveals its essential nature in them. At
the lowest level are natural forces such as gravity and magnetism,
above them the various species of inorganic and organic bodies.
Finally, at the highest level, there is the human species in which that
same will obscurely manifested in gravitational or magnetic
phenomena reveals its nature most clearly. These grades are the
Ideas, the objects of aesthetic perception. It follows then that
aesthetic perception involves a double transformation: " a t one stroke
the particular thing becomes the Idea of it species, and the perceiving
individual the pure subject of knowing" (WR 1, p. 179).
8 Before passing to Schopenhauer's treatment of the particular arts,

I want to raise, and try to answer, a number of questions concerning
the general theory which lies now, in outline, before us.
The first can be introduced by observing that Schopenhauer's
insistence on the will-less disinterestedness of aesthetic contemplation
provides him with, among other things, a criterion for distinguishing
between art and, roughly speaking, pornography. For since art not
only arises out of, but also seeks to communicate, the aesthetic state,
it follows that genuine art should never represent objects (the female
form, for example) in a manner calculated to arouse the appetites.
Although, pace Nietzsche (see ch. 5, sec. 8 below), this seems a
plausible account of the distinction between art and pornography, it
also raises a problem. For if art is to be confronted in a will-less state
then, since every emotion is classified by Schopenhauer as a state of
the will (WR 11, p. 202), the unacceptable consequence seems to
follow that art, properly perceived, never evokes emotion. On a
much criticized yet stubbornly vital theory of what it is for a work
of art to express emotion, moreover - the theory that the work is
cheerful or sad or angry just in case it tends to produce that feeling
H Nietzsche's philosophy of art
in the audience - it would further follow that art cannot express

emotion.
As we will shortly see, Schopenhauer's central interest lies in
emphasizing the cognitive function of art. For this reason he attends
only en passant to its expressive aspect. Nonetheless, he says enough,
I think, to show that he neither supposes, nor is "committed to
supposing, that the will-lessness of aesthetic perception excludes the
propriety of an emotional response to art.
Schopenhauer repeatedly emphasizes that the kind of emotion
that is incompatible with aesthetic contemplation is personal
emotion - "personal participation" (WR n, p. 373), the presence of
"personal a i m s " (PP 11, p. 205), "individual [my emphasis]
subjectivity" (WR 1, p. 199). This suggests that he might allow an
affective response to art provided that the emotions involved are in
some way depersonalized.
The clearest confirmation that this is his position is to be found in
his discussion of the sublime. We experience the "feeling of the
sublime," he says, when we perceive an object that normally stands
in a "hostile" relation to the will without feeling, in the ordinary way,
fear. (The hostility of the "dynamically" sublime - huge tempests,
waterfalls, the wind howling through gullies, bleak, black, over-
hanging rocks - consists in their bringing home to one one's
powerlessness in the face of the might of nature, of the " m a t h -
ematically" sublime - the night sky, the dome of St. Paul's - in
making one aware of the vanishing insignificance of one's tenure in
space and time.) How is such "fearlessness" in the face of the fearful
possible? Why do we not only not flee the sublime but even seek
confrontation with it? The crucial phenomenon is simply that
disassociation from one's normal identity, that ascension to the
standpoint of the " p u r e subject" which occurs in experiencing the
beautiful. What distinguishes the sublime from the beautiful,
however - the two may merge into each other - is that in ex-
periencing the former one has a split, "two-fold" consciousness so
that although one is the pure, non-individual subject one also feels
oneself as the "feeble phenomenon," "dependent," "threatened,"
"insignificant," "abandoned to chance" (WR 1, pp. 204-6). This
latter induces a specially intense feeling of joy as one becomes aware
of one's separateness from the threatened, insecure, above all mortal
individual. The feeling of the sublime is for Schopenhauer, as for
Kant, whom he follows closely in this matter, an intimation of
Schopenhauer 15
immortality, a coming alive, in Kant's words, to the "supersensible

side of our being" {Critique of Judgment, sec. 27). Notice, however,
that one also experiences the fearful emotions of the threatened
individual. That one does not flee the sublime is explained by one's
disassociation from that individual: one, as it were, empathizes with
those emotions without regarding them as one's own.
If we now, as I believe we should, infer from this account of the
sublime to a general account of the expressiveness of art, the crucial
distinction can be seen to lie between ordinary, personal, action-
prompting emotion on the one hand, and depersonalized, universal
emotion on the other - universal because if the individual who
confronts the sublime object is not " m e " it is, surely, everyman. It is
the former, but not the latter, which is excluded from aesthetic
contemplation.
9 The second issue I want to raise is that of the nature and

significance of the "Platonic I d e a s " in Schopenhauer's general
theory of art. In Willing and Unwilling (ch. vn, sec. 6) I have argued
at length against the view that Schopenhauer's use of Platonic
terminology is intended to introduce as that which the artist
apprehends and makes into the content of the artwork a domain of
objects ontologically distinct from the domain of ordinary indi-
viduals. That which Cezanne perceives and his work represents is, I
have suggested, not the Idea of the apple rather than the particular
apple; rather, he perceives and represents the particular apple as
Idea. That which a Rembrandt self-portrait represents is not
Humanity rather than R e m b r a n d t ; it is, rather, Rembrandt but with
the focus and emphasis upon not the idiosyncratic in the indi-
vidual - that way lies the path to caricature (WR1, p. 225) - but the
universal, that "side of the Idea of mankind specially appearing in
this particular individual" (WR 1, p. 221).
To perceive or represent an object as Idea is, as we may put it, to
idealize it; to bring out its "significant form" (WR 1, p. 201), to
produce a representation of it in which "everything essential and
significant is gathered together and placed in the brightest light, but
everything accidental and foreign eliminated" (WR 1, p. 248). This
is what it is to represent an object as beautiful, to beautify it. (Delight
in significant form is the second of Schopenhauer's two kinds of
aesthetic pleasure [see sec. 6 above].) To some extent beauty already
occurs in nature. Every natural object instantiates the Idea of its
i6 Nietzsche's philosophy of art
species and hence, if its form is such as to express that Idea clearly,
it is beautiful. In general, however, art is more beautiful than nature
since the artist's control over form is greater than that of nature. He
is able to provide a " purer repetition" {WR n y p . 407) of nature's
forms and hence to "express clearly what nature only stammers"
( W Ä i , p . 222).
The impetus behind this account of aesthetic representation is the
rejection of naturalism. Art does not mirror nature, Schopenhauer
insists, but rather eliminates, obscures or deemphasizes everything in
an object or action that is not to its purpose. That purpose - a
purpose, he holds, which art shares with philosophy - is the
revelation of ultimate and universal truth; " t h e true nature of
things, of life and of existence" {WR 1, p. 406). It is the emphasis of
this purpose, not the introduction of Plato's ontology, which, I
believe, provides the rationale for Schopenhauer's use of Plato's
terminology. Plato, that is, pursuing " t h e ancient quarrel between
philosophy and poetry," condemns art for seducing the mind away
from the quest for truth with a play of sensuous surfaces.
Schopenhauer's aim is to rebut Plato's critique of art, " o n e of the
greatest errors... of that great m a n " {WR 1, p. 212), by redescribing
art in precisely the terms which Plato reserved for philosophy. Art
does not baffle but rather, in its own way, prosecutes the quest for
ultimate knowledge.
10 Schopenhauer holds, as has been mentioned, that the Platonic

Ideas in which the will, the metaphysical essence of the world
manifests itself, constitute a hierarchy in which different " g r a d e s "
correspond to the different degrees of clarity with which the will
reveals itself. Corresponding to this hierarchy is a hierarchy of the
arts. For each art has a special appropriateness to a certain grade of
the will's self-revelation. Architecture is the "lowest" art, for it has
as its central concern the "dullest visibility" of the will, the play
between the forces of gravity and rigidity inherent in its material. At
the top of the hierarchy are the poetic arts, for in their subject-matter
the metaphysical truth about the world reveals itself most clearly.
(Notice that Schopenhauer orders the arts solely in terms of their
cognitive value: aesthetic value is, for him, identical with cognitive
value.) With the exception of his discussions of poetry and, above all,
music, Schopenhauer's discussion of the particular arts has only
marginal relevance to our interest in Nietzsche. I shall, accordingly,
confine my attention to what he has to say about these two arts.
Schopenhauer 17
11 One of the hazards of attempting to refute Plato's critique of art
by redescribing it in the terms which Plato reserves for philosophy is
that of obliterating the distinction between art and philosophy.
Schopenhauer is aware of the need to accommodate the distinction.
He does so by insisting that although the topic of art and philosophy
is the same - both are concerned to reveal the nature of ultimate
reality - their modes of communication are different. For while
philosophy is essentially conceptual, art is perceptual {WR 11, p. 406).
The heart of this contrast is the idea that whereas philosophy
presents its universal truth abstracted and isolated in the form of a
proposition, art presents its truth always only in and through the
concrete particular, the "fragment" or "example," the "image of
perception" {ibid.). The knowledge of philosophy is always explicit,
that of art implicit, so that philosophy, he says, is related to art
somewhat as wine to grapes {WR 11, p. 407).
Schopenhauer's account of poetry (he includes under this term
poetic drama - theater, that is, as he knew it) has, at its heart, this
interplay of cognitive universality and perceptual particularity.
The poet's concern, he says, is with both "distinctness and
vividness" {WR 1, p. 242). On the one hand, he seeks vividness of
communication with the imagination of the reader. To this end his
skill (lies in the fact that although he employs the same words as are
used in the "driest prose" to communicate conceptual thought, he
is yet able to combine them so as to stimulate the appearance of
perceptual images before the imagination. In this connection, the
use of, for example, adjectives and adverbs is particularly important,
for through them the "sphere of a concept" is restricted more and
more until perceptuality is reached. This is how the lines from
Goethe's Mignon
Where gentle breezes from the blue heavens sigh
There stands the myrtle still, the laurel high
precipitate from a few concepts the delight (as we will see, a
particularly Nietzschean delight) of the southern climate (WR 1, p.
243)-
On the other hand, however, poetry is concerned to present with
clarity and distinctness the Idea of, above all, humanity. It is
concerned with the communication of universal truth about human
life. To this end (unlike history, which, according to Schopenhauer,
presents huge, boring chunks of factual detail in which, since
chronology provides the only principle of ordering, the trivial and
the significant are lumped together in an undifferentiated mass)
poetry selects for our attention only " significant characters in
significant situations." By "holding up before us a clarifying mirror
[verdeutlichenden Spiegel]" in which everything "essential and signifi-
c a n t " is retained but everything idiosyncratic or trivial eliminated
(WR i, p. 248), the poet tells us about man (WR 1, p. 244) (unlike the
historian who speaks only of men [ibid.]).
12 Schopenhauer experiences some difficulty in applying his general

theory of art to lyric poetry. For since the lyric is, he suggests,
distinguished from other forms of poetry by the fact that the depictor
is also the depicted, " a certain subjectivity is essential to poetry of
this k i n d " (WR 1, p. 248). Since will-less objectivity is, according to
his general theory of art, a condition of genuinely aesthetic
perception, this leads to a devaluation of lyric poetry as not requiring
genius for its production: "even the man who is not very eminent
can produce a beautiful song," for all that is required is a "vivid
perception" of his own state in a moment of emotional excitement
(WRi, p. 249).
But this is a bad misunderstanding of his own general theory, for,
as we saw in discussing the sublime (sec. 8 above), it is possible for
the artist to be detached from, "objective" about, his own feelings
as well as about the outer world. He can do this by ascending to the
perspective of the " p u r e subject of knowing" a state in which, as
Schopenhauer correctly put it in the case of the composer, " t h e man
is entirely separate from and distinct from the artist" (WR 1, p. 260),
Presumably, it is the predominance of the personal pronoun in lyric
poetry that misleads Schopenhauer into failing to give a unitary
account of poet and musician.
Nietzsche saw that Schopenhauer had misapplied his own theory,
and saw that in his "profound metaphysics of music" he "held in his
hands the m e a n s " for a properly Schopenhauerian account of lyric
poetry. Accordingly, in The Birth of Tragedy, he sets out to correct
what Schopenhauer actually says, " i n his spirit and to his h o n o u r "
(BT 5). That he here understands the implications of Schopen-
hauer's general theory of art better than Schopenhauer himself is
striking evidence of the depth of his Schopenhauerianism in this
early phase of his career.
Art, the Schopenhauerian Nietzsche says, is always "objective"
the "willing individual furthering his own egoistic ends" is always
Schopenhauer i9
its antagonist. But this by no means requires that the lyric poet,
say Archilochus, "should see nothing of the phenomenon of the
man Archilochus." For Archilochus qua lyric " g e n i u s " is distinct
from Archilocus qua "non-genius," qua "passionately inflamed,
loving and hating m a n . " This is so because, through a "mystical
self-abnegation," he has become " t h e only truly existent and eternal
self resting at the basis of things." From that perspective he may
retain objectivity but still express his "primordial [i.e. universal]
pain symbolically in the symbol of the man Archilochus" (ibid.).
(Notice that Nietzsche offers here precisely the reconciliation of
objectivity and expressiveness which, in section 8, I argued to be
implicit in Schopenhauer's general theory of art.)
13 Schopenhauer says (as he must given both pessimism and the

identification between aesthetic and cognitive value) that the
highest expression of the poetical art is tragedy. His interest, as with
both Aristotle and Nietzsche, lies in the nature of the " tragic effect,"
in the question of why we willingly submit to, even derive pleasure
from, depictions of the misery and injustice of life. Schopenhauer's
answer to this question is that pleasure in tragedy is the highest
degree of the "feeling of the sublime." The "tragic catastrophe," he
says, makes us feel
urged to turn our will away from life, to give up willing and loving life. But
precisely in this way we become aware that there is still left in us something
different that we cannot know positively but only negatively, as that which
does not will life. Just as... a red colour demands green, and even produces
it in the eye, so every tragedy demands an existence of an entirely different
kind, a different world, the knowledge of which can only be given to us
indirectly as here by such a demand. At the moment of the tragic
catastrophe we become convinced more clearly than ever that life is a bad
dream from which we have to awake. (WR 11, p. 433)'
Schopenhauer holds, then, that tragedy simultaneously produces
"resignation" (WR 1, p. 253) towards this life and makes us alive to
the "supersensible side to our being." With the greatest tragedies -
Schopenhauer thinks that on the whole ancient tragedies are
inferior to Christian ones since they exhibit only stoic heroism in the
face of misfortune - this serene, even cheerful, resignation is not
merely the effect but is also depicted in the tragedy, a depiction
which produces a further intensification of the effect. The drama,
that is, portrays not merely a tragic development in the action but
also the effect of this development upon the mind of the hero, an
effect which culminates in a moment of metaphysical, world-
transcending insight. Schopenhauer cites Bellini's Norma in this
connection (WR i, p. 436), but one might think al§o of the film of
Marcel PagnoPs, so it seems to me, deeply Schopenhauerian Manon
des Sources: of the harvest of catastrophe reaped by Papet from his
narrow, greedy willing and of his sudden transformation into a
metaphysical figure of resignation and dignity as he learns that the
man his rapaciousness has destroyed is, in fact, his own yearned-for
son.
14 Schopenhauer regards music as an exception to his general

theory of art, for it does not represent any individual or event of the
type that belongs to everyday reality. There is, of course, the
phenomenon of program music. But the representation of battles
and bird-song (Schopenhauer reports here the conviction shared by
all musical purists) is at best light-hearted and at worst an
objectionable perversion of the true function of music (WR 1, pp.
362-4). Properly employed, music never represents empirical
objects. Hence neither does it represent any such object as Idea. The
general theory which posits the Platonic Ideas as the topic of art does
not apply to music. Schopenhauer thus propounds a radical
dichotomy between music and the other arts which, as we will see,
reappears in Nietzsche.
How are we to account for this exceptional, apparently " abstract"
character of music? Leibniz held that music really is abstract, that
it is " unconscious arithmetic," a mere play with numerical ratios, an
uninterpreted syntax. But this, says Schopenhauer, must be rejected
as incapable of accounting for the profound and powerful effect that
music has on us. Music seems to tell us something, seems, that is, to
be a ' ' l a n g u a g e " that represents, is about, something. Only by
validating this intuition can we accommodate its depth and
seriousness (WR 1, p. 256).
What then is music about? Since it does not represent empirical
reality, only one answer, within the dualism between appearance
and thing in itself, is possible: it represents the thing itself, the will.
The other arts, of course, are by no means precluded from intimating
knowledge of the metaphysical: as bodily and facial movement and
gesture can express an inner will, so representations of the
"physiognomy" of nature can be representations of its inner will.
Schopenhauer 21
(Though Schopenhauer, of course, does not, it is perhaps helpful

here to think of Van Gogh.) But only music has direct access to the
metaphysical, only it provides us with an "immediate... copy" of
the will. This is why, cognitively, it is the profoundest, the highest of
all the arts: while the others speak always of the "shadow," it takes
us directly to the "essence" of things (WR i, p. 257).
15 Notice that Schopenhauer's account of the aboutness of music

has two aspects to it: on the one hand music is said to be about
metaphysical reality, the "thing in itself"; on the other hand it is said
to be about psychological reality, about "will." This double-
aspectedness is responsible for an ambivalence in Schopenhauer's
theory that comes to a head in the case of opera.
If we focus upon the first aspect, then the status of opera becomes
highly problematic. For if music gives us direct access to the thing in
itself and if, as Schopenhauer holds, the highest form of art is that
with the greatest cognitive value - that which communicates
knowledge of ultimate reality in the clearest and most vivid
way - then it would seem to follow that the highest form of music is
purely instrumental, as Wagner referred to it (derogatorily),
"absolute" music. And if we further assume, as Schopenhauer tends
to, (that music has only one proper function, opera comes to appear
(another aspect of the purist conviction) as a debased form of the art.
For if music, by itself, gives us immediate knowledge of ultimate
reality, then the addition to it of words (and action) would seem to
be at best an irrelevance and at worst a positive distraction. If, to
develop Schopenhauer's Platonic metaphor, music takes us directly
to the Real World of sunlight what possible interest could one have
in trying to guess at the character of that world by deciphering the
shadows in the cave?
Insofar as Schopenhauer attends to this aspect of his theory we find
him, as one would expect, in a frame of mind hostile to opera. Opera,
he says, is "strictly speaking... an unmusical invention for the
benefit of unmusical m i n d s " ; the truly musical mind desires only the
"pure language of tones" (PP 11, p. 437). The best that can be said
by way of justifying libretto is to view it as a kind of doodling to
occupy the intellects of lesser minds so that their musical faculties
may be better able to attend to the music (PP 11, p. 432). Again, we
find Schopenhauer suggesting that the mass is superior to opera since
the words, through constant repetition, come to function as a mere
solfeggio, mere sounds (PP n, pp. 434-5'). And of Rossini's operatic

music he remarks that its greatness consists in the fact that "it
requires no words at all, and therefore produces its full effect even
when rendered by instrumental means alone" (WRl, p. 262).
16 To be set against these kinds of remarks, however, is the fact that

Schopenhauer actually loved opera. And his writings, moreover, are
full of glowing references to the individual operas of Mozart, Rossini,
and, as we have already remarked, Bellini: Norma is described as
"quite apart from its excellent music... and considered only
according to its motives and interior economy... a tragedy of
extreme perfection" (WR 11, p. 436). These references are entirely
innocent of any hint of the inferiority of opera to absolute music. The
explanation of this, it seems to me, is that much of the time
Schopenhauer ignores his official view that music is a representation
of the metaphysical "will, treating it instead as a depiction of an
entirely human, merely psychological reality.
Developed in this way, Schopenhauer's theory of musical
representation posits, as its object, human emotions. Not, however,
"particular and definite" emotions but, rather, their "inner n a t u r e "
divorced from all "accessories and so also without any motives for
t h e m " {WRi, p. 261).
What is the "inner n a t u r e " of an emotion? Let us say that an
emotion can be analyzed into on the one hand an intentional object
and on the other an inner phenomenology that runs along
dimensions such as intensity, waxing or waning, brevity or
lingeringness, and innumerable others difficult or impossible to
articulate in words. This latter, this inner "feel" of an emotion seems
to be what Schopenhauer has in mind when he describes music, in
particular melody, as representing the "secret history" of the
"intellectually enlightened, that is human, will {WR 1, p. 259) (a
remark which seems, almost, to constitute the " program " for Strauss'
Ein Heldenleben).
Understood in this way, Schopenhauer's theory of musical
representation, treated psychologically, anticipates some aspects of
that proposed in more recent years by Susanne K. Langer (see, for
example, Feeling and Form).9, For, like her, he treats the way in which
music depicts, as we might call it, the feeling of feeling as a matter
of isomorphic correspondence between, on the one hand, elements of
the represented emotion and, on the other, elements (mainly
Schopenhauer 23
rhythmic and melodic) in the music. The constant deviation of

melody from the keynote, for example, corresponds to the perpetual
striving of the human will, and the return to its satisfaction {WR 1,
p. 259). And the short phrases of rapid dance music correspond to
the feeling of "ordinary happiness which is easy of attainment"
while the longer phrases and wide deviations of the allegro maestoso
seem to represent " a greater, nobler effort towards a distant goal
and its final attainment" {WR 1, pp. 260-1).
Understood in the above, nonmetaphysical way as a precursor of
the theory of Langer, Schopenhauer's theory of musical rep-
resentation becomes highly " opera-friendly," for on it, opera
becomes not only legitimate but might even be regarded as (speaking
from Schopenhauer's cognitivist point of view) the highest art-form.
For if music depicts the inner reality of human life and words the
outer, then music and words appear to be ideally suited to combine
in the presentation of a stereoscopic vision of the world. 9
17 I have labored the ambivalence in Schopenhauer's theory of

music that manifests itself in his conflicting attitude towards opera
because, as we will see in the next chapter, it is an ambivalence
inherited by his two disciples, Wagner and Nietzsche. Let me,
therefore, conclude this chapter by summarizing the exact character
of the ambivalence.
Schopenhauer says that will, which is what music represents,
constitutes the " i n n e r " reality of the world. He also says that it is the
"thing in itself" which lies beneath the surface of appearances.
These two metaphors, the inner-outer and the surface-depth
metaphors, run through all Schopenhauer's discussions of the will.
Sometimes one assumes prominence, sometimes the other. Some-
times, in talking of music, Schopenhauer emphasizes the depth
metaphor, for this captures his (romantic) intuition of its cognitive
ultimacy. (As Nietzsche points out, this elevation of the composer
into " a priest, a kind of mouthpiece of the 'in itself of things, a
telephone from the beyond" [GM 111, 5] is undoubtedly connected
with the attraction that Schopenhauer's philosophy of art held for
Wagner - never one, as Nietzsche remarks, to ignore anything in
majorem musicaegloriam {ibid.).) But to the extent that he speaks in this
vein Schopenhauer's theory of music demands absolute music and is
hostile to opera.
At other times, however, Schopenhauer emphasizes the inner-
outer metaphor. From this perspective the difference between music
and the other arts lies not in its representing a different and deeper
level of reality but rather in the object of its (direct) representation
being a different aspect of reality. To \ht extent that Schopenhauer
thinks in this way, music loses its cognitive superiority to the other
arts; on the other hand the theory becomes entirely friendly to
opera.
The difficulty with Schopenhauer's theory of music is that he tries
to square the circle by combining the view of music as cognitively
superior to the other arts with, at least at times, friendship towards
opera. Nietzsche and Wagner, as we will see, follow him into a
similar incoherence.
CHAPTER 2
The Birth of Tragedy
i Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy > was published in 1872,
the same year as that in which the foundation stone was laid for the
Festival Theater in Bayreuth. Politically and emotionally it is, like
his next substantial discussion of art, Richard Wagner at Bayreuth
(1876), dominated by the figure of Richard Wagner. The work is not
only dedicated to Wagner (to whom, at this period, Nietzsche was
accustomed to refer as Meister) but is conceived as, above all, a work
of propaganda on behalf of the Wagnerian cause. (If one attempted
to summarize the essence of its complex argument the following
might be offered: we stand in need of a "solution" to the suffering
and absurdity of life. The Greeks found such a solution in the art of
their great tragedians. Our only hope for a solution - given the
untenability of Christianity in the modern age - lies in the rebirth of
such art in the music-dramas of Richard Wagner.) Nietzsche was
dedicated to Wagner's cause and made proposals, both before and
after the publication of The Birth, to abandon his professorship at
Basle in order to work exclusively for the realization of the theater at
Bayreuth.
Philosophically, however, the figure of greatest importance for the
work is Arthur Schopenhauer. This is in no way inconsistent with its
Wagnerianism, for the Wagner Nietzsche came to know (they first
met at the end of 1868), the Wagner who had completed his whole
musico-dramatic ceuvre save for Götterdämmerung (1874) and Parsifal
(1882), had been, since his discovery of Schopenhauer in 1854,
himself dominated by the philosophy of the great pessimist.
Nietzsche himself discovered Schopenhauer in 1865 and became
an immediate disciple. In letters of the following year he spoke of
"my Schopenhauer" and described himself and Schopenhauer as
"often the same thing." This passion, it is clear, is what first
attracted him to Wagner: " I have found a m a n , " he wrote of
25
Wagner to Karl von Gersdorff in 1869, " w h o reveals to me what

Schopenhauer calls 'the genius' and is quite possessed by that [i.e.
Schopenhauer's] wonderfully intense philosophy." Earlier in the
same year he described his friendship with Wagner to Erwin Rohde
as "like taking a practical course in Schopenhauerian philosophy,"
and at about the same time wrote to Wagner himself: " T h e highest
and most inspiring moments of my life are closely associated with
your name, and I know of only one other man, and that man your
twin brother of intellect, Arthur Schopenhauer, whom I regard with
the same veneration - yea even more, as religione quadamT
In the light of these biographical observations concerning the
years of its inception, it is natural to expect The Birth to be a work
deeply Schopenhauerian in character. It comes, therefore, as
something of a surprise to discover that the question of the nature
and scope of the Schopenhauerian influence is a matter of deep
controversy, and that many, particularly English-speaking, com-
mentators are bent on minimizing its significance.
2 In some ways, that there is a Schopenhauerian influence is

undenied and undeniable. There is, that is, fairly wide agreement
that (as we will see) The Birth incorporates without modification
Schopenhauer's metaphysics, that it incorporates substantial ele-
ments of his theory of art, especially his theory of music, and that
Nietzsche found Schopenhauer's bleak portrait of the world and
human life at least the authentic statement of a problem. What is
highly controversial, however, is whether he also endorsed Schopen-
hauer's pessimism; whether, that is, he endorsed Schopenhauer's
inference from the pain and purposelessness of human existence to its
worthlessness. This question, which it is the main purpose of this
chapter to answer, is the most crucial of all the questions which can
be asked about The Birth, both with regard to understanding the
meaning of the work itself and with regard to determining its
relation to Nietzsche's later works.
3 After his break with Wagner in 1876 Nietzsche began to describe

not just Wagner but Schopenhauer too (this is not surprising given
the near-identity of the two in his mind) as "sick," "decadent," and
- invariably a term of high abuse for Nietzsche - "romantic." And
he started to represent his own philosophy as antipodal to
Schopenhauer's in a way that centrally involves the issue of
The Birth of Tragedy 27
pessimism: in opposition to Schopenhauer's " d e n i a l " of life, the

later Nietzsche represents "life-affirmation" as the pervasive
character and fundamental point of his own philosophy.
Aware of, and in agreement with, this self-characterization, many
commentators have sought to incorporate The Birth into the body of
Nietzsche's works by driving a wedge between Schopenhauer's
"sick" philosophy and the healthier turn taken, even at the
beginning, by Nietzsche's. In The Birth, they suggest, Nietzsche is
already emancipated from his youthful infatuation with Schopen-
hauerian pessimism. In spite of its Schopenhauerian garb, its use of
Schopenhauer's philosophy as a kind of "language," its fundamental
message is anti-Schopenhauerian: the message is opposed to the
medium. Hence The Birth is fundamentally continuous with
Nietzsche's later works and may be incorported into the auth-
entically Nietzschean canon.
Apart from Nietzsche himself (of whom more in a moment) the
most important of these commentators is Walter Kaufmann. 1
Kaufmann is important on account of the tremendous influence he
has, in the English-speaking world (witness the numerous references
to " Apolh'nian," which as far as I know is not a word of English), an
influence which stems partly from his mana as a pioneering (and
generally very fine - the finest) translator of Nietzsche into English,
but more dubiously from the many overintrusive, dogmatic footnotes
which accompany those translations and which mean that many
English readers imbibe text and Kaufmannic interpretations and
opinions in the same gulp. Kaufmann denies that the work is
pessimistic:
Instead of proving himself in his first book as an unswerving follower of
Schopenhauer Nietzsche discovered in Greek art a bulwark against
Schopenhauer's pessimism. One can oppose the shallow optimism of so
many Western thinkers and yet refuse to negate life. Schopenhauer's
negative pessimism is rejected along with the superficial optimism of the
popular Hegelians and Darwinists: One can face the terrors of history and
nature with unbroken courage and say Yes to life.2
This view is, I believe, quite mistaken (as mistaken as Kaufmann's
attempt to deny Nietzsche's, on balance, thoroughly hostile attitude
to Socrates). Nietzsche does, to be sure, offer a "solution" to
pessimism, a way of, in a sense, "overcoming" (BT3) it. In fact he
offers two solutions. But these solutions, so I shall argue, represent,
like Schopenhauer's, a flight from, a " d e n i a l " of human life. If we
can establish this overridingly central point then we will be justified

in regarding The Birth as a fundamentally Schopenhauerian work.
And given that, as I shall suggest, in the so-called " positivistic "
works produced after 1876 Nietzsche abandoned pessimism, we will
be justified in regarding 1876 as marking a sharp break in his
thought, in viewing The Birth as sharply discontinuous with those
(though not the final) works.
4 Nietzsche's own retrospective comments on The Birth are, on the

question of its pessimism, self-contradictory. On the one hand he
writes, in Ecce Homo (1888), that " t h e Greeks were not pessimists:
Schopenhauer went wrong at this point as he went wrong
everywhere"; the Greeks "got over their pessimism, they over-
came i t " [EH iv, 1). Since he almost always identifies (pre-
Alexandrian) Greek attitudes with his own, this strongly suggests
that by 1872 Nietzsche himself had abandoned pessimism. It is not
surprising, therefore, that a few lines later in the same book, he writes
that " t h e cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer sticks only to a few
formulas" in The Birth.
Kaufmann makes much of this self-assessment as he does of the
remark in the 1886 preface to The Birth that its treatment of tragic
art is utterly different from the life-denying " resignationism " which
Schopenhauer takes to be its meaning (BT, "Attempt at a Self-
Criticism," 6). But he fails to discuss the far greater number of
passages which point in the opposite direction. In section 853 of The
Will to Power, for example, Nietzsche says that pessimism counts in
The Birth as a truth, and in section 1005 of the same work identifies
1876 as the year in which " I grasped that my instinct went in the
opposite direction from Schopenhauer's: towards a justification of
life" which seems to imply that at the time of The Birth he saw life
as ^justifiable. Even in Ecce Homo itself he identifies " the years of my
lowest vitality" as the time when he "ceased to be a pessimist" [EH
1, 2). Since it is always the period of the "free-spirited" works
bounded by Human, All-too-human (1878) at the beginning and The
Gay Science (1882) at the end that Nietzsche refers to in this way, this
again implies that the author of The Birth was a pessimist. Another
turn of discussion pointing in the same direction is constituted by the
later Nietzsche's identification of life-denying pessimism with
"romanticism" (e.g. in GS 370) together with a theme that runs
through the prefaces to all the works of the "free-spirited" years, the
assertion that the period of their authorship is one of recovery
through "anti-romantic self-treatment" from a " d a n g e r o u s " case of
"romanticism" (/Z//11, Preface, 2). And in the 1886 preface to The
Birth itself Nietzsche characterizes the work as "romantic," marked
by a "deep hatred against " t h e Now," against " r e a l i t y " and
"modern ideas," and calls its author a "pessimist and art-deifier."
Referring to the metaphysical "comfort" for the suffering of life which
The Birth offers (as we will see), the mature Nietzsche advises "you
young romantics" to seek rather a "this-worldly comfort" (BT,
"Attempt at a Self-Criticism," 7). If we were to decide the issue by
reference to Nietzsche's retrospective comments alone the balance
would come down fairly decisively against Kaufmann. This,
however, we should not do.
As we have already seen, Nietzsche's retrospective self-descrip-
tions, considered from the point of view of scholarly accuracy, are
deeply unreliable. To look at them from this point of view is,
however, a mistake, a misunderstanding of their intended function.
The mature Nietzsche holds, that is (as we will see in chapter 4), that
a flourishing life demands the " r e d e m p t i o n " of one's own past, a
redemption which requires one to achieve a view of it as constituting,
together with one's present and one's goals for the future, an
aesthetic unit: one needs to " c r e a t e " oneself as a literary hero, to
view one's life as if it were a work of literature. Nietzsche was thus
required to achieve such a view of his own past life, of, that is (since
nearly all of it happened in books), his earlier writings. This not
objective, scholarly assessment or introductory remarks intended to
be helpful to the reader is the function of the array of prefaces,
second prefaces, "self-criticisms," and philosophical autobiography
(Ecce Homo) that the later Nietzsche interposes between the reader
and the works. The aim, that is, is not to provide an accurate
mirroring of the textual facts but rather to create (by the discovery
of hints, undertones, " r e a l " intentions, almost-utterances lurking
between the lines, and by obscuring, where necessary, what is said on
the lines) a work of art, an aesthetically convincing account of the
intellectual and spiritual life of the man behind the works. In the
case of The Birth Nietzsche was, I believe, divided between two
aesthetic strategies, two scripts for his life. The dominant one is to
view his life on the model of Saul-Paul with his sudden departure in
the middle of the first Bayreuth Festival (1876) marking the
satisfyingly dramatic moment of conversion (see EHvi, 2). But there
is also a disposition to view his intellectual history as the story of the
emergence of a butterfly from a chrysalis: to view the authentic
Nietzsche as already present in the early works albeit wearing
borrowed and unbecoming garb. ("I tried [in The Birth] to express
by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and
new valuations which were basically at odds with Kant's and
Schopenhauer's spirit and taste... obscured and spoiled Dionysian
premonitions with Schopenhauerian formulations" (BT, "Attempt
at a Self-Criticism," 6).
As Nietzsche-commentator, then, Nietzsche is to be viewed with
greater distrust than most. We should, therefore, not try to decide
the question of pessimism by appealing to his retrospective claims
but rather by trying to achieve a clear-eyed perception of the work
itself, a perception that avoids the distorting lenses through which
Nietzsche the artist would persuade us to look.
5 What is The Birth about? Nietzsche gave the book two alternative
titles: The Birth of Tragedy (in the first edition, The Birth of Tragedy
out of the Spirit of Music) and Hellenism and Pessimism. These indicate
its two central theses in the statement of each of which the celebrated
(but elusive) distinction between the "Apollonian" and the
"Dionysian" plays a crucial role. As a first approximation, these
theses may be stated as follows. The first, " t h e birth-of-tragedy
thesis" I shall call it, asserts that Greek tragedy came into being
through the union of Apollonian and Dionysian elements. It " d i e d "
through the elimination of the Dionysian from Greek drama at the
hands of Euripides acting under the baleful influence of Socrates.
The second thesis, which I shall call " t h e Hellenism-and-pessimism
thesis," asserts that although vividly sensitive (BT<$, 6) to the " terror
and horror of existence" (BT 3) the Greeks were nevertheless able
to survive and even thrive, psychologically speaking, through the
effect of their art - through, more specifically, the effects of their two
types of art, Apollonian and Dionysian art.
Stated in this way, the argument of The Birth has the air of thin-
blooded scholarly detachment that one would expect from an author
who was still Professor of Greek at Basle. Actually, however, the
book is far removed from any such spirit for, in reality, it is engaged,
evaluative, prescriptive, short on footnotes (Kaufmann's generous
supply rather spoils this effect), long on fancy, fanciful to the point
of falsification. The reason for this is that its primary concern is not
The Birth of Tragedy 3*
to provide an historically accurate account of the Greeks and their
culture at all. Its concern lies, rather, with us and our culture,
Nietzsche's speculative account of the rise and fall of Greek art and
culture having importance only as a "polished mirror'' (HH na,
218) in which we can see aspects of our own culture reflected and
clarified: The task of the classicist, he wrote in section 7 of the
unpublished " W e Philologists," is that of "understanding his own age
better by means of the classical world. This demotion of classical
scholarship, by a supposed professional in the field, from an end in
itself into a means for understanding modern life and culture - his
demand that it be " r e l e v a n t " - goes a considerable distance towards
explaining the scholarly fury with which the work was first received. 3
In reality, it seems to me, Nietzsche's first thesis is not, in its most
fundamental intention, a genetic thesis about Greek tragedy at all
but rather an analytic and evaluative thesis about great art in
general. The highest form of art, that is art which, seen in the
"perspective of life" (BT 2, 5), is of the greatest service (as with
classical scholarship and all forms of theoretical activity, Nietzsche
always insists that art has value only to the degree that helps us in
the practical task of living life), is a "fraternal u n i o n " in which,
though " t h e Dionysian predominates," "Dionysus speaks the
language of Apollo and Apollo speaks the language of Dionysus."
When this happens " t h e highest goal of tragedy and of all art is
attained" (BT 21, 24; my emphasis). Greek tragedy, Nietzsche
holds, provides a paradigm example of such art and for this reason
it merits close study. The fundamental purpose of The Birth,
however, is to argue not the greatness of Greek tragedy but rather
that we have, finally, another instance of the pattern of greatness
first exemplified in the works of Sophocles and Aeschylus - the
music-drama of Richard Wagner. Hence, Nietzsche holds, though
our culture is "Socratic," devoid of the Dionysian, we can yet hope
for its regeneration through the music which is to sound from
Bayreuth.
With regard to the Hellenism-and-pessimism thesis the important
point is that it is not just the Greeks but we, 4 too, who confront the
pain and absurdity (BT 7) of existence. Hence the Greek art-
solutions to pessimism were not only of interest to them but are of
vital concern to us. Fundamentally, that is, the Hellenism-and-
pessimism thesis is a recommendation as to how we should overcome
pessimism.
The remainder of this chapter falls into five main parts: in the first
(sees. 6-7) I attempt to understand the Apollonian-Dionysian
dichotomy; in the second (sees. 8-9) the birth-of-tragedy thesis; in
the third (sees. 10-13) the Hellenism-and-pessimism thesis; in the
fourth (sees. 14-18) I attempt to establish my thesis concerning the
Schopenhauerian, that is pessimistic, character of the work; I
conclude (sees. 19-21) with some remarks concerning Richard Wagner
at Bayreuth, a work that can be seen as something of a postscript to The
Birth.
6 Nietzsche's talk of the Apollonian is hard to understand until one

realizes that, as he admits {BT 1), he uses the term in different,
though related, senses. (Alternatively put, since Nietzsche often says
what he has to say by using Apollo as a symbol rather than
"Apollonian" as a predicate, Apollo is, for Nietzsche, an ambiguous
symbol.) Specifically, he uses the term in two senses: one when
talking about art; the other, in its primary occurrence, when talking
about metaphysics. In the metaphysical sense, Apollonian con-
sciousness is consciousness of the world that is (Nietzsche repeatedly
uses Schopenhauer's terminology) subject to the principium individu-
ationis {BT 1, 2). It is, that is to say, that mundane consciousness
which is the product of the limiting, delimiting, "boundary
d r a w i n g " {BT 9) - as we sometimes say - " r a t i o n a l " faculty of
mind which divides the world up into a plurality of discrete, spatio-
temporal individuals. Nietzsche uses "Apollonian" in this sense in,
for example, all those contexts in which he wishes to speak of the
ethical and social consequences of various modes of consciousness
and in which the Apollonian is opposed to the barbaric as the
fundamental civilization-forming force. Apollo, he says, for instance,
"wants to grant repose to individual beings... by drawing
boundaries between them and by again and again calling these to
mind as the most sacred laws of the world with his demand for self-
knowledge and measure" {ibid.). This "majestically rejecting
attitude of Apollo" {BT 2) created Greek civilization and preserved
it from the "horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty" {ibid.) of the
surrounding barbarians.
Used in the metaphysical sense there is no necessary connection
between the Apollonian and the beautiful: the object of consciousness
is simply the world of the principium individuationis which may or may
not be experienced as beautiful. Used in the aesthetic sense,
however, the object of Apollonian consciousness is essentially
beautiful: it is, not the mundane world, but rather that world raised
to a state of glory; it is the "perfection" (BT i), the "trans-
figuration" (BT 16), the "apotheosis of the principium individuationis"
(BT 4). The aesthetically Apollonian is the metaphysically Apol-
lonian perceived as beautiful. 5
Nietzsche's first introduction of the objects of (aesthetically)
Apollonian consciousness {BT 1) makes it clear that they are modeled
upon Schopenhauer's "Platonic I d e a s " : in the Apollonian state, he
says, we take delight in "beautiful appearances," 6 appearances in
which "all forms speak to us [and] there is nothing unimportant or
superfluous," a description that closely follows Schopenhauer's
conception of what it is to perceive an object as beautiful. Nietzsche
even follows Schopenhauer in calling the objects of Apollonian art
"archetypes" (BT2), and the reference to them as " t h e eternity of
the phenomenon" (BT 16) alludes similarly to the Platonic Ideas. It
seems clear, therefore, that while that which is Apollonian in the
metaphysical sense is Schopenhauer's world "as representation,"
that which is Apollonian in the aesthetic sense is Schopenhauer's
world as " I d e a . "
Nietzsche connects the Apollonian with the metaphor of a dream
image. In line with the ambiguity of the term, this metaphor, too,
has a double function. On the one hand, it has the function of
capturing the merely phenomenal status of everyday reality
(Nietzsche gives a Schopenhauerian provenance for this use of the
metaphor [BT i]). 7 But on the other, since in dreams we simplify
images, eliminate details not relevant to the dream's " n a r r a t i v e " or
point 8 (Nietzsche is quite correct, it seems to me, to observe that " i n
our dreams we delight in the immediate understanding of figures; all
forms speak to us; there is nothing unimportant or superfluous"
[ibid.]), he is also able to use the metaphor to capture the idea of the
pleasurable 9 contemplation of the beautiful, of the world perceived
as Idea.
7 If dreams stand for the Apollonian, Rausch - "intoxication,"

" r a p t u r e , " "ecstasy," "frenzy" - stands for the Dionysian. Diony-
sian consciousness is a "high," a state of literal or metaphorical
drunkenness in which we overcome the "sobriety" of ordinary
(metaphysically Apollonian) consciousness which presents the
principium individuationis as absolute reality. In Dionysian rapture
one realizes that, on the contrary, rea/ity is non-individual, a
"primordial u n i t y " (BT i). This unity is nothing other than
Schopenhauer's "universal will" (BT 17). The object of Dionysian
consciousness is, therefore, Schopenhauer's " world as will."
It is important to observe a divergence between Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche over the possible manifestations of Dionysian
consciousness. For Schopenhauer, as we saw (ch. , sec. 15), the
overcoming of plurality, the realization that all individual identities
merge in that of the metaphysical will, constitutes the consciousness
of the altruist. Hence the consequences of entering such consciousness
are entirely benign. Nietzsche acknowledges this as an aspect of
Dionysian consciousness: " u n d e r the charm of the Dionysian," he
writes, all the "rigid hostile barriers" that the metaphysically
Apollonian mind places between man and man and man and nature
are broken down. In the Dionysian rapture of the participants in, for
example, the Bacchic festivals of the ancient world or the carnivals
of southern Germany, the barriers of "necessity" and "convention"
are replaced by a "gospel of universal h a r m o n y " in which everyone
"feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his
neighbour, but as one with him, as if the veil of maya [a term much
used by Schopenhauer] had been torn aside and were now merely
fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial being" (BT 1).
This clearly is the Gemeinschaft of the Schopenhauerian altruist.
But Nietzsche also recognizes another side to Dionysian con-
sciousness, a "horrible witches b r e w " of "sensuality and cruelty"
(BT 2). (That "intoxication" contains the idea of both a benign and
disgusting expression captures this double-edgedness of the Diony-
sian, its " d u a l n a t u r e " [BT 10].) And he is right to do so;
Schopenhauer is mistaken in assuming that the benevolent actions of
the moral altruist constitute the only possible expression of, as we
called it (ch. 1, sec. 5), metaphysical solipsism. For if one identifies
with a transindividual self then while one may be moved to act with
sympathetic concern for others, one may also act barbarically,
regarding particular individuals as insignificant, valueless, as
dispensable as toe-nails. One may even affirm and celebrate one's
transcendence of individuality by the desecration or destruction of
an individual. For this reason, Nietzsche holds, social life depends
upon the confinement of Dionysian ecstasy to symbolic, artistic
expression. (The manner of this containment will be examined in
section 13 below.) This is what distinguished Greek civilization from
10
the surrounding barbarism: in the Dionysian festivals of the Greeks
" nature for the first time obtains her artistic jubilee... the destruction
of the principium individuationis for the first time becomes an artistic
phenomenon" {ibid.).
8 I want to turn now to the birth-of-tragedy thesis. T o understand

this we need to understand how "Apollonian" and "Dionysian," so
far considered as attributes of consciousness, are applied to art. The
important point to observe here is that Nietzsche accepts Schopen-
hauer's radical dichotomy between music and the nonmusical arts.
The latter, being concerned with the beautiful representation of
phenomenal reality are, in Nietzsche's terms, Apollonian: they
embody and communicate (aesthetically) Apollonian consciousness.
Music, however, at least when it performs its highest and proper
function (program music is, for Nietzsche as for Schopenhauer, a
perversion of the medium), has " a character and an origin quite
different from all the other arts, because, unlike them, it is not a copy
of the phenomenon but an immediate copy of the will itself, and
therefore complements everything physical in the world and every
phenomenon by representing what is metaphysical, the thing in itself"
(BT 16). Music then is " t h e Dionysian a r t " (ibid.), for it is music
th^t arises out of and communicates Dionysian consciousness.
From this initial understanding of the dichotomy between
Apollonian and Dionysian art it seems to follow that according to the
birth-of-tragedy thesis great art must consist in some kind of
synthesis (a synthesis, remember, in which the Dionysian " p r e -
dominates") between the beautiful representation of phenomenal
reality - primarily, one assumes Nietzsche to hold, by means of
speech and action - and music.
One objection one might wish to raise at this point is that,
however the^precise nature of the synthesis in question is to be spelled
out, the thesis can be seen immediately to be vitiated by an arbitrary
connecting of the value of a work of art to its medium, an
unwarranted discrimination against nonmusical media. Why for
instance, assuming Verdi's Otello to be a fine opera as operas go and
Shakespeare's Othello a fine play as plays go, should Verdi's be a
greater work of art merely because Shakespeare was not a composer?
Viewed in relation to this objection The Birth exhibits, I believe, a
tension between Nietzsche qua Wagner propagandist and Nietzsche
qua philosopher of art.
Qua Wagner propagandist, Nietzsche J was constrained to ac-

commodate himself to Wagner's immodest portrait of himself (in, for
example, Opera and Drama) as the reborn, the German Aeschylus. In
view of the fact that its choral parts were sung, that is, Wagner was
able to represent Attic tragedy as the complete form of art, the
original Gesamtkunstwerke the spirit of which found its rebirth for the
first time in his own Gesamtkunstwerke. Hence, qua propagandist,
Nietzsche is more than happy to relegate all nonmusical artists to the
long trough that separates the Aeschylean and Wagnerian apexes of
artistic greatness. It is in line with this motivation that Nietzsche
formulates the birth-of-tragedy thesis in the manner we have seen
and accords music a monopoloy over the Dionysian, calling it "the
Dionysian a r t " (BT 16; my emphasis).
On the other hand, as a serious philosopher and as an aesthetic
man sensitive to the unsurpassed claims to greatness of Shakespeare
or Goethe, Nietzsche had to recognize that it cannot be demanded
of great art that it take the form of opera. In line with this, we find
that his more considered discussions moderate the demand that
great art should be literally musical to the requirement that it should
contain, should be generated out of, "musical m o o d " (BT5); that
is, in the words of the original title of the book, " t h e spirit of music."
What Nietzsche means by "musical m o o d " is simply Dionysian
consciousness. (Though the force of the shift from talk of literal to
metaphorical music is to allow Dionysian content to artworks which
lack musical form, Nietzsche's continued association between music
and the Dionysian is readily understandable in Schopenhauerian
terms: music represents the metaphysical world directly, the non-
musical arts represent it, at best, only indirectly. Music, though no
longer " t h e [only] Dionysian art," remains " t h e Dionysian dirt par
excellence.") This consciousness, according to our new understanding
of the birth-of-tragedy thesis, is the generative force behind the
greatest works of art and is their fundamental meaning or content.
Great art, such as Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, that is, is the
attempt to give expression to Dionysian intuition in "symbolic
dream-images" (BT 5), beautiful images of the Apollonian world.
This means that there is something deceptive (see BT 21 and sec. 13
below) about such art. Though the surface of, for example,
Aeschylean tragedy is (aesthetically) Apollonian - simple, beautiful,
precise, and lucid (BT 9) - beneath it one senses an infinite,
"enigmatic d e p t h " (BT 12): in spite of the lucidity of plot, action,
and speech, its figures carry with them a mysterious penumbra, a
" comet's tail" (ibid.) of significance. Hence their actions are fuller of
meaning than their words: they "speak, as it were, more superficially
than they act," and this is because great art contains " a deeper
wisdom than the poet himself can put into words and concepts" (BT
I7)
-
Notice that this account of the greatness of great art as consisting
in its being a vehicle for the communication of Dionysian insight -
Nietzsche's portrait, that is, of the artistic " g e n i u s " as, through
"mystical self-abnegation and oneness" with the "primal unity,"
becoming the "medium through which the one truly existent
subject" speaks to us (BT 5) - i s essentially continuous with the
Kant-Schopenhauer conception of the artist as "genius." For, as
with Schopenhauer, the artist is portrayed as essentially a bringer of
metaphysical and hence (since, for Nietzsche as for Schopenhauer,
the domain of the conceptual is confined to the phenomenal world)
conceptually unparaphrasable news. This means that the later
Nietzsche's satirical attack upon the romantic concept of genius, the
deification of the artist into " a n oracle, a priest, indeed more than
a priest a kind of mouthpiece of the 'in itself of things, a telephone
from the beyond... [a] ventriloquist of G o d " (GM in, 5) is an attack
nof merely upon Schopenhauer and Wagner but also upon his own
youthful self- as he later, sometimes, concedes (e.g. J?i, 3).
9 Must art have a hidden metaphysical curriculum? Is the

possession of metaphysical, "afterworldly" (ibid.) meaning a
condition of greatness in art? There seems to be absolutely no reason
to suppose this, no reason to suppose the art of the immanent to be,
a fortiori, inferior to the art of the transcendent. Nietzsche's insistence
that it is is, in my view, a product of the distortion of aesthetics by
pessimism. Given, that is, that art has value only to the degree that
it serves life, and given also my claim that, in the end, The Birth of
Tragedy holds this life not to be worth living, it follows that art can
ultimately only be of service to us by bringing, like religion, hope of
another kind of life. Just how it is supposed to do this will be
discussed shortly.
What of the other side to the birth-of-tragedy thesis, the claim that
the Apollonian is a necessary component in great art? Is this really
so? Is it really necessary that great art should represent phenomenal
reality, should be, in the everyday sense, representational or
figurative art? The central problem here (though it could be raised,
too, by reference to abstractness in the visual arts) is created by the
phenomenon of purely instrumental, as Wagner called it, " a b -
solute," music.
Regarding absolute music, we find again a tension in The Birth
between the demands of propaganda and those of philosophy, a
tension that exists, too, between Wagner's earlier and later aesthetic
writings, and, as we have already seen (ch. i, sees. 14-17), in
Schopenhauer. On the one hand, we find Nietzsche claiming, as the
birth-of-tragedy thesis demands he should, that "music at its highest
stages must seek to obtain its highest objectification in images" {BT
17; my emphasis). This remark reflects the view taken by Wagner
prior to his discovery of Schopenhauer's philosophy of music that
absolute music is a functionless absurdity (Beethoven's introduction
of Schiller's words into the finale of the Ninth made it the "last
symphony"), that music demands words in order to achieve its
function which is "realise the poetic intention for the feelings" 11 to
bring home to feeling, what words and action present to the intellect
and senses. On the other hand, however, we find Nietzsche writing
that "music in its absolute sovereignty does not need the image and
concepts, but merely endures them as accompaniments. [Words]
can express nothing that does not already lie hidden in the vast
universality and absoluteness of the music... Language can never
adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music" (BT 6). This,
which is inconsistent with the birth-of-tragedy thesis, reflects of
course the Schopenhauerian view that since music takes us to a
domain deeper and more significant than words can go, words, to
the truly musical listener at least, are a distracting irrelevance.
The fact is that The Birth has no consistent position with respect to
absolute music but constitutes, rather, a necessarily confused attempt
to combine a defense of Wagnerian opera as the highest form of art
with Schopenhauer's metaphysical interpretation of music. The
insistence upon the necessity of the Apollonian element in great art
reflects the former constraint. But the phenomenon of absolute music
shows that it is a mistaken insistence: 12 the task of the aesthetician is
to accommodate the fact that Beethoven's last string quartets belong
to the highest level of art, not to legislate, absurdly, that they do not.
10 I turn now to the Hellenism-and-pessimism thesis. The Greeks,

Nietzsche asserts, though deeply sensitive to the "terror and h o r r o r "
of existence, were able, psychologically, to survive on account of their
art. And we too can surmount the horror of life through art. More
strongly, it seems - given the famous assertion that " i t is only as
aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally
justified" (BT6, 24; first emphasis mine) - Nietzsche asserts that only
through art can we overcome life's terror.
Before examining the thesis itself I want to raise the question of
just what it is that constitutes the terror and horror of life.
Commentators typically deal rather briefly with this question,
taking it to be rather obvious that disease, natural disasters, the loss
of close friends, and such like are the kinds of things Nietzsche has in
mind. But this is an inadequate answer. For what the terror and
horror does, Nietzsche holds, is to bring one to the brink of an
affirmation of pessimism: an affirmation of the "wisdom of Silenus"
("best of all is not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second
best for you is - to die soon" [BT 3]) which leads to action-
paralyzing " n a u s e a " (BT 7) and a "longing for a Buddhistic
negation of the will" (ibid.). The ultimate practical expression of this
state of mind is suicide (BT 15). But a mere Candide-like catalogue of
life's ills cannot adequately motivate such a response. It cannot, that
is, reveal it as anything other than pathological. But Nietzsche does
not take the response to be pathological: it is something that (but for
the life-saving power of art) all intellectual and spiritually sensitive
people stand in danger of.
In section 7 of The Birth Nietzsche says that that which threatens
"Buddhistic negation of the will" is " t h e terrible destructiveness of
so-called world history" and the "cruelty of nature." Both of these
phrases have a strongly Schopenhauerian ring to them. The latter,
particularly if taken in conjunction with Nietzsche's reference to the
"curse of individuation" (BT9) and to individuality as the "primal
cause of evil" (BT 10), evokes Schopenhauer's picture of nature as
bellum omnium contra omnes, his portrait of pain and anxiety as the
" k e y n o t e " of one's life as an individual (WR\y p. 373). And it evokes
his horror at nature's (the will's) callous indifference to the suffering
of the individuals to which it gives rise. The former phrase evokes the
Schopenhauerian, anti-Hegelian sense that history conceived as a
story of evolution or progress is merely "so-called," that in a sense
history does not exist at all, since all there is is the endless repetition
of the same meaningless patterns (see e.g. WR 1, p. 315). To the
Schopenhauerian and of course Nietzschean eye the world lacks
teleology: its course resembles that of not an arrow but a circle. 13

Even as superb and apparently progressive a construction as the
Roman Empire seems doomed to last only a brief moment before
being reduced to the rubble from which it arose. In The Antichrist it
becomes clear that much of Nietzsche's bitterness against Christi-
anity stems from the fact that, like Gibbon, he holds it responsible for
the collapse ofthat Empire, an empire "fit to laßt a thousand years."
Nature, then, is not merely cruel, it is also purposeless. Individuals
do not merely suffer; they suffer senselessly, " a b s u r d l y " (BT 7), for
there is no goal in which their suffering might find justification as its
necessary means. These thoughts are connected in Nietzsche's mind,
with the threat of world-disgust. But they are still not sufficient to
constitute it. For someone might acknowledge nature to be both cruel
and purposeless yet hold that this is merely its de facto, not its de jure
character, something contingent and in principle alterable. From
this standpoint, while one might deny parts or phases of the world,
that cosmic world-disgust which embraces not merely the past and
present but also all possible futures is impossible.
To adopt the standpoint in question is to adopt what Nietzsche
calls "Socratism"- the view that human and more particularly
scientific thought is "capable not only of knowing being but even of
correcting" it {BT 15). Nietzsche makes three observations about the
Socratic outlook (sometimes called the outlook of " theoretical" or
" scientific man " ) . First, that up to a point it has value as an antidote
to pessimism. Since he believes, that is, in the merely contingent
character of life's ills, in our, in principle, "limitless power" [BT 18)
to control both nature and human nature, life presents the Socratic
type with only solvable problems. And though nature, unaided by
man, may lack teleology, it is nonetheless possible for us to remedy
this by ourselves imparting progressive movement to world history.
Theoretical man is even likely to welcome the terror and aimlessness
of nature as a challenge, a spur to scientific research and action, a
source of excitement: "theoretical man finds infinite delight in
whatever exists, and this satisfaction protects him against...
pessimism" [BT 15). He experiences a "blissful affirmation of
existence that seeks to discharge itself in actions" {ibid.). (Pre-
sumably, the lay inhabitant of a scientific culture can to some degree
share vicariously in the scientist's delight.)
Nietzsche's second point (to which we will return in section 14
below) is that our culture, with its faith in "democracy," scientific
The Birth of Tragedy 4i
"optimism," "rationality," and "utilitarianism" (BT, "Attempts

at a Self-Criticism," 4), faith that is, in the ultimate triumph of
"earthly happiness for a l l " (BT 18), is Socratic. The third point is
that the Socratic belief in the unbounded power of science is a
terrible error. The reason for this is revealed by, in a broad sense,
science itself Wissenschaft. Science itself, that is, reveals that ultimate
reality is not accessible to scientific rationality. (A rather similar
theme has reappeared in recent years in the works of W. V Quine.)
For, as " t h e extraordinary courage of K a n t and Schopenhauer" has
shown, all we can understand "with the aid of causality" is the
phenomenon, never the world in itself (ibid.).
The truth of K a n t and Schopenhauer's idealism might show
Socratism to be an error, but why a terrible error? One might, after
all, though admitting the unknowability and hence uncorrectibility
of ultimate reality by human agency, have faith, with Kant, in the
existence of a nonhuman agent that imparts progressive direction to
the course of world history.
Nietzsche, however, rejects the possibility of such faith for he
knows, or at least has a picture of, the character of ultimate reality.
According to this Schopenhauerian-Heraclitean picture, the ul-
timate nature of the world is ceaseless flux, a boiling sea of eternal
"becoming" in which everything is fluid and nothing stable or
permanent, no "being," is to be found (see EHw, 3). This provides
a metaphysical guarantee that world history cannot possess teleology.
The structures we build in order to impress our wills upon the world
are mere "frail b a r k [ s ] " (BT 1) poised, as it were, on the crest of a
wave that is bound to break. It is, therefore, a metaphysical certainty
that history is a cycle of creation and destruction. It is guaranteed
that whatever happiness and security a society or individual achieves
will, in the end, be smashed. For this inevitable catastrophe the
Socratic type is entirely unprepared.
The "Dionysian" type, on the other hand, knows the Heraclitean
truth of things. The (pre-Socratic) Greeks knew it: they were
possessed of "Dionysian truth," "tragic vision." T h a t they were
susceptible to "overwhelming dismay in the face of the titanic
powers of nature, the Moira [fate] enthroned inexorably over all
knowledge" (BT 1) is recorded in their myths; in particular, in the
tragic myths of the humanitarian Prometheus and the wise Oedipus
(ibid.). (Notice the resemblance between "Dionysian wisdom" and
Schopenhauer's "feeling of the [dynamically] sublime" [see ch. 1,
sec. 8]. This provides a hint as to the kind of solution to the terror
of life Nietzsche will ultimately propose.) It is this that threatens life-
denying nausea, Buddhistic negation of the will: "Dionysian man
resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of
things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for
their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of
things;... knowledge kills action; action requires the veil of illusion"
(BT 7). But the Greeks did act, for through their art they were saved
from nausea. How did it do this? I turn first to Nietzsche's discussion
of Apollonian art.
The Apollonian "prophylactic" (BT 11) against pessimism is

pictured, by Nietzsche, as belonging to the earlier, Homeric period
of Greek culture. The Greeks of this period "overcame... or at any
rate veiled" (BT 3) the terror of life by producing, in their art, a
" r a d i a n t glorification" of the phenomenal world (BT 16), by
interposing between themselves and the realities of life, in particular,
the "radiant dream-birth of the Olympians" (BT<$). In their stories
of the gods, that is, the Greeks erected no non- or antihuman ideal
(here Nietzsche anticipates his later critique of Christianity) but
rather a "transfigured" j ^ - p o r t r a i t , a glorification of human life
(ibid.). In this way the Homeric Greeks "seduced" (BT 18)
themselves into continued existence - "existence under the bright
sunshine of such gods is regarded as desirable in itself" (BT 3) -
and into action.
What exactly is transfiguration? Nietzsche's most common
explanatory notion is that of "illusion" or " l i e " (BT3, 7, 16, 18; cf.
WP 853) which, together with the ancient link between dreaming
and wish-fulfillment - the world-picture engendered by Apollonian
art stands to reality, he says, as does the "rapturous vision of the
tortured martyr to his suffering" (BT 3) - suggests that the Greeks
overcame pessimism by dwelling in a realm of sentimental fantasy in
which really nasty things are no more allowed to exist than they are
in the world of Enid Blyton or the television commercial. In fact,
however, this cannot be a correct understanding: first, because
Homer is nothing like Enid Blyton; and second, because Nietzsche
says that in Apollonian art " all things, whether good or evil [böse] are
deified" (BT 3; my emphasis), and speaks of it as " transform [ing]
the most terrible things by the joy in mere appearance and in
redemption through mere appearance" (BT 12). Apollonian art,
therefore, in some way and to some degree, acknowledges and does not
eliminate from consciousness the terrible in life. Illusion it may offer
us; but in some sense it is a truthful illusion.
The clue to understanding how life can be rendered beautiful
without censorship of the ugly can be discovered, I believe, by
returning to the fact that it is Schopenhauer's "Platonic I d e a s " that
provide the basis for Nietzsche's conception of Apollonian art.
Schopenhauer holds, it will be remembered, that since anything
expresses an Idea to some degree, anything can be beautiful provided
it possesses "significant form." Extrapolating from this to perception
of art, we may say that beauty lies not in what is represented but in
the way it is represented. Nietzsche repeats this: to enjoy the
beautiful is, he says, to "delight in beautiful forms" (BT 16).
If beauty is, in this way, divorced from content then it is possible
for the beautiful and terrible to coexist, and for the terrible to be
"redeemed" by its beauty. Nietzsche says that in Apollonian art
"beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life" (BT 16). This
would be possible if, in such art, one's attention is focused upon the
beauty of the portrayal and away from the terribleness of the
portrayed. And this seems to be Nietzsche's conception of what
happens. Unlike theoretical man, whose interest is only in
"uncovering" truth, the artist, he says, whenever truth is uncovered
(we may assume that it is nausea-threatening, Dionysian truth
Nietzsche has here in view) will always " cling with rapt gaze to what
still remains covering after such uncovering" (BT 15).
How, to turn from art to life, does this suggest a style of living
capable of overcoming pessimism ? What it suggests, I think, is an
outlook in which one is disposed to describe life as "terrible but
magnificent." (One of Nietzsche's images of human existence, an
image to which we shall return, compares us to soldiers in a grand
and beautiful oil-painting of a battle [BT 5] - one thinks, perhaps of
Uccello's Battle of San Romano [see jacket].) Such an outlook, while
not flinching from acknowledging that Hector suffered a terrible fate
at the hands of Achilles, nonetheless focuses upon the beauty of its
heroes, their powerfulness, courage, the sheen of their armor, their
"style." In this respect Homer does for his heroes what that modern
(but regrettably dying) epic, the Western, does for its.
Part of such an outlook, it seems to me, must be (as in the
Western) a strong insensitivity to the inner reality of human
suffering: for the horror of Homeric warfare not to swamp one's
enjoyment of the magnificence of its sweep and style one must avoid
empathy, avoid identification with the suffering of its victims. This,
Nietzsche holds, is what happens in the Apollonian outlook: the
"mirror of appearance" (Schein), he says, prevents the Apollonian
artist from "becoming one and fused with his figures" (ibid.). We
are, as it were, so dazzled by the beauty of the Homeric figures that
we cannot see the inner reality of their suffering. The Apollonian
outlook is characterized by an externality, a profound superficiality. 14
(Schopenhauer makes a similar observation about the Homeric
world: objects and events are portrayed, he says, with a unique
"objectivity," are untouched, that is, by human feelings and moods
[PPn, p. 444]-)
12 Why, given that Apollonian art does acknowledge the terrible,

does Nietzsche connect with it the notion of " l y i n g " ? For, I think,
two reasons. First, because, though acknowledging the existence of
life's horrors, it fails to present them from the inner perspective, fails,
that is, to bring home to us their inner reality, their feeling. Hence, in
that it implicitly claims to offer a comprehensive vision, the whole
truth about the world, what it offers is, "in a sense [in einem gewissen
Sinne- Kaufmann's translation omits this important qualification],
lies" (BT 16). The second reason is that, in Nietzsche's account, the
Greeks of course knew that Apollonianism does not offer the whole
truth about the world: they lied to themselves. Self-deception is at
the heart of the Apollonian solution to pessimism. (Nietzsche offers
a slightly different perspective upon the Apollonian lie in Human, All-
too-human, in a brilliant passage that seems to say as much about the
Irish as about the Greeks:
Playing with Life - The facility and frivolity of the Homeric fantasy was
necessary for soothing the immoderately passionate disposition and over-
subtle intellect of the Greeks and temporarily banishing them. When their
intellect speaks, how cruel and bitter life appears! They do not deceive
themselves, but they deliberately and playfully embellish life with lies.
Simonides advised his compatriots to take life as a game, they were only too
familiar with its painful seriousness (for the misery of mankind is among the
favourite themes for song among the gods), and they knew that even misery
could become a source of enjoyment solely through art. As a punishment for
this insight, however, they were so plagued by a delight in telling stories
that it was hard for them to desist from lies and deception in the course of
everyday life -just as all poetical people take a delight in lying, a delight
that is moreover quite innocent. The neighbouring nations were no doubt
sometimes reduced to despair by it. [HH i, 154].)
13 The Apollonian " veiling" of the horrors of life strikes one as a
somewhat fragile prophylactic against pessimism. Though it may
seduce one into a general valuing of life, its "superficiality" appears
to leaves one unprotected against suffering that thrusts itself upon
one in a personal and unavoidable way. But Nietzsche does not
represent it as an ideal. The solution he favors is the Dionysian
solution, the solution offered by Greek tragedy. This, he says,
belongs to a higher stage of Greek culture and offers a " m o r e
profound" world-view than that offered by Apollonian art (BT 10).
What then is the Dionysian solution? Nietzsche says that whereas
Apollonian art tries to convince us of the joy of existence by a
glorification of phenomenal reality, Dionysian art "teaches us that
we are to seek this joy not in phenomena but behind t h e m " (BT 17).
It brings us, that is to say, a certain "metaphysical comfort" for the
"terrors of individual existence" (ibid.). How does it do this? This
question is the question of Nietzsche's account of the "tragic effect,"
the question of why, paradoxically, we derive pleasure from,
voluntarily subject ourselves to, confrontations with, indeed in a
certain sense, experiences of, the painful and catastrophic in life.
The general character of Nietzsche's answer to this question is
clear. In Dionysian art, in Greek tragedy in particular, the
destruction of the tragic hero is presented in a way that is exulting:
though forced to witness the tragic catastrophe " w e are not to
become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily
from the bustle of changing figures. We really are, for a brief
moment, the primodial being itself" (ibid.).
It seems to me clear, in spite of attempts by the later Nietzsche and
others to suggest that his account of the tragic effect is entirely
original (BT, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism," 6), that this is a version
of Schopenhauer's account of the tragic effect as our highest
experience of the "feeling of the sublime" - as indeed, in The Birth,
Nietzsche admits: the "artistic taming of the horrible" is, he says,
"the sublime" (BT 7). Our tragic joy consists in an at least
momentary escape from the terror of individual human existence, in
an intimation of our "higher," suprahuman destiny: tragedy " i n the
person of the tragic hero... knows how to redeem us from the greedy
thirst for this existence, and with an admonishing gesture... reminds
us of another existence and a higher pleasure for which the tragic
hero prepares himself by means of his destruction not by means of his
triumphs" (BT 21).
Unlike Schopenhauer, however, who reports the sublime effect
46 Nietzsche's philosophy offurt
but never really attempts an explanation of how it occurs (see ch. i,
sec. 13 above), Nietzsche attempts such an explanation, at least with
respect to Greek tragedy. Some of its details are obscure, but it is
clear that the crucial idea is that the Greek audience, though (as in
Schopenhauer's account of the experience of the sublime) partially
identifying with the individual threatened by tragic destruction - it
"shudders at the sufferings which will befall the h e r o " (BT 22) -
has, as its primary identification, the chorus.
Nietzsche suggests that the singing of the chorus (the original
prototype of tragedy, the drama being, as it were, born out of it at
a later date [BT 7]) "nullifies" the principium individuationis (ibid.),
draws the hitherto soberly Apollonian spectator into the Dionysian
world. From this perspective he experiences w i t h j ^ the annihilation
of the tragic hero. As, that is, the barbarians celebrated their ecstatic
absorption into the primal oneness in acts of real violence performed
on real individuals, so the Greek audience performed the same act
symbolically (the first "artistic jubilee" of the Dionysian impulse
[see sec. 7 above]). Tragedy offers, as it were, a symbolic sacrifice to
Dionysus. A joy which appears to rest on cruelty, appears to be
Schadenfreude, is in reality, an exuberant affirmation of one's supra-
individual identity that resembles the burning of banknotes as an
expression of sudden accession to great wealth.
Nietzsche says that tragedy offers us " a profound and [note this
word] pessimistic view of the world. It offers " t h e conception of
individuation as the primal cause of evil" but also " the joyous hope
that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored
oneness" (BT 10). And he speaks in apocalyptic terms of the
yearning of the Dionysian initiates for a " rebirth of Dionysus, which
we must now dimly conceive as the end of individuation" (ibid.). But
if this is the character of the tragic effects, why did the Greeks not
lapse into Schopenhauerian " resignationism " (BT, " Attempt at a
Self-Criticism," 6), a pessimistic nausea, and " Buddhistic negation
of the will"? Social organization, action, in particular political
action, that is, demands the world of Apollonian individuation: a
distinction between actor and that which is acted upon, a distinction,
in the case of the defense of the state, between us and them. But
Dionysian man knows both the futility of action - that it can change
nothing " i n the eternal nature of things" - and the joy of a higher,
non-Apollonian state. It surely follows, then, that "from [Dionysian]
orgies a people can take one path only, the path to Indian
Buddhism" (BT21). And yet the Greeks acted: among things, they
defeated the Persians. How was this possible?
Nietzsche answers by saying that situated between the Indian
culture of actionless contemplation on the one side and the Roman
culture of action and assertion on the other, the Greeks "exhausted
themselves neither in ecstatic brooding nor in a consuming chase
after worldly power and worldly h o n o u r " but succeeded, at least
during the short period of their high tragedies, in producing a
synthesis of Indian passivity and Roman assertiveness, a third form
of culture both "fiery and contemplative" (BT 21). Through
tragedy, that is, we are brought tidings of a "higher existence," a
"metaphysical comfort" which "stimulates, purifies and dis-
charges" our feelings of nausea at our habitation of the world of
individuals (ibid.). Now, however, the Apollonian part of tragedy
must be brought into play. Through it we are subject to the "noble
deception " (ibid.) that the meaning of the play concerns only the fate
of an individual in a world of individuality: the tragic hero as it were
"relieves us of the b u r d e n " of Dionysian insight (ibid.). Even the
author, as we have seen, cannot properly understand the meaning of
his work (BT 17).
The same is true of Wagner's Tristan. No completely musical soul
would be able to experience the third act as absolute music with
"expiring in a spasmodic unharnessing of all the wings of the soul"
(BT 21). 15 Fortunately, however, the Apollonian drama exists to
restore " t h e almost shattered individual with the healing balm of
illusion" (BT 17). Tristan wakes up from metaphysico-sexual
reverie and so do we, unable to understand the metaphysical
meaning of our musical experience. The effectiveness of Dionysian
art, therefore, is that while on the one hand affirming to us our
ultimate deliverance from the pain and anxiety of individuality, on
the other ^ as if recognizing that "action requires the veil of
illusion" (BT 7) - it acts like a fairy godmother and draws a veil of
forgetfulness over what we have experienced. In this way we are
returned to the world strangely comforted but yet able to act.
14 We are now in a position to return to the question of whether or

not The Birth is a pessimistic work, whether or not it affirms or rebuts
Silenus' evaluation of life, his view that the best response to human
existence is " t o die soon."
It is, it seems to me, completely clear that the Apollonian solution
48 Nietzsche''s philosophy of art
to suffering implies a pessimistic assessment of the value of human life:
that were Nietzsche to endorse it as his solution there would be no
question as to his pessimism. For what the solution offers as a way of
overcoming pessimism, of avoiding the pessimist's judgment on life,
is self-deception, telling oneself "lies." But this implies that in the
fullness of knowledge one would not affirm life as worth living. It
implies, more briefly, that life is not worth living. 16
But it is also clear that the Apollonian solution is not and cannot
be Nietzsche's solution. It cannot be the solution he endorses since,
given the birth-of-tragedy thesis' account of the highest form of art,
and given also the thesis that the greatest art is that which performs
the greatest service for life, Nietzsche has to endorse Dionysian, tragic
art as offering the best solution to the suffering of life. The question
of Nietzsche's pessimism turns, therefore, on the question of whether
Dionysianism implies a pessimistic assessment of human life.
It seems to me clear, even obvious, that it does. One intimation of
this is to be found in the language used to describe the effect of
Dionysian art, Dionysian art, he says, "seduces" us into continued
life, provides a "metaphysical comfort" for life (in later works
Nietzsche sometimes speaks of art as enhancing life), turns the horror
and absurdity of life into "notions with which one can live]' (BT 7).
None of these turns of phrase suggests human existence to be a
particularly attractive state of being. And it should be borne in
mind, too, that "intoxication," the central metaphor for Dionysi-
anism, though not perhaps necessarily, nonetheless most naturally,
carries with it pessimistic associations. The need for intoxication,
that is, is to be discovered typically where the realities of life are
found to be unacceptable. (Nietzsche makes the connection between
intoxication and pessimism explicit in later works, describing those
who "seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves
through art...intoxication, convulsions, anaesthesia and madness"
as "romantic pessimists" [GS 370].)
The best way, however, to see that The Birth is a life-denying work
is to note its fundamentally religious character and to conjoin this
observation with the well-known view of the later Nietzsche that
religion, in particular Christianity, is the product of those who,
damaged and demeaned by life, are fundamentally hostile to it.
(Although claiming, in Ecce Homo, that The Birth already shares in his
later abhorrence of Christianity - it exhibits, he claims, a "profound
and hostile silence about Christianity" [EHiv, 1; cf. BT, "Attempt
at a Self-Criticism," 5] - the truth is that it in fact interprets at least
German Christianity, Lutheranism, as a rebirth of the Dionysian
[BT 23].)
That The Birth has religion as its fundamental concern, that it
seeks to find through art - through "art-deification" - something to
fill the void left by the demise of the Christian God is manifested in
its account of the role of the tragic theater in Greek life - an account
which, remember, is supposed to provide a model for the
regeneration of modern culture. The Greek theater, he says, had the
function of "stimulat[ing], purifyfing], and discharging] the whole
life of the people" (BT 21) (a fanciful claim, given the probability
that during the period of the great tragedies the Greek audience was
mainly, if not exclusively, male). In so describing it, he transforms
Greek theater (and demands the same status for Wagnerian theater)
into, in all but name, a church, a church which possesses the
centrality to social life possessed by the church of medieval
Christendom, and which fulfills the same function of providing
metaphysical consolation for the horrors of human life.
That it is a religious role Nietzsche assigns to theater becomes ever
more clear when we attend to his (impressive) critique of the
positivistic spirit of contemporary industrial culture and to his
remedy for its ills. As Greek tragedy was killed by the insistence of
Socrates, that "despotic logician" (BT 14), that the beautiful, and
hence the admissible, in art should imitate reality (as conceived by
Socrates) in being fully intelligible to the Apollonian mind (BT 12),
so the scientistic refusal of the modern age to countenance anything
inaccessible to the rational mind has produced a "decisive
secularization" (BT 23) of our culture and has thereby created a
climate in which myth - tragic, Dionysian myth in particular -
cannot flourish. Several consequences follow from this. First, a lack
of both' artistic and political unity, for only the sharing of an
"unconscious metaphysics" can prevent " t h e powers of the
imagination and of the Apollonian dream from their aimless
wandering" (JBT23), and only a state in possession of the "unwritten
laws" of a "mythical foundation that guarantees its connection with
religion and growth from mythical notions" (ibid.) can achieve
genuine cohesion. Second, modern, mythless man, denied any
culturally endorsed solution to the suffering and absurdity of life, is
led to a feverish plundering of other and earlier cultures in a restless
quest for satisfaction of the "metaphysical d r i v e " (ibid.). Hence
western culture contains a " pandemonium of myths and super-
stitions" (ibid.), a "revolting" smorgasbord of religious and quasi-
religious remedies for life. And hence, too, the vulgar materialism of
western culture, its dominance by the " b u r d e n and greed of the
moment," 1 7 a worthless and desperate hedonism of the moment, a
feverish consumerism. Lacking the perspective of eternity, we find
our only locus of satisfaction to be the sensuality of the now (ibid.; cf.
WB, pp. 219-20).
The closing pages of The Birth are (like some of his later works)
dominated by Nietzsche's presentiment of the imminent collapse of
western culture. Only a rebirth of Dionysian myth, which will occur,
if anywhere, in the " p u r e and vigorous core of the German
character" (BT 23), can transmute it into a culture of dignity and
value, for " a n y p e o p l e - j u s t as, incidentally, any individual - is
worth only as much as it is able to press upon its experience the
stamp of the eternal; for thus it is, as it were, desecularised and shows
its unconscious inward convictions of the relativity of time and of the
true that is metaphysical significance of life" (ibid.).
It is clear from all this that the task for Bayreuth is to achieve not
merely a rebirth of tragedy but^the recreation, too, of a religious
culture. This is why art, in the words in which The Birth is dedicated
to Wagner, is the highest task and truly metaphysical (Nietzsche
could equally have said religious) activity of this life (BT Preface).
15 Exception might be taken to the implicit assumption in the above

discussion that to identify The Birth as a religious work is a fortiori to
identify it as a pessimistic work. For a religion need not, it may be
said, and in Nietzsche's case is not, a denigration or denial of this
world in favor of another. For Nietzsche's religion is a religion, a
celebration of life, a joyous "Saying Yes to life even in its strangest
and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own
inexhaustibility even in the very sacrifice of its highest types" (EH
iv, 3), rather than, as in the case of Christianity, the promotion of an
antihuman ideal by means of which to condemn, "say No to," life.
Coupled with this objection may be the further one that in my
account of the tragic effect I failed to mention that, according to
Nietzsche, one not only identifies with the primal unity but also
experiences in "creative j o y " its eternal "satisfaction in [the]
change of phenomena," its "raging desire for and joy in existence"
(BT 17). Surely, it may be said, when the tragic effect is fully
described in this way we see that, as he claims, Nietzsche's account
of that effect is indeed far removed from Schopenhauer's pessimistic
"resignation" from life. Finally, it may be protested, in representing
Nietzsche as a pessimist I have ignored the famous assertion that,
considered as an aesthetic phenomenon, the world is "eternally
justified."
16 Let me begin to answer these charges by attending to the last

point first; but considering the import of the assertion that "only as
an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified"
(575,24).
The first point to investigate is the question of the force of the
"only." What other kind of justification is being rejected? The
answer is that it is moral justification he rejects: "confronted with
morality," he writes in the 1886 Preface, "life must continually and
inevitably be in the wrong... crushed by the weight of contempt and
the eternal N o " {BT, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism," 5; cf. KG iv 3,
p. 388, Fragment 30 [51]). The point here, a point taken over from
Schopenhauer, is the impossibility of reconciling the character of the
world with a morally perfect, omnipotent creator - the ludicrous
impossibility of Christian theodicy: Schopenhauer holds, as we saw
(ch. , sec. 4), that if we insist in anthropomorphizing the creative
source of existence then not benevolence but sadism is the character
we must attribute to it.
There is, however, Nietzsche suggests, a third possibility: we may
conceive of the source of existence as neither saint nor sadist but as,
rather, " a n entirely reckless and amoral artist-god" {BT, " A t t e m p t
at a Self-Criticism," 5), a "world-building force" which " t h e dark
Heraclitus compares to a playing child that places stones here and
there and builds sand hills only to overthrow them a g a i n " [BT
24). 18 In Dionysian ecstasy, then, it is with this child-artist-god that
we identify: sharing in his "creative j o y " we take delight in the
" a r t w o r k " " w e " have created and finding it beautiful 19 see it as
"justified." The world we see contains, of course, terrible ca-
tastrophe, arbitrary, unmerited suffering, tragic "dissonances" {BT
24) - the "ugly and disharmonic," in the language of the later
Nietzsche. But, as in music, these artistically employed dissonances
can be seen to increase the aesthetic pleasurability of the whole. And
if, as sober, Apollonian individuals, we feel inclined to protest that
we do not enjoy being part of those dissonances, let us not forget that
we individuals are not the creator of the world but "merely images
and artistic projections for the true author, and that we have our
highest dignity in our significance as [his] works of a r t " (BT 5). We
resemble soldiers painted on a canvas of a battle scene (ibid.). O u r
protest that the world should have been kinder to us is as laughable
as their protest would be.
As aesthetic phenomenon, then, the world is an object of pleasure;
beautiful, "justified," affirmable. But to whom is it justified? Not,
clearly, to individual human beings, but rather to the world creator.
There is no suggestion here at all that humans find or can find their
life to be pleasurable or justified. To suggest otherwise would be to
suggest that because a concentration camp "justifies" itself to its
sadistic (or perhaps merely playfully mad) commandant as a
pleasurable " e n t e r t a i n m e n t " (BT6), so too must the inmates find
it justified. If Nietzsche's account of the tragic effect is right, human
beings can, with luck, be transported briefly out of the role of
protagonist in the tragedy of life and into that of its "sole author and
spectator" (ibid.). But this does nothing to justify the life of an
inmate to an inmate. And such a justification indeed - Nietzsche is
quite explicit - is not offered. The world, he says, evincing an artist's
megalomania of truly Wagnerian proportions, was not created "for
our betterment or education" (BT 5). Consequently, justification
from our perspective is something we have no right to demand.
It is possible that we have misunderstood Nietzsche's Dionysi-
anism by taking the discussion too literally, too metaphysically?
Should we not perhaps 2 0 take metaphysics as metaphor and
understand The Birth to take the Dionysian to be not really a
metaphysical, but rather a,psychological, state? On this interpretation,
the "end of individuation" is not a matter of absorption into a
higher metaphysical domain but rather the achievement of a state of
love for and security with one's fellow human beings - Schopen-
hauerian Gemeinschaß (see ch. sec. 5), in other words. On this
view Nietzsche's Dionysianism would not be an escape from, denial
of, the human self and life, but rather an affirmation of the higher
potentialities of that life and self.
The answer is that while it is possible to reconstruct Nietzsche in this
way, to derive from The Birth inspiration for a Nietzschtfarc (or, more
correctly, Schopenhauerian) ethics of altruism, it is not possible
correctly to interpret The Birth in this way. For two reasons. First,
because, as we will see in the next chapter, the later Nietzsche's
critique of the postulation, intimation of, or yearning for, a
" metaphysical world," whether it be in religion, art, or philosophy,
a critique begun in his " positivistic " years, is very clearly a self-
critique: he describes the metaphysical interpretation of life with an
authenticity and intimacy that only a former inhabitant of that
interpretation could achieve. Indeed, he tells us this in the already-
quoted (n. 19 above) passage in £arathustra, a passage that can refer
only to The Birth: " A t one time Zarathustra too cast his delusion
beyond man, like all the afterworldly. The work of a suffering and
tortured god. The world then seemed to m e . . . " (£1, 3). T o view The
Birth's metaphysics as mere metaphor deprives Nietzsche of an object
for this self-critique. The second reason is that, as Schopenhauer
realized - and as Nietzsche, given his close acquaintance with
Schopenhauer cannot have failed to realize too - altruistic ide-
ntification with the totality of human lives does not solve the problem
of pessimism. If I identify - empathize, that is - with humanity in
general then, though the quality of my suffering may change, given
that the wisdom of Silenus was a problem to start with, it remains a
problem: if human life is in general a confrontation with horror and
absurdity, then it remains so notwithstanding my solidarity with the
numerous other individuals who find themselves in the same
predicament. (One is not the less likely to drown just because there
are others in the lifeboat.) Indeed, if Schopenhauer is right,
identification with others increases one's awareness of the horror of life
(see ch. 1, sec. 5). Since, therefore, overcoming pessimism is the
problem for The Birth, it is important to resist the temptation to read
Nietzsche's Dionysian solution as a matter of identifying with other
human beings. Rather, one identifies with a wonhuman being, the
primal unity, or "will-to-live" which celebrates, says yes to, not the
inexhaustibility of human life but rather "its own inexhaustibility"
(see sec'. 16 above; my emphasis), the wanton pleasure of its own
eternally boyish existence as the creator-spectator of the fate of the
human flies (see A 48).
17 Let me bring the discussion of The Birth to a close. The question

of the stance taken in it towards pessimism is, I suggested, the
question of whether or not the Dionysian solution to suffering is
pessimistic. But it is pessimistic, I have argued, since the only being
to whom the life lived by human beings is said to have any kind of
value is a nonhuman, external spectator. H u m a n beings are offered,
as a solution to their suffering, a transcendence of their humanity, an
escape from individuality into a feeling of absorption into the Primal
One. Clearly though, it seems to me, this does nothing to rebut the
wisdom of Silenus: the best things for human individuals is indeed
not to be born and the second best is to die soon; or at least to " k i l l "
the consciousness of what it is like to be human with heady draughts
of Dionysian intoxication.
Like Schopenhauer, therefore, Nietzsche offers flight from human
individuality as his solution to its pain and absurdity. Like him
therefore, he denies (human) life. Later on, in Assorted Opinions and
Maxims, he distinguishes between one who "wants to enjoy his own
nature by means of a r t " (clearly a descendant of the Apollonian
glorifier of the phenomenon) and one who "wants with its aid to get
above and away from his n a t u r e " (HHIIZL, 371). The latter is clearly
the "romantiq pessimist" (see sec. 14 above). And it is also, in his
Dionysian vein, the author of The Birth of Tragedy.
18 Is there then no difference between the Schopenhauerian and

Nietzschean solutions to suffering? There is a difference, for whereas
the Nietzschean hero, Dionysian man, identifies with the world-will,
the primal source of the world as phenomenon, the Schopenhauerian
stance is unable to stomach such an identification. Moral repugnance
against the creative source of that hell which the world is leads him,
as we have seen, to a horrified rejection of the will. Thus, though
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are at one in denying human existence
they differ in that in Schopenhauer there is a double denial, a denial,
in Nietzschean terminology, of not just Apollonian but of Dionysian
reality in favor of identification with a we know not what, a
something " b e y o n d " the will (see WR n, p. 198).
This occurs because Schopenhauer fails to adopt the Nietzschean
stance "beyond good and evil." Nietzsche, that is, suggests that only
aesthetic criteria are to be employed in judging the world and its
creator. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, judges according to
moral criteria and condemns the creator for failing to be constrained
by moral ideals (see WP 1005). It has to be said, I think, that, given
Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's identical assessment of the character
of the human world, Schopenhauer's response is the more attractive,
the more human. There is, it seems to me, something ugly, inhuman
even, one is tempted to add, Wagnerian about a willingness not only
to condone but even to inhabit a state of mind willing to deploy
human individuals as mere means to the production of the
artist-god's spectacular, bloody, cosmic epic.
19 After The Birth, Nietzsche's only other sustained discussion of art

prior to the radical change of stance represented by Human, All-too-
human is the last of his four Untimely Meditations, Richard Wagner at
Bayreuth. This work, a portrait of Wagner at a time at which only
Parsifal (1882) remained to be written, was published in 1876, the
year of Nietzsche's dramatic flight in the middle of the first Bayreuth
Festival, his final break with the Wagner phenomenon. It is one of
Nietzsche's weakest works (he himself has serious doubts about its
publishability), weak in structure, short on argument and analysis,
long on rhapsodic yet (in contrast to The Birth) somehow inauthentic
attempts to evoke the power of Wagner's music. It also, I shall
suggest, has nothing of substance to add to The Birth: in print, at any
rate, Nietzsche's thought about art remained static from 1872 until
1876.
Nietzsche wrote the work with difficulty. The reason is that by the
time of its writing his attitude towards Wagner had changed from
adulation to ambivalence. Though outwardly still devoted to both
Wagner and his cause, privately he was full of reservations: his
notebooks for the two years preceding the work's publication raise
many of the accusations - that Wagner was insincere, a populist, an
"actor," a German nationalist - which were to constitute the
foundation of his later case against Wagner.
The device Nietzsche adopted to enable him to write out of this
divided state of mind was to compose an idealized biography in
which Wagner's " h i g h e r " self eventually triumphs over the errors
and weaknesses of his " l o w e r " self (see especially WB 8). This
enables him to combine hagiography with a warning to Wagner to
remain true to his highest ideal. Thus Wagner is pictured, in the first
stage of his career, as a composer of grand opera, a power-hungry
striver after cheap and empty "effects" and "artifices" with which
to "wrest a success from the public" (a description that may call to
mind certain composers of the contemporary "musical"). Never,
comments Nietzsche, can so great an artist have started out so deeply
involved in error, nor engaged in a more "revolting" form of his art
(ibid.). Of the next stage, that of the social revolutionary, it can at
least be said that it is distinguished from the first by a certain nobility
of feeling. The mature Wagner, however, transcends this stage too,
realizing that the transformation needed by art and by humanity
concerns not social institutions but rather the individual heart
{ibid,). This mature Wagner now becomes Nietzsche's mouthpiece.21
Under the rubric " Wagner holds that' 5 we are in fact told what he,
Nietzsche, believes about art and about life.
What does this Wagner-Nietzsche figure tell us? As in The Birth,
the underlying premise is pessimism; that life is something to be
endured rather than embraced. The individual, we are told, has a
desperate need to be delivered from " terrible anxiety which death
and time evoke" (WB 4), a metaphysical yearning for deliverance
from this life which is experienced, as in Tristan, as "evil, deception
and separation" (WB 8).
The solution (here Nietzsche reiterates the illusory character of
"Socratic," scientific optimism) is not to be found in action:
"suffering pertains to the essence of things" (WB 8) and cannot be
eliminated. And power, all power, is, as Wo tan shows us in the Ring
cycle, evil; Wotan's renunciation of power is a model for us all to
follow (WB 11). At the beginning of Wagner at Bayreuth Nietzsche
says that the most vital question for philosophy is the extent to which
the world is alterable; vital, he says, making an active-sounding
remark, so that once it is answered we may "set about improving that
part of it recognised as alterable" (WB 3). But at the end of the work it
turns out to be not the world but only our attitudes to it that are
capable of alteration. One can believe in the future, he says, only
because the Socratic attitudes of our modern culture towards art and
the metaphysical are, at least possibly, capable of being changed, not
because any changes in the fundamental character of human
existence are possible (WB n ) .
Art, that is to say in particular Wagner's music, is capable of
endowing life with a metaphysical dimension. It is capable of
bringing the individual to an identification with "something higher
than himself" (WB 4), of transporting him (a Kantian phrase this)
to a "realm of freedom" (WB 7). When, "strangely consoled," we
return from this realm we possess a "new feeling of security."
Towards our fellows, since we have realized the merely phenomenal
status of the principium individuationis, the illusoriness of individuality
and separateness, we feel "abundantly benevolent." And we have
difficulty taking our previously so-distresing life seriously since,
because we have taken art so seriously, ordinary life now appears to
us as an unimportant fragment of the total experience we have
traversed in our ecstatic, musical absorption (ibid.).
20 This, then, is what art does for life: it returns us to life able to face
it with grace and benevolent serenity, our knowledge of the
inevitability of suffering and death alleviated by a sense of life's
vanity, rendered trivial by being viewed in the perspective of
eternity. O r rather, this is what art can do for life. Modern music-
less, mythless theoretical man, however, has cut himself off from such
redemption. Convention has alienated him from other human
beings and from himself. In its adaptation to cognitive ends, language
has ceased to perform its original function of communicating strong
feelings, so that human beings can only communicate about the
"objective." Culture, instead of being the outer manifestations of
inner "content," has become mere artifice so that we are, even to
ourselves, mere "appearance," " o u t of t o u c h " with our feelings so
that we are unable to admit to ourselves how wretched we are; how
full our lives are of "hoary impotence, nagging discontent,
industrious boredom, dishonourable wretchedness" (WB 5). " M o d -
ern a r t " has become a form of "quiet dipsomania" (Stille Trunksucht)
(ibid.) in which we seek to drown our disquiet. But this must be
replaced by the " dithyrambic" art first exemplified by Aeschylus
and now reborn in the art of Wagner (WB 7) so that men can once
more become "naive," "candid," authentic. For only the natural,
"free" man is capable of "genuine satisfactions and redemptions,"
capable, as it were, of receiving the " s a c r a m e n t " offered by
redemptive art (WB 11).
21 It is clear from the foregoing precis that Wagner at Bayreuth both

shares in the pessimism of The Birth and offers us the same
metaphysical comfort for it; as we called it, the Dionysian solution.
The last of the Untimely Meditations is an uneasy repetition of The
Birth of Tragedy - with the difference, since its focus is upon music,
that the're is no mention of Apollonian art nor of an Apollonian
solution to pessimism.
CHAPTER 3
Human, All-too-human
i At about the time Richard Wagner at Bayreuth appeared Nietzsche

began work on Human, All-too-human, which he published in the
spring of 1878. In 1886 it was republished as volume 1 of a work with
that same title, volume 11 comprising Assorted Opinions and Maxims,
first published in 1879, a n d The Wanderer and his Shadow of 1880. This
body of material, together with Dawn (1881), is the topic of this
chapter. Accordingly, the chapter falls into four parts: in the first
(sees. 2-13) I discuss Human, All-too-human (to avoid confusion I shall
refer only to the work of 1878 under that title); in the second (sees.
14-22) Assorted Opinions and Maxims; in the third (sees. 23-5) The
Wanderer and his Shadow, and in the fourth (sees. 26-9) Dawn.
2 Human, All-too-human is subtitled A Book for Free Spirits. The

foremost spirit thus referred to is, he explains in Ecce Homo, himself:
the book, he says, is a work of liberation, the work in which " I
liberated myself from that in my nature which did not belong to m e "
{EH vi, 1). Emotionally, the book marks his "liberation" from
Wagner, his first "coming o u t " as a non- indeed anti- Wagnerite.
Though the last meeting between the two had occurred eighteen
months prior to its publication, the devastatingly deflationary
portrait of the artist posing as romantic, prophetic, quasi-priestly
" g e n i u s " (Wagner, that is, in all but name) which, as we will see, the
work contains, placed the rupture between the two beyond repair.
(A sign, however, of Nietzsche's all-too-human emotional confusion,
a sign that the liberation from Wagner was less than total is the fact
that he sent both Richard and Cosima copies of the book hoping, of
course in vain, for some kind of approval.) Philosophically, the book
marks a liberation from certain aspects of Nietzsche's Schopen-
hauerism. Gone is the Schopenhauerian reverence for the trans-
cendence of rationality, for " t h e saint" and " t h e genius" (see EHvi,
58
Human, All-too-human 59
i) and gone too, as we will see, is Schopenhauer's pessimism.
Stylistically, the book marks a liberation from the nineteenth
century. Gone are the long, heavy, humorless passages of overripe
prose that marked The Birth of Tragedy. In the short, dry, witty
aphorisms that replace them we escape and breathe, in fact, for the
first time, the air of the modern world.
3 Human, All-too-human marks, it is clear, a tremendous departure

from the world of The Birth of Tragedy. The most startling departure
is that it adopts and inhabits that stance identified in The Birth as the
antithesis of Nietzsche's own Dionysianism, the stance of "theor-
etical," "Socratic," or "scientific" man.
This adoption reveals itself in the disappearance of the quality of
" untimeliness" that characterizes The Birth and indeed, in one
way or another, all of Nietzsche's other published works. Human, All-
too-human, it seems to me, is unique in its abandonment of the
" w a n d e r e r " pose (see GS 380), the stance of the outsider alienated
from his time and culture. In the work he abandons the neoromantic
critique of modern culture presented by its predecessors and comes,
instead, to inhabit and affirm the science-based, " progress "-
affirming Weltanschauung of his age. Though most of the character-
istics of modern culture for which, in The Birth, it was condemned are
again recorded, the Gestalt is now entirely different. Thus, for
example, though again recording the collapse of the old national
cultures and their replacement by a new, international, " m o t l e y "
culture, rather than lamenting their demise he now says that we
should feel proud to live in an " a g e of comparisons." And we should
feel excited at the possibilities, in particular, for the achievement of
peace (HH 1, 23-6). "Progress" conceived, it seems, in terms of
health, education, welfare, and peace is possible (the question of the
meaning of such progress, of whether it constitutes an affirmable
end-in-itself, prominent in Nietzsche's later work, is conspicuous by
its absence). Pessimism is rejected: away with this "overused" word,
says Nietzsche, " occasion for using [it]... is growing less day by day "
{HH 1, 28). The increasing human ability to abolish suffering, even
one day perhaps death (HH 1, 128), is, he adds, a " b a d lookout for
the writers of tragedy - for there is less and less material for tragedy
because the realm of inexorable, implacable destiny is growing
narrower and narrower" (HH 1, 108). But disappearing too is the
need for the myths that, according to The Birth, were embodied for
6o Nietzsche's philosophy of art
us in tragedy: "serious occupation" with symbolic thinking " h a s
become [now] a mark of a lower culture." What we value now are
not the grand "errors handed down by metaphysical and artistic
ages of m e n " but the "small unpretentious t r u t h s " we discover by
"rigorous thinking" of which earlier ages were incapable (HH i, 3).
4 T h e main target for criticism in Human, that from which Nietzsche

would finally and totally liberate both himself and us, is " t h e
metaphysical world" (HHi, 9), sometimes the "thing in itself" (HH
1). What do these phrases encompass?
In one sense, it is fairly clear, Human affirms a metaphysical world.
In section 9 Nietzsche says that since we cannot but perceive the
world through the human head there must be a gap between
appearance and reality: the human picture of the world must, that
is, be a mere interpretation, an interpretation guided by biological
constraints (see ch. sec. 1). In section 19 Nietzsche talks of the
error of believing in temporally enduring " t h i n g s " - science, he
says, is "resolving everything thing-like (material) into motions" -
and in section 29 he says that, through science, we are getting closer
and closer to knowledge of the " t r u e n a t u r e " of the world. Putting
these remarks together we derive (1) a biologically based idealism
with regard to the layman's world-view, (2) an affirmation of
scientific realism - the world is the way a completed natural science
claims it to be - and (3) the affirmation that science is moving
towards a dynamic rather than mechanistic view of nature (see ch. 1,
nn. 3, 4).
Now all this, surely, suggests that Nietzsche's view of nature in
Human is little, if at all, removed from the Heracliteanism subscribed
to in The Birth (see ch. 2, sec. 10), an impression strengthened by the
affirmation in section 2 that "everything has become: there are no
eternal facts." But this, surely, amounts to the affirmation of a
particular metaphysical view of the world. What then is the
metaphysical world that is to be rejected?
Part of the answer is that it is the literally metaphysical world, that is
rejected, the supranatural world, the Kantian "thing in itself" that
is beyond space and time, as we at least ordinarily conceive them.
Naturalism 1 is a fundamental assertion in Human, All-too-human.
Another way of describing the world that is to be rejected is to say
that it is the excitingly metaphysical world, the world pregnant with
implications of practical (rather than theoretical) import. The
Kantian "thing in itself," that is, was important as the focus of
everything "valuable, terrible, delightful" (HH i, 9). It was the

world affirmed by religion, demanded by morality, and intimated by
art. The thing in itself revealed by science, however - the meta-
physical world retained by Nietzsche - is, from the point of view of
"happiness, salvation and life," utterly uninteresting; knowledge of
it is even more useless than is knowledge of the composition of water
to a sailor in danger of shipwreck {ibid.). The metaphysical world
revealed by science is a " r o o t " not a "blossom," for it does nothing
to give life meaning, direction, or " c o l o r " (HH 1, 29). (Actually, it
deprives the world of color since the dissolution of objects into
" m o t i o n s " results, presumably, in the relegation of "secondary
qualities," sounds, odors, colors, and so on, to the realm of
appearance.)
5 A question which presents itself at this point is that of why

Nietzsche's own metaphysical world should be regarded as so prosaic
given that it is essentially the same Schopenhauerian-Heraclitean
world as that affirmed in The Birth of Tragedy. In The Birth, that is,
it was the fact that beneath or behind the flickering and painful
world of individuals there exists the "primal unity," the one force,
energy, or will whose manifestation or appearance all individuals
are, that was the presupposition and ground of the "Dionysian
solution" to the horror and terror of existence. For according to this
solution, it is by realizing that our real identity is constituted by the
One that we overcome the nausea and pessimism engendered by
knowledge of the essential character of the life of individuals. But if
now, the One still remains, why should this metaphysical fact be of
any less practical interest than it used to be?
Presumably what Nietzsche would now point out, in his new,
tough-minded, scientific mood, is that to anthropomorphize the
totality of the world's energy - to speak of it either as a
child-artist-god or as one's own real self- is nothing but romantic
" h y p e , " poetic fiction, sentimental illusion. There are people, and
there is totality of the world's energy. The former are sentient
individuals, the latter is not. Ergo, no person is the "primal unity."
The "primal u n i t y " is not a person. It is worth noticing that at one
strange point Nietzsche seems to take this stance in The Birth itself.
In section 18 he describes " t h e metaphysical comfort that beneath
the whirl of phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibly" as,
along with the Apollonian and Socratic remedies for life's suffering
one of "three stages of illusion." What he means here, presumably,
is not that the dichotomy between the primal One and the principium
individuationis is illusion. What is romantic illusion, rather, is the
notion that the being of the one constitutes the " eternal life" of any
person.
6 In Human, All-too-human, therefore, the metaphysics of The Birth

has undergone a process of de-anthropomorphization. The primal
One belongs now to the physicist, no longer the tragedian.
Nonetheless, since, apart from this de-anthropomorphization, the
metaphysics of The Birth remains, the question presents itself as to
how it is that the pessimism of the former, a pessimism which, as we saw
(ch. 2, sec. io), was grounded in that metaphysics, has been replaced now
by scientific optimism. The answer can only have to do with an
alteration in Nietzsche's conception of nature and power of natural
science. In what way can it have changed?
In The Birth, it will be remembered, the terrible thing for
Nietzsche (as for certain contemporary " c h a o s " theorists) about the
"destructiveness of world history" was its randomness. The essence,
that is, of metaphysical flux, of the "Dionysian child-god," was its
capriciousness: as humans we can never anticipate when it will again
be overcome by the creative urge, when its " sandcastles " will
become boring, when it will smash them in order to build others. (In
Human Nietzsche identifies "arbitrariness" as an essential feature of
primitive, animistic world-views; when everything is the product of
conscious, volitional agents, he suggests [in one of his brilliant
excursions into speculative anthropology], nature is not predictable.
Religion begins as the attempt to win the favor of the deity by means
of the same kind of techniques as a tribe seeks to propitiate a stronger
tribe. Its aim thereby is to make nature predictable [HH i, i n ] . )
It was this randomness, it will be remembered, that rendered the
optimistic assumption that the world is capable of scientific
"correction" a disastrous illusion. Science, that is, was perceived as
inhabiting, along with common sense, the "frail b a r k " of the
principium individuationis. The Schopenhauerian-Heraclitean world of
the fluctuating will was, therefore, something it could not know and
so not tame.
I want now to propose the hypothesis that somewhere between
1872 and 1878 Nietzsche reevaluated his assessment of science as
unable to conceive of the world in terms appropriate to its
Heraclitean reality. What adds support to this hypothesis is that we
know that though, through F. A. Lange's History of Materialism,
Nietzsche had some acquaintance with the history and contem-
porary state of natural science as early as the 1860s, it was not until
1872s that he began his serious study of Roger Boscovich's Philosophia
Naturalis, the work which convinced him (for a time - see ch 4, sec.
5) that from a strictly scientific and not merely philosophical viewpoint there
are no "things." Boscovich, that is, proposed that there are no
atoms, no matter, but only force organized round various exten-
sionless points, or "puncta": "Boscovich taught us to abjure belief
in...'substance,' in 'matter, 5 in the earth-residuum and particle
atom: it was the greatest triumph over the senses hitherto achieved
on e a r t h " (BGE 12; cf. ch. 1, n. 3). But if this is how the world looks
to science then, it seems, science is not inexorably locked into the
conceptual scheme of "things," does not, after all, inhabit the
principium individuationis. What I want to suggest, then, is that in
between The Birth and Human Nietzsche came to the view that far
from there being, as he had originally supposed, an opposition
between his metaphysical Heracliteanism and the scientific world-
picture, there is, in fact, a perfect congruence.
Boscovich's physics, of course, since he took himself to be
developing Newton's was entirely deterministic: the total state of the
universe at a later time is a function of its state at any earlier time.
Hence Nietzsche must have come to see that the world can both be
flux, in the sense of there being no material objects that persist
through time and change, and be predictable. In Boscovich, flux
does not, as it does in The Birth, place reality beyond the reach of
scientific understanding and "correction."
This account of Nietzsche's reevaluation of science is, as I say,
hypothetical. What is not hypothetical, however, is that in Human
nature, for whatever reason, has become (in principle) wholly
predictable. In section 107 (cf. GS 109) he speaks of " t h e new
knowledge" (the context implies it is new to him, thereby tending to
confirm the hypothesis that Human was written under the recent
impact of Boscovich) according to which everything is "necessary,"
and in section 106 he applies this knowledge to that ostensibly least
predictable part of nature, human action:
At the sight of a waterfall we think we see in the countless curvings,

twistings and breakings of the waves capriciousness and freedom of the will;
but everything here is necessary, every motion mathematically calculable.
So it is in the case of human actions; if one were all-knowing, one would be
able to calculate every individual action, likewise every advance in
knowledge, every error, every piece of wickedness.
(The conclusion Nietzsche draws from this is " t h e complete

unaccountability of man for his actions" [HH i, 107], an
exhilarating, liberating conclusion since what follows is the "inno-
cence" [ibid.] of man, our freedom from guilt and the dread that
accompanies it.)
7 T h e main aim of Human, to resume the main thread of the

discussion, is, as we observed in section 4 above, to do away with the
metaphysical world, to abolish all "idealism," every setting of
human nature and destiny in a suprabiological, suprahuman
context: the title of the work means, says Nietzsche, " where you see
ideal things, / see what is human, alas, all-too-human! - I know
man better" (EH vi, 1). Thereby, we are to create a "free spirit,"
a spirit free of the myths and superstitions of more primitive ages.
Why does this ambition appear to be so important to the author
of the work? Because although, as we saw in The Birth, the comforts
and delights of metaphysical perspectives "sooth and h e a l " they do
so "only provisionally, only for a m o m e n t " (a specific rejection, this,
of the Dionysianism of The Birth). What is worse is that "they
hinder men from working for a real improvement in their conditions
by suspending and discharging in a palliative way the very passion
which impels the discontented to action" (HH 1, 148). The more a
man inclines towards a metaphysical interpretation of life, says
Nietzsche, continuing in his Marxian vein,
the less attention will he give to the cause of the ill and to doing away with
it; the momentary amelioration and narcoticizing, such as is normally
employed for example in the case of a toothache, suffices him in the case of
more serious sufferings too. The more the domination of religion and all the
arts of narcosis declines, the stricter attention men pay to the actual
abolition of the ill. (HH 1, 108)
But how can life be supportable without a metaphysical crutch of
one sort or another? Is not (in the words of Schopenhauer's famous
chapter title) " M a n ' s need for metaphysics" (WR 11, ch. xvn) an
inalienable part of human nature such that life cannot be born
without its satisfaction? People assume, replies Nietzsche, that the
" metaphysical need " is immutable because they assume that human
nature is. But both assumptions are false (HH 1, 2, n o ) . The
metaphysical need has come into existence (" Christianity has first to
burden the heart so as afterwards to be able to lighten i t " [HH 1,
119]) and can therefore go out of existence (HHi, 131). Though a
too violent withdrawal is not to be recommended - to this extent
metaphysical art and philosophy (for example, The Birth of Tragedy)
in which we enjoy at least the mood of religion (ibid.) are useful as
" substitutes" to ease the withdrawal from the " h a r d " stuff supplied
by religion proper (HH 1, 27) - the proper response to the
metaphysical need is to work towards its weakening and ultimate
extermination (ibid.). For only when we escape finally and
completely from the clutches of the metaphysical, only when we
cease to abase ourselves before the nonhuman, will we fully escape
" g u i l t " and "depression" (HHi, 133), only then will we achieve as
humans genuine "self-love," "self-valuation" (HH 1, 134).
8 How does art fall within the scope of this spiritual spring-cleaning
that is to produce the self-love of the "free spirit"? Why, that is, does
art invite and perpetuate the metaphysical interpretation of
existence ?
As has already been intimated,
Art raises its head when the religions relax their hold. It takes over a host
of moods and feelings engendered by religion, lays them to its heart and
itself grows more profound and soulful, so that it is now capable of
communicating exultation and enthusiasm as it formerly could not. The
wealth of religious feelings, swollen to a torrent, breaks forth again and
again and seeks to conquer new regions; but the growth of the
Enlightenment, undermined the dogmas of religion, and inspired a
fundamental distrust of them; so that the feelings expelled from the sphere
of religion by the Enlightenment throw themselves into art... Wherever we
perceive... higher, gloomier colouring, we can assume that dread of spirits,
the odour of incense and shadows of churches are still adhering to them.
( / / / / I , 150)
(Note the stark contrast between this and the demand in The Birth
for the "desecularization" of society [BT 23; cf. ch. 2, sec. 14],) Art,
in other words, enables us to enjoy religious sentiment without the
need to subscribe to any conceptual content (see HHi, 131) - a point
not only admitted but emphasized as constituting its central value
by, in particular, Kant. Art in a secular age provides, as it were, a
catacomb in which the religious habit of mind can continue to exist.
For what it offers is religious feeling without cognitive responsibility.
We have, says Nietzsche, in a penetrating and surely self-analytical
remark about the romantic imagination, a tendency to ontologize
the intentional objects of " d e e p " and serious feelings, to assume, as
does astrology, that what we have "essentially at h e a r t " must
constitute also " t h e essence and heart of things" (HH i, 4). But the
objects of the quasi-religious feelings engendered by art are so
intangible and vague that they constitute no challenge to the
accepted verities of a secular age.
Above all, music provides a home for the continued existence of the
religious feeling. (It comes as no surprise, given that in The Birth it
was viewed as the metaphysical art, that it is now viewed with
particular distrust.) " A r t , " says Nietzsche,
makes the thinker's heart heavy. - How strong the metaphysical need is, and
how hard nature makes it to bid it in a final farewell, can be seen from the
fact that even when the free spirit has divested himself of everything
metaphysical the highest effects of art can easily set the metaphysical
strings, which have long been silent or indeed snapped apart, vibrating in
sympathy; so it can happen, for example, that a passage in Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony will make him feel he is hovering above the earth in a
dome of stars with the dream of immortality in the heart: all the stars seem
to glitter around him and the earth seems to sink further and further away.
- If he becomes aware of being in this condition he feels a profound stab in
the heart and sighs for the man who will lead him back to his lost love
whether she be called religion or metaphysics. It is in such moments that
his intellectual probity is put to the test. (HH 1, 153)
If art functions for us as a substitute for religion then the artist

must occupy a role similar to that of the priest or prophet. And so,
says Nietzsche, in the romantic "cult of genius" (a cult that reaches
something like its ultimate expression in the claim that art represents
" t h e highest task and truly metaphysical activity of this life" [BT
Preface]) he does. One ascribes to artists, as Nietzsche's newly
satirical phrasing puts it, " a direct view of the nature of the world,
as it were a hole in the cloak of appearance, and believes that, by
virtue of this miraculous seer's vision, they are able to communicate
something conclusive and decisive about man and the world without
the toil and rigorousness required by science" {HHi, 164; cf. GMin,
5)-
9 How does Nietzsche propose to liberate us from faith in the

"ideal," metaphysical, more-than-human world? How, in par-
ticular, from such faith as is presented in art?
He would like to convince us that (like Descartes) he has
discovered a new method, a method for exposing the errors of
metaphysics; a purported branch of "natural science" which
investigates the origin of ideas, feelings, and practices which he calls
"historical" (later he prefers the term "genealogical") philoso-
phizing (HH 1, 1). The old "metaphysical philosophy," he
announces to us at the very beginning of Human, found various
.phenomena, moral (the altruist), religious (the saint), and aesthetic
(the genius), to be inexplicable save for the postulation of " a
miraculous source in the very kernel and being of the 'thing in
itself.'" Historical philosophy, however, demonstrates the redund-
ancy of such a postulation by providing a "chemistry of the moral,
religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations," a demonstration
of how even " t h e most glorious colors" are derived from " b a s e , "
that is " h u m a n " - f r o m the point of view of the old metaphysical
yearning "All-too-human" - materials (ibid.).
But in fact Nietzsche has no single method for disposing of the
metaphysical. For in his demolition of the aesthetic home of the
metaphysical (as in his demolition of its other homes), "historical"
considerations function as only one ingredient in an opportunistic
mixture that also includes (1) the surgical application of the tools of,
as we now call it, " a n a l y t i c " philosophy, and (2) more and less
subtle uses of rhetoric.
Examples of Nietzsche's deployment of rhetoric against the
metaphysical in art we have already seen. Recall, for example, how
the language of section 164 (quoted at the end of sec. 8 above) draws
us into a conspiracy in which we both ridicule the romantic artist
and feel angry that he should try to achieve the kudos of the scientist
with none of the effort. And notice the brilliance with which in
section 153 (quoted in the penultimate paragraph of section 8
above) Nietzsche first demonstrates in the rhapsodic yet accurate
beauty of his evocation of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth that he,
too, the unbeliever, can generate the illusion of immortality but then
punctures it with the brisk coldness of the final sentence. T h e
conjurer's art is, as it were, given a magnificent performance and
then we are made to feel that it is nothing more than a cheap trick.
Nietzsche's rhetoric (like all rhetoric) is to be viewed with
suspicion since it gives us the experience of having overcome the
metaphysical interpretation of life without providing reasons for
rejecting it. He himself offers us "something conclusive and decisive
about man and the world without the toil and rigorousness required
by science" (HH 1, 164). Less problematic are his excursions into
analytic philosophy. With respect to metaphysical art, the analytic
mode of philosophizing is one he inhabits mainly in discussing the
spectator's response. The main thrust of his argument here can be
summarized as "presentiments are not arguments." Thus, he points
out, certain moods bring with them the "sympathetic resonance" of
many related moods, sensations, and thoughts so that they come to
be experienced as unities. Referring to these we speak of religious or
moral feeling ( i / i / i , 14). We call such feelings "profound" believing
them to be pregnant with metaphysical import. But in fact,
such feelings are profound only insofar as when they occur certain complex
groups of thoughts which we call profound are, scarcely perceptibly,
regularly aroused with them; a feeling is profound because we regard the
thoughts that accompany it as profound. But a profound thought can
nonetheless be very distant from the truth as, for example, every
metaphysical thought is; if one deducts from the profound feeling the
element of thought mixed in with it, what remains is the strong feeling, and
this has nothing to do with knowledge as such, just as strong belief
demonstrates only its strength, not the truth ofthat which is believed. (HH
1, 1 5 ; cf. 220, 222)
To someone trained in analytic philosophy, these observations -

thoughts not feelings are the bearers of cognitive content, strength of
conviction is quite distinct from strength of evidence - may appear
to be of a fairly elementary order. But in relation to their specific
target, romantic wistfulness, they are pertinent and necessary
observations. Thus, for example, it is quite true, as Nietzsche
suggests, that in romantic philosophy one finds " t h e justifications of
metaphysical hopes and the profound peace to be attained through
t h e m " based on "presentiments" such as that to be derived from
" t h e whole sure evangel in the glance of Raphael's M a d o n n a " (HH
1, 131). (Without naming him, Nietzsche is here remembering
Schopenhauer. What Schopenhauer actually says is that to banish
the idea that there exists an absolute "nothingness" beyond this
world of suffering we have only to contemplate the saint's "ocean-
like calmness of the spirit, that deep tranquility, that unshakable
confidence and serenity, whose mere reflection in the countenance as
depicted by Raphael or Correggio, is a complete and certain gospel"
[WR i, p. 411].)
10 Nietzsche's deployment of specifically "historical" observations

is directed against the deification of the artist. In the romantic cult
of genius in, for example, Schopenhauer's characterization of the
composer (or Nietzsche's own characterization of the lyric poet as
one who, through "mystical self-abnegation," becomes identical
with " t h e only truly existent and eternal self resting at the basis of
things" [BT 5; cf. ch. 1, sec. 12]) the artist is perceived as a quasi-
priestly figure in special and mysterious communion with another
world. This perception Nietzsche portrays as grounded in no way in
the reality of artistic creation, but in, rather, a (largely unconscious)
conspiracy between artist and audience for the purpose of mutual
gratification. On the artist's side, Nietzsche suggests, he of course
encourages the idea of himself as someone with direct access to a
"beyond," for this is a potent means of increasing his power and
influence (HH 1, 146). To this end he employs various, as it were,
conjuring tricks. He carefully hides, for example, all signs of effort
and temporal development in the production of the artwork so that
it may "tyrannise" us by its perfection: the finished work "repulses
all thinking as to how it b e c a m e " so that (one thinks here, perhaps,
of the importance of the illusion of omnipotence in the instru-
mentalist's achievement of the virtuoso effect) we feel the work to be
the "casual improvisation of a g o d " (HH 1, 145). 3
The reality, however, beneath this deceptive veneer is utterly
different. Beethoven's notebooks, for example, reveal the huge
industry of sorting, sifting, rejecting, and transforming by means of
which a glorious and apparently effortless melody is distilled out of
a mass of material in which good, bad, and indifferent are mixed
together (HH 1, 155). Inspiration is, in reality, perspiration. T h e
requirements for art are "inexhaustible" energy, industry, courage,
education, taste, and judgment (ibid.) and also, in certain respects,
an arrested development. The artist's imagination, that is, is stuck in
childhood (notice the rhetorical suggestion that, as adults, we should
be slightly ashamed of our devotion to art), that primitive stage of
the individual which, like dreams, recapitulates the world of
primitive man. In a way, that is to say, art really does transport us
to another world. It is, however, not a suprascitntific but a
/^scientific world, an animistic world "imbued with soul," full of
"gods and demons" (HH 1, 12, 13, 147, 159; cf. sec. 6 above).
Artistic creation is, then, a mundane, human (all-too-human)
phenomenon that is passed off by the artist-magician as something
pregnant with supernatural overtones. But as with the conjuring-
trick proper, we, the audience, connive at our own deception. One
motive for this is provided, as we saw, by our need for a surrogate
outlet for all those feelings denied religious expression by the
dominance of scientific rationalism (HH i, 150), our need for, as
Nietzsche later puts it, the art of "spiritual pleasure" (GS Preface,
4). (We, as it were, do not want to be without our " d r u g " even
though we cannot take it in the " h a r d " form anymore.) Another is
provided by our vanity: by regarding the artist as a different order of
being we avoid having to think less well of ourselves on account of
our own inability to produce art: " to call something i divine' means:
'here there is no need for us to c o m p e t e ' " : the stars, in Goethe's
words, one does not covet (HH 1, 162).
It is easy to pick holes in these brilliant but exaggerated
observations. Does not Beethoven's Grosse Fuge display his life-long
battle with the art of fugal writing? Are we not impressed by
Cezanne's integrity precisely because the painful consideredness of
each brush stroke is often so visible? On the other hand, is not
Schubertian or Mozartian perfection sometimes a genuinely effortless
phenomenon ? And while the observations concerning the vanity of
the audience may correctly analyze the gushing worship of the
" m a e s t r o " or " d i v a " of many a bourgeois opera aficionado, is there
not such a thing, too, as genuinely humble gratitude for art? But
these objections are, I think, beside the point. For the point of
Nietzsche's "historical" observations is to give us the idea of the
technique of demythologizing art. His argument, that is, seems to me
implicitly inductive: though art is a highly complex activity,
Nietzsche suggests, with devastating effectiveness, there will always
be some non-"miraculous" (HH 1, 162) interpretation of those
phenomena which prompt the romantic's flights of fancy, some
account that will show aesthetic activity to be of the same order as
human activities of an uncontroversially mundane kind.
11 In sections 7 and 8 we saw Nietzsche's objecting to the meta-

physical interpretation of life in general and to metaphysical art
in particular that by intimating to us promises of other-worldly
comfort for our ills it diverts us from remedial action in this world.
Though, that is, we have in our hands the means, science, for
undertaking a cure for life's ills, art seduces us away from this into
merely symptomatic treatment of short-lived efficacy. The conse-
quence of this is that art is (1) redundant and (2) pernicious. Having
performed its function of easing the passage from an explicitly
religious to a fully secular outlook it should, therefore, be allowed to
fade away. Indeed it is so fading. We live, says Nietzsche - exhibiting
Human, All-too-human 7i
as nowhere else the "timeliness" of his current m o o d - in the

"evening twilight" of art; the artist will soon be regarded as a
"glorious relic" (HH 1, 223) of a more primitive culture, someone
whom we honor for past services, but (like Plato and for Plato's
reasons - art distracts us from "reality and truth") show firmly to
the door. For the future belongs to science: " the scientific man is the
further evolution of the artistic" (HH 1, 222).
But surely, one wishes to object, this argument presupposes what
is clearly false: that all art is other-worldly art. This, moreover, is
something that the author of The Birth of Tragedy - with its
fundamental distinction between art that glorifies the world of
human actuality and art which takes us behind " t h e phenomenon"
- ought to be particularly conscious of. There is the art of this world
as well as the art of " t h e beyond."
Nietzsche does acknowledge, in Human, in effect Apollonian as
well as metaphysical (as it used to be called, "Dionysian") art; a
type of art which "lays a veil over reality" in such a manner that it
"now conceals, now brings into prominence." T o one seeking
comfort, it "makes the sight of life bearable by laying over it a veil
of unclear thinking" (HH 1, 151; cf. 154). But as the rhetoric
indicates, Nietzsche for the moment has little more taste for
Apollonian than he does for metaphysical art. The explanation for
this, I think, is that Nietzsche is now clearly aware that Apollonian
art is, in a sense, as other-worldly as is Dionysian. In terms, that is,
of the contrast between disposing of an ill by getting rid of its cause
and by bringing about a "change of sensibility" (HH 1, 108) with
regard to that ill, Apollonian as much as Dionysian art does the
latter. As much as the art of metaphysical flight, the fuzzy
glorification of the phenomena by Apollonian art is a " narcoticizing
of human ills" (ibid.) and hence an impediment to action. Pain, in
short, is good. We do not want reality to be made " b e a r a b l e " by any
kind of art because it is pain that prompts us to action.
12 What, then, to raise Nietzsche's own question (HH 1, 222),

remains of art? Above all, he says, art
has taught us for thousands of years to look upon life in any of its forms with
interest and pleasure, and to educate our sensibilities so far that we at last
cry: "life, however it may be, is good!" 4 This teaching imparted by art to
take pleasure in life and to regard human life as a piece of nature... without
being too violently involved in it has been absorbed into us, and now re-
emerges as an almighty requirement of knowledge. One could give up art
but would not thereby relinquish the capacity one has learnt from it... If
art disappeared the intensity and multifariousness of the joy in life it has
implanted would still continue to demand satisfaction. The scientific man
is the further evolution of the artistic. (HH i, 222)
This passage seems to postulate the preservation of the Apollonian
attitude to life - the stance of detached, "objective" delight - in the
activity of science, though presumably, since clarity of thought
belongs to the essence of science (//// 1, 3), it is an Apollonianism
from which "unclear thinking" is expunged, an honest Apollo-
nianism. (Why there should be any Ternary connection between delight
in life and science is mysterious; the scientist must, of course, be
interested in at least parts of the world, but it is not at all clear that this
entails that she must be delighted by it. And Nietzsche soon changed
his mind, coming to see science as, at least often, serving the "ascetic
ideal" [GAf in, 25].)
13 What are we to make of the dismissal of art in Human, All-too-

human? The important thing to notice, it seems to me, is the length
of the shadow cast by The Birth. The Birth, that is, was dominated by
a pessimistic account of life and by the thought of our impotence to
improve its character through action. Against this background the
function of art was either to conceal or to comfort us for life's horrors.
Now, however, pessimism has evaporated. Art, therefore, is left
without a function. Against this line of argument at least two
important objections need to be raised. The first consists in pointing
out the excessively hasty nature of Nietzsche's abandonment of
pessimism, of his newly discovered faith in action. Nature, as we saw,
becomes in Human knowable, predictable. From this Nietzsche infers
the possibility of a fundamental kind of "progress"; he infers, in the
language of The Birth, that nature is capable of "correction." But
this inference is mistaken, for all that follows from the predictability
of Nature is that future sufferings, if and when they occur, are, like
death and taxes, predictable sufferings. It by no means follows that
they are eliminable.
T h e second objection is that even if science were able to eliminate
human suffering it would not follow that art was functionless. For it
is not true - to state the obvious but nonetheless necessary - that the
sole function of art is to ameliorate the problem of human suffering.
It is not true, to put the point in an equivalent way, that all art is the
art either of Apollonian glorification or of metaphysical escape. The
Apollonian-Dionysian distinction is not, as Nietzsche explicitly
supposes in The Birth and implicitly supposes in Human, an exhaustive
one. Art, rather, has a variety of actual and potential functions -
cognitive, 5 expressive, decorative, hortative, and so on - so large
that it is probably impossible to specify all of them. When attacking
the Kant-Schopenhauer view that disinterestedness constitutes the
essence of the aesthetic attitude (see ch. 5, sees. 3-6 below) Nietzsche
himself emphasizes the variety of our responses to art. Art may, for
example, he says, serve as an occasion for communication: our
pleasure in understanding an art work may be the pleasure of
decoding a kind of riddle; or it may give us pleasure by
commemorating a past pleasure, a victory, a hunt, or a wedding; or
again art may have the function of moving and rousing the audience
to action through, for example, the glorification of revenge or danger
(HH us., 119). Strangely, however, when offering his own assessment
of the value of art Nietzsche always ignores this awareness of its
plurality of functions. There is always some one function the
fulfillment of which confers - or, in Human, fails to confer - value
on art. Nietzsche's idea as to what this unique value-conferring
function is undergoes, as we will see, kaleidoscopic transformations.
But the unwarranted predilection for identifying some one thing as
the (deep, serious, important, value-conferring) function of art is
never questioned.
14 Nietzsche described Assorted Opinions and Maxims, together with

its successor, The Wanderer and his Shadow, as " continuations and
appendices" (HH u, Preface, 2) of Human, All-too-human. Insofar as
both works continue to debunk the metaphysical in all its guises, and
continue to inhabit the stance of the scientific optimist, the description
is justified. With respect to art, however, it is seriously misleading.
For whereas art, in Human, is consigned to the realm of glorious
memory, in Opinions, Nietzsche recovers his sense of its indis-
pensability. Art, we will see, is assigned the vital role of " sign-
posting" the future, an assignment that brings with it a revival, in
transmuted form, of The Birth's conception of the artist as agent of
cultural regeneration. It follows that though there are sound reasons
for regarding Nietzsche's works between 1876 and 1882 as a unity,
as together constituting a "positivistic" or " m i d d l e " period, there
are, nonetheless, important transitions within this period.
Why the change? Why does the future no longer belong to
"scientific m a n " alone? The answer, I believe, is that Nietzsche has
come to confront a problem neglected in Human - value. Scientific
man, the "free spirit" (at least at this stage in Nietzsche's conception
of the latter), has abandoned all the old metaphysical presuppo-
sitions which gave value to the world - distinguished, that is between
" g o o d " and " b a d " actions - but has, as Nietzsche says, nothing to
communicate (even to himself) except his joy in this liberated
condition (HH i, 34). Such joy, however, must evaporate as soon as
the problem of action presents itself. For above the level of biological
need and lust, scientific man, so Nietzsche seems to believe, cannot
act but is rather a mere uninvolved spectator of life's pageant (see
sec. 12 above). The reason for this is that, as he later puts it, science
"never creates values" but rather requires something external to
itself to be " a n ideal of value, a value creating power in the service
of which it could believe in itself" (GM m, 25). The scientist is thus
perceived as a mere purveyor of hypothetical imperatives, instruc-
tions as to effective means of achieving given ends. Categorical
imperatives, those ends or values themselves, must be created and
disseminated by some other agency. 6 That agency, as we will see, is
art.
15 What kind of art can perform this vital, art-redeeming function?

Not, first of all, the art of metaphysical flight. Nietzsche distinguished
two types of art and artist: the one "wants to enjoy his own nature
by means of a r t " ; the other "with its aid to get above and away from
his nature for a while" (////11a, 371). This looks like a reappearance
of the old duality between Apollonian and Dionysian art. But the
lighting conditions are now very different. Dionysian art, any art
which takes us away from the actuality of human existence, is now
completely out of favor. Away, demands Nietzsche, with "all those
fantastic, superstitious, half-mendacious, faded subjects upon which
certain poets demonstrated their powers." The "good poet of the
future" (notice that there are now to be poets in the future) is to
confine his attention to the world of human actuality: "only reality"
(nur Wirkliches) (HH 11a, 114; cf. 135, 169) is his legitimate topic.
He is not, however, to indulge in slavish naturalism: "only reality
but by no means every r e a l i t y ! - h e will depict only a selected
reality" (ibid.). Why is this? Because artists are to become again, like
the Greek artists of old, "transformers of animals, creators of men,"
" sculptors and re-modelers of life," "teacher[s] of adults" ( / / / / i i a ,
172). They are, that is, to dedicate their powers
not so much to the representation of the contemporary world or to the
reanimation and imaginative reconstruction of the past, but to signposting
the future - not, though, as if the poet could, like a fabulous economist,
figuratively [im Bilde] anticipate the kind of conditions nations and societies
would prosper better under and how they could then be brought about.
What he will do, rather, is to emulate the artists of earlier times who
imaginatively developed the existing images of the gods and imaginatively
develop a beautiful [schön] image of man: he will scent out those cases in
which, in the midst of our modern world and reality and without any
artificial withdrawal from or warding off of this world, the great and
beautiful soul is still possible. (HH 11a, 99)
This selected reality he is to raise to " the status of a model and in so

doing, through the excitation of envy and emulation, help to create
the future" (ibid.) (precisely Nietzsche's own ambition, it may be
added, in constructing the glowing portrait of the Übermensch in
ârathustra),
16 Writing, as I do, in the former colony of New Zealand, one is

particularly aware of the significance of art in its " signposting " role.
For the contribution made by art to the creation of an authentically
local identity (and the intensity of the demand made of it that it
should thus contribute) is in this part of the world quite obvious. It
is not, I think, to be doubted that, for example, the apotheosis of the
vocabulary and speech-rhythms of the rural New Zealand male in
the novels of Frank Sargesson or of the peculiarly harsh, " h a r d -
edged" quality of the New Zealand light in the paintings of Rita
Angus and, later, Colin McCahon have made significant contri-
butions in this respect. New Zealand art has had as its particular
preoccupation, the task of liberating New Zealanders from the need
to inhabit pale and ill-fitting identities imported from the mother-
country. Nietzsche's observation that art helps, or can help, to create
the future is particularly true of an ex-colony. But of course it is true,
also, elsewhere. Art, in general, has the capacity to create (as the
unlovely jargon has it) "role models." In unheralded ways it
legislates (here we find an echo of the Birth's concept of artist as
prophet) values for the future.
Notice that in the idea of " signposting " we find a rehabilitation
of Apollonian art. For it is clear that in discussing the creation of
ideals out of the mass of material presented by past and present life
we are discussing the "transfiguration" of reality - the activity
which defines Apollonian art. Notice, however, that though
signposting art employs the familiar Apollonian techniques of
selecting, "concealing and reinterpreting" ( / / / / i i a , 174) and so on,
its old associations of " l i e " and "illusion" have been discarded.
Apollonian art has become " h o n e s t " because it has ceased to make
truth-claims. In The Birth, that is, the Apollonian artist, as it were,
held up a distorting mirror to nature and said (mendaciously) " the
world is thus." Now, however, she holds up the same mirror but
says: " m a k e yourself t h u s ! " (In terms of a Wittgensteinian
distinction: the "sentence-radical" is the same but the mood-
indicator has changed.)
17 What kind of art signposts the future? Not, we have seen, the art
of other-worlds. Only this-worldly art can construct the future of this
world. (Not musical art either, so, at least some of the time, it seems.
Since according to section 171 music is always backward-looking -
"all truly meaningful music is a swan-song" - it seems to be
excluded from future-oriented activity.) And not the art (about
which more will be said shortly) which consists in " t h e barbaric if
enthralling spluttering out of hot and motley things from a chaotic,
unruly soul." For the image of the "great and beautiful soul" can be
embodied only in forms that are "harmonious and well-pro-
portioned." The poems, therefore, of artists who signpost the future
will be distinguished by the fact that they appear to be secluded and

secured against the fire and breath of the passions: the incorrigible error, the
shattering of the entire human instrument, mocking laughter and gnashing
of teeth, and everything tragic and comic in the old customary sense will be
experienced as a tedious, anachronizing coarsening of the human image
when confronted with his new art. Strength, goodness, mildness, purity and
an involuntary inborn moderation in the characters and their actions: a
level ground which it is repose and joy to the feet to walk upon:
countenances and events mirroring a luminous sky: knowledge and art
blended to a new unity: the spirit dwelling together with its sister the soul
without presumptuousness or jealousy.7 (HH 11a, 99)
They will be characterized by that at least apparent "coldness and

sobriety" (HH 11a, 142), "unconscious astringency and morning
chilliness, an avoidance of passion" {HH 11a, 126), "moderation,
symmetry" (ibid.), "proportion and limit" (HH 11a, 131) which
characterized both the souls and the art of the great artists of the past
( / t f / u a , 126).
18 The above remarks amount to an equation between good, that

is (to Nietzsche's current way of thinking), signposting art and
classical art. (In section 144 he explicitly identifies " g r e a t " with
"classical" art.) For the features he says that signposting art " w i l l "
(i.e. must) have are just the attributes which, in eighteenth-century
Germany, had been identified as constituting the essence of Greek
art. Here, for example, is the enormously influential J o h a n n Joachim
Winckelmann (1717-68) assimilating to his account of the spirit of
Greek art the seemingly most intractable case, the famous Laocoon
group, a sculpture depicting the Trojan priest and his sons in the
grip of the sea-god's serpents:
The universal, dominant characteristic of Greek masterpieces... is noble

simplicity and serene greatness in the pose as well as the expression. The
depths of the sea are always calm however wild and stormy the surface: and
in the same way the expression in Greek figures reveals greatness and
composure of soul in the throes of whatever passions. This spirit is depicted
in Laocoon's face, and not in the face alone, in spite of the most violent
sufferings. The pain which is manifest in all the muscles and sinews of the
body... does not express itself with any violence either in the face or in the
position as a whole. This Laocoon, unlike the hero of Virgil's poem, is
raising no dreadful cry The pain of the body and the greatness of the soul
are equally balanced throughout the composition of the figure and seem to
cancel each other out. Laocoon suffers; but he suffers like Sophocles'
Philoctetes; his misery pierces us to the soul; but we should like to be able
to bear anguish in the manner of this great man.8
Notice that Winckelmann, too, was interested in deriving from art

models that will "excite envy and emulation." Nietzsche's equation
between signposting and classical art is, in fact, doubly backward-
looking, for it is an attempt to return to the outlook of eighteenth-
century German Hellenism that culminated in the Weimar classicism
of Goethe and Schiller: 9 in section 99 he explicitly says that " m a n y
a path to this poetry of the future starts out from Goethe." Why,
however, should we accept the equation?
19 Let me try to recapitulate, in a somewhat organized fashion, the

structure of Nietzsche's route to the validation of his neo-Hellenistic
demands upon art.
Good art, we have seen, is required to be didactic] the artist is to

become a "teacher of adults." She is to do this by " transfiguring"
the mundane, by constructing beautiful images of the " great and
beautiful soul," images which, by exciting "envy and emulation,"
help to create the future. Now art, of course, may influence the
future in various ways: it may point it in directions both desirable
and undesirable. It may do either because the archetypes it
constructs may be models of either desirable or undesirable
personality types. Nietzsche's demand is, of course, that it should do
the former. Good art, then, so begins Nietzsche's route to neo-
Hellenism, is art which offers vivid and seductive models of desirable
personality types. Call this premise one. Premise two offers an account
of the "great and beautiful soul": it is a soul "secured against" (but
not unacquainted with) the "fire and b r e a t h " of passion, a soul in
which "spirit" is not "jealous" of her rational "sister" (see n. 7
above) and hence a soul in which strength, purity, mildness,
goodness, moderation, and self-mastery reign. Since we have here a
pretty exact description of Plato's ideally just soul (mildness looks
like Plato's "temperance," "goodness" like his "justice" [see n. 7
above]), we may refer to Nietzsche's ideal personality type as
" Platonic man." Nietzsche's third premise makes the claim that only
those forms which are (for us) limited, balanced, symmetrical, and
harmonious are capable of expressing the collection of character
traits which make up the beautiful soul. Models of Platonic man can
only be expressed by classical forms. From these three premises the
conclusion follows that good art can only be (neo-)classical art.
20 What are we to make of this peculiar argument? The third

premise, first of all, is, I am inclined to accept, true. Its basis is in
human physiognomy. Extreme and violent passion distorts facial
(and bodily) features, displaces them from their normal - har-
monious, reposeful - state. Hence we naturally associate dishar-
monious forms with violent passion: the expression of the calm
passions demands harmony, symmetry, proportion. Or it is, at least,
very hard to imagine how mildness, serenity, security from passion
- particularly security in the face ö/the passions {vide the quotation
from Winckelmann in sec. 18 above) - could be depicted by anything
but forms which conform to the classical ideal. (The difficulty of
imagining otherwise resembles the difficulty of imagining, in detail,
the exchange of brains and personalities between the refined prince
and the coarse pauper.) Violent passions, it is true, appear on
occasion in, for example, Mozart. But when they do - in, for
example the wailing, tonality-threatening D-minor scales of the
Commendatore's music at the end of Don Giovanni (see / / / / l i b , 165)
- they seem to be accompanied by a corresponding distortion of
classical form.
Nietzsche's first premise, however, is much more questionable.
Why should it be that the only legitimate function of art is the
creation of desirable role models? Even if we accept, as I for one do,
that good art (or good anything else) must in some way be of service
to life, why should we for a moment suppose that only by the
creation of " i m p r o v i n g " role models can it do that? Even if we were
to accept the more specific claim that art must be of service to life by
helping to construct the future there are ways of doing that other
than the presentation of beautiful images. One might, for example,
after the manner of Dickens or Zola (see further, ch. 5, sec. 13),
construct images of ugliness and depravity that excite not "envy and
emulation" but rather horror, outrage, and the demand for reform.
I have had occasion before to draw attention to Nietzsche's tendency
to monomania - his disposition to deny the variety of the (useful)
functions of art. It is this monomania that helps here to give
Nietzsche's neo-Hellenism the face of aesthetic Stalinism. More
exactly described, Nietzsche's position smacks of aesthetic Platonism:
having, in Human, All-too-kuman, dismissed art from his brave new
world for exactly the reasons given in book x of the Republic - that art
distracts the mind from that " t r u t h and reality" which is accessible
to (but only to) the scientific mind - he now seems to mimic book m
of the Republic, which, while banning Homer, admits to the
classrooms of the ideal state stories in which justice is always
rewarded, wickedness punished, and the gods never act in anything
but the nicest of ways.
An objection one wishes to bring against Nietzsche's second
premise is that there is no single personality type to which it is
desirable that everyone should conform. (The suggestion that there
is is the other aspect of his argument that gives it the face of
Stalinism.) Ants are not what we want. 1 0 Nietzsche tries to
accommodate this objection by talking about "tender distinctions"
within the "all-embracing golden g r o u n d " constituted by Platonic
man (HH 11a, 99), but it is not easy to imagine a multiplicity of
unique and contrasting individuals all of whom share the "golden
8o Nietzsche's philosophy of art
g r o u n d " of strength, purity, goodness, mildness, self-control,
moderation, and so on.
Even if one can, the question still needs to be raised as to whether
it is always the case that a desirable future is best promoted by the
general predominance of the Platonic type of soul. In section 119
Nietzsche says that " it is everything orderly and regular in life which
alone we have... to thank for our well-being." Since this strongly
recalls the thesis of The Birth of the essentially Apollonian character
of social life - its dependence upon the rejection of barbarism by the
impulse to " m e a s u r e " and " m o d e r a t i o n " - we may hypothesize (1)
that the future Nietzsche is concerned with is a social, not an
individual one - his concern is to promote the well-being of society
as a whole - and that (2) his assumption is that the well-being of the
social organism demands the constant and vigilant promotion of the
Platonic virtues of order and regularity against the forces which
threaten to demolish them.
But is this latter assumption correct? In the 1960s artists (and
others) promoted images of "letting go," "getting in touch w i t h "
our feelings, abandoning reverence for " r e a s o n " and science. Was
all this {pace Allan Bloom) necessarily bad? Is it always respect for law
and order that needs to be reinforced ? Surely not. Surely when, for
example, a political order becomes unresponsive, exhausted and
sterile, subversion, the promotion of precisely önft-classical ideals of
being and action may be just what is required. Romantic images of
extremities of freedom and immoderate heroism may, at a time,
promote social regeneration while classical images of mildness and
measure may serve only to entrench a repressive order.
True to his habit of not being able to maintain an evident
falsehood very long or very consistently, Nietzsche, in a quiet way,
admits this, even in Opinions itself. " B a r o q u e " (soon to be called
" r o m a n t i c " ) art is, he says, the art of "so-called inorganic
composition bedecked with the most marvellous means of ex-
pression" (////11a, 131). It is art that is "rhetorical and dramatic,"
that deals in " t h e eloquence of strong emotions and gestures, of the
sublime 11 and ugly, of great masses, of quantity as such... the glow of
twilight, transfiguration or conflagration [of] ... strongly constructed
forms" (HH 11a, 144). It is the art of Wagner, art which replaces
"limit and proportion" by a kind of "swimming" movement in
which one "surrenders unconditionally" to a "watery element"
(HH 11a, 134). Baroque art is, he says, inevitable:
If we follow the history of an art, that of Greek rhetoric for instance, as we

proceed from master to master and behold the ever increasing care spent
on obedience to all the ancient rules and self-limitations and to those added
subsequently, we are aware of a painful tension in ourselves: we grasp that
the bow has to break and that... the baroque style of Asia12 was sooner or
later a necessity and almost an act of charity, (////iia, 131)
It is also, in some circumstances, to be welcomed: anticlassical

"unchainers of the will"; artists dedicated to "unharnessing,
unfettering, destroying" may sometimes be " liberators of life" (HH
11a, 172).
There is then - Nietzsche at times agrees - no man for all seasons,
no image of humanity which, from the point of view of the social
organism, we timelessly want to be promoted. And if the
predominance of different types of soul is needed at different times
then, though one of the ways in which art can be of benefit to society
is, it seems impossible to deny, by constructing role models, this
service is one it can and will perform by constructing different
models at different times. In the Gay Science, it is worth noting,
Nietzsche clearly recognizes this. Images of destruction and change,
of "becoming," he suggests, require a dual interpretation: on the
one hand, they may express (and also promote) mere anarchic
resentment: the hatred of the existing order by the "ill-constituted,
disinherited and underprivileged." But on the other, they may
express (and encourage) " a n overflowing energy that is pregnant
with future (my term for this, as is known, is 'Dionysian') " (GS 370).
A final and, I think, the most damning objection against
Nietzsche's second premise is that its enunciation is fundamentally
inconsistent with the role and conception of the artist mapped out in
the first. The fundamental thought behind the first, that is, -is that
artists are uniquely creative - creative of value; they are " tamers of the
will, transformers of animals, creators of m e n . . . sculptors and
remodellers of life" (HH na, 172). They are not, let it be noticed,
conceived as mere technicians skilled in the seductive packaging and
propagation of ideals designated and chosen by some external
agency. Rather, they are the choosers, discoverers of value
themselves. What Nietzsche wants is an as it were poet-king (an
ambition realized literally, as I write, for the first time in modern
European history in Czechoslovakia), a legislator of value, no mere
propagandist on behalf of values chosen by the party. Why the artist
should be thought especially suited to this role is not made clear in
Opinions. But presumably the idea (an idea which will become
clearer in ch. 5) is that the artist not only produces transfigurations
but sees the world in a transfigured and simplified way which makes
her particularly able to "scent out those cases in which, in the midst
of our modern world and reality the great and beautiful soul
is... possible" before going on to "imaginatively develop a beautiful
image of m a n " (////11a, 99). (In The Gay Science, a quotation we will
return to in the next chapter, Nietzsche says that "only artists have
given men the eyes and ears to see [themselves] ...simplified and
transfigured, to discover the hero that is concealed in everyday
characters" rather than losing it in a mass of "foreground" detail
[GS78].)
Nietzsche's second premise, however, undercuts this special
valuing of the artist. For here the petty party bureaucrat (Nietzsche
is, of course, a great artist, but on occasions such as the present one
speaks as a bureaucrat) tells the artist what she must see, announces,
in the manner of Stalin, the program to which the artist must
adhere. And this produces a contradiction: in the first premise the
artist is someone we, the ordinary, need on account of her unique
powers of mediocrity-transcending vision; but in the second the
mediocre tells the artist what she is to see, thereby ensuring precisely
that mediocrity of vision one sought to avoid.
21 In Opinions Nietzsche discovers a vital occupation for the artist

that rescues her from the oblivion to which she was consigned in
Human, All-too-human (though he also, I have argued, partially spoils
the discovery by attempting to shackle her with the chains of
Hellenism). Coexisting with this discovery, however, is a skepticism
about art - " t h e art of works of a r t " (HH 11a, 174) - which seems to
apply quite generally and not merely the forms of art of which we
have seen Nietzsche explicitly disapprove. In section 102, for
example, he describes art as
An excuse for many a fault- The ceaseless desire to create on the part of the
artist, together with his ceaseless observaton of the world outside him
prevents him becoming better and more beautiful as a person, that is to say,
from creating himself ...he possesses only a fixed quantitfy of strength: that
of it which he expends upon himself- how could he at the same time expend
it on his work? - and the reverse.
And in section 174 he emphasizes that " a r t is above and before all
supposed to beautify life, thus making us ourselves endurable, if
possible pleasing to others."
Is it possible to reconcile these two themes? Section 174 attempts
to do so by making it clear that Nietzsche stands not for the abolition
of art, but is concerned, rather, to oppose the deification of " t h e art
of works of art," to set it in its proper place as an " a p p e n d a g e " to
the art of living. A man or society, he says, who possesses an "excess"
of beautifying power, will, in the end, "discharge" it in works of art
as well as in life. The mistake, however, is to believe that " t h e art of
works of art is the true art out of which life is to be improved and
transformed." Life, rather, is to be transformed by applying artistic
powers to it directly. Art is the "dessert," not the main course.
Nietzsche's position here seems to rest on the Schopenhauerian
perception of the artistic genius as someone endowed with
exceptional energy (see WR 11, p. 377). It seems that, in spite of the
suggestion in section 102 that everyone has only a limited quantity
of energy, the exceptional person has in fact energy enough to create
herself as a work of art (this is a notion we shall explore in detail in
the next chapter) and also to create artworks in the literal sense. So
the overall position seems to be that the true artist legitimately
engages in the production of artworks and these will have value as
"signposts" to the future. Ordinary people, on the other hand, are
required to devote their limited creative energies to their lives and
are not to delude themselves that either by producing minor
artworks or by having elevated experiences in art galleries are they
doing anything of life-transforming significance.
But this attempt to present a consistent position is a failure. For if
the providing of "signposts" to the future is really an important,
artwork-justifying function, then regardless of the question of whether
or not their production involves the diversion of energy from the
beautification of life, the artist, surely, is legitimately employed in
their production. Many people have taken the view that, often at
least, the price of great art is a deficient or diseased personality. If
that is so then the price of art is lack of " b e a u t y " in the artist's life.
But that, surely, if art has the function of creating ideals or values for
the future, is a price that may be worth paying. The run of
humanity, that is, in the endeavor to beautify, to give shape and
coherence to their lives stand in need of archetypes that only the
exceptional person, the artist, can provide. This, in a fine passage in
The Gay Science, Nietzsche came later to understand. The "con-
templative" type, the "poet," he says, sadly fancies that he is a mere
"spectator and listener who has been placed before the great visual
and acoustic spectacle that is life." But this is a "delusion." For it is
really the poet who keeps creating this life. Of course, he is different from the
actor of this drama, the so-called active type; but he is even less like a mere
spectator and festive guest in front of the stage. As a poet he certainly has
vis contemplativa and the ability to look back upon his work but at the same
time also and above all vis creativa which the active human being lacks,
whatever visual appearances and the faith of all the world may say. We
who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion
something that had not been there before: the whole eternally growing
world of valuations, colours, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations and
negations. This poem that we have invented is continually studied by so-
called practical human beings (our actors) who translate everything into
flesh and actuality, into the everyday. (GS 301)
22 The conclusion to be drawn from the reflections of the previous
section is that in Opinions contrary impulses are at work. On the one
hand, continuous in this respect with the debunking of the romantic
vision of art and the artist in Human, there is disposition to debunk
everything connected with " h i g h " art, with concert halls, art
galleries, and the like. (The examples he gives in section 174 of the
beautification of life through the direct application of the aesthetic
impulse - the creation of "social forms," "rules of decency,
cleanliness, politeness, of speaking and staying silent at the proper
t i m e " - have a humble, almost William Morris flavor to them.) On
the other hand, the theme of the artist as prophetic regenerator of
culture reappears in the work in a way that restores to the artist a
pedestal not that much lower than the one so recently removed.
Opinions is, with respect to art, an unresolved work.
23 Like its predecessor, The Wanderer and his Shadow is concerned

with the elevation of the classical ideal over the " a r t of today." A
new synonym for "classical" is introduced: " t h e grand style." This
Nietzsche defines (echoing yet again the metaphysics of The Birth) as
occurring when " t h e beautiful carries off victory over the mon-
strous" (////11b, 96).
What is " t h e monstrous"? Nietzsche says the following:
A Chief reason for corruption of style - To desire to demonstrate more feeling for
a thing than one actually has corrupts one's style, in both language and all
the arts. All great art, rather, has the opposite tendency: like every man of
moral consequence, it likes to arrest the feelings on their course and not
allow them to run quite to their conclusion. This modesty which keeps the
feelings only half visible can be observed at its fairest in, for example,
Sophocles; and it seems to transfigure the features of the feelings when they
present themselves as being more sober than they are. (HH 11b, 136)
Style or form, according to this aphorism, is corrupted by histrionics,
the display of fake or falsely exaggerated feeling. Nietzsche develops
the idea of such corruption into yet another attack on Wagner.
Coupling the massively enhanced resources of the romantic orchestra
with, as he sees it, Wagner's neurotic exaggeration of feeling, he
castigates the "music of t o d a y " as the music of "strong lungs and
weak nerves" ( / / / / l i b , 166). And referring to the relegation of art in
our "industrious a g e " to a mere "recreational activity," he laments
its corruption into a bombastic display of "narcotics, intoxicants,
convulsives, paroxysms of tears" designed to "overpower the tired
and weary, arouse them to a fatigued over-liveliness and make them
beside themselves with rapture and terror" (HH 11b, 170). Art,
particularly music, " i n the age of work," in other words, has
become the art of " [ m e l o ] d r a m a t i c " "high relief," the art of the
empty "effect" (////11b, 165). 13
Notice the rhetorical trickery contained in this discussion of
aesthetic corruption. Section 136 (the long quotation in the previous
paragraph), though if read closely can be seen to acknowledge three
ways in which feeling can be related to artistic form, seeks to present
the appearance that we are compelled to choose between, on the one
hand, the "modesty" of classical restraint and proportion and, on
the other, the fake or falsely exaggerated feeling of " m o d e r n " art.
The discussion of Wagner collaborates in presenting us with such a
c h o i c e : " modern " art, the art of dramatic contrasts and unreposeful
forms - " b a r o q u e " art, as Opinions called it - is corrupt, inauthentic.
Thus Nietzsche seeks to force on us the equations: authentic = clas-
sical, modern ("baroque") = corrupt. If we accept them then we
are forced, of course, to agree to a further equation: good
art = classical art.
But, of course, there are really two ways in which the constraints
of classical "modesty" can be disrupted in art: they can be disrupted
in the endeavor to display unfelt feelings; but they can be disrupted,
too, in the expression of entirely genuine feeling. In the expressionist
tradition, in, for example, the paintings of Edvard Munch (a
painter, paradoxically, who greatly admired and indeed produced a
c e l e b r a t e d p o r t r a i t of Nietzsche), o n e finds a r t w h i c h , while as far

r e m o v e d as possible from the c o n s t r a i n t s of classicism, is equally far
r e m o v e d from the p r o d u c t i o n of e m p t y "effects." F a r from
i n a u t h e n t i c i t y , M u n c h gives us a l m o s t a n excess of painful, self-
r e v e a l i n g honesty.
24 G o o d a r t , we h a v e seen, is s u p p o s e d to be restrained, " m o d e s t . "

T h o u g h n o t devoid of spirit or feeling, it is a " d a n c i n g in c h a i n s "
(HH 11b, 140). W h a t constitutes these c h a i n s ? Nietzsche e x p l a i n s :
With every Greek artist, poet and writer one has to ask: what is the new
constraint he has imposed upon himself and through which he charms his
contemporaries (so that he finds imitators) ? For that which we call
" i n v e n t i o n " (in metrics, for example) is always such a self-imposed fetter.
" D a n c i n g in chains," making things difficult for oneself and then spreading
over it the illusion of ease and facility - that is the artifice they want to
demonstrate to us. Already in Homer we can perceive an abundance of
inherited formulae and epic narrative rules within which he had to dance:
and he himself created additional new conventions for those who came after
him. This was the school in which the Greek poets were raised: firstly to
allow a multiplicity of constraints to be imposed upon one; then to devise
an additional new constraint, impose it upon oneself and conquer it with
charm and grace: so that both the constraint and its conquest are noticed
and admired, (ibid.)
C h a i n s , t h e n , are " c o n v e n t i o n s " g o v e r n i n g aesthetic form. W h a t ,

h o w e v e r , a p a r t from the d e m a n d , of the tour deforce1* is so good a b o u t
the o b s e r v i n g of c o n v e n t i o n s ? Nietzsche e x p l a i n s :
Three-quarters of Homer is convention; and the same is true of all Greek

artists who had no reason to fall prey to the modern rage for originality.
They lacked all fear of convention; it was through this indeed that they
were united with their public for conventions are the achieved artistic means,
the toilsomely acquired common language, through which the artist can
truly communicate himself to the understanding of his audience. Especially
when, like the Greek poets and musicians, he wants to conquer immediately
with each of his works - since he is accustomed to contend publicly with one
or two rivals - the first condition is that he should also be understood
immediately: which is possible, however, only through convention... As a
rule what is original is admired, sometimes idolized, but rarely understood;
obstinately to avoid convention means wanting n^t to be understood. To
what, then, does our modern rage for originality point? (HH lib, 122)
I t points, Nietzsche w o u l d p r e s u m a b l y h a v e o n e think, to the

unfittedness of the " m o d e r n " artist to the signposting of the future.
For if one's models are to excite envy and emulation, if like the Greek
poets one is to be a "teacher of adults" (HHna, 172), then of course
one's art must be readily understood. But the modern artist, the
" r o m a n t i c " ("Both those spirits of a classical and those of a
romantic bent - the two species exist at all times - entertain a vision
of the future; but the former does so out of a strength of their age, the
latter out of its weakness" [HH lib, 217; cf. i84] 1 5 ), has no response
to the future except fear, and so has no contribution to make towards
its construction. Once again we are presented with an invidious
comparison between " m o d e r n " and classical art; between the
fearful and useless "romanticism" of the former and the world-
building confidence of the latter.
But the argument is a trick which depends upon a pun on
"chains." Classical art, we are told, is "modest." As with the
reposeful, or at least controlled, physiognomy, passion is not allowed
to destroy the balance or symmetry of form. Feeling is " c h a i n e d "
down by the will to preserve those formal and spiritual values;
beauty is victorious over the monstrous. Art that seeks to
communicate, however, is chained by a quite different set of
constraints: the constraints of communication, those conventions
which constitute the common aesthetic " l a n g u a g e " of the artist's
age. These may at least be quite different from the constraints of
classical style. In a romantic or baroque age, for example, the forms
that create ease of communication will be nonclassical. And the
abrupt introduction of classical constraints (one thinks here of
the reintroduction of "doric " order and severity by Schönberg or the
Bauhaus) is likely to impede communication, to lead, initially at
least, to shock and rejection. In section 140, as we saw, Nietzsche
contrasts the conventional in art with "originality." This is the
correct opposition: that which threatens aesthetic communication is
the temporally and culturally fluctuating phenomenon of originality.
It is not, at least not necessarily, departure from the unchanging
ideals of classicism.
25 Like its predecessor, Wanderer is concerned to elevate classical art

over the " a r t of today." The alternative to classicism, it is suggested,
is the meretricious parade of empty, inauthentic "effects," or 16
again, an uncommunicative straining after originality. Both sugges-
tions should, however, be resisted. Classical art has a monopoly over
neither authenticity nor intelligibility.
26 Morgenröte, " D a w n " or "Daybreak," which appeared the year
after Wanderer, preoccupied as it is with the critique of morality and
of Christianity, touches only rather peripherally on art. Those of its
remarks which do deal with art are concerned in the main to amplify
first the critique of metaphysical art offered by its "positivistic"
predecessors, and second their critique of Wagnerian or, as I shall
now call it, "demagogic" (see D 255) art. Though the observations
on art made in Dawn are uniformly hostile, it nonetheless shares, I
shall suggest, that valuing of a certain kind of art which distinguished
both Opinions and Wanderer from Human.
27 In The Birth, we saw, the value of art lay in its capacity to bring
us "comfort" for (or else to disguise) the horror and terror of
existence. In Human Nietzsche loses (temporarily) the Schopen-
hauerian sense of life as a tormenting " r i d d l e " the idea that there
is a philosophical problem of pessimism is reduced to ashes by the
heat of scientific optimism. Yet there remains, of course, the
undeniable phenomenon of depression "distress of the soul" (D
269) as an individual phenomenon has to be acknowledged. The
difference is that it has lost its epistemological validation. It is no
longer a deep, truth-perceiving, philosophically justified state of
mind, but is, rather, a mere neurosis. With this Nietzsche is now
brisk, militaristic, and (as in Wanderer [see HH 11b, 1, 84])
physiological. He recommends "change of diet and hard physical
l a b o u r " (D 269). (This crudely physical approach contrasts sharply
with the, as it were, "talking c u r e " for depression that he discovers,
as we will see, in The Gay Science.)
Unfortunately, however, he continues, people resort to "means of
intoxication: to art, for example" as a cure for their distress (ibid.).
This, though perhaps alleviating the problem for a short time, in the
long term only exacerbates it. For as is the habit of drugs, it produces
both serious side-effects and dependency. One begins to identify
one's real life and self with one's intoxicated state and to view one's
ordinary existence as a drab impediment to access to one's real self.
In this way addicts (such as, for example, the " u n t i m e l y " author of
The Birth of Tragedy - the passage is unmistakably self-referential [see
BT, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism," 7]) qome to " h a r b o u r feelings of
revengefulness towards their environment, their age, their entire
w o r l d " (D 50).
In spite of the mark of deadly truth with which this passage,
considered as phenomenology of a certain species of afflicted
consciousness, is stamped, it is time to enter a protest against the
general truth of the assertion which constitutes its heart; the assertion,
in Schopenhauerian language, that affirmation of a metaphysical
world always and inevitably entails denial of this one; in Nietzschean
language, the assertion that such affirmation is always and inevitably
"romantic."
28 In discussing The Birth we saw Nietzsche himself turning to an

"intoxicated" kind of metaphysics for comfort on account of his
"incurable pessimism" (BGE 59) about the possibility of ameliora-
ting the awfulness of the human condition through action. In section
7 of the present chapter we saw it objected that metaphysics in
general and metaphysical art in particular stifles the attempt to
improve the world through action. And in Dawn, as we have just
seen, metaphysical art is represented as a form of " intoxication"
that is both effect and cause of alienation from human reality.
(Notice that the favor with which Nietzsche regards Rausch varies
inversely with his hopefulness with regards to human existence.)
Throughout Nietzsche's writings runs the thesis that affirmation of
the metaphysical entails - is both symptom and intensification of-
denial of the physical. This, the heart of Nietzsche's critique of the
metaphysical in art (and in general), it is now time to subject to
critical scrutiny.
The brilliance of Nietzsche's analysis of the impulses to meta-
physical art (a brilliance closely related to that of his account of the
roles of resentment and revenge in the impulse to Christian
affirmation) is his discovery of the roles of disability, defense, and
compensation in the - in Nietzsche's sense 17 - romantic spirit. Con-
sidered, as I have suggested, as pathology of the metaphysical impulse,
there can be no doubting this brilliance. Nietzsche's rhetorical
trickery, however, lies in the presentation of pathology as if it were
anatomy. Another part of his trickery is to present his pathology in
a manner so dazzling as to inhibit, through fear of appearing boring,
the making of the mundane points which expose it as merely
pathology. The points, nonetheless, need to be made.
We need, that is, to remind ourselves of such obvious phenomena
as the theology of salvation by works rather than grace, to remember
that it is by no means a general truth that metaphysical affirmation
stifles action - empirically, in any case, a fatuous assertion. Again,
we need to remind ourselves that a Christian view of life, through
increasing one's sense of ultimate worth and security, may have as its
effect, fearlessness, effectiveness, and delight in this life; that the
location of ultimate bliss in a future life does not preclude, and may
facilitate the discovery of, relative bliss in the present. And that, in
any case, the nature of "salvation" is conceived, in some theologies,
not in terms of a future state at all, but in terms, rather, of a present
"relatedness" to the Divinity.
In addition to all this we need to recall that not all metaphysical
affirmations are of an even covertly theistic character, so that even
were it true that theism generally involves a critique of the moral
standing of human beings, it would not follow that metaphysical
affirmation as such does, it is true that a sense of the metaphysical
involves, in general, a blow to our epistemological self-esteem; an
awareness of the puniness of the human intellect in relation to the
vastness of what exists to be known. But the bitterness involved in
this, as in all encounters with the sublime, is more than compensated
for by the scale and richness that the cosmos possesses for one, by the
avoidance of epistemological claustrophobia. Affirmation of the
metaphysical does, it is true, reduce human self-esteem. But that
such a reduction is invariably a matter for regret is far from clear.
The trouble with Nietzsche's thesis that other-worldly affirmation
entails this-worldly denial is that it predicates of the whole that
which is true only of the part. Metaphysical affirmation is identified
with Christian affirmation and that, in turn, with something like
Calvinism. (More accurately, it is identified with Schopenhauer-
ianism. Schopenhauer, who claims that in denying the possibility of
salvation by works, in affirming asceticism and world-denial, his
philosophy captures the essence of Christianity [WR i, p. 386] seems
the dubious source of most of Nietzsche's " theology.") For all the
psychiatric brilliance of its deployment, the thesis is, therefore, false.
Indeed it is obviously false - which makes this hard to say.
29 Dawn, as I mentioned, continues to prosecute the attack against

Wagner. The characterization of his music as the art of empty
" effects " is expanded. It is now characterized as the art which " seeks
to exalt without being exalted" (D 223), as a "bombastic," "in-
flated" art that seeks not to discharge but to create a feeling of
"swollenness" (D 332), as-an art in which every move is calculated to
"assemble delighted looks," to stupefy, convulse, shatter, in general
to possess and manipulate the feelings of the audience (D 255).
Wagner's art is the art of market forces, the art of a " d e m a g o g u e "
(ibid.).
The question presents itself as to just what is so wrong with the art
of consumer demand. (It is easy, one reflects, to see Andrew Lloyd
Webber as a shallow, but difficult to see him as a deeply pernicious,
phenomenon.) The epithet "demagogic" is particularly significant
here because it suggests an answer. It suggests, that is, that Nietzsche
sees Wagner in the same light as Plato, particularly in the Gorgias,
sees the rhetoricians. 18
In section 165 of Wanderer, Nietzsche says that although the art of
high, melodramatic relief (" the music of the [Don Giovanni's] stone
guest" that Mozart produced on just this one occasion) may indeed
produce the greatest effect on a contemporary audience, to produce
an effect on " t h e people" is something the " n o b l e " artist should
never want to achieve (see D 269). This reproduces Plato's objection
that an attitude of slavish groveling towards the demos is unworthy of
a freeman (Gorgias 495). But Plato's fundamental objection to the
rhetoricians is that whereas the true statesman ought to be improving
and educating his people, qua rhetorician, all he possesses is the ability
to follow them, to tailor and present his proposals in a way calculated
to appeal to their lower instincts. This, I think, is Nietzsche's
fundamental objection to Wagner. The business of art, we saw in
Opinions, is to signpost the future. It is, as Dawn continues the theme,
to " i m p r o v e " its audience, for example, as Corneille did "with
pictures of knightly virtue, stern duty, magnanimous self-sacrifice,
heroic self-restraint" which demonstrate that "greatness [Grö'sse]
and humanity are possible together" (D 191). With Wagner,
however, we find the reverse of what we should find. Artist as
legislator of high values for the future has been replaced by artist as
panderer to low tastes of the present. Clearly, a presupposition of this
critique is that Wagner had the capacity to fulfill the mission of art.
It is a noble mind which, failing to heed the veiled warning of Wagner
at Bayreuth, is now revealed as overthrown.
CHAPTER 4
The Gay Science
How gay, actually, is The Gay Science? The retrospective Nietzsche

would have us believe that, as its title suggests, the book is
"affirmative, profound but bright and benevolent," that " i n
practically every sentence profundity and exuberance go hand in
h a n d " {EHwin). And by and large he has been successful. Here, for
example, is how Richard Schacht views the work:
In tone and content, the volume deserves its title. After having struggled
through a period of some years of intellectual crisis, its author has attained
a new philosophical and spiritual health, of the sort he describes at the fifth
book's end (382). He has become profoundly and joyfully affirmative of life
and the world and has discovered that "all the daring of the lover of
knowledge is permitted again" (343). He is in love with knowledge and
with life and the world, and with the humanity emerging out of them; for,
having earlier become hard and disillusioned by them, he has now become
newly appreciative of them. Thus he cheerfully and confidently sets out to
explore them as they stand revealed in the "new dawn" that has broken
in the aftermath of "the news that 'the old god is dead' " (343)x
Schacht, I want to suggest in this chapter, has been duped. In

spite of its title, The Gay Science, it seems to me, is a work in which the
only kind of gaiety its author achieves is a kind of manic frivolity
which is really no more than a symptom of desperation and despair.
2 Before getting down to the substance of this chapter some

preliminary, bibliographical observations. Although I have called
the chapter " The Gay Science" I in fact intend to discuss in it not
merely The Gay Science but also the related parts of all of Nietzsche's
works published between 1882 and 1887: in addition to The Gay
Science, that is, Thus Spoke ârathustra and Beyond Good and EviL There
are good chronological reasons for treating this body of work as a
unity. For of The Gay Science only books I-IV appeared in 1882, book
v and the preface to the second edition not appearing until 1887.
92
The Gay Science 93
These two parts of the work thus bracket £arathustra (parts I - I I
appeared in 1883, part 111 in 1884, part iv in 1885) and Beyond Good
and Evil (1886).
The reason I make The Gay Science the center of this unity is that
all of the major ideas touching upon the topic of art which appear
in the works of this period are found first in it: in fact, in its first four
books. (The one exception to this, the critique of the K a n t -
Schopenhauer notion that aesthetic perception is "disinterested," I
shall reserve for discussion in chapter 5.) All the other works may be
regarded as commentaries on, elucidations of The Gay Science, It is
true that Nietzsche himself suggested that the latter could be
regarded as commentary on the yet-to-be-written ârathustra2 but
the truth, so it seems at least to me, is if anything the reverse,
Thoughts which first appear in The Gay Science and, because it stands
so close to their creation, are expressed in difficult and unclear ways,
not uncommonly appear with much greater clarity and simplicity in
Zarathustra. Wissenschaftliche prose, strangely, finds its elucidation in
poetic fiction.
3 Let us begin at the beginning; with the title of the work. Why
should anyone entitle a book The Gay Science? Why should anyone
subtitle it la gaya scienza, a phrase of Provencal that refers to the
culture and poetry of the medieval troubadours; to their, as
Nietzsche describes it, gay, free, exuberant, childish, mocking,
dancing, light, floating spirit? Why insist- and insist, as Nietzsche
does, so repeatedly - on how infused and permeated by that spirit is
the book? Why preface and conclude the work with a set of poems
- as if in fear that someone might fail to get the point that in it the
spirit of the troubadours is reborn? A prudent reader, it seems to me
(a "philologist" or "psychologist" in Nietzsche's sense), ought to
suspect that someone who displays, parades their alleged gaiety so
insistently - and in the end tediously - is closely acquainted with
suffering and despair.
In the Preface (on which, since it was written last and therefore
constitutes Nietzsche's last word in the work, I shall place
considerable weight) Nietzsche admits to a past acquaintance with
suffering. The book is, he says, " nothing but a bit of merry-making
after a long privation," filled with the " intoxication of con-
valescence" (GS, Preface, 1) of one who has endured a "long slow
p a i n " (GS, Preface, 3). What we have to decide is how correctly this
pain is consigned to the past.
4 But let us first do away with metaphor. What is the "long slow
p a i n " to which Nietzsche refers? It is, in a word, the death of God,
an event which, though formally announced for the first time only
in section 125 of The Gay Science, was in fact acutely present to
Nietzsche from the very outset of his philosophical career. The pain
is the pain of confronting the "terror and horror," the "heart-
breaking and cruel character" of existence - " w h a t I desire most,"
he wrote to Heinrich von Stein in December 1882, "is a high point
from which I can see the tragic problem lying beneath me. I would
like to take away from human existence some of its heartbreaking
and cruel character" - without the "metaphysical comfort"
brought to us by theistic belief. The problem is suffering and our
vulnerability to it: not all suffering (not the pain of dentistry, for
example) but rather suffering for which we can discover no
redeeming purpose or justification, suffering that disposes us to view
life as "nauseating." Without God life appears to be " a b s u r d " and
(save for extinction) there appears to be no deliverance from it.
In The Birth of Tragedy, as we saw, Nietzsche discovered a
substitute for God in art. In experiencing tragic art we receive the
"metaphysical comfort" of becoming aware of our supraindividual
identity, our oneness with the "primal unity" that is the
metaphysical reality beneath the illusory world of individuality. In
Human, All-too-human, however, the idea of art as a substitute for
religion, the idea of a "metaphysical world" in both its overt and
covert manifestations, is exposed to ridicule and is demolished. The
world, as Nietzsche confronts it at the beginning of The Gay Science is
completely "naturalized," fully "dedeified" (GS 109). There is no
metaphysical redemption from its horrors.
5 But, surely, one might reflect, the dedeification of existence was

already confronted by Nietzsche in Human, All-too-human. And there,
surely, there was nothing painful about the absence of the
metaphysical world. Its destruction seemed, on the contrary, a
necessary, even joyful, task. Why then, at the beginning of The Gay
Science, has its absence become painful?
In Human, All-too-human, as we saw, Nietzsche came to occupy the
hitherto despised stance of "Socratic," scientific optimism. " P r o -
gress " through science seemed possible, and this both provided a telos
to the world and gave meaning to the life of the Wissenschaftler able
to think of himself as participating in the process of its realization.
The Gay Science 95
This is what provided the rationale for the destruction of the
metaphysical world: the point was to liberate our energies so that we
could turn to the elimination of the causes of suffering rather than
merely " narcoticizing" their effects. Nietzsche, in short, was
sustained in his rejection of the old faiths by the acquisition of a new
one: faith in science. Not an other-worldly state but rather a future
state of this world is seen as redeeming life from its present horrors
and terrors.
But in The Gay Science, in Nietzsche's anguished demand for
consolation over the death of God (GS 125), the old pain and the old
yearning for "metaphysical comfort" has returned. Something,
therefore, must have altered in his assessment of the nature and
capacities of science.
What has altered has, it is fairly clear, something to do with
"perspectivism"; that is, "phenomenalism," idealism: " t h e essence
of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand t h e m : . . . the
world of which we can become conscious is only a surface and sign-
world" (GS 354), a world of "appearances," in more traditional
language. The Gay Science is full of remarks in a similar vein:
"Delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge," he says in
section 107, and in the Preface he announces the abandonment of his
"youthful" quest to unveil the statue of reality since, "we no longer
believe that truth remains truth when all the veils are w i t h d r a w n "
(sec. 4).
Perspectivism, though the term is first introduced in The Gay
Science, goes back in one form or another to the beginning of
Nietzsche's thought. In The Birth of Tragedy, as we saw, its scope was
conceived as embracing all that can be produced by the Socratic
mind. It was this, as demonstrated by " t h e extraordinary courage
and wisdom of K a n t and Schopenhauer," that placed " b e i n g "
beyond the knowledge and hence control of the Socratic mind. In
Human, All-too-human, however, its scope diminished: only the lay,
common-sense, thing-affirming image of the world was held to the
ideal, the scientific image, in particular the thing-dissolving image of
Boscovichian physics, being affirmed as real. Being appeared as
knowable, as predictable, and hence as in principle capable of
"correction."
What is it in this view of things that has altered by the time of The
Gay Science? The issue is shrouded in mystery so that the following
can be offered as no more than an hypothesis.
What I suggest is that in The Gay Science Nietzsche came to see
that whatever reasons there are for applying perspectivism to the
common-sense image of the world are reasons, equally, for applying
it to the Boscovichian image. In Beyond Good and Evil, recalling,
perhaps, his thoughts from the Human, All-too-human period,
Nietzsche expresses his gratitude to Boscovich, who " taught us to
abjure belief in ...'substance 5 , in matter, in the earth-residuum and
particle atom: it was the greatest triumph over the senses hitherto
achieved on earth." " O n e must, however," he adds, " g o still further
and also declare war on the 'atomistic n e e d ' " (sec. 12). Why does
Boscovich not go far enough? Because, I suggest, though abolishing
the extended atom, his puncta (see ch. 3, sec. 6), though unextended,
mimic the extended atom in being spatially mobile, temporally
persistent entities. Boscovichian physics, therefore, still remains
gripped by, still caters to, the "atomistic need." Boscovich's puncta
are really just immaterial atoms.
In section 111 of The Gay Science Nietzsche suggests that " t h e
concept of substance" is (1) "indispensable to logic," yet (2) such
that " i n the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it." By
" l o g i c " he means here the grammatical structure of language, and
by "substance," I think, any object of reference. It follows that
Boscovich's puncta are as much human projections, grammatical
fictions, as are the extended atoms of the theorists he opposed:
"physics too [even the superior physics of Boscovich] is only an
interpretation and arrangement of the world" (BGE 14). Reality as
such is ineffable, in principle incongruent with any structure proposed
by human thought or language. Existence outside of one perspective
or another, "existence without interpretation" is, he says, " n o n -
sense" (GS 374).
But not, notice, non-existent. Although some of his formulations of
perspectivism might be interpreted as an affirmation of, in Kant's
language, "absolute i d e a l i s m " - t h e world contains nothing but
interpretations (and perhaps interpreters) 3 - such, in fact, is not
Nietzsche's position. The world outside the mind, beyond our
interpretations, is still there in The Gay Science: " T h e total character
of the world ...is in all eternity chaos [or 'nonsense'] in the sense not
of a lack of necessity4 but of a lack of order, arrangement, form" (GS
109), everything there could make it congruent with, graspable by,
conceptual thought or language. As Arthur Danto has put it, 5
because Nietzsche wants to say that all our beliefs about ultimate
The Gay Science 97
reality are (not truth-valueless but rather) false, " errors," he is
constrained to introduce a world for them to be false to or about, a
world which (like the Kantian noumenon) is to all eternity ineffable,
chaotic relative to the distinctions drawn by conceptual thought, yet
for all that indisputably there.
6 What does the impact of, as we may call it, comprehensive

perspectivism mean with regard to Nietzsche's earlier optimism with
respect to scientific progress? Had perspectivism been correctly
interpreted as absolute idealism the answer would have been:
nothing at all. For then there would have been nothing " o u t there,"
nothing to be incongruent with our scientific world-interpretations.
But there is something; something which has its own "necessary"
nature yet is ineffable to reason and hence unknowable by science.
Something, moreover, which is permanently liable to "disorderly
motion" (see n. 4 above), liable to disrupt the ordered structures
created by human science and technology. In effect, therefore, we
have returned to the position of The Birth of Tragedy. Being,
perpetually threatening to human well-being, is unknowable and
hence incapable of "correction." Scientific optimism is again (and
again the agent of disillusionment is science, philosophy, itself)
exposed as illusion. This time, however, the effect is devastating;
devastating because Nietzsche himself had succumbed to its charms.
This is why the realization in The Gay Science that "delusion and
error are conditions of human knowledge" threatens such an
extreme reaction: "nausea and suicide" (GS 107).
7 To summarize: at the beginning of The Gay Science what Nietzsche

confronts is a triple loss of faith. We cannot justify, redeem, bring
ourselves to affirm our existence by accepting the claims of religion
that this life is a brief and necessary stage on a journey to an
ultimate, transcendent salvation. And neither can we accept the
intimations in art of a vaguer, less articulated version of the same
world-interpretation. But neither, finally, do we possess the power to
eliminate the "horror and terror" that afflicts us. There is only one
world and its eternal character is, as it were, nasty, brutish, short,
and meaningless (see WP 853). Humanity appears condemned, for
some nameless crime, to a kind of Kafkaesque prison (see Z n> 2 0 )
that it can neither alter nor escape. Nausea and suicide threaten.
Nietzsche sums up his predicament at the end of section 3 of the
Preface. Life, he says, has become "problematic." This may seem a
rather mild term for the kind of Angst we have been discussing. But
in fact problematisch is a deeply pregnant expression which takes its
resonances from Schopenhauer's greater chapter " O n man's need
for metaphysics" (WR n, ch. xvn; cf. p. 170). It is the word
Schopenhauer uses to capture the sense of life as a tormenting
"riddle," an anguish-ridden phenomenon which, according to
Schopenhauer, creates the "metaphysical need," the demand for
another world to provide us with its "solution" (ibid.).
What Nietzsche confronts, therefore, at the beginning of The Gay
Science is the Schopenhauerian " r i d d l e " (see £11, 20; Z in> I 2 [3])-
But in the work, he claims, he discovers a solution. What is that
solution?
8 Nietzsche says that the pain of confronting the riddle is peculiar

to, or felt in its acute form at least only by, " w e philosophers" (GS,
Preface, 3). Felt, that is, by Nietzsche together with his thoughtful
and sensitive contemporaries. (As he suggests [GS, Preface, 2], the
fluctuating states of " H e r r Nietzsche's" spiritual well-being as such
are of interest to no one except Herr Nietzsche. It is only qua
epitomizer of the crisis of his times, the crisis of modernity, that
Nietzsche's travails are of general and philosophical interest.)
Distinguished from " t h e people" (GS 3) by the "will to t r u t h " (GS,
Preface, 4), by " h o n e s t y " (GS 335) or the "intellectual conscience"
(GS 2), the philosopher is compelled to inhabit, to constitute, the
" b a d conscience" of his time (BGE 212). He is compelled, that is, to
pick at the scab 6 constituted by the conventional comforts of the age,
subject their foundations to the most rigorous examination. Ordinary
people, people who, free of the philosopher's scruples about evidence
and truth, are moved to belief by what is comfortable rather than by
what is true, accept without difficulty the comfort brought by faith
in religion, art, or science. The Faustian thinker, however, " t h a t
being in whom the impulse for truth a n d . . . life-preserving errors
clash for their first fight" (GS 110), cannot do this. He is set apart.
In view of this, it is not surprising that a strong element of
misology, hatred of reason, characterizes Nietzsche's solution to the
riddle. " W e philosophers," he says, gripped as we were by the will
to truth, descended to our "ultimate depths, became "profound."
But as a result we were " b u r n e d , " betrayed by our love of truth. For
the truth we discovered was " B a u b o " - t h e Greek demon who
The Gay Science 99
personified the obscene. " W e artists," however, he continues
(reminding us again that the author of The Gay Science is a^poet, a
troubadour, one who has, as it were, encapsulated the philosophy of
The Gay Science within the healing balm of poetry) have discovered
a better wisdom. As artists " w e now learn to forget well, and to be
good at not knowing." We learn to love not depths but surfaces, " the
fold, the skin, ...forms, tones, words, ...the whole Olympus of
appearance" (GS, Preface, 3, 4). As a " counterforce " to the "over-
severe d e m a n d s " of our "irritable honesty" we have discovered the
"cult of the untrue," the "good will to appearance" (GS 107). Like
the Greek artists we have learnt to be "superficial - out of profundity"
(GS, Preface, 4). "As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still
bearable [erträglich] for u s " (GS 107).
Such a transformation of outlook, however, demands, is equivalent
to, nothing less than the transformation of the self. We must turn not
just the world but also the self into an "aesthetic phenomenon"
(ibid.). We must, says Nietzsche, continuing a theme from Assorted
Opinions and Maxims (see ch. 3, sec. 21 above) become artists who
produce not (or not primarily) " t h e art of works of a r t " but rather
their own lives. We must learn the art of " staging... ourselves " (GS
78), we must become "poets of our lives" (GS 299).
How are we to do this? By copying the work of artists in the literal
sense (artists who produce " t h e art of works of a r t " ) , by emulating
their techniques. Particularly crucial here is " d i s t a n c e " (GS 78),
"artistic distance" (GS 107). By standing back from our lives we
bring it about that there is " a good deal that one no longer sees and
there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at a l l "
(GS 299). Distance, that is, gives us the creative freedom to script for
ourselves a new character. We can write out all {hose memories,
character traits, and ambitions which gave us the personality and
the problems of the profound, weighty (GS 107), troubled, burnt
thinker, and write in, in its place, a new kind of "superficial"
personality, that of someone who experiences the world in a "light,
fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial" way, someone
whose world, "like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies" (GS,
Preface, 4). We write out, in particular, the demands of our honesty
and thereby create for ourselves an "exuberant, floating, dancing,
mocking, childish and blissful...freedom above things" (GS, Preface,
4) an incredible lightness of being, in short, la gaya scienza.
This, it seems, is Nietzsche's solution. We transform ourselves from
weighty thinkers into intellectual and spiritual "lightweights": from
the deep and gloomy Schopenhauer into the " g a y , " "staged,"
frivolous, "divinely artificial" Oscar Wilde. (It is not an accident, I
think, that Wilde, who said he had put his genius into his life, only
his talent into art, was an almost exact contemporary of Nietzsche.)
We find relief from (to change the image) the "over-severe honesty"
of modernism in the decadent superficiality, the whimsically allusive
love of surfaces of postmodernism. We solve the problem of the riddle
by simply "forgetting" about it. T h a t was someone else's problem,
a problem in which we are childishly uninterested. Like Albert
Finney in his neglected Charlie Bubbles, as the heavy social realism of
the marital drama reaches its torrid climax, we slip away to the end
of the garden where, by divine artifice, a gaily colored balloon awaits
us. The terror and horror we leave behind and below us as we float
off, receding like a flame, into unclouded skies.7
9 But will the balloon fly for very long? The essence, after all, of
Nietzsche's solution to the riddle is self-deception, acting, role-
playing. Becoming an appearance to oneself, deplored in Wagner at
Bayreuth (WB 5), is now, it seems, just what is proposed. Repression,
the denial of desires and character traits, the pretense that traumatic
events of the past never happened, is seen now as a vital, life-saving
activity. But does this not lend a brittle, desperate, doomed quality
to Nietzsche's gaya scienza? Truth, as poor, silly Wilde's tragedy
exemplifies, cannot easily be kept at bay. And even if, for a time, it
can, the price exacted by such repression in terms of neurotic
symptoms is (if we believe Freud at all) a high one.
Another question to ask, however, is whether the advocacy of
profound superficiality really constitutes Nietzsche's last word by way
of a solution to the riddle. What gives force to this question - and
makes The Gay Science 3, very puzzling text to decipher - is that
although the Preface is dominated by the perceived need at all costs
to fly from, eradicate, the will to truth, the body of the work is
dominated by the attachment of tremendous value to "honesty," to
the "intellectual conscience" (GS 2, 335), to the avoidance ofthat
"suicide of reason" for which, in Beyond Good and Evil (229), he
condemns Pascal. Moreover, and most importantly, The Gay Science
is the place where the doctrine that being able to will the eternal
recurrence is the mark of the ideal stance towards the world receives
its first enunciation [GS 341). And the point of this doctrine, as we
The Gay Science IOI
will shortly see, is that ideally one should be able to accept, love, will
to recur all of the truth about the world, down to the very last detail.
io The solution to this puzzle is to be found, I believe, in the fact

that like The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science offers not one but rather
two solutions to the problem of the riddle. As in The Birth one of these
solutions is preferred to the other. And as in The Birth, too, one
essentially involves illusion, the other ecstasy {Rausch). In fact the
parallels with The Birth are so strong that, without wishing to imply
that The Gay Science is by any means a simple rewriting of The Birth,
I shall call the one solution, the one we have already looked at,
"Apollonian," and the other, preferred solution, "Dionysian."
The key to seeing that there is this duality is to notice that
profound superficiality, the Apollonian solution, is intended speci-
fically for "we convalescents" (GS, Preface, 1,4). (In £arathustra it
is said that the convalescent needs to sing a "different song" from
the healthy man [ £ 11, 13].) It is intended, that is, for people who
have made some kind of a recovery from a sickness (to the question
ofjust what the sickness is I shall return later, but what Nietzsche has
in mind, it may be helpful to state here, is closely connected with
Christian belief) but are still far from completely healthy. This
suggests that the Dionysian solution is intended for, will be achieved
by (and only by), someone who is fully healthy.
II What does the Dionysian solution look like? In Beyond Good and
Evil Nietzsche couples the life of la gaya scienza with the Christian
interpretation of existence, as both species of profound superficiality.
Both the transcendentalization of existence by ''homines religiosi" and
the "impassioned and exaggerated worship o f ' p u r e forms' among
both philosophers and artists" illustrate, he says, " h o w much
wisdom there lies in the superficiality of men. The instinct that
preserves "these ["burnt children"] teaches them to be flighty, light
and false." (Notice that this coupling provides, given Nietzsche's
well-known antipathy to homo religiosus, a further reason for doubting
that la gaya scienza constitutes Nietzsche's final response to the
riddle.) Both, he continues, are products of artistry, artistry inspired
by "fear of truth," fear of an "incurable pessimism" that would
result were one to "get hold of a truth too soon." But he mentions,
too, another, nonsuperficial, truth-embracing approach to existence
that one could take were one "strong enough, hard enough, artist
io2 Nietzsche's philosophy of art
enough" (BGE 59). This indicates, firstly, that the Dionysian
solution will abandon the Apollonian " falsification " of the image of
life (ibid.), that it will be in some way "honest," and, secondly, that
it, too, will somehow involve artistry. As in The Birth of Tragedy,
therefore, we are provided with two ^-solutions to the riddle.
12 How is art involved in the Dionysian solution? As with the

Apollonian, it requires one to view, to create oneself as an "aesthetic
phenomenon." Imitating again the techniques of artists in the literal
sense, especially the technique of aesthetic distance, one is required
to view the self from a distance so that rather than regarding it " i n
the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and
most vulgar appear as it were vast and reality itself," rather than its
being "nothing but foreground," we learn to see the wood for the
trees, to see ourselves "simplified and transfigured," " t o see
a n d . . . es teem the hero 8 that is concealed in everyday characters"
(GS 78). Elsewhere Nietzsche says that what is "needful" is to "give
style" to one's character, by fitting the various aspects of one's
" n a t u r e " into a pleasing totality according to an "artistic p l a n " (GS
290). 9 One is, in other words, to come to view all the details of one's
life as fitting together into the kind of coherent unity that we demand
of a well-executed character in literature.
13 How, it might at this point be wondered, is the Dionysian any

different from the Apollonian solution to the riddle? For that too
seemed to involve giving oneself a certain style, viewing oneself very
much as if one were a character in literature.
The answser has to do with Nietzsche's repeated injunction to
"become who you a r e " (GS 270), an injunction that he clearly
regards as being of central importance since his final, autobio-
graphical work, Ecce Homo, is subtitled: How One Becomes What One
Is. There are two aspects to the injunction, the epigrammatic
conjunction of which helps to give it its paradoxical appearance. The
first is the anti-Delphic idea that the self is something one " becomes,"
that is (GS 335 makes this clear), makes or. creates rather than discovers.
It is a fundamental position of the later Nietzsche that there is no
real, given self waiting to be discovered, neither a self conceived as a
persisting Cartesian o b j e c t - " s o u l atomism... that belief which
regards the soul as being something indestructible, eternal, in-
divisible, as a monad, as an a t o m . . . o u g h t to be expelled from
The Gay Science 103
science" (BGE 12) - n o r a self conceived in the related Schopen-

hauerian or Freudian manner (see n. 9 above) as a set of " r e a l , "
innate, and unalterable, but largely repressed desires. T h e self,
Nietzsche holds, resembles the state; it may be conceived as a "social
structure of drives and affects" (ibid.). As such, though its elements
may be given, it, like the state, is the product of free creative activity.
The second is the idea of becoming who one is as opposed to who one
is not, the idea of becoming an authentic rather than inauthentic self.
It is this second aspect that is emphasized in section 335 of The Gay
Science: we who " w a n t to become those who we are [wollen die werden,
die wir sind]" who want to " c r e a t e " ourselves as beings who are
"new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws," must
acknowledge everything that is "necessary," given in the world.
"Therefore: long live physics! [clearly a metaphor, here, for
comprehensive, exhaustive, hard, and unromanticized knowledge of
the given] And even more that which compels us to turn to physics
- our honesty!"
So the idea seems to be that though in a sense created, the self that
figures in the Dionysian solution to the riddle is an honestly created
and in that sense authentic self: none of the deceptions and
fabrications which help to create the Apollonian self are employed. 10
How does the construction of this authentic self proceed? And how
does that construction help to solve the problem of the riddle? T o
understand this we need to understand the intimate relations that
exist in Nietzsche's thought between three things: becoming who
you are, amor fati (love of fate), and willing the eternal recurrence.
14 It is by now widely accepted that the thought of the eternal

recurrence is not, certainly not primarily, intended as the for-
mulation of a cosmological doctrine. It occurs rather in a test for, as
Nietzsche conceives it, the ideal relationship in which one can stand
to the world. More exactly, it occurs in a test for the ideally healthy
stance towards the world: in ârathustra its hero is called a
"convalescent" on account of his inability yet to will the eternal
recurrence (£111, 13). The test, in its first formulation (GS 341), is
this: can you bring yourself to will the eternal recurrence of
everything in your life down to the last detail? More precisely, can you
bring yourself to "crave nothing more fervently" than that, to be in
a condition such that there is no future life you would prefer to the
repetition of your exact life just as it is.
As such, the injunction to bring oneself to will the eternal
recurrence is the same as the injunction to "love fate," an injunction
which also receives its first formulation in The Gay Science:
For the new year Today everybody permits himself the expression of his
wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish
from myself today I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what
is necessary in things beautiful. Amorfati: let that be my love henceforth!
I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse;
I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away [after the
fashion of the profoundly superficial] shall be my only negation. And in its
totality and greatness [alles in allem und grossen]: some day I wish to be only
a yes-sayer. (GS 276)
Since all of the past is "necessary," unalterable, the doctrine of

amor fati entails loving, that is being able to will the eternal
recurrence of everything that (to one's knowledge) has happened.
This becomes even clearer in a later formulation of amor fati: " m y
formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants
nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not
in all eternity. Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity,
still les to dissemble it [after the fashion of the profoundly
superficial] but to love i t " (EH 11, 10). That eternal recurrence and
amor fati are equivalent formulations of the same injunction is not
merely implicit in this quotation but is made quite explicit by
Nietzsche's habit of referring indifferently to each as the "highest,"
"Dionysian relationship to existence," the "formula for greatness"
(WP 1041; EH u, 10).
15 How can one possibly come to love, will the recurrence of,
everything that has happened? Section 276 of The Gay Science (quoted
in sec. 14 above) starts to tell us: one is " t o see as beautiful what is
necessary in things." The following section continues the thought.
Though there is no divine providence in the world we are to seek to
put in its place the vision of a "wonderful harmony," a "personal
providence." We are
to see how palpably always everything that happens to us turns out for the
best. Every day and every hour, life seems to have no other wish than to
prove this proposition again and again. Whatever it is, bad weather or
good, the loss of a friend, sickness, slander, the failure of some letter to
arrive, the spraining of an ankle, a glance into a shop, a counter-argument,
The Gay Science 105
the opening of a book, a dream, a fraud - either immediately or very soon

after it proves to be something that "must not be missing": it has a
profound significance and use precisely for us. (GS 277)
Nietzsche, it seems, was strongly influenced in his development of
the idea ofamorfati and of how it is to be achieved by Ralph Waldo
Emerson [an initially surprising conjunction between the Unitarian
minister and the self-styled "Antichrist"] whom he had loved since
boyhood, continued to love until the end of his productive life, and
was rereading as he wrote The Gay Science.11 The first edition carried
a quotation (slightly mistranslated into German) from Emerson, on
the title page: " T o the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all
things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all
men divine." 1 2 Emerson actually called himself " a Professor of the
Joyous Science" meaning among other things thereby " a detector
and delineator of occult harmonies and unpublished beauties."
Seeing a personal providence in one's life is, says Nietzsche, a
matter of "practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and
arranging events" {ibid.). One is, that is, to discover all events in
one's past including apparent evils, apparently harmful events, to be
not evils at all but rather "for the best," benefits, means to
subsequent goods. Nietzsche constantly stresses this as a way of
coming to love one's fate. Rather than seeking revenge for a wrong,
he says in ârathustra, one should show that one's enemy has actually
done one some good (Z 1, 18). And in Ecce Homo, in the course of
demonstrating the alleged (see the Epilogue below) fact that "amor
fati is my inherent n a t u r e " {EH xm, 4), he says, speaking in a
homeopathic vein, that though Wagner is a "poison," he himself is
"strong enough to turn even the most questionable and most
perilous things to [his]...own advantage and thus to become
stronger." Thus he says, " I call Wagner the great benefactor of my
life" {EH 11, 6).
This, it must be emphasized, is by no means Nietzsche's only
technique for accommodating the "questionable" (GS 370): another
consists in exhibiting problematic attributes and events not as means
to but rather as parts of the good. The giving of " s t y l e " to one's
character, for example, is, he says, an " a r t " that is "practiced by
those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and
then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as
art and even weaknesses delight the e y e " (GS 290). So, for example,
one might see a character trait that in isolation one might regard as
a vice as, in the context of one's personality as a whole, having the
necessary function of softening, taking the hard edge off one's
virtues, humanizing one's character. Or one might come to view a
period of slavish discipleship to Schopenhauer and Wagner as
having the aesthetically necessary function of highlighting the
courage and originality of one's later career. This, as I suggested (ch.
2, sec. 2), is one of the strategies Nietzsche employs for ac-
commodating that problematic aspect of his own career,
A further technique that applies to only one - but a very
important - phenomonon, the phenomenon of death, is to see its
occurrence at a given time as demanded by the pleasingness of one's
life as a whole, in the way in which the inner logic of a play or piece
of music demands that at a certain point it should stop. In " O n free
d e a t h " ( £ 1 , 21) Zarathustra enjoins: "Die at the right time!" One
should, he says, "cease letting oneself be eaten when one tastes best"
and not, like a wizen apple, hang upon the branch for too long.
A still further technique (though strictly " t e c h n i q u e " is not the
right word here) is not taking things seriously, forgetting about
them:
to be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's

misdeeds seriously for very long - that is a sign of strong, full natures in
which there is an excess of power to form, to mould, to recuperate, and to
forget (a good example is Mirabeau who had no memory for insults and vile
actions done him and was unable to forgive simply because he forgot). [GM
1, 10)
(Notice that there is all the difference in the world between

repressing the memory of an event - on account of its extreme
significance - and forgetting it on account of its utter triviality. Amor
fati is not a test of the memory: one is allowed to forget providing the
forgetting is genuine.)
16 The important thing to notice about all of these techniques for

coming to terms with prima facie evils in one's life (in the case of past
evils Nietzsche calls the process one of" redemption " - " recreating]
all 'it was' into a 'thus I willed i t ' " [£11, 20]) is that one cannot do
it without knowing, that is, for Nietzsche, choosing who you are:
deciding, that is, what your dominant desires, character traits,
emotions, goals, and values are. I cannot view a weakness as
contributing to the overall attractiveness of my nature unless I know
The Gay Science 107
the " artistic p l a n " ofthat nature as a whole. Neither can I view, let
us say, the mental damage that terminated my career as a
mathematical logician and turned me to the life of philosophy nor
the "counterargument" that turned me from a philosopher into a
peace activist as a benefit unless I have decided that being a
philosopher or a peace activist is what, fundamentally, I want to be.
To decide that some past event was a benefit presupposes and
commits me to certain views as to who I am, what my dominant
desires and goals are now. Thus the process of coming to love fate,
coming to will the eternal recurrence, demands, and incorporates
the construction of the self- the construction of an authentic, truth-
embracing self: becoming, in other words, who one is.
Notice that the process of creating this self is an artistic process, 13
a task of ordering the events in one's life that in some respects is
analogous to the writing of a Bildungsroman,14 a story of the growth
of personality from naivety to maturity, and in other respects is
analogous to the task of constructing a character that will engage the
esteem and attention of the reader. And notice, too, that in a clear
sense the creation of this self is more artistic (see sec. 11 above), more
of an artistic tour deforce than the creation of an inauthentic self. For
as we think of one scientific theory as better than another if it
comprehends a greater range of observational " d a t a " it makes sense
to think of art as more or less consummate according to the richness
of the " d a t a " that it accommodates.
Of course, the construction of a self such that all its past deeds and
experiences add up to the life of an attractive, fortunate self- a self
we can "esteem," "desire," view with " p l e a s u r e " (GS 78), " a t t a i n
satisfaction" with (GS 290), a self we like, indeed love being - is not
the only self one could construct. One could construct out of the
same set of facts an equally clear coherent and honest self that is the
victim of misfortune. ( " T h e world of the happy person is a different
one from the world of the unhappy person," writes Wittgenstein. But
it is not the "facts" that are different only the " l i m i t s " [Tractatus,
6.43].) T h a t way, however, lies the path to "nausea and suicide."
The construction of a self that we love to be is the one we need
because in it we find the solution to the problem of the riddle.
17 It might be wondered, however, just what being able to will the

recurrence of one's own life in all its remembered detail has to do
with solving the riddle. That, after all, which threatens to be an
object of nausea is nothing so trivial as my life. It is, rather, existence
as such, " Nausea," that is, is no mere sense of personal failure or
misfortune but is, rather, a metaphysical, almost dignified condition,
something that afflicts only those of deep and knowledgeable
perspectives. Yet could not one perhaps will the recurrence of one's
own life yet find being as such deeply nauseating? Could one not be
thoroughly content with one's own life yet find, for example, the
death of Jacqueline du Pre from multiple sclerosis or the massacre in
Tianamen Square to be inescapable and unredeemable objections to
being as such? One would then be in the position of regarding one's
own life as a lucky exception to the generally problematic character
of existence.
Nietzsche formulates the thought of the eternal recurrence
indifferently in terms of individual life (GS 341) and in terms of
world history (£111, 2). Sometimes, as in section 56 of Beyond Good and
Evil, where the "world-affirming m a n " calls out " d a c a p o " to " t h e
whole piece and play," it is quite vague as to just what it is that is
to recur. This indifference and vagueness indicates, I think, that
Nietzsche believes one can will the recurrence of one's life if and only
if one can will the recurrence of the world. The wording of section
341 in The Gay Science explains, I think, why. Here, the thought of
eternal recurrence is formulated as follows:
This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more
and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every
pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably
small and great will have to return to you, all in the same succession and
sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees.
Notice that the spider and the moonlight are treated here as, like my
pains and joys, parts of my biography. This can only be a shorthand
way of saying that the experience of the spider and of the moonlight
is part of my biography. If, then, I am to will the recurrence of not
just my life but of my exact life, I must will the recurrence of all of my
knowledge of world history. But if there are any world-historical
events I cannot will to recur then I cannot will the recurrence of my
knowledge of them. To will, then, the recurrence of my exact life I
must be able to will the recurrence of all those events in world history
I know about. The thought of the recurrence of my life and of the
world as seen from my perspective are equivalent. It follows that
bringing oneself to will the recurrence of one's exact life requires the
The Gay Science 109
redemption not just of problematic events that belong to one's

biography, but of those too which do not. The artistic techniques by
means of which one discovers a personal providence must be
extended to embrace world history as a whole. 15
18 This, then, is the Dionysian solution. The riddle posed by the

existence of absurd, pointless, nauseating suffering is to be solved by
achieving the world-view of Emerson's "joyful scientist," according
to which there is, in fact, no suck suffering at all. ''The riddle", in
Wittgenstein's words (and with, I believe, essentially his senti-
ments 16 ) "does not exist" (Tractatus, 6.5). In this respect the
Dionysian and Apollonian solutions are the same. They differ only
in their methods: the Apollonian denies all knowledge of the
"questionable" in life. The Dionysian acknowledges it but, as it
were, answers the question by attaining to a view of the world " t h a t
sanctifies and calls good even the most terrible and questionable
qualities of life" {WP 1050), by performing, that is, a kind of
atheistic theodicy.
The Gay Science, as we now see, contains not just the Apollonian but
also the Dionysian solution to the Schopenhauerian riddle: a
prescription for a genuine cure rather than a brief evasion of the
problem, a recipe for a genuine, truth-accepting, lasting, Emersonian
cheerfulness. But why then is the forced uncertain, febrile gaiety of
the Apollonian solution the dominant tone in the work? Why, when
the text contains the Dionysian solution, does the Preface - which
must have the last word since it was written last - offer us ojnly the
Apollonian ?
Because, Nietzsche holds, "Nobody yet has the strength to will
the eternal recurrence" (GS 285). Section 370 makes the same point:
"Dionysian pessimism"-Nietzsche's paradoxial name for that
profoundly z/wpessimistic view of the world which acknowledges all of
the questionable in life yet finds it to be justified - is a "pessimism of
the future," achievable not by ordinary mortals but only by the
"Dionysian god and man." In other words, the Übermensch. What we
lack is the strength and more particularly the spiritual health to will
the eternal recurrence. We cannot do so because, like Zarathustra,
we are still "convalescents" (£111, 13).
19 What has health or its lack got to do with coming to a view of the
world in which the questionable is redeemed, the appearance that
I 10 Nietzsche's philosophy of art
life is a pit of reasonless pain dispelled? What, in other words, does
the Übermensch have that we lack?
Nietzsche's answer is: "energy." A "fullness," an "over-fullness of
life" an "overflowing energy that is pregnant with future." It is this
which brings it about that " T h e Dionysian god or man, cannot only
afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible
deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition, and negation. In
his case what is evil, absurd and ugly seems, as it were, permissible,
owing to an excess of procreating, fertilizing energies that can still
turn any desert into lush farmland" (GS 370). We, however, suffer,
to one degree or another, from "impoverishment of life" (ibid.). In the
Geneaology of Morals this is said to be a physiological state associated
with a coolness of the "affects," a slowness in the " t e m p o of life,"
and the absence of "certainty of life and of the future" (GM m, 25).
Why should energy be the key to willing the eternal recurrence?
And why should it be connected in some important way with the
future? What Nietzsche is confronting here, I believe, are the limits
to any redemption of the past which does not embrace the future.
There are, I think he is prepared to concede, atrocious events that
can be redeemed by nothing that is discoverable in past or present
experience. And for ordinary mortals that is the end of the matter:
the future is dark, and while it is not, perhaps, inconceivable that some
pattern in future history might present materials for the redemption
of those events, that is something of which we lack all "certainty."
Dionysian man, however, is different: he possesses such certainty.
What has this certainty, or its lack, to do with energy levels?
Nietzsche is pointing out, it seems to me, that with regard to certain
beliefs about the future it is inappropriate to regard them as based
on evidence or to demand that they should be thus based. Rather,
they are to be treated as aspects of a general orientation towards the
world that is a symptom of one's level of psychic energy. If, that is,
one's energy level is high one will feel not merely equal to whatever
exigencies may be thrown at one by fate but possessed of a surplus
of energy with which to master fate, mold it to one's will. One will
then be likely to subscribe to a set of beliefs expressing confidence in
a congruence between one's future and one's will. And by an
extension of confidence one will be likely to subscribe to a set of
more-or-less ungrounded beliefs concerning events over which, in
the normal sense, one has no personal control. A highly ebullient
Russian, for example, might (at least at the time of writing) be
The Gay Science
expected to be confident of both an orderly transition to liberal
democracy and of the continued integrity of the Soviet Union.
Those of low psychic energy, on the other hand, will feel unequal
to what fate is liable to throw at them and their vision of the future
will be (equally groundlessly) full of foreboding. Since they expect
no consolation in the future for present ills they will turn instead, in
one form or another, to other worlds. They will become " r o m a n t i c "
rather than "Dionysian" pessimists and will seek "rest, stillness,
calm seas, redemption ... through art... or intoxication, convulsions,
anesthesia and madness" (GS 370). 17 Or else, we might add, through
profound superficiality,
The Übermensch is an extreme case of the person of high energy. So
" overflowing " is she with energy that she is certain of the redemption
of presently unredeemed evils. Though she cannot always see what
these redemptions are, she has absolute faith that they will occur, an
absolute faith that enables her to " a t last cry [using Goethe's line]:
'life however it may be is g o o d ! ' " (HH1, 222). We, however, have
lived under the shadow of God for so long that we possess still a
theological cringe (see GS 285), a culturally transmitted taint of
" g u i l t " and "depression" (HH 1, 133). We lack a sense of our own
worth and power, we lack "self-love" and "self-valuation" (HH 1,
134), and cannot therefore believe in the future redemption of, as
yet, unredeemed events: because of our guilt we feel that there
cannot be redemption, that existence must be eternal " p u n i s h m e n t "
(£11, 20). As "convalescents," therefore, the only recourse for us is
profound superficiality, the remedy for convalescents. Only that can
rescue us from the riddle.
20 It may be observed at this point that someone conspicuously

unable to believe in future redemption is Nietzsche himself. In
section 343 of The Gay Science, as Schacht in the quotation with which
we began this chapter says, Nietzsche records his personal excitement
at " t h e news that 'the old god is d e a d , ' " the excitement of any
empty "horizon," of preparation for a voyage into "open sea."
What Schacht fails to mention, however, is that in the same section
Nietzsche criticizes himself for this excitement, suggesting that he is
"too much under the impression of the initial consequences of this
event, the consequences for ourselves,'" too uninvolved in the
"shadows that must soon envelop Europe." When we take into
account how much was based on the Christian God, "for example,
I 12 Nietzsche's philosophy of art
the whole of our European morality," we cannot fail to confront
" t h e long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin,
and cataclysm that is now impending... an eclipse of the sun whose
like has probably never yet occurred on earth." It is remarks of this
order (see also sec. 347) - remarks which it must be legitimate to
regard as premonitions of the First World War, just twenty-seven
years away - which set the dominant tone of book v of The Gay
Science. Not Schacht's "joyful affirmation of life" but rather a sense
of Spenglerian doom envelops it. Nietzsche has no optimism about
the visible future - is conspicuously unable to believe that events
must "either immediately or very soon after" turn out "for the
best" (GS 277) - a n d is quite silent with respect to the invisible
future. As disgust at the being and doings of the "small m a n "
prevent Zarathustra willing the eternal recurrence ( £ m, 13), so in
The Gay Science it prevents Nietzsche. At least part of what, in the
Preface, he finds refuge from in profound superficiality is that
disgust.
21 Why does Nietzsche not entertain the possibility of a third kind of

solution to the riddle, distinct from both the Apollonian and
Dionysian solutions, which consists in, though acknowledging, the
existence of unredeemed and unredeemable evil, setting it in the
context of existence as a whole which, as a whole, is seen as desirable
and worth living? Why cannot life be loved warts and all, affirmed,
that is, as a lovable whole in spite of its faults? Why cannot it be
affirmed without whitewashing of those faults, without the effort to
"call...good even the most terrible and questionable qualities of
life" (WP 1050), to pretend, that is, that they are not really faults at
all? Why, in short, is it not a sufficient response to the riddle to be,
while not able to will the recurrence of absolutely everything, yet
able to will the recurrence of most of one's life and of what one knows
of the world ?
Alexander Nehamas {Nietzsche; see ch. 5 [which presupposes ch.
3]) explains this by attributing to Nietzsche the metaphysical view
that every feature of an object or event, whether intrinsic or
relational, is essential to it. From this it follows, since everything is
related to everything, that if anything at all were to recur everything
would have to. Hence to will the recurrence of anything one must
will the recurrence of everything.
Apart from the fact that Nehamas attributes this thesis to
The Gay Science "3
Nietzsche almost entirely on the basis of unpublished material (the
one exception to this, a passage from Jârathustra, I shall return to in
a moment), I view this interpretation with disfavor because it
implicitly attributes to Nietzsche an intensional fallacy and thereby
renders his view of spiritual health the uninteresting result of
inferential error. Nehamas, that is (see p. 156), represents Nietzsche
as arguing that if (1) a person S wills the recurrence of an event E
then since (2) if E recurs then every event recurs it follows that (3)
S wills the recurrence of every event. But one might not know that
nothing can recur unless everything does. Or one might not believe
it. As a matter of fact / do not believe it: it strikes me as
metaphysically bizarre to suppose that if someone drops a bus-ticket
in Red Square just as I eat my dinner then the event of the eating
could not but have had the property of being contemporaneous with
the dropping of the bus-ticket. Hence I at least can will the
recurrence of some without willing the recurrence of every event.
Nietzsche may have toyed in private moments with the idea
Nehamas suggests. He may even, at some stage, have believed it. But
I dp not think the idea is at all relevant to our question. For it seems
to me clear that the source of Nietzsche's view that to stand in the
ideal relationship to the world is to love, will the recurrence of,
everything about it lies not in his metaphysics but in, rather, his
concept of love, his conception of what it is to accept, love, joyfully to
affirm something.
This is really made quite clear in the one published passage
Nehamas does quote (Nietzsche, p. 155) in support of his in-
terpretation. Nietzsche does indeed say, in the penultimate section of
ârathustra,18
Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you have said
yes to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamoured: if ever you
wanted one thing twice, if ever you said, "You please me, happiness! Abide
moment!" 19 Then you wanted it all back. All anew, all eternally, all
entangled, ensnared, enamoured.
But what he immediately goes on to say (a continuation not
quoted by Nehamas) is:
oh, then you loved the world. Eternal ones, love it eternally and evermore;
and to woe too, you say: go but return! For all joy wants- eternity.
All joy wants the eternity of all things, wants honey, wants dregs, wants
drunken midnight, wants tombs, wants tomb-tears' comfort, wants gilded
evening glow.
i i 4 Nietzsche's philosophy of art
The focus of the passage is thus not metaphysics but the concept
of joy. If, Nietzsche is saying, you stand in the ideal relationship to
the world then you perceive all things to be interconnected not
because they are, of metaphysical necessity, so interconnected but
rather because standing in that relationship is a matter of accepting
the totality of things as constituting a beautiful, "perfect" (ibid.)
whole of which everything is an organic part and in which
problematic events stand in redemptive relationships to ones which
are not problematic. If, Nietzsche is saying, you ever "say Yes" to
anything you must "say Yes" to everything - not on account of the
metaphysical interconnectedness of all things but simply because if you
do not "say Yes" to everything then it is not, in Nietzsche's sense, " Y e s "
that you say. " J o y , " he writes, "wants everything eternally the
s a m e " (ibid.). If that is not what one wants then one's " Y e s " to life
(the cautious, qualified discerning " Y e s " of, as Nietzsche would be
likely to say, the scholar) is not the joyful " Y e s " that Nietzsche seeks.
The search for such a " Y e s " is manifested not just in the
dithyrambic ârathustra but in The Gay Science too. Most people, he
complains in section 288, do not believe in "elevated moods" (hohe
Stimmungen). At best they believe in their lasting for a few moments,
" a t most a quarter of an hour." T o be " a human being with one
elevated feeling - to be a single great mood incarnate" has up to
now been considered " a mere dream and delightful possibility." Yet
might not history, Nietzsche speculates, one day give rise to such
beings, beings whose perpetual state is, as it were, " a continual
ascent as on stairs and at the same time a sense of resting on clouds"?
T o achieve, then, the status of Übermensch is to achieve and sustain
a condition of ecstasy (Rausch) - to be, as we used to say in the 1960s,
on a "permanent [and apparently ever-ascending] high." Now it
seems to me that Nietzsche is quite right that ecstasy is, by definition,
unqualified and unconditional. If one affirms something ecstatically,
if one loves someone or something ecstatically, then one does not love
it in spite of but rather because of its faults. Its faults, that is, to the
extent that one is aware of them, are seen as part of what one loves
about it - which is to say that they are not really faults at all but
necessary contributors to the "desirability" (WP 1041) of the whole.
The reason, therefore, that Nietzsche demands the willing of the
recurrence of everything about the world is that it alone expresses the
condition of ecstasy; and ecstasy is what he regards as the ideal relationship
to reality.2Q
The Gay Science JI
5
22 It may be noticed, en passant, that it is on account of this ideal
that, given that we are unable to achieve the Dionysian solution to
the riddle, the only alternative considered by Nietzsche is the
Apollonian. The stance of profound superficiality, that is, also yields
an ecstatic state. (As we observed earlier, Nietzsche describes not
merely Dionysian joy but also his own convalescent gaiety as a state
of "intoxication" [GS, Preface, i].) For qua inhabitant of the
condition of profound superficiality, one affirms, like Dionysian
man, everything in one's world; one loves one's fate. T h e only
difference between this and the Dionysian state is that what one
loves is a fake fate. Nietzsche's valuation of ecstasy is thus so high
that, so he believes, if one is unable to affirm everything, the only
viable response is to eliminate the irremediably unlovable from one's
world. La gay a scienza is a kind of parody of willing the eternal
recurrence.
23 Why does Nietzsche believe ecstasy to be the ideal relationship to

the world? Because, in a word, he wants something to worship and is
aware once again, as he was in The Birth of Tragedy (see ch. 2, sec.
14), that a sense of the holy, of the sacred is a fundamental human
need. If the old God is dead then nature herself must be made divine,
"perfect" (Z IV> l9)- The non-ecstatic affirmation of life holds no
interest for Nietzsche since it has no bearing on his problem; the
problem of proving that God, after all, exists. Less provocatively: the
problem of achieving a state of mind, "feel[ing] oneself 'in
heaven,' ' e t e r n a l ' " (A 33), in which a naturalized object is the
target of all those feelings and attitudes that used to be directed
towards the (no longer believable) transcendent. 21
24 Suppose one were to dispute Nietzsche's claim that his Dionysian

" p a n t h e i s m " (WP 1050) constitutes the ideal stance towards the
world. He would reply that what makes it the ideal stance is that it
is the stance you would adopt if you did not suffer from diminished
psychic energy. It is, he would claim, the ideal relationship to the
world because it is that relationship we would adopt if we were fully
healthy. Ecstatic affirmation is the ideal because it is the expression
of the ideal of spiritual health.
Here, however, it needs to be pointed out that the idea that the
person of "overflowing" energy will have faith in the future
redemption of all events which are, to date, unredeemed is, as so
n6 Nietzsche's philosophy of art
often with Nietzsche, an exaggeration of a genuine insight. For while
it is true that the energetic, healthy person will tend to subscribe to
a set of beliefs that express her excitement about and confidence in
the future, there is no reason at all to demand that this set should
include anything as comprehensive as the redemption of each and
every hitherto unredeemed event. One can, in Nietzsche's language,
be full of an overflowing desire for "destruction, for change, for
future, for becoming" (GS 370) without (unless one has, like Nietzsche,
a religious need to satisfy) at all believing in the redemption of all of
the past. It is a truism that many people look forward to the future
precisely because they believe that many of the unacceptable aspects
of the past will be, not redeemed, but rather eliminated. Nietzsche
tries to suggest that if a desire for becoming is of this character then
it expresses " t h e hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and
under-privileged who destroy, must destroy, because what exists,
indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes t h e m " (ibid.),
But, again, while this psychology of socialism is penetrating, it is also
exaggerated. One can deplore absolutely certain states of affairs and
hope for (and believe in) their elimination from the future without
necessarily being consumed by sick-making resentment towards the
perpetrators of those conditions.
25 T o summarize: Nietzsche suggests, it appears, that failure to will

the eternal recurrence, failure to believe in the future redemption of
all that appears at present as unredeemed evil, indicates a lack of
psychic energy and constitutes, therefore, a critique of one's state of
spiritual health. Against this, however, I have suggested that there
is no reason to suppose that that general confidence in the future
which, in normal circumstances, plausibly is implied by a high level
of psychic energy must include faith in the future justification of
every "questionable" aspect of the past. We have therefore no
reason to accept the capacity to will the eternal recurrence as a
condition of spiritual health. Neither, therefore, do we, lacking that
capacity, have a motive to seek a surrogate in the life of profound
superficiality. We are not, in short, compelled to accept the equation
of psychic health with ecstasy. The psychology of the non-ecstatic
life affirmer may be dull. But there is no reason to accept that it must
be diseased.
CHAPTER 5
Twilight of the Idols
Nietzsche's final year of sanity, 1888, was a time of extraordinary

productivity. In it he wrote four major works, The Case of Wagner,
Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ, and Ecce Homo, as well as
compiling Nietzsche Contra Wagner out of earlier writings 1 and
producing a large amount of the JSfachlass material published
posthumously as The Will to Power. He must have written, even more
than in previous years, in an extraordinary frenzy of productivity.
The portrait of the artist as creating out of a state of frenzy (Rausch)
painted, as we will see, in Twilight of the Idols, must be amongst other
things a self-portrait.
The works of 1888 hang together in a closely coherent way so that
collectively they can be taken to constitute Nietzsche's final thoughts
about art and about its relation to life. The unity which they form
is, it seems to me, one that is separate from that constituted by The
Gay Science and the works discussed with it in the last chapter.
Though it would be aesthetically pleasing for Nietzsche's output to
fall, like Gaul, into three parts (early, middle, and late), actually, it
seems to me, it falls into four. In a way, though, the tripartite
structure is preserved since, so I shall argue, Nietzsche's final
account of the relation between art and life constitutes a return to his
first.
2 Two contrasts in particular separated the works of 1888 from The

Gay Science. First, a renewed sense of the ultimate importance of the
artist and of art: the " a r t of works of art," as much as that which has
one's life as its product. None of the antagonism to the former
expressed in the "positivistic" period and still preserved to some
extent in The Gay Science ("we should learn from artists while being
wiser than they are in other matters. For with them [their] ...subtle
power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but
117
n8 Nietzsche's philosophy of art
we want to be poets of our lives" [GS 299]) is present in the works
of 1888. Instead art, literal art, is seen as the "great stimulus to life"
( 7 7 ix, 24) and a cause of health (CW 3), while the "psychology of
the artist" is seen as the epitome of healthy life-affirmation ( 7 7 i x ,
8-9, x, 4-5).*That artists are by our standards typically "sick" is
viewed, in The Will to Power, as a criticism not of the artist but of our
criteria of health (812).
The fact is that in 1888 art and its creators are restored to their
former glory: the glory they possessed in The Birth of Tragedy. It
seems to me completely wrong to suggest, as does Michael Tanner, 2
that Nietzsche spent the rest of his life regretting his characterization
of art in The Birth of Tragedy as " t h e highest task and truly
metaphysical activity of this life" or to suggest, as does Richard
Shacht, that "Nietzsche's enthusiasm for art in The Birth of Tragedy
was so great that further reflection could only have tempered it - as
it in fact did." 3 After The Birth Nietzsche did indeed have, as Schacht
suggests "second thoughts about a r t " (ibid.). But he also had third
and fourth thoughts, and the fourth ones return, in their esteem for
art, to the first. To be sure, it is no longer Wagner who sits upon the
throne of art. But the throne remains, occupied now by the likes of
Hafiz, Raphael, Rubens, Goethe, Bizet, and, once again, the Greek
tragedians.
The second and connected contrast is that the "Dionysian"
attitude to life, regarded in The Gay Science as beyond the power of
ordinary mortals, is viewed in 1888 as achievable, indeed achieved,
by at least the artist ( 7 7 i x , 8, x, 5). The sense of The Gay Science that
we are all "convalescents" disappears in Nietzsche's final year. (In
fact, however, this apparently optimistic turn in Nietzsche's thought
is an illusion; for, so I shall argue, the only reason the Dionysian
condition is viewed as achievable is that, without Nietzsche properly
noticing it, the concept of what constitutes it has altered.)
3 According to Kant, aesthetic pleasure is "disinterested. The

beautiful, he says, is that which gives pleasure " a p a r t from any
interest" (Critique of Judgment, sec. 5). Schopenhauer, as we saw in
chapter 1, takes over this idea and interprets it in his own way.
Disinterestedness (or "objectivity," as he also calls it), while for
Kant a necessary mark of aesthetic pleasure, is not its object. The
object, that in which we take pleasure, is a kind of "free" orderliness,
the kind of orderliness we recognize in an object of perception when
Twilight of the Idols "9
we bring it under a concept but which, in the case of the beautiful,
is perceived without bringing the object under any concept. For
Schopenhauer, however, the object of pleasure is one's own state of
disinterestedness. In the aesthetic state what one takes pleasure in 4 is
one's freedom from the "vile [schnöde] pressure of the will." One's
pleasure consists in experiencing the " S a b b a t h of the penal servitude
of willing" (WR 1, 196). The significance of this pleasure, for
Schopenhauer, is that it is a brief intimation of " h o w blessed must
be the life of a man in whom the will is silenced not for a few
moments, as in the enjoyment of the beautiful, but for ever" (WR 1,
p. 390). Art, in other words, is an intimation of, a pointer towards,
the " c o r r e c t " stance to life and the world, asceticism: the denial of
the will and the world. 5
Nietzsche refers to Schopenhauer's account of the aesthetic state in
sections 21-2 of the part of Twilight of the Idols called "Skirmishes of
an untimely m a n " - h i s last sustained (published) discussion of art
and the heart of the material we will consider in this chapter. He
speaks of Schopenhauer's "melancholy fervor" in describing the
beautiful, observing correctly that Schopenhauer sees it as " a bridge
on which one will... develop a thirst to go further... a momentary
redemption from the 'will' - a lure to eternal redemption" ( 7 7 r x ,
22).
Schopenhauer's representation of art as a pointer to asceticism
provides the motive for Nietzsche's attack upon the K a n t -
Schopenhauer (but mainly Schopenhauer) account of "the aesthetic
state" (WP 801). Art, he holds, far from serving " t h e ascetic ideal,"
is its fundamental opponent (GM m, 25). Schopenhauerian
aesthetics is a "maliciously ingenious" attempt to stand the truth on
its head, to "adduce in favour of a nihilistic total depreciation of
life" precisely the great "counter-instance," the great self-affirm-
ation of the "will to live," life's form of exuberance ( 7 7 i x , 21). The
defense of this latter thesis - the essentially life-affirming character of
art - is the fundamental concern of Nietzsche's philosophy of art
during his final productive year and constitutes the central topic of
this chapter.
4 Nietzsche's attack upon the attempt to link disinterestedness to the

aesthetic state goes back to ârathustra and The Genealogy of Morals.
In the latter he attributes the creation of the "fat worm of error"
which is the disinterestedness theory to the fact that Kant "like all
philosophers instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the
point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the
beautiful purely from that of the 'spectator,' and unconsciously
introduced the 'spectator 5 into the concept 'beautiful'" (GMin, 6).
No artist, Nietzsche continues, could possibly have done this. Take,
for example, Stendhal, who calls the beautiful " a promise of
happiness." To him, far from Schopenhauerian will-lessness, " t h e
fact seems to be precisely that the beautiful arouses the will
('interestedness')" (ibid.).
A question that needs to be raised at this point, is why, in
Nietzsche's view, aesthetics must be done only from the artist's point
of view. Why should it not be done from both perspectives? Why
should there not be both a spectator's aesthetics and a creator's so
that Kant and Stendhal could both be right about their respective
subject-matters?
The answer is that, according to Nietzsche, that state which is,
properly, the product of art is identical in kind with the state that
produces it. This assumption is implicit in the reference to Stendhal
as a "genuine spectator and artist" (ibid.) - K a n t , he says, lacking
the nature of the latter, lacking "personal...vivid authentic
experiences, desires, surprises, and delights in the realm of the
beautiful" (ibid.), fails to count as the former - and is explicit in
various remarks in The Will to Power. In section 801, for example, he
writes that " t h e aesthetic state" cannot appear in " t h e sober, the
weary, the exhausted, the dried up (e.g. scholars)." They, he
continues, "can receive nothing from art because they do not possess
the primary artistic force... whoever cannot give also receives
nothing." And in section 821, even more explicitly, he claims that
" t h e effect of works of art is to excite the state that creates art."6 There
is, in short, a psychological condition that is uniquely identifiable as
" the aesthetic state, a state that is common to the creator of art and
the " g e n u i n e " spectator. The question of its nature constitutes "the
aesthetic problem.
5 Nietzsche's claim is that if we examine " t h e aesthetic state" from

the correct, that is the creator's, viewpoint we will see that it cannot
possibly be a state of disinterestedness. Why not? Nietzsche tries to
explain this in the somewhat labored section of ârathustra called
" O n Immaculate Perception" (£11, 15). Here he makes two claims.
First, that " p u r e perceivers" are secret "lechers." Their "spirit" has
Twilight of the Idols 121
been persuaded that " t o look at life without desire and not, like a
dog, with one's tongue hanging o u t " is best; but not their "entrails."
They are, therefore, "sentimental hypocrites... lechers" who lack
"innocence" in their desire for immaculate perception, their desire
to be "nothing but a mirror." This surely, is another presentation of
the psychoanalysis of Schopenhauer (see n. 5 above), the theory that
his "interest" in disinterested is in using it "like lupulin 7 or
c a m p h o r " [GM m, 6) as an antidote to the "vile urgency" of sexual
desire.
Nietzsche's second claim is that pure perceivers are barren. It is
not as "creators," not as the sun but rather as the moon, that they
"love the earth": they will never "give birth." T o think that their
ernasculated leer constitutes the experience of the beautiful,
continues Nietzsche, is a travesty. Where really is beauty? "Where
I must will with all my will: where I must love and perish that an
image may not remain a mere image." A similar connecting of the
beautiful with sex and reproduction occurs in Twilight of the Idols:
" b e a u t y , " he says there, "incites procreation" ( 7 7 i x , 22).
Nietzsche's objection to the disinterestedness theory is, itiseems to
me, a simple one: disinterested, will-less contemplation is ncit a state
out of which anything is created. Yet art, the state which produces
it, essentially is creative. Hence "objectivity, mirroring, suspended
will" are "inartistic states" (WP 812). Art, in short, is not
contemplation but action. Nietzsche's activist vocabulary for talking
about artists - he refers to them as creators, makers, doers, violators and
as rapists ( 7 7 ix, 8) - continually emphasizes this. And it is this
perspective on the artist that provides the basis for the inclusion
of conquerors and builders of states and empires among the ranks of
" a r t i s t s " : men possessed of the artist's "terrible...egoism," artists
of "violence" (GM 11, 17).
6 One might offer, on Schopenhauer's behalf, the following kind of

defense of the role of immaculate perception in the genesis of art. Of
course, one might say, artists are doers; for art essentially involves the
production of artworks and that of course demands action and the
will. This much is obvious. But these truisms, one might continue,
pertain only to the executive phase of the process that leads to the birth
of the artwork. Distinct and separable from this in the process that
is the creation of (at least good) art is a contemplative phase. It is this,
and this alone, that is claimed to be disinterested. Moreover, if the
aesthetic state is held to be common to both artist and audience then,
since (typically) the audience is not prompted by the artwork to the
production of further artworks, we ought to restrict the application
of that phrase to the contemplative phase of the productive process.
To understand the kind of reply Nietzsche would give to this
defense of disinterestedness we need to recall (see ch. , sec. 6 above)
that in Schopenhauer's account the aesthetic state is a condition of
pure passivity. This conception is implicit in Schopenhauer's very
methodology for elucidating the character of the aesthetic state. In
ordinary perception, as he describes it, the mind is active, constantly
selecting information that is of interest to the will, rejecting that
which is not. And our emotions, too, are continually at work
"colouring" perception - in bright hues when things go well for the
will, in dark ones when they go badly. The aesthetic state is
conceived, negatively, as the cessation of all this activity. One
escapes the perception-molding {creative, let it be noted) effects of the
will and exists as a " p u r e , " "objective," "clear mirror" of the object
{WR i, 178-9). The mind becomes, as it were, a reflecting tabula rasa
that registers without any distortion, selection, or comment that
which is objectively given. One might compare Schopenhauer in his
conception of the aesthetic state to the Counter-Reformation
Pyrrhonists such as Erasmus who used the arguments of classical
skepticism as a technique for clearing the mind of human pride and
pretension so that it could become receptive to the implantation of
true knowledge by God. This comparison is by no means fanciful
since Schopenhauer says of that insight into the true nature of the
world that comes with the aesthetic state that it is "independent of
free choice... not to be forcibly arrived at by intention or design but
comes suddenly as if flying in form without... [as it were an] effect of
grace" {WR 1, p. 404).
On the other hand, however, Schopenhauer also holds, as we saw
(ch. , sec. 7), that in the aesthetic state we experience the object as
" I d e a , " as beautiful, and that this is a matter of experiencing the
"significant form," that which is essential and universal in a
particular individual. And this, it seems clear, is inconsistent with
the idea of the aesthetic subject as pure receptivity, or mere mirror.
For what it demands of the subject is activity, selecting a particular
Gestalt upon an object, sorting things into figure and ground and so
on. This inconsistency manifests itself in a tension between
Schopenhauer's view that (1) art deals in essences, that the " Platonic
I d e a " is the content of art, the artist's vision pared down to just that
which is universal in an object and (2) his account of the

unparaphrasability of the content of a r t - " w e are entirely satisfied
by the impression of a work of art only when it leaves behind
something... we cannot bring down to the distinctness of a concept"
(WR 11, pp. 408-9) - in terms of the idea that the mirror-like quality
of the aesthetic mind means that the content of aesthetic vision is as
infinitely rich in aspect and detail as is the object itself (ibid.).
Nietzsche's thoughts about art and the beautiful are consonant
with his second strand in Schopenhauer's thought. The beautiful, he
insists, is made, not discovered. "Beauty in itself" is, he says, an
empty phrase ( 7 7 i x , 19): one makes things beautiful by "enriching
everything out of one's own fullness," "transforming things until
they mirror [one's own] perfection" ( 7 7 i x , 9). "This having to
transform into perfection i s - a r t " (ibid.). Out of one's "fullness"
one lends to things, out forces them to accept from us, one violates them -
this process is called idealising. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealising
does not consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty
and inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring
out the main features so that the others disappear in the process. (77 ix, 8)
The point here, in the last two sentences, is the rejection of the notion
that the experience of the beautiful can be divided up into (1) a
phase of pure receptivity and (2) a will-governed phase in which one
subtracts, erases, that which obscures or is irrelevant to " t h e main
features." If, as both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer agree, ex-
periencing the beautiful is experiencing "significant form," then
being significantly structured is how one's experience is from the
start. If, to employ an analogy, one sees one's lover across a crowded
room one does not observe first a sea of faces and then attach the
predicate "nonlover" to all but one. Rather one sees the lover and
simultaneously all the other faces simply disappear from con-
sciousness. The lover becomes in Wittgenstein's phrase (Notebooks
igi4~i6, p. 83) the whole of " m y world."
Nietzsche is certainly right that " m i r r o r i n g " in the sense of pure
passivity is an "inartistic state." Conceived as pure passivity the
aesthetic state is a fiction. In fact, as Kant pointed out, there is no
consciousness of any kind with respect to which the mind is a tabula
rasa. The subject of aesthetic experience, whether it be the creator of
art Or the spectator (who must also, though perhaps with help from
the artwork, impose a construction upon the object of experience),
must always " d o " things to, " a c t " upon the object.
But does this mean that the will, interestedness in Schopenhauer's

sense, is necessarily involved in the state out of which art grows? Let
us remind ourselves, firstly, of what Schopenhauer means by saying
that in the aesthetic state we cease to view objects " i n relation to the
will" (see ch. , sec. 6). In ordinary perception, he holds, we cannot
but view objects as potential satisfiers or else frustrators of our
desires, promoters or threats to our well-being. Such "interested-
ness" is not a view of things that is added to one's initial perception
but is, rather, built into ordinary perceptual experience itself.
Ordinarily, we perceive objects under concepts that relate them
immediately to our "subjective" interests:
In the immediate perception of the world and of life we consider things as
a rule... according to their relative... essence and existence. For example,
we regard houses, ships, machines, and the like with the idea of their
purpose and their suitability therefore; human beings with the idea of their
relation to us, if they have any, and then according to their position and
vocation, perhaps judging their fitness for it, and so on. (WR n, p. 372)
Ordinarily, in short, we are aware of objects only under "subjective"
concepts - " h a m m e r , " "boss," "servant," "real estate," "tor-
nado," " w a r , " and so on - concepts that relate them to our own
practical needs. And we perceive in objects only that which so relates
them: to the traveler in a hurry the beautiful Rhine bridge appears
as little more than a dash intersecting with a stroke (WR 11, 381).
In describing aesthetic perception as disinterested Schopenhauer
means that in the aesthetic state these normal categories of
perception are suspended, thereby enabling us to become alive to
usually unnoticed aspects and construals of objects: in Nietzschean
language, the object undergoes "transfiguration." And this, surely,
is essential to (good) art. Schopenhauer says that the concept, in art,
is "eternally barren and unproductive" (WR 1, 235), that art which
has a conceptual origin is always stiff, lifeless, and second-rate. This
does not seem to me quite correct. If I become aware of the light
from the street-lamps in the snow-thick night air as a double row of
imposing, semi-transparent pyramids then my normal account of
what I see - my normal account of figure and ground, of what are
the " things" in my field of vision - has been dislocated; but it is not
the case that my experience has become nonconceptual. It is rather
that tired old routines, the cliches of vision, have been replaced by
new concepts, by a novel - and hence pleasurable - conceptuali-
zation of the situation. Still, Schopenhauer's main point, the
demand for the dislocation of the normal, interested categories of

perception, is surely correct. It constitutes, I think, the core of truth
in the much-abused notion that art requires an " innocent eye."
It seems to me, therefore, that Schopenhauer's central point is
correct. Though wrong to regard the aesthetic state as a condition of
absolute passivity, he is correct in seeing that art demands the
suspension of our normal, interested categories of perception. And
this suspension does, in fact, entail a kind of passivity, for the
suspension of interested concepts means, of course, the suspension of
our normal anxious, planning, scheming, manipulative stance to the
world. In the aesthetic state one does not will. Though one is active,
one does not act.
7 Nietzsche, then, though his objections to the picture of the

aesthetic perceiver as in a condition of absolute passivity are well
taken, is mistaken in thinking that the correct, activist view
invalidates Schopenhauer's point that aesthetic perception is
disinterested. In a way, however, this mistake does not matter to the
overall structure of his argument for the life-affirming character of
art. For the next stage in the argument presupposes only the falsity
of the absolute passivity account of the aesthetic state. Given, that is,
the creative role of the perceiver in the transfiguration of the object
of aesthetic perception, it becomes appropriate to inquire into the
kind of conditions in the perceiver that brings this transfiguration
about. What, Nietzsche asks, constitutes the "psychology of the
artist" ( 7 7 i x , 8)?
" I f there is to be art," he replies, " a n y aesthetic doing and seeing,
one physiological condition is indispensable": Rausch, "intoxi-
cation-" or, as Kaufmann in this passage in which Nietzsche is
concerned to emphasize the active character of art rather better
translates it, "frenzy" [ibid.). What is essential in this frenzy,
Nietzsche continues,
is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. Out of this Feeling one lends
to things, out forces them to accept from us, one violates them - this process
is called idealising. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealising does not
consist, as is commonly held, in subtracting or discounting the petty and
inconsequential. What is decisive is rather a tremendous drive to bring out
[ein ungeheures Heraustreiben] the main features so that the others disappear
in the process, (ibid.)
In sections 10 and 11 of "Skirmishes of an untimely m a n "
Nietzsche makes an important revision to the conception of the
Apollonian-Dionysian distinction as presented in The Birth of
Tragedy. There, as we saw, "intoxication" was associated exclusively
with the Dionysian and was opposed to Apollonian " d r e a m s " (see
ch. 2, sec. 7). Now, however, both are to be "conceived as kinds of
Rausch" (TI rx, 10). The difference, now, is only that in the
Apollonian state Rausch "excites above all the eye so that it gains the
power of vision," whereas in the Dionysian state " the whole affective
system is excited and enhanced: so that it discharges all its means of
expression at once and drives forth the power of representation,
imitation, transfiguration, transformation 8 and every kind of
mimicking and acting" (ibid.). Music is still given a special
association with the Dionysian, being conceived as an immobili-
zation of all the manifestations of Dionysian intoxication save for
song: a kind of repressed dance or, more exactly, Gesamtkunstwerk.
The importance of this recasting of the Apollonian-Dionysian
dichotomy as different in species (of Rausch) rather than in kind is
that it enables Nietzsche to inquire into the psychology of the artist,
to give a unified account of the genesis of all (good) art. The view of
art as growing out of Rausch gains comprehensiveness.
8 What kind of Rausch is it that constitutes the art-generating state?

In the Genealogy of Morals (GM in, 6), spurred on by the desire to
adopt a position " a n t i p o d a l " to that of Schopenhauer (whom,
remember, Nietzsche psychoanalyses as finding in the aesthetic state
an escape from the guilty torments of the sexual will), he flirts in a
rather indistinct way with the idea that specifically sexual in-
toxication is the ground of art: Pygmalion, he suggests, was not an
"unaesthetic man," and the "sensual" Stendhal's view that " t h e
beautiful promises happiness" 9 is intimated by Nietzsche to be the
view that the beautiful is a promise of sexual happiness.
In The Will to Power he is much more direct: "without a certain
overheating of the sexual system a Raphael is unthinkable" (800);
and again: " T h e demand for art and beauty is an indirect demand
for the ecstasies of sexuality " (805). In Twilight of the Idols he returns
to a more indistinct, flirtatious position, inviting us to embrace the
idea that art is universally sexual in origin without actually affirming
it. He reports Plato as saying that if there had been no beautiful
youths in Athens there would have been no Platonic philosophy.
The art-form constituted by the Platonic dialogues as well as the
culture of classical France at least, he suggests, "grew on the soil of
sexual interest." He also asks us to consider the function of " beauty

in tone, colour, fragrance [ a n d ] . . . rhythmic movement in n a t u r e "
( 7 7 ix, 22, 23).
Nietzsche does not, of course, maintain that art is the natural
expression of sexual excitement. The idea he entertains, rather, is
that it is its sublimated or, to use his favored term, " spiritualised " ( 7 7
v, 2) expression. He quotes with approval Plato's remark that "all
beauty incites procreation from the most sensual up to the most
spiritual" ( 7 7 i x , 22), suggesting, obviously, that art belongs at the
spiritual end of this continuum. In The Will to Power again the
sublimation thesis is expressed in a much more direct and
unequivocal way: " T h e force that one expends in artistic conception
is the same kind as that expended in the sexual act: there is only one
kind of force. An artist betrays himself if he succumbs here, if he
squanders himself h e r e " (WP 815); and again: " M a k i n g music is
another way of making children; chastity is merely the economy of
the artist" (WP 800).
9 What is it that inclines Nietzsche to the view that art is sublimated

sexuality? To understand this we need first to remember that the
central, all-important thesis Nietzsche wishes to establish in his final
meditations upon art is that it is of its essence to affirm, "say Yes
to," life. Art, he says in Twilight of the Idols, is " t r a n s f o r m i n g things]
into perfection" (TI ix, 9). In The Will to Power he writes, more
expansively:
What is essential in art remains its perfection of existence, its production of
perfection and plenitude: art is essentially affirmation, blessing, deification of
existence. What does a pessimistic art signify ? Is that not a contradiction ? -
Yes. - Schopenhauer is wrong when he says that certain works of art serve
pessimism. (WP 821)
And in a similar vein he describes " t h e ugly" as " t h e contradiction
to art, that which is excluded from a r t " (WP 809). In Twilight this
view of art is turned into a critique of the Aesthetic Movement:
Lart pour I'art. The fight against purpose in art is always a fight against the
moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. Uart pour
I"art means, "The devil take mortality!" But even this hostility still betrays
the overpowering force of the prejudice. When the purpose of moral
preaching and of improving man has been excluded from art, it still does
not follow by any means that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless
- in short, Vart pour Vart a worm chewing its own tail. " Rather no purpose
at all than a moral purpose!" - that is the talk of mere passion. A
psychologist, on the other hand, asks: what does all art do? does it not
praise? glorify? choose? prefer? With all this it strengthens or weakens
certain valuations. Is this merely a "moreover"? an accident? something
in which the artist's instinct has no share? Or is it not the very
presupposition of the artist's ability? Does his basic instinct aim at art, or
rather at the sense of art, at life? at a desirability of life? Art is the great
stimulus to life: how could one understand it as purposeless, as aimless, as
rart pour Tart? (77rx, 24)
Notice that in this passage the essentially affirmative character of

art stands revealed as a normative thesis: the artist's basic instinct must
" a i m at life," otherwise he is not, properly speaking, an artist at all.
Of course, says Nietzsche, history is rich in examples of, in the
descriptive sense, art produced out of the "opposite state," a life-
denying psychology: all art, for example, produced by the "genuine
Christian." Normatively speaking, however, what such people
produce is not art but rather "anti-artistry." Let us not, he adds, be
"childish" and offer Raphael as a counterinstance. " R a p h a e l said
Yes, Raphael did Yes: consequently Raphael was no Christian" ( 7 7
ix, 9).
Now one of Nietzsche's central techniques for persuading us of the
life-affirmative character of all (good) art - this is what prompts his
interest in the "psychology of the artist" - is to present what we are
to recognize as a paradigm of the psychological state out of which the
truly great artist creates. That paradigm state is Rausch. But in such
a state Nietzsche, as we have seen, claims, one idealizes, perfects,
glorifies, deifies, beautifies. Hence art affirms.
But why should we accept that the world perceived in a state of
Rausch is necessarily a world perfected? It is in answer to this
question that the idea that the artist's Rausch has a specifically
sexual character proves attractive. No doubt reflection upon his own
sources of creativity had something to do with giving the idea a
certain plausibility for him. Nietzsche's suggestion that " a n artist
betrays himself" if he squanders his energy in the sexual act (WP
815) has an unmistakable air of self-justification, of compensating for
his own limited and unhappy excursions into the domain of real sex.
But mainly it seems that it is the appropriateness of the idea of a
sexual genesis to Nietzsche's conviction as to the essentially
affirmative character of art that attracted him to the hypothesis.
T h a t is, art, Nietzsche believes, essentially transfigures, perfects,
beautifies, idealizes. But this is just what sexual love does:
On the genesis of art. - That making perfect, seeing as perfect which

characterises the cerebal system bursting with sexual energy (evening with
the beloved, the smallest chance occurrences transfigured, life a succession
of sublime things, "the misfortune of the unfortunate lover worth more
than anything else"). (WP 805)
And again:
sensuality in its disguises... (3) in art, as the "embellishing" power: as man

sees woman and, as it were, makes her a present of everything excellent, so
the sensuality of the artist puts into one object everything else that he
honours and esteems - in this way he perfects an object ("idealises" it). (WP
806)
Thus, such seems to be the idea to which Nietzsche is attracted, the

notion that art is sublimated sexuality is true because it accounts for
its essentially transfiguring, affirmative character,
10 But of course an argument of this character renders Nietzsche's

position implicitly circular. That is, art, we are asked to believe,
paradigmatically idealizes reality because it is the product of sexual
intoxication. But when we ask why we should believe art to have
such an origin all we are offered is the claim that art idealizes and
that the postulation of a sexual origin provides a plausible
explanation of this phenomenon. It should be noticed that, apart
from autobiographical and anecdotal reflections (highly suspect
reflections - Bach produced not only a large number of cantatas but
also twenty-three children), Nietzsche provides no argument for the
hypothesis of the sexual origin of art other than its power to explain
its supposed idealizing character.
It is important to observe here that the resemblance between the
Nietzschean view we have been considering and that of Freud is only
superficial. Freud, that is, the earlier Freud at least, held the theory
that sexual energy is the only kind of energy there is so that, for him,
any nonsexual act is a sublimation. T h a t art is sublimated sexuality
is just a special case of the view that everything is sublimated sexuality.
But this is not Nietzsche's view. In spite of The Will to Power's " T h e
force that one expends in the artistic conception is the same as that
expended in the sexual act: there is only one kind of force" (WP
815), the published works of the later Nietzsche acknowledge a
multiplicity of primal drives. 10 In Twilight, for example, whereas
" l o v e " is a " spiritualisation of sensuality," "another triumph is our
spiritualisation of hostility" into, for example, politics (TI v, 3).
Unlike Freud, therefore, Nietzsche has no general theory of behavior
of which the sexual origin of art is a specific application. The sole
argument for such an origin rests on Nietzsche's claim that art
idealizes its content. This is what threatens the circularity in
Nietzsche's thought.
It is doubtless the recognition of this threat which, in the
published works, leads Nietzsche to flirt with, rather than to
embrace, the thesis of the exclusively sexual origin of art (though he
is not above using the suggestion of such a thesis, rhetorically, to
manipulate us into accepting the life-affirming paradigm for art).
And actually, when he comes to consider the "psychology of the
artist" as such, he rejects the thesis allowing a multiplicity of types of
Rausch to find sublimated expression in art:
If there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition

is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of
the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however
diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this; above all, the
frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy.
Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy
of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy
of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction; the frenzy under certain meteorological
influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of
narcotics; and finally the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. (TYrx,
8)
11 What then remains of the thesis of the life-affirming character of

art? It seems to me, first of all, that Nietzsche is quite right in holding
Rausch, psychic frenzy, to be the essential psychological condition of
the creation of art; for it is this that generates the energy necessary
to disrupt and dislodge the routine cliches of "interested"
perception. And, in a sense, it seems to me that Nietzsche is also
correct to insist that Rausch "idealises," that is "brings out the main
features" (ibid.), in the object of perception. But once we
acknowledge the truth that not merely sexual but many other kinds
of emotional excitement can produce a transformation of perception,
the thesis that Rausch, and hence art, idealizes in Nietzsche's sense
according to which idealization is equivalent to beautification or perfecting,
becomes extremely problematic. In states of anger, cruelty, or fear
for example, a particular Gestalt upon the world is constructed -
Twilight of the Idols l
3*
confronting a maniac, our focus is likely to contract to little more than
the knife gleaming in his hand (cf. Schopenhauer's remarks on how
the will "colours" the world quoted in section 6 above) - but there
seems no reason to suppose that beautification of the object of
perception will occur in these cases. I conclude that Nietzsche offers
no compelling argument that will take us from contemplation of the
psychological origin of art to the conclusion that it is essentially life-
affirming.
12 Nietzsche has, however, a different way of defending the thesis:

the demonstration that prima facie difficulties for the thesis are not
really difficulties at all. With somewhat uncharacteristic circum-
spection he recognizes that such difficulties do indeed exist. Art, he
says, is " t h e great stimulus to life." Yet
one question remains: art also makes apparent much that is ugly, hard and
questionable in life: does it not thereby spoil life for us? And indeed there
have been philosophers who attributed this sense to it: "liberation from the
will" was what Schopenhauer taught as the overall end of art; and with
admiration he found the great utility of tragedy in "evoking resignation."
But this, as I have already suggested, is the pessimists' perspective and "evil
eye." (77ix, 24)
Nietzsche acknowledges two kinds of art that might appear to "spoil

life " : " naturalism " in the sense of the term introduced by Zola and,
as just mentioned, tragedy.
In section 809 of The Will to Power', as we saw, Nietzsche describes
ugliness as " t h e contradiction of art." "All art," he claims, "works
tonically." But the effect of the ugly is "depressing." In section 802,
however, the ugly is, more plausibly, allowed a certain place in art.
It is allowed a place because Nietzsche perceives that in certain cases
even ugliness can work as " a n enhancement of the feeling of life, a
stimulant to it." He distinguishes two such cases: ugliness can be a
stimulant "insofar as it... communicates something of the artists'
victorious energy which has become master of this ugliness and
awfulness; or insofar as it mildly excites in us the pleasure of
cruelty." In general terms, it may be said that Nietzsche seeks to
accommodate tragedy and naturalism to his thesis of the life-
affirming character of art by exhibiting tragedy as a case of the
former kind of " stimulating" ugliness, naturalism as a case of the
latter. I turn first to his discussion of naturalism.
13 How is Zola's ugliness, his portrait of urban squalor and
destitution, to be seen as life-affirming? Nietzsche writes: " A r t
affirms. J o b affirms. - B u t Zola? But the Goncourts? - The things
they display are ugly: but that they display them comes from their
pleasure in the ugly" (WP 821). Since " t h e effect of works of art is to
excite the state that creates a r t " (ibid.), it follows that, in Nietzsche's
view, such pleasure not only produces but is produced by the novels
of naturalism.
What is " pleasure in the ugly " ? Presumably, it is the same as " the
pleasure of cruelty" mentioned in the previous section and the
"frenzy of cruelty " which appeared in section 10 as one of the forms
of Rausch whose sublimation can be art. Nietzsche in his reflections
on naturalism is reminding us, as he did in the second essay in the
Genealogy of Morals, that Schadenfreude, the taking of pleasure in the
sight of the suffering of others (and even, on occasion, of one's own),
is a primal element in human nature. In the old days, he there
claims, before men became ashamed of their cruelty, suffering was
seen as " a n enchantment of the first order, a genuine seduction to
life":
With what eyes do you think Homer made his gods look down upon the
destinies of men? What was the ultimate meaning of the Trojan Wars and
other such tragic errors? There can be no doubt whatever: they were
intended as festival plays for the gods; and insofar as the poet in these matters
was of a more "godlike" disposition than other men, no doubt also as
festival plays for the poets. (GM 11, 7)
Thus Homer and now, Nietzsche claims, Zola too. Zola's joy in
creation is the joy of his surrogate satisfaction of the impulse to cause
and witness pain. And of such a character, too, is the satisfaction we
derive from reading Zola.
14 Is Zola really thus pornographic; a pulp, sex-and-violence novel

given a veneer of respectability by the Penguin on the outer cover?
This, surely, is a misrepresentation of absurd proportions. (As not
infrequently happens, Nietzsche's enthusiasm for a theory has
temporarily blinded his normally acute perception of literary
reality.) What he has willfully blinded himself to is the fact that Zola,
like the Goncourts or Dickens, was a social reformer, a socialist. His
response to the " u g l y " was not - not, at least, qua artist - pleasure
but outrage (his novels were criticized by Marx and Engels as too
overt, too unsubtle, a species of socialist propaganda), and that, of
course, is the response he intends to evoke in the reader.
It is instructive to note that Nietzsche not only produces this really
quite stupid account of Zola (though he did not, it must be
remembered, publish it) but has, at his disposal, a theory of art
which fits the case of Zola perfectly. I have in mind here the
"signposting" theory of his "positivistic" period (see ch. 3, sees.
14-16), the view of the artist as someone who seeks to help "create
the future" by constructing "images of m a n . " In Zola's case, of
course, the image possesses not a beauty designed to excite "envy
and emulation," but rather an ugliness designed to provoke outrage
and the impetus to reform. But that is no reason at all why the
signposting theory should not acknowledge and embrace this kind of
future-shaping art.
Notice that the signposting theory not only provides a correct
account of the art of Zola but also, in an obvious way, exhibits it as
life-affirming. The naturalist, Nietzsche could point out, by providing
a critique of the condition in which life is actually lived (by some)
together with an implicit account of the oppressive social structures
responsible for this condition commits himself (and us) to the
suggestion that life is potentially a wonderful and beautiful
phenomenon. The demand is that we remove those structures which
prevent this beauty from flourishing.
Why does Nietzsche fail to consider this obvious way of reconciling
the art of naturalism with his thesis of the life-affirming character of
art? The answer is that to adopt it would be to acknowledge the
varieties of socialist art as constituting a legitimate and valuable
species. But socialism, Nietzsche considers, is nothing but " t h e
hatred-of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged who
destroy, must destroy, because all existence, all being, outrages and
provokes t h e m " (GS 370). But why must this be so? Why must socialist
talk be mere resentment-driven cant? Why cannot a socialist, a
socialist artist, genuinely and constructively believe in the possibility
of a "better future"? The answer is that Nietzsche believes once
again, as he did in The Birth of Tragedy, that suffering is inseparable
from life. This is so because life, he holds, is essentialy change,
becoming, and, like the becoming of child-birth, " all becoming... in-
volves p a i n " ( 7 7 x, 4). It follows that though there are various
responses, perhaps, which one might usefully make to the pain of
existence, the one thing one cannot do is to eliminate or even, it
J
seems, ameliorate that pain by means of social engineering.

Schopenhauer claims that the most that can be achieved by social
engineering is an alteration in the form of suffering (WR i, 315): pain
is always conserved, its quantum can be neither increased nor
diminished. In a similar vein Nietzsche writes that " d e c a d e n c e " is
inseparable from life:
one is in no position to abolish it... It is a disgrace for all socialist

systematizers that they suppose there could be circumstances - social
combinations - in which vice, disease, prostitution, distress would no longer
grow... A society is not free to remain young. And even at the height of its
strength it has to form refuse and waste materials... Age is not abolished by
institutions. Neither is disease. Nor vices. (WP 40)
Therefore, if art, good art, is to be of " service to life" - the one view
Nietzsche always holds - it follows that it cannot be more or less overt
propaganda on behalf of socialist reform. And Zola was a good artist.
So let us not be "childish" about this. Zola was a good artist:
consequently Zola was no socialist.
15 If life and pain are inseparable and if art is to be of service to life

then there exists an obvious motivation for Nietzsche's inclination to
insist that good art must be a beautification or transfiguration of life,
why it must act as a " t o n i c " or "stimulus," a " s t i m u l a n t " of, and
"seduction" to, life (see WP 853). " T r u t h , " says Nietzsche, "is
ugly." ("For a philosopher to say, 'the good and the beautiful are
one,' is infamous; if he goes on to add 'also the true,' one ought to
thrash him. Truth is ugly" [WP 822].) That is to say - except for
those special cases where the ugly acts as a stimulant - depressing:
" T h e effect of the ugly is depressing: it is the expression of a
depression. It takes away strength, it impoverishes, it weighs d o w n "
{WP 809). " T r u t h is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth"
(WP 822). In other words, art must represent life as beautiful, as
affirmable, precisely because life is not beautiful. Life truthfully
known, it is implied by Nietzsche's demand that art must be an
idealization and stimulant, is unaffirmable.
Notice how these observations absorb us, once more, back into the
world of The Birth of Tragedy. As in The Birth, being is again held to
be incapable of "correction." Consequently, just as there was no
place in The Birth for "Socratism," so there is now no place for
naturalism, the art of socialist reform. What we need rather is the
redemptive power of illusion. What Nietzsche offers us, in short, in
his final year, is once again the Apollonian solution to the horror and
terror of existence:
The antithesis of a real and apparent world is lacking... there is only one
world and it is false, cruel, contradictory, seductive without meaning - A
world thus constituted is the real world. We have need of lies in order to
conquer this reality "Life ought to inspire confidence": the task thus
imposed is tremendous. To solve it man must be a liar by nature, he must
be above all an artist... Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of
making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life.
(WP853)n
16 The second apparent difficulty for the thesis that art affirms life
acknowledged by Nietzsche is provided by the case of tragedy. It is,
I think, of considerable significance that tragic art, the starting-point
of Nietzsche's philosophy but absent from his thought ever since its
dismissal as a serious phenomenon in Human, All-too-human ("the
realm of inescapable, implacable destiny is growing narrower and
narrower," a " b a d lookout for writers of tragedy" [HH 1, 108]),
reappears at its terminus. (Tragedy does make a brief appearance in
The Gay Science, but because it suits Nietzsche's theoretical purposes
of the moment is represented, quite scandalously misrepresented, as
a species of Apollonian art. The Athenian went to the theater,
Nietzsche there claims, not to experience strong sentiments but "in
order to hear beautiful speeches. And beautiful speeches were what
concerned Sophocles: pardon this heresy!" [GS 580]. Certainly not,
one wishes to respond.)
Does the tragic artist's display of the " u g l y " "spoil life" for us?
There have indeed been philosophers, writes Nietzsche, who thought
so:
"liberation from the will" was what Schopenhauer taught as the overall
end of art; and with admiration he found the great utility of tragedy in its
"evoking resignation." But this...is the pessimist's perspective and "evil
eye." We must appeal to the artists themselves. What does the tragic artist
communicate of himself? Is it not precisely that state without fear in the face
of the fearful and questionable that he is showing? This state itself is a great
desideratum; whoever knows honours it with the greatest honours. He
communicates it - must communicate it, provided he is an artist, a genius of
communication. Courage and freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy,
before a sublime calamity, before a problem that arouses dread - this
triumphant state is what the tragic artist chooses, what he glorifies. (77ix,
24)
What is this " courage and freedom of feeling before a powerful

e n e m y " (this " mastery of ugliness and awfulness," as section 802 of
The Will to Power puts it [see sec. 12 above]) ? And - a supplementary
question we may bear in mind - does it amount to real courage?
Nietzsche's answer is given in the following passage - a passage he
clearly thought highly of since it is quoted, in part, in Ecce Homo {EH
iv, 3)
The psychology of the orgiastic as an overflowing feeling of life and

strength, where even pain still has the effect of a stimulus, gave me the key
to the concept of tragic feeling, which had been misunderstood both by
Aristotle and, quite especially, by our modern pessimists. Tragedy is so far
from proving anything about the pessimism of the Hellenes, in Schopen-
hauer's sense, that it may, on the contrary, be considered its decisive
repudiation and counter-instance. Saying Yes to life even in its strangest
and hardest problems, the will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility
even in the very sacrifice of its highest types - that is what I called Dionysian,
that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet.
Not in order to be liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge
oneself to a dangerous affect by its vehement discharge - Aristotle
understood it that way - but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of
becoming, beyond all terror and pity - that joy which included even the joy
in destroying. And herewith I again touch that point from which I once
went forth: The Birth of Tragedy was my first reevaluation of all values.
Herewith I again stand on the soil out of which my intention, my ability
grows - I the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus - I, the teacher, of
eternal recurrence. (77 x, 5)
The answer here is clear: one experiences "courage and freedom

before a powerful enemy," courage in the face of, in other words, the
" horror and terror of existence," one is able to "say Yes to life even
in its strangest and hardest problems" because, in the experience of
tragic art, one shares in the artist's "Dionysian," "orgiastic"
transcendence of individuality; one identifies not with any of the
individuals who are vulnerable to pain and death but becomes,
rather, "oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror"; one
loses one's identity as an individual and identifies instead with " t h e
will to life rejoicing over its own inexhaustibility" (my emphasis).
The tragic effect, in short, is, as it was in both The Birth of Tragedy
and in Schopenhauer's account of tragedy, identified as the feeling
of the sublime. As in The Birth, what tragedy does for life is to bring
one the " metaphysical comfort" of feeling oneself to be at one with
the "primal unity," or as Nietzsche says, " t h e will to life." (Notice
how as, at the end of his work, his thought returns to its
Schopenhauerian starting-point, Schopenhauer's vocabulary starts
to replace his own. In Jârathustra he had been exercised to reject
"will to life" as a fundamental metaphysical concept in favor of his
own "will to power." Now Schopenhauer's phrase is preferred to his
own.) What, therefore, Nietzsche offers us at the end of his life is once
again " t h e point from which I once went forth " - t h e Dionysian
solution to pessimism (see ch. 2, sec. 13).
17 At the end of the section from Twilight of the Idols that we have
been discussing, Nietzsche seems to indicate that he perceives some
connection between the experience of tragic feeling and willing the
eternal recurrence ("I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,
I, the teacher, of eternal recurrence"). The preceding section
explains the connection he believes to obtain. Goethe, he claims,
excluded the orgiastic from his understanding of the Greek soul:
Consequently Goethe did not understand the Greeks.12, For it is only in the
Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state, that the basic
fact of the Hellenic instinct finds expression - its "will to life." What was it
that the Hellene guaranteed himself by means of these mysteries? Eternal
life, the eternal return of life; the future promisee! and hallowed in the past;
the triumphant Yes to life beyond all death and change: true life as the over-
all continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of
sexuality. For the Greeks the sexual symbol was the venerable symbol par
excellence, the real profundity in the whole ancient piety. Every single
element in the act of procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the
highest and most solemn feelings. In the doctrine of the mysteries pain is
pronounced holy: the pangs of the woman giving birth hallow all pain: all
becoming and growing - all that guarantees a future - involves pain. That
there may be the eternal joy of creating, that the will to life may eternally
affirm itself, the agony of the woman giving birth must also be there
eternally.
All this is meant by the word Dionysus: I know no higher symbolism
than this Greek symbolism of the Dionysian festivals. Here the most
profound instinct of life, that diverted towards the future of life, the eternity
of life, is experienced religiously - and the way to life, procreation, as the
holy way. (77 x, 4)
This passage suggests, among other things, that to be in the

Dionysian state - as that is conceived in Twilight of the Idols - is to will
the eternal recurrence. But this is deeply confused - or at the very
least confusing.
In The Gay Science and in J?arathustra, that which - if I am a
nonconvalescent, fully healthy, Dionysian Übermensch - I will is the
eternal recurrence of my life: the totality of the deeds and experiences
which constitutes my exact life as an individual human being. The
fate I love is the fate I experience as an individual within the world
of becoming and pain. Such love and affirmation, if I achieve it,
manifests genuine courage, for, as we saw, if I really will the eternal
recurrence of my life (rather than some falsified, " profoundly
superficial" account of it) then I face the world "honestly": I
acknowledge its horrors and terrors, I acknowledge that pain and
ultimately death are part of my inexorable lot. What, however,
Dionysian man as conceived in Twilight of the Idols wills to recur is
just life: he wants "eternal life, the eternal return of [not, notice, to]
life," "true life as the overall continuation of life through procreation,
through the mysteries of sexuality." The only sense it makes to speak
of him willing his own return is if he identifies himself with a
transindividual entity that lives on in his children and in the human
species. In his later conception, in short, Dionysian man says " Y e s "
to life only by identifying with something outside of individual
human life: the "will to life" or "eternal becoming." (Compare
" T h e word Dionysian means: an urge to unity, a reaching out
beyond personality, the everyday, society, reality, across the abyss of
transitoriness" [WP 1050].) But to affirm life from the point of view
of this identification is entirely consistent with the saying of an
emphatic " N o " to one's life as an individual.
Another way of describing the tremendous difference of outlook
between The Gay Science and Twilight of the Idols that is disguised
(disguised, it would seem, from Nietzsche too) by a similarity of
phraseology is to observe that in Twilight Dionysian man (or man in
the Dionysian state) has transformed himself into, in Nietzsche's
terminology, a being. The problematic character of our life, that is,
its terror and horror, is, we have seen, attributed by Nietzsche to the
fact that the world we inhabit is a world of "flux," ofbecoming: being
subject to change inexorably entails, Nietzsche holds, being
vulnerable to pain and death. This is why becoming is the object of
our deepest dread, why we yearn above all for a state, a world of
being (cf. GS 109). In The Gay Science Dionysian man is conceived as
loving his fate as an inhabitant of the realm of becoming. In Twilight,
however, in the Dionysian state, one escapes becoming by
transforming oneself, by becoming "oneself the eternal joy of
becoming." Dionysian man, in other words, identifies himself with
the whole eternal process of becoming and, as such, achieves
immunity to the penalties of being part of that flux. He has, in short,
become a being. Whatever the merits of achieving this state, to do so
is not to show the courage that is involved in facing one's habitation
of the world of becoming. If one conceives oneself as identical with
the process of becoming and as such "beyond all death and c h a n g e "
( 7 7 x , 4), then one's "freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy,
before a sublime calamity" ( 7 7 rx, 24) does not really constitute
" c o u r a g e " at all. For the " e n e m y " is not experienced as an enemy.
This is what makes the experience "sublime."
18 In The Gay Science and in ârathustra Nietzsche made an heroic

attempt to affirm (ecstatically - the only kind of affirmation he
acknowledges) his habitation of the human world, the world of
human individuality: in the language of The Birth of Tragedy the
world of the principium individuationis. But in the end he failed.
Though ârathustra ends on a note of optimism (the appearance of
the laughing lion at its end symbolizes Zarathustra's proximity to
the child state, the final metamorphosis into Ubermenschlichkeit, and
with Zarathustra Nietzsche sometimes felt himself to be identical), by
the time he came to write the preface to The Gay Science he could see
no solution to the pain of existence other than profound super-
ficiality. Here, profound superficiality is not a merely temporary
solution for those en route to the health of Ubermenschlichkeit but rather
the solution for human beings.
In the final months of his thought about art and its relation to life
Nietzsche offers us a choice of solutions: on the one hand, we are
offered the redemptive power of Apollonian illusion - profound
superficiality, in other words; on the other, the redemptive power of
Dionysian sublimity. But the latter too is, as he points out in The
Birth (BT 18), a species of illusion, an evasion of the actuality of our
human existence. What we are offered, therefore, is a choice between
two forms of dishonesty: human life is to be made bearable either by
telling ourselves beautiful lies about it or else by pretending to
belong to an order of being other than that of human individuality.
The implication of this is clear: life, real life, is unaffirmable. The
wisdom of Silenus is true. We possess art, whether Apollonian or
Dionysian, lest we perish of this truth. In the end, therefore,
Nietzsche ends up with a view of the human condition indis-
tinguishable from that expressed in The Birth of Tragedy. And, despite
his many protestations of the antipodean character of their
philosophies, it is a view as afflicted as is that of Schopenhauer.
19 A third kind of art, the existence of which Nietzsche recognizes

as being in prima facie conflict with his thesis that all (good) art
affirms life, is, as he calls it, " r o m a n t i c " art. Here he employs a new
strategy. With respect to naturalism and tragedy the thesis was
defended via the demonstration that, contrary to appearances, both
the naturalist and the tragedian really do affirm life. With regard to
romanticism, however, the strategy is to deny that it constitutes good
art: romantic art is bad, " d e c a d e n t " (CW, Epilogue; EH 11, 5) art.
What, to repeat Nietzsche's own question (GS 370), is ro-
manticism? First, some of Nietzsche's examples: Wagner (par-
ticularly the Wagner of the post-Tristan period, above all the
Wagner of Parsifal [GS 370; CW passim]), Schopenhauer considered
as art (GS 370), Brahms, Goldmark (CW Second Postscript),
Delacroix, Berlioz, Baudelaire (EH 11, 5). And, more startlingly,
Ingres (WP 105), authentically Christian art (GS 370; 7 7 i x , 9), all
music since the Renaissance (WP 842).
What is it that links these examples together? Romanticism, says
Nietzsche, is the product of alienation: it is the art of" homesickness "
(WP 419), art which "looks away, looks back from... [the artist's]
self and from his world" ("yearning" is all that is distinctive of
Brahms [CW, Second Postscript]), art which longs for "rest, stillness,
calm seas, redemption from... self" (GS 370), such longing being the
product of a "great dissatisfaction" (WP 844) with, a hatred for,
vengefulness against (JVCW, " W e Antipodes") one's self and one's
world. This art of "dissatisfaction with reality" has as its antipode
the " art of apotheosis," art which expresses "gratitude for happiness
enjoyed," the art of Homer, Hafiz, Rubens, and Raphael (when we
realize that his Christian iconography is a mere vehicle for the
expression of a quite un-Christian stance towards life) (WP 845; GS
370).
At a deeper level of analysis, romantic art is art which springs from
" h u n g e r " rather than "superabundance," "impoverishment"
rather than "over-fullness of life" (GS 370). This is the psychic
condition which underlies life-hatred. As we saw in chapter 4 (sec.

19), the person of impoverished psychic energy is someone who is
dissatisfied with, afraid of, life. Such a person fears, in particular, the
future. ("But those spirits of a classical and those 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" [HH 11b, 217].) Hating and being afraid of life, the sick,
romantic personality seeks simultaneous compensation for and
revenge against it by making some other world into the focus of
everything good, a world that may be located either in a
metaphysical, transcendent domain or in the distant past (WP419).
20 Thus far, Nietzsche's criterion of romanticism in art appears to

be psychological: romanticism is alienation from the given, the
actual; yearning for, affirmation of, that which is not. Thought of in
this way, the romantic has as her antipodes the person who is
psychologically assimilated to, " a t h o m e " in, the actual.
The situation is complicated, however, by the fact that Nietzsche
also employs a second criterion of romanticism, a criterion that is not
psychological but rather formal or stylistic. According to this,
romanticism is understood as the antithesis not of anything like
assimilation to the actual but of, rather, classicism (or " t h e grand
style" [WP 842]), where the latter is understood - very much as it
was during Nietzsche's " positivistic" period - in terms of such
expressions as "logical, simple, unambiguous, mathematics, law"
the will to "master chaos," to compel "chaos to become form" (WP
842), "coldness, lucidity, hardness... hatred for feeling, heart, esprit,
hatred for the manifold, uncertain, rambling, contempt for detail"
(WP 849). Classicism, in other words, is conceived in Nietzsche's
final period, as it was in the "positivistic" phase (see ch. 3, sees.
17-20), as the dominance of balanced and harmonious form over
feeling and romanticism as the opposite, the dominance of form by
feeling; romanticism values "passion, meaning disorder and
immoderation, ' d e p t h ' meaning confusion, the profuse chaos of
symbols" (WP 79) as Nietzsche unsympathetically puts it.
21 Since Nietzsche would not (presumably) willingly introduce an

ambiguity into his concept of romanticism it must be supposed that
he takes his two criteria of romanticism to be equivalent: that all and
only those art-works which count as romantic according to the
psychological criterion count also as romantic according to the
stylistic criterion. That Nietzsche does assume their equivalence
manifests itself, I think, in a persistent tendency in his last, as in the
"positivistic," period to equate good art with classical art. (If
romantic art is bad, life-denying art then, according to the
psychological criterion, good art is nonromantic, that is, according
to the formal criterion, classical art.) In The Case of Wagner, for
example, he writes that every age extols the values either of
"ascending" or "declining" life: "Aesthetics is tied indissolubly to
these biological presuppositions: there is an aesthetics of decadence
and a classical aesthetics" {CW, Epilogue).
The trouble with this equation is not merely that it looks to be
mere prejudice and bigotry dressed up as a philosophical thesis (a
thesis which is obviously false), but also that it is inconsistent with
many of the judgments Nietzsche himself wants to make about
individual artists. The matter comes to a head in his attitude towards
Rubens, whom he admires as a paradigm of the " a r t of apotheosis "
(WP 8^6, 847). While Rubens evidently is such a paradigm, it is also
evidently the case that his lusciously turbulent forms are very far
removed from the classical ideal, something like the antithesis of
Winckelmann's ideal of the containment of turbulence of feeling
within an overall reposefulness of form (see ch. 3, sec. 17). 13 This is
why, art-historically, Rubens is of course classified as an exponent,
not of the classical but of the baroque. Evidently, then, some
nonclassical art is life-affirming and therefore, in Nietzsche's own
terms, good art. And conversely: one only has to call to mind
Victorian or postmodernist neoclassicism in architecture to see that
classical forms may easily express a retreat from the actual, a
(psychologically) romantic yearning for a bygone "golden age." An
intimation of this may be connected with Nietzsche's classification of
Ingres - formally speaking a neoclassicist - as a romantic (WP 105).
In view of these difficulties section 370 of The Gay Science is a
crucial passage. What Nietzsche says there in answer to the question
" w h a t is romanticism?" is that although it may at first sight seem
appropriate to answer in terms of a distinction between " t h e desire
to fix, to immortalize, the desire for being" - i.e. the ideal of classical
form - on the one hand, and " t h e desire for destruction, change and
becoming" on the other, these desires are actually ambiguous in that
each may be prompted by either love or hatred of life. Therefore, says
Nietzsche, the "main distinction" is to be made not in terms of a
Twilight of the Idols H3
dichotomy between the ideal of classical order and the denial ofthat
ideal but in terms, rather, of the question: " I s it hunger [i.e.
'impoverishment of life,5 of energy] or superabundance that has here
become creative?" What this amounts to is the affirmation that the
psychological conception of romanticism is fundamental, that
romantic alienation may find expression in anticlassical but also in
classical forms, and, conversely, that the spirit of life-affirmation may
inhabit any form. Classicism, conceived in terms of form, disappears
as the antithesis of romanticism.
But why then, having seen this as early as 1885-6 (the crucial part
of section 370 of The Gay Science is identical with section 846 of The
Will to Power, which was written then) does he still persist in
opposing romanticism to classicism in the way we have seen him do
- "there is an aesthetics of decadence and a classical aesthetics" - i n
his final year?
The answer, I think, lies in a view Nietzsche sometimes seduces
himself into, the view that nearly all European art that is life-
affirming comes from the classical or Renaissance period in European
history and nearly all art that does not (e.g. the medieval art of
"genuine Christianity") is life-denying. In line with this school-
boyish thesis - a thesis which manifests Nietzsche's disposition to a
simple-minded dichotomy of historical periods into pagan (life-
affirming, good) and Christian (life-denying, bad) - the classical-
romantic dichotomy comes to be used in a third way: neither
psychological nor stylistic but rather historical. According to the
thesis, "life-affirming art is classical" is true in the sense that if an
artwork is life-affirming then it exemplifies that stance towards life
which was, paradigmatically, exemplified during the classical period.
And, correspondingly, "life-denying art is r o m a n t i c " is held to be
true in the sense that life-denial is paradigmatically exemplified in
the art of nonclassical periods. This is the use of the classical-
romantic antithesis which finds expression in, for example, section
842 of The Will to Power: observing that modern European music
"began to blossom only when the renaissance world had already
attained its evening" Nietzsche draws the (absurd) conclusion that
all "modern," post-Renaissance music is "romanticism," that is,
"decadence."
Not only is the view of art history manifestly absurd, it is also, in
Nietzsche's own (psychological) sense, romantic. (In one early [1885]
passage Nietzsche virtually confesses his own romanticism:
German philosophy as a whole - Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer to
name the greatest - is the most fundamental form of romanticism and
homesickness there has ever been: the longing for the best that has ever
existed. One is no longer at home anywhere; at last one longs back for that
place in which alone one can be at home, because it is the only place in
which one would want to be at home: the Greek world. [WP 419]
Notice that the confessional use of the pronoun in this passage has
the effect of adding Nietzsche's own name to the roll-call of German
greats.) By the time of The Gay Science Nietzsche realizes that he
himself is vulnerable to the charge of psychological romanticism and
warns himself to guard against it: the higher type, he says, must
overcome his time, its thoughts and values, but " n o t only his time
but also his prior aversion and contradiction against this time, his
suffering from this time, his untimeliness, his romanticism" [GS 380).
Comparisons between present and past, to the detriment of the
former do not, of course, necessarily constitute romanticism. For the
romantic is alienated not from the present but from life, from its
present and future. Hellenism, therefore, the idealization of classical
antiquity, can constitute a nonromantic stance: it does so if the way
back is genuinely conceived as the way forward. Nietzsche often likes
to portray himself as a constructive Hellenist of this kind. But at the
end this is not part of his philosophy. He is ultimately and
fundamentally, as I shall shortly emphasize, himself a romantic - as
he confesses on occasion, a "decadent."
22 In the previous section I noted some of the confusions contained

in Nietzsche's conception of romanticism. What is clear, however, is
that the important conception is the psychological one: romantic art
is art which is alienated from the actual and yearns for or affirms a
"better world" located either nostalgically in the past or else in a
realm "beyond space and time." The attempt to view classicism
conceived either stylistically or historically as the antithesis of
romanticism in this sense is simply a mistake.
The reason that the psychological conception is, from Nietzsche's
perspective, fundamental is that it is only as thus conceived that the
phenomenon of romanticism comes into even apparent conflict with
the thesis of the life-affirming character of (good) art. Only, that is,
insofar as certain kinds of art appear to " n e g a t e " this world do they
call for a response from the standpoint of Nietzsche's central thesis.
Only as such is Nietzsche required to reject romanticism as bad art.
Twilight of the Idols *45
Is it true that romantic art (I shall use the term exclusively in
Nietzsche's psychological sense from now on) is bad art? Is it true
that art in which "hunger," "impoverishment" of, alienation from,
life " h a s become creative" (GS 370) is bad art? Eric Heller accuses
Nietzsche of the genetic fallacy. In the most poetic of ways:
" psychology... cannot establish the worth or unworth, the beauty or
ugliness, the truth or untruth of what has grown from roots sunk
deeply into the psyche as little as botany or soil analysis or
meteorology or geology can prove or disprove the justification of the
sense of autumnal glory one may have in the sight of a yellowing
birch tree before one's window or of the play of sunlight on the
rugged faces of the mountains that rise beyond it." 14 But this, I
think, is a mistake. What Heller has overlooked is Nietzsche's axiom,
as I have called it, that " t h e effect of works of art is to excite the
state that creates a r t " (see sec. 4 above).
Nietzsche, that is, so it seems to me, is concerned, centrally, not
with the causes but rather the effects of art. His whole conception of
the good and bad in art is focused on the question of effects: the good
is conceived as that which stimulates, acts as a tonic*(" Bizet makes me
fertile," " a better human being." "Whatever is good makes me
fertile. I have no other gratitude, nor do I have any other proof for
what is good" [CW 1]) and the bad, the ugly, is excluded from art
because, remember, it depresses,
He is interested in causes only because, given his axiom, it is a way
of being interested in effects. His real argument against romanticism,
that is, has the following structure. Art excites the same kind of state
as that which produces it. Hence art created out of "sick,"
"impoverished," life-alienated states causes and reinforces similar
states in the audience. But good art is art which promotes health, is
" t h e great stimulus to life" ( 7 7 ix, 24). Conversely, art which is
harmful to health, is detrimental to our being-in-the-world, is bad
art. Hence art created out of sick, alienated states, romanticism, is
bad art.
23 It is possible to register doubts concerning the Nietzschean

axiom. For there is a quite familiar discrepancy between the
psychology of the artist and the character of his art effectively
exploited in, for example, Peter Schaffer's Amadeus. The most
glorious, life-deifying art may well spring from and compensate for
the existence of a crippled, life-suffering personality. This, indeed, is
surely Nietzsche's own account of the impulse to Apollonian art: the
dream of Apollonianism stands to reality as the beautiful vision of
the tortured martyr to his suffering (BT 3).
Nonetheless, if we think of romanticism as defined in terms of the
effects Nietzsche associates with it, then his criticism of the genre (as
distinct from his views on which particular artists belong to it) seems
well taken. If it really is true of a certain kind of art that, as Nietzsche
claims of Wagner's music, it "corrupts our h e a l t h " (CW 5), then it
seems very hard to dissent from the view that it is bad art. Art which
is bad for us is bad art.
The question remains, however, as to whether Nietzsche is entitled
to raise this criticism against any artist. In the " positivistic" period
he criticized other-worldliness, whether in the form of religion or art
(in effect, romanticism), as a " narcoticizing " of our sensitivity to the
pains of existence. The characterization of romanticism that we have
looked at in this chapter is similar. Romanticism, he says, caters to
" those who suffer from impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness,
calm seas, redemption from themselves through a r t . . . intoxication,
convulsions, anaesthesia and madness" (GS 320).
What, however, it may be asked, is so wrong about satisfying, and
thereby reinforcing, this impulse? In Human, All-too-human the
objection was that to desensitize us to the pains of existence is to
diminish our will to eliminate their causes. Romanticism, in short,
damages our mode of inhabiting the world because it prevents us
from doing something about that in the world which troubles us. In
a different way the same objection lies behind the animus against
romanticism expressed in the period of The Gay Science and
ârathustra. The proper response to the questionable and painful
existence is not (so Nietzsche is prepared to say at least some of the
time) its evasions but rather the creation of a self in which the past
is redeemed and the willing of the eternal recurrence, an " h o n e s t "
amorfati, replaces self-dislike and resentment, alienation from one's
self and world. In The Gay Science - at least for the übermenschlich - as
in Human, All-too-human, there is something to be done about one's
alienation from the world (though, of course, a very different kind of
doing is proposed in the two works).
But in the last period there is nothing to be done. Precisely what
Nietzsche himself offers is " r e d e m p t i o n " from world and self,
through either Apollonian "superficiality" or else through Diony-
sian illusion. Given that these are the alternatives, Nietzsche's
Twilight of the Idols H7
objection to romanticism - that it reinforces rather than combats
alienation - amounts to no more than a baseless preference for one
form (more exactly, two) of escapist inauthenticity over another. In
the Preface to The Case of Wagner Nietzsche describes himself as " n o
less than Wagner, a child of this time; that is a decadent." Or in
other words, a romantic. He was right. Romantics, he says, are those
who seek refuge from themselves in "intoxication, convulsions,
anaesthesia and madness" {GS 370). In his last works he sought
refuge in intoxication. He was shortly to find it in madness.
Epilogue
i In the foregoing chapters we have followed the curve described by

Nietzsche's philosophy of art. We have followed it from its
Schopenhauerian beginnings in The Birth of Tragedy, through the
science-affirming anti-artism of Human, All-too-human. We saw how,
during the period of The Gay Science and ârathustra, Nietzsche's
scientism evaporates, leading to a renewed sense of the importance
of art, of viewing life aesthetically. And we saw how, during this
period, he attempts, or at least contemplates the possibility of, an
" honest" confrontation with and acceptance of the reality of one's
existence as an individual human being. But we saw in the last
chapter how, in the end, Nietzsche returns to the inauthenticity, the
illusionism of " that point from which I once went forth: The Birth of
Tragedy" ( 7 7 x, 5). As in The Birth we are again offered a choice
between the Apollonian and Dionysian solutions to the pain of
existence. Nietzsche's identification with Dionysus - " Have I been
understood? -Dionysus versus the crucified" is how his last book, Ecce
Homo, ends - makes it plain that his ultimate preference remains for
the Dionysian. But both, I have argued, constitute modes of illusion.
The implication of this (whether Nietzsche allowed himself to see the
implication is another matter) is that pessimism, the wisdom of
Silenus, is regarded, ultimately, as true. Real life, the life of human
individuality, is something it would be better we had never been
born into. To the extent, therefore, that its main aim is to be the
" a n t i p o d e " to Schopenhauerianism, to "affirm life," Nietzsche's
philosophy ends in failure.
2 How, exactly then, does Nietzsche's final philosophy stand in

relation to Schopenhauer? Clearly, if my account has been correct,
their assessments of the worth of human existence do not, in the end,
diverge: though Schopenhauer takes vengeful relish in emphasizing
148
Epilogue 149
his pessimism while Nietzsche fights to avoid it, or at least to disguise
its truth from both himself and others, the truth about human
existence is, in the end, as " u g l y " for Nietzsche as it is for
Schopenhauer.
With regard, however, to their responses, their solutions to
pessimism, the two philosophers do diverge. Nietzsche's Apollonian
solution, first of all, the idea of "overcoming" Silenus' truth through
the redemptive power of the beautiful illusion, is something of which
there is no hint in Schopenhauer's philosophy. In a way, this is
strange since no philosopher has emphasized more than Schopen-
hauer the role of illusion in human life. We have already observed
his emphasis upon the idea that our conception of the outer world is
constructed in the interests of the practical will rather than those of
truth (ch. 1, sees. 1 and 6). And when it comes to the inner world,
Schopenhauer again is deeply alive to the role of illusion, of
repression and self-deception, in the normal functioning of the human
psyche. Ignoble motives and desires, he says (in a passage
acknowledged by Freud to anticipate his central postulations of
repression and the unconscious), we quite typically deny admission
to "clear consciousness" since " t h e good opinion we have of
ourselves would inevitably suffer." In their place we substitute
fictions, as we do, too, with respect to the gaps created in memory by
the repression of past experiences too painful to be acknowledged
(WR 11, pp. 209-10, 399-402; WR 1, pp. 192, 296).
But while recording the role of illusion in human life with
unprecedented thoroughness, Schopenhauer's stance towards it is
always Platonic - contemptuous. The cause of this is his philoso-
pher's morality, his care for truth - the fact that, as Nietzsche would
put it, possessing an "unconditional will to t r u t h " he is "still pious"
(GS 344). This prevents him from entertaining the distinctively
Nietzschean idea that illusion, " a r t , " is " ' m o r e divine' than truth,"
prevents him making the inference that since " w e have need of lies
in order to live," well then, let there then be lies (WP 853).
Nietzsche's Dionysian solution, too, is something not offered to us
by Schopenhauer. Not that he did not, in effect, consider it. " O n l y
small, trivial minds," he writes, "fear death as annihilation" (WR 11,
p. 475). And he speaks of the fact that the species survives the
destruction of the individual as "nature's great doctrine of
immortality" (WR 11, p. 475), her intuitive proof of the "inde-
structibility of our inner n a t u r e " by death (WR 11, p. 463). If, that is,
Schopenhauer suggests, one identifies oneself not with the suffering
and mortal individual but with the metaphysical will-to-live, then
" h e would willingly give up his individuality, smile at the tenacity
of his attachment thereto, and say: what does the loss [or pain] of
this individuality matter to me? for I carry within myself the
possibility of innumerable individualities" {WR n, 491). The idea
that we can escape the horror and terror of individual existence by
achieving a state of sublimity, a sense of a supraphenomenal
existence, is strongly present in Schopenhauer. Such a state is indeed
achieved by the Schopenhauerian altruist: she escapes the anxious care
for the individual self by identifying with the will that manifests itself
in all individuals (see ch. 1, seic. 5).
What takes Schopenhauer, however, beyond this position is once
again morality. The " transition from virtue [altruism] to as-
ceticism" (see ch. , sec. 5) is brought about by the altruist's coming
to share in Schopenhauer's moral revulsion against the will which,
as the ground of the world's sufferings, comes to be perceived as evil.
Schopenhauer, because he is unable to adopt the Nietzschean stance
beyond good and evil, looks, ultimately, for redemption in
identification not with the will but with some still more fundamental
entity " beyond the will."
What sets Schopenhauer apart from both Nietzsche's solutions
(and what, one might well feel, makes him ultimately a more
human, more attractive figure) is his morality. On the other hand,
what is common to both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is ro-
manticism, "romantic pessimism" (GS 370). Both Schopenhauer
and, at the end, Nietzsche, is caused by his "great dissatisfaction"
with life, to "look away...from himself and from his world" (WP
844), to yearn for some better mode of being.
3 I have suggested that Nietzsche's philosophy of art, in the end,

returns to its starting point and hence describes a circle. It may be
felt, however, that this foisting of a circular philosophy upon the
philosopher of the circle is altogether too neat. In particular, it might
be suggested, in seeking to turn Nietzsche's career into a neatly
aesthetic phenomenon I have suppressed an important element of
that career; for what I have done is pretend that Nietzsche's work
ends with Twilight of the Idols, whereas it in fact ends (discounting
compilations from earlier works) with the philosophical auto-
biography, Ecce Homo. And what one finds here, it might be said, is
Epilogue l l
5
not just that Nietzsche claims his "inmost n a t u r e " to be amorfati (EH
XII, 4), but also that the work "exemplifies this a t t i t u d e " towards his
whole life,1 viewing it " u n d e r the aspect of amor fati and thus
[coming] to affirm it in every part." 2 Hence, it might be suggested,
Nietzsche's work ends not in failure, nor with a Schopenhauerian
whimper, but rather with a triumphant and uniquely Nietzschean
bang; the achievement o f t h a t Übermenschlichkeit, the willing of the
eternal recurrence, described but not yet attained in The Gay Science
and in ârathustra.
4 Actually, however, Ecce Homo is not an exercise in amorfati at all,

but rather (though it contains occasional passages as fine as anything
Nietzsche wrote) a sad, self-deluding and self-contradicting exercise
in its parody, "profound superficiality." A few examples: Nietzsche's
entirely fictitious claim to Polish ancestry (EH 1, 3), the point of
which is to leave him free to abuse all things German; the claim that
only one person ever bore him ill-will (EH 1, 4); the claim never to
have experienced resentment (EH 1, 5); the claim never to have
experienced religious difficulties and consequently to have no sense
of sin (EH 11, 1); the claim that " a trait of fanaticism will be sought
in vain in my nature. At no moment in my life can I be shown to
have adopted any kind of arrogant or pathetic posture" ( EH 11, 10);
the self-deifying megalomania (arrogance) of the chapter headings
" W h y I am so wise," "so clever," and so on, and of "wherever I go,
here in Turin for example, every face grows more cheerful and
benevolent at the sight of me. Old market-women take great pains
to select together for me the sweetest of their grapes" (EHm, 2); the
claim that only The Birth of Tragedy made Wagner a symbol of
cultural hope (EH iv, 1); the claim that neither Goethe, Shake-
speare, nor Dante could have "for a moment known how to breathe
in the tremendous passion" of J?arathustra; and the claim that the
Vedantic poets are " n o t even worthy to unloose the latchet of the
shoes of a Zarathustra" (EH ix, 6). Most striking of all, perhaps, is
the following sentence, suppressed by Nietzsche's sister and
rediscovered only in 1969 by M. Montinari, editor of the new edition
of his works: "when I look for the deepest contrast to myself, the
unimaginable baseness of instinct, I find always my mother and
sister - to think of myself as related to such baseness would be a
blasphemy against my godliness" (KG vi, 3, p. 266; my translation).
These and the many other examples of megalomaniacal delusion in
Ecce Homo reveal how far removed is the work from that " h o n e s t "
confrontation with reality which is the sine qua non of genuine amor
fati, It needs to be said, too, that their character is continuous with
that of the delusions experienced by Nietzsche after his explicit
mental collapse, the general theme of many of which is belief in his
own divinity. " I would much rather be a Basle professor than God,"
he wrote to Jacob Burckhardt, " b u t I have not dared to push my
private egoism so far as to desist for its sake from the creation of the
world." Other remarks concern the taking over of political authority
in Europe - hence the " a u t h o r i t y " behind the well-known remark,
" I am just now having all anti-Semites shot" - the assumption of
divine authority - " the old God has abdicated, I shall soon be
ruling the world" - and the absence of coincidence: "there are no
coincidences any more. I think of someone and immediately a letter
comes politely through the door." It is reported that in the
sanatorium to which Nietzsche was confined he apologized for the
poor weather promising, however, to "prepare the loveliest weather
tomorrow."
In Ecce Homo, in short, that which is affirmed is not at all
Nietzsche's life but rather a fiction, a profoundly superficial
substitute for it. The work represents yet another excursion into the
beauties of Apollonian illusion, an excursion which, this time,
borders on madness. Nietzsche's work in no way ends in übermenschlich
triumph but with, rather, yet another manifestation of the
affiictedness that links him to Schopenhauer and takes him, finally,
to madness.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Bernd Magnus "Nietzsche's philosophy in 1888: The Will to Power and
the ' Übermensch?" Journal of the History of Philosophy 24 (January 1986),
PP- 79-99-
SCHOPENHAUER
I have discussed Schopenhauer's biological route to idealism in detail in
chapter 1, section 3, of my book Willing and Unwilling a Study in the
Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987).
2 In Willing and Unwilling (see especially ch. in) I have argued that
Schopenhauer is most coherently read as not so much abandoning
Kant's dualism between an ideal nature and a non-natural thing in
itself but as, rather, dividing up the natural side of the duality into (1)
the world as conceived in the common-sense image and (2) the world
as conceived in an image constructed out of philosophical reflection
upon the foundations of natural science. T h e result is a Jnpartite
structure composed of the common-sense world, a deeper world of
" w i l l " , and the non-natural world in itself: the second, though often
called the thing in itself is, I suggest, ultimately distinct from it.
Nietzsche, however, most often reads Schopenhauer as implicitly
naturalizing the Kantian thing in itself, as offering a dichotomy
between the ideal world of common sense and an an sich that is to be
conceived in terms of the equivalent notions of "force," energy, or
"will." In what follows, I shall present Schopenhauer in Nietzsche's
rather than my own way.
3 Schopenhauer's argument for this (see ch. 4, sec. 2) is, in a nutshell, that
since (1) the most ultimate entities posited by any scientific theory must
possess causal powers in order to have explanatory value and (2)
atomism is committed to grounding any power or disposition in atomic
structure, it follows that the atomistic view is infinitely regressive, that
it can never consistently claim to possess an account of ultimate reality.
In chapter iv, section 3, of Willing and Unwilling I have shown that
Schopenhauer's dynamism places him in a tradition that goes back via
K a n t to Joseph Priestley and ultimately to the eighteenth-century Jesuit
153
154 Notes to pages 6-23
mathematician and physicist Roger Boscovich. Nietzsche too, in his

Heraclitean affirmation of " b e c o m i n g " over " b e i n g " - his well-known
rejection of all permanencies, " t h i n g s " or 'f substances," as " e r r o r s "
and " l i e s " - belong to this same tradition. He explicitly acknowledges
a debt to Boscovich: "Boscovich," he writes in section 12 of Beyond Good
and Evil, " h a s taught us to abjure the belief in 'substance,' in 'matter,'
in the earth residuum [material seat of a causal power] and particle
atom."
4 Nietzsche, too, in his unpublished notes makes the same move: " A
force," he writes, " w e cannot imagine is an empty word and should be
allowed no rights of citizenship in science " (WP 621). And again: " T h e
victorious concept 'force' by means of which our physicists have created
God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be
assigned to it which I designate as 'will to p o w e r " ' [WP 619).
5 This conception is not Schopenhauer's only, or his most prominent
road to the contrast. But I am, as I have said, presenting him in the way
in which Nietzsche took him.
6 Schopenhauer, in short, is not an absolute pessimist, not a nihilist, not
one who holds, in Nietzsche's characterization of the view, that " t h e r e
is only one world, and this is false, cruel, contradictory,... without
m e a n i n g " [WP 853). So at least I have argued in Willing and Unwilling
(see especially, chs. m and ix). My argument essentially presupposes my
/npartite reading of Schopenhauer's metaphysics (see n. 2 above). O n
a bipartite reading, where the will is evil, suffering, but also ultimately
real, there can be no salvation from suffering save in the (dubiously
possible) hope for absolute extinction or nothingness. T h a t Schopen-
hauer is generally read in the bipartite way explains why he is generally
read as a nihilist; but not, at least not always, by Nietzsche. He was
at times aware (though not approving) of the mystical turn taken by
Schopenhauer's philosophy at its end (see GS 99).
7 In section 5 above I suggested that Schopenhauer is genuinely
committed to a domain, a locus of salvation, beyond suffering nature,
beyond the will and is therefore not a nihilist. Notice how this account
of tragedy together with Schopenhauer's general cognitivism about art
confirms this suggestion.
8 Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1953).
9 This is not to deny that there may be problems within opera, the raising
of difficult questions of priority as musical and dramatic desiderata
come into conflict. But that is entirely different from the problem of
opera, the question of its very right to exist as an art-form. T h a t
problems occur in a marriage does not entail that it should never have
taken place.
Notes to pages 27-33 155
2 THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

1 Another reasonably influential minimizer of the Schopenhauerian
influence is Richard Schacht: see Nietzsche (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1983), ch. win passim.
2 Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th edn. (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press 1974), p. 131; see also Tragedy and Philosophy
(New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), ch. ix, sec. 5 8 ; also his
Introduction to his translation of The Birth and various footnotes,
especially p. 59, n. 3.
3 See M. S. Silk and J . P Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch. 5.
4 Nietzsche holds that to "feel profoundly the weight and burden of
existence" is a mark of " t h e more nobly formed n a t u r e s " (BT 18). For
them, "cheerfulness," if possessed at all, is an achievement, a victory.
" V u l g a r " (ibid.) people and cultures may, for a time, at least, be
cheerful too, but only because they lack the profundity to experience the
challenge to cheerfulness. (Nietzsche is full of contempt for easy
cheerfulness, for, in particular, the "senile and unproductive love of
existence" (BT 17) which he sees as characterizing the Alexandrian,
decaying stage of Greek civilization.) The " w e " to whom The Birth is
addressed are - Nietzsche flatters us - these nobler natures.
5 How does consciousness make the transition from the metaphysically
Apollonian to the aesthetic ? I do not believe Nietzsche ever satisfactorily
answered this question until right at the end of his thought about art in
Twilight of the Idols. There, his answer is given in terms of Rausch,
intoxication (see ch. 5, sec. 7 below). But in The Birth this is an answer
he is precluded from giving by the fact that, as we are about to see,
Rausch is associated exclusively with the Dionysian.
6 Kaufmann's translation of" Schein " in this passage as not " appearance "
but "illusion" has been aptly criticized by Charles Sen Taylor, in
"Nietzsche's Schopenhauerianism," Nietzsche-Studien 17 (1988), pp.
45-73. In my view the same mistranslation of Schein occurs (twice) in
the second paragraph on p. 50 of his translation.
7 Notice that Nietzsche never abandoned this view. T h a t central theme
of his later philosophy that "things," temporally persistent substances,
are " e r r o r s " or " l i e s " (see, for example, the beginning of book m of The
Gay Science) merely repeats in non-Schopenhauerian language the thesis
of the merely apparent status of the world of the principium individuationis.
8 A feature brilliantly exemplified in the dream sequence of Woody
Allen's Another Woman.
9 The suggestion that dreaming is always pleasurable runs into the
problem of nightmares. Nietzsche must have been, as it is called, a
"lucid dreamer," as indeed he indicates - "even when dream reality is
most intense we still have, shimmering through it, the sensation that it
is mere a p p e a r a n c e " (BT i ) - t o have been able to take pleasure in
156 Notes to pages 35-8
nightmares: "perhaps many will, like myself, recall how amid the
dangers and terrors of dreams they have said to themselves in self-
encouragement and not without success: ' I t is a dream! I will dream
o n ' " (BT 1). Many people, for example Descartes, are not lucid
dreamers. It is important for our attempt to understand the Apollonian
solution to pessimism (sees. 11-12 below) to remember that it is the lucid
dream, the dream one, as it were, spectates rather than lives, to which
aesthetically Apollonian consciousness is compared.
10 Notice here the early appearance of a theme much in evidence in
Nietzsche's later philosophy. Living well - which implies at least living
a civilized life - depends, we have seen, upon the existence of the " l a w s "
and " b a r r i e r s " erected between one individual and another by the
(metaphysically) Apollonian mind. These are to preserve us from the
crudities and cruelties of barbaric Dionysianism. But these barbaric
impulses are not to be eradicated (as Christianity would like) but rather
sublimated or, as Nietzsche puts it, "spiritualized," transmuted into, for
example, art. "Evil," the later Nietzsche insists, is something we need,
is inseparable from "greatness."
The quotations, from Wagner's Opera and Drama are given in Carl
Dahinaus' fine essay " T h e two-fold truth in Wagner's aesthetics," the
second essay in his book Between Romanticism and Modernism, tr. M.
Whittall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Notice the
harmony between the musical theory of the younger Wagner and the
opera-friendly version of Schopenhauer's theory.
12 There is a temptation to insist that since music cannot be formless
content, the Apollonian must be present even in absolute music. There
are two comments to be made here. First, that which is demanded by
form is a contribution from, as I have called it, the metaphysically
Apollonian mind, the ordering, organizing " r a t i o n a l " mind which
gives us the world of the principium individuationis. The birth-of-tragedy
thesis, however, holds that great art must contain, as a component,
Apollonian art, must, that is, be in part a product of the aesthetically
Apollonian mind. Second, during the period of The Birth Nietzsche did
not admit the claim that music must possess form, taking as paradigms
of musical "composition" the rhapsodic emissions of the Dionysian
reveler and the conceptually unintelligible choral hymns to Dionysus
that punctuate Greek tragedy. Later, Nietzsche saw that art must
communicate and that communication demands (conventionally under-
stood) form (see ch. 3, sec. 24); but communication is not demanded of
music in his early period. In the unpublished fragment " O n music and
w o r d s " reproduced in a Kaufmann translation in Dahinaus' book (see
n. 11 above) he writes, in a discussion of song, that
the individual who is in a state of Dionysian excitement has no listeners to whom
he has anything to communicate any more than does an orgiastic crowd,
[though] the epic narrator and, more generally, the Apollonian artist, does
presuppose such a listener. It is of the essence of Dionysian art it does not know
any consideration for a listener; the enthusiastic servant of Dionysus
understood only by his peers, (p. 114)
13 Nietzsche is, of course, the famous philosopher of the circle. But
Schopenhauer preceded him in the use of the circle as an image for time
(see WR 1, pp. 380, 280).
14 The borrowing of his paradoxical conjunction from The Gay Science
(Preface, 4) is apposite here for it captures Nietzsche's insistence in The
Birth that the "cheerfulness" of the Greeks was the solution to a problem,
was achieved in the face of a deep sensitivity to the horrors of life and was
not, as the dominant nineteenth-century conception had it, due to a
blithe ignorance of such horrors (see n. 4 above).
15 This extraordinary evocation of musical experience might be seen as
constituting an answer to the criticism made in section 9 above that
Nietzsche seems mistaken in demanding an Apollonian aspect of all
great art given the undeniable greatness of many works of purely
instrumental music. As an answer, however, this would only be effective
were we really willing to grant to absolute music the power to threaten
permanent psychological dislocation.
16 This is the reason that the famous assertion that only as aesthetic
phenomenon is life and existence justified (see sec. 15 below), an
assertion which would appear to be a natural bedfellow for the idea of the
Apollonian triumph of beauty over suffering, is, in fact, associated only
with Dionysian, never Apollonian art. The world is not justified by the
Apollonian outlook but only seems so to its inhabitants. In a later
echoing of the famous sentence that is connected with Apollonian art
Nietzsche is careful to eliminate the notion of justification; " a s an
aesthetic phenomenon," he says, "existence is still bearable for u s " (GS
107; Nietzsche's emphasis).
17 Nietzsche's condemnation of modern culture parallels his condemnation
of the culture of the " n e w Attic C o m e d y " that succeeded the age of
Greek tragedy as a culture that takes "womanish flight from seriousness
and terror" into the "craven satisfaction and easy enjoyment" of " t h e
passing m o m e n t " (BT 11).
18 See Nietzsche's comments on Heraclitus in "Philosophy in the tragic
age of the Greeks," in The Complete Works of Frederick Nietzsche, ed. O.
Levy (London: Foulds, 1911)5 vol. 11, pp. 106-11.
19 Notice that the artist-god with whom we identify is an Apollonian artist
i> (sculpture, remember, e.g. sand-sculpture, is a paradigm of Apollonian
art), someone the object of whose consciousness is the principium
individuationis raised to a state of beauty. Occasionally, Nietzsche makes
the resemblance to the human Apollonian artist even closer by
suggesting that the demiurge's motive for creation is to find an escape
from the reality of its own " p a i n and contradiction" (BT 5). He refers
back to this conception in ârathustra:
At one time Zarathustra too cast his delusion beyond man, like all the
i58 Notes to pages 52-74.
afterworldly. The work of a suffering and tortured god, the world then seemed
to me. A dream the world then seemed to me, and the fiction of a god: coloured
smoke before the eyes of a dissatisfied deity. Good and evil and joy and pain and
I and you - coloured smoke they seemed to me before creative eyes. The creator
wanted to look away from himself: so he created the world. (£ 1, 3)
This notion seems to me (1) inconsistent with the dominant conception
of the demiurge as a joyfully playful child whose existence is "powerful
and pleasurable," " h a p p y " (BT 17), and (2) inconsistent with the idea
that identification with the primal unity constitutes a solution to the
pain of human existence. If the primal unity's mode of existence is a
copy of our own then identification with it is a transition, merely, from
the frying-pan into the fire. These inconsistencies come about, I think,
because Nietzsche wants to use the idea of the artist-god to perform two
functions: (1) to contribute an answer to the cosmological question of
why the world came into being; and (2) to figure in the Dionysian
solution to pessimism. The kind of answer he gives to (1) determines a
characterization of the demiurge inconsistent with that demanded by
(2).
20 As Petra von Morstein has suggested to me.
21 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche suggests that in Wagner at Bayreuth he uses
Wagner as Plato used Socrates " a s a sign language for P l a t o " {EH v,
3).
3 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN
Since Nietzsche wants to reduce matter to force, "motions," it would be
incorrect to treat "materialism" as a synonym for the " n a t u r a l i s m " to
which he subscribes. In section 5 he rejects mind-body dualism as a
primitive superstition. It seems, therefore, that Nietzsche's particular
form of naturalism is best described as "neutral monism."
2 See G. J. Stack's Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983),
pp. 226-7.
3 Mozart's " J u p i t e r " Symphony was, I believe, so called because it seems
to possess the effortless perfection of a god.
4 This conjunction between (Apollonian) art and the unconditional willing
of life seems to anticipate the theme of The Gay Science that (as we will
see in chapter 4) art helps us will the eternal recurrence.
5 O n one occasion, Nietzsche acknowledges a cognitive value in art: in
Wagner at Bayreuth he suggests that art can provide a simplification of the
multiplicity of phenomena that reveals to us the "laws of life"
knowledge of which is essential to the adoption of a " s p i r i t u a l - m o r a l "
attitude towards it (WB, p. 213). But never again does he acknowledge
that it has this value. This is the most consistent deficiency in his
thought about art. Schopenhauer, in this respect, had a much better
understanding.
6 This picture of science as a value-neutral activity seems to me a myth.
M a n y values - truth, beauty, simplicity, interpersonal harmony, for
Notes to pages j6-86 J
59
example - are written into the activity of science. The scientist qua
scientist is committed to these values and does not need any outside
agency to determine them for her.
7 This distinction between " s p i r i t " and " s o u l " is an allusion, surely, to
Plato's division between the "spirited " part of the psyche and " reason."
In the Republic "justice" in the soul is defined as harmony between its
various parts, under the leadership of "reason," There are various
forms of "injustice" one of which, the " t i m o c r a t i c " soul, consists in the
dominance of the rational soul by aggressive, ambitious, militaristic
"spirit." This is what Nietzsche here seems to be rejecting.
8 Quoted in E. M. Butler The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1935), p. 46.
9 See M. S. Silk and J . P . S t e r n , Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch. 1, sec. 2.
10 In Nietzsche's mature philosophy, above all in £arathustra, there is, of
course, a very powerful anti-ant theme. T h e "great and beautiful soul"
is conceived as a rare and isolated individual standing out from and in
opposition to the multitude or " h e r d . " But in Opinions there is no hint
of this. Indeed the logic of the discussion precludes it, for if artists are
to construct " i m p r o v i n g " archetypes then, by definition, their audience
or target is the multitude. The great individual who stands out against
the herd must, of necessity (a theme which will become prominent in ch.
4), be a self-creator rather than a follower of other-determined
archetypes.
Notice that Nietzsche's distinction between the classical and " b a r o q u e "
is reminiscent of the Kant-Schopenhauerian distinction between the
beautiful and the sublime and, of course, his own between the
Apollonian and Dionysian.
12 In The Birth " A s i a " is the home of " b a r b a r i s m " that threatens always
to engulf Greek (i.e. classical) civilization.
13 In Opera and Drama Wagner accuses Berlioz of by "purely mechanical
m e a n s " creating " a n unprecedented variety of... the most marvellous
effects" the content of which, however, is "inartistic rubbish" (quoted
in Carl Dahlhaus, " T h e two-fold truth in Wagner's aesthetics," in his
Between Romanticism and Modernism, tr. M. Whittall [Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1980], p. 9). Nietzsche's critique of Wagner is not
intended to be novel. The intention is rather, I think, to hoist him with
<. his own petard.
14 It seems appropriate to enter a protest against the implicit demand here
that an artist should conquer the formal constraints of his art with an
"illusion of ease and validity." Not only is this a highly subjective, and
not particularly attractive, valuation, it also sits most uncomfortably
with the suggestion in Human, that we should not be taken in by the
artist's attempt to make his work seem the "casual improvisation of a
g o d " (see sec. 10 above). Does Nietzsche wish to be ravished by the
artist or does he not?
i6o Notes to pages 8y-g6
15 This is the first published appearance of" romantic " used, in Nietzsche's
characteristic manner, as a pejorative expression.
16 Though Nietzsche would sometimes like to represent Wagner's
" b a r o q u e " art as both of these things (see HH na, 144) they cannot
possibly be simultaneously coinstantiated.
17 Another conception of the romantic would conceive of him as someone
alienated from the given world not by incapacity to deal with the
present and fear of the future but by the demand for more than is
yielded by the present and impatience to realize it in the future.
According to Nietzsche's (arbitrary) terminology, however, that person
is not " r o m a n t i c " but "Dionysian" ( " Z a r a t h u s t r i a n " or "Nietz-
schean") (see GS 370).
18 If this comparison is correct Nietzsche's relation to the Gorgias is a
peculiar one. His moral philosophy, it is clear, is deeply indebted to
Callicles, the ablest defender of the rhetoricians' way of life. Indeed
Callicles' distinction between master and slave morality, his defense of
the former and postulation of resentment as the source of the latter so
closely anticipates Nietzsche's own Genealogy of Morals as to place the
latter in some danger of sustaining a charge of plagiarism. On the other
hand, if I am right, Nietzsche's objections to Wagner are influenced by
Socrates' objections to rhetoric. Nietzsche, it seems, borrows from both
sides in the debate which is the Gorgias.
4 THE GA T SCIENCE
"Nietzsche's Gay Science, or, how to naturalize cheerfully," in R.
Solomon and K. Higgins (eds.), Reading Nietzsche (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988), p. 69.
2 In a letter to Franze Overbeck of 1884. See Selected Letters of Friedrich
Nietzsche, ed. C. Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969), p. 223.
3 And have been thus interpreted by Alexander Nehamas in Nietzsche:
Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985),
ch. 2. One of the major pieces of evidence cited by Nehamas in favor of
his interpretation is the fact that at GS 354 Nietzsche disassociates the
affirmation of perspectivism from the "opposition of'thing in itself and
appearance." This, together with section iv of Twilight of the Idols
("How the 'true world' finally became a fable"), he sees as establishing
that the mature Nietzsche abandoned the metaphysical contrast
between thing in itself and appearance. I agree that he did. But to deny
that a thing in itself lies behind our interpretations of the world is not at
all the same as holding that nothing does. Two comments are in order
here. First, Nietzsche typically uses "thing in itself" when he wants to
evoke specifically Kantian overtones, so that to be a " t h i n g in itself"
something has to be a non-natural item of the kind demanded by religion,
presupposed by morality, and intimated by art (see ch. 3, sec. 4, above).
Notes to pages g6-8 161
It is this world, I think, that is denied in part iv of Twilight of the Idols

and is probably uppermost in Nietzsche's mind at GS 354. Ultimate
reality, as conceived by Nietzsche, is a natural reality. But it is also (as
we are about to see) a " c h a o s " in which the order implicit in our
concept of thinghood finds no application. Even, therefore, were one to
naturalize the concept of the thing in itself Nietzsche would still, quite
understandably, resist its application to reality as he conceives it.
A further criticism I have of Nehamas' (as it may be described,
postmodernist) interpretation of perspectivism is that rather than
introducing it in the natural way that I have - by reference to
Nietzsche's published account of the doctrine - he chooses rather to do so
by reference to the unpublished jotting in The Will to Power (sec. 481):
"facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations" (p. 42).
This of course leads him to see perspectivism as deeply paradoxical and
potentially self-undermining: if there are only interpretations then
surely the view that there are only interpretations "is itself an
interpretation and therefore possibly false" (p. 1). O n my under-
standing of perspectivism, however, Nietzsche is no more ensnared by
paradoxes of self-references than is Kant.
Actually, even the paragraph from which Nehamas quotes is far from
clear in its support for his interpretation when quoted in full: "Against
positivism, which halts at phenomena - * There are only facts' - I would
say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We
cannot establish any fact' in itself: perhaps it is folly to want to do such
a thing." Naturally taken, the burden of this passage would seem to be
epistemological rather than, as Nehamas wants to suggest, ontological. It
is interesting that Kaufmann's classic Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist
and Antichrist contains no discussion at all of anything remotely
resembling Nehamas' "perspectivism," a fact which reminds us of the
ease with which the preoccupations of a particular age and writer are
read into the history of philosophy.
4 In Plato's Timaeus the world that constitutes the material of God's, the
Demiurge's, creative activity is described as exhibiting both chaos and
necessity in that, while it fails to exhibit any of the patterns of the Forms
which he will try to impose on it, it yet has, like the material with which
any craftsman must work, an inalienable, "necessary," nature
(disorderliness) which both limits the creative possibilities available to
the demiurge and endows his handiwork with a permanent disposition
to "disorderly motion," to throwing off the order into which he has
" p e r s u a d e d " it. It is surprising that Nehamas, a classical scholar, fails
(see n. 3 above) to notice the allusion to the Timaeus in GS 109, the
comparison between the demiurge and ourselves as imposters of order
upon chaos.
5 Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 96.
6 There is the world of difference between believing in the religious
interpretation of life because you have never confronted any alternative
IÖ2 Notes to pages IOO-J
and doing so in a chosen or " b o r n a g a i n " manner. I use the image of

scab-picking to capture Nietzsche' belief that modern religiosity is of the
latter kind. On some level, Nietzsche believes, the modern person knows
religious belief to be absurd but clings to it, in a self-deceiving way, out
of fear of "incurable pessimism" (BGE 59). Modern consciousness, even
that of " t h e people," is wounded consciousness, our various faiths at
best scabs that conceal the wound.
7 Notice that though, like " t h e people," we have become innocent of the
will to truth, we have become gayer, freer, lighter than they are,
weighed down by their bourgeois conventions and responsibilities. One
must, it seems, be either " h e a v i e r " or " l i g h t e r " than they; at all costs,
never the same weight.
8 As in English, one can use the word Held, as Nietzsche does here, to
indicate a (not necessarily heroic) central character: the hero of a novel.
9 Schopenhauer too discusses at length the problem of "style," or as he
calls it "character," and he too uses aesthetic analogies (WR 11, 35).
Most people, he suggests, lack it, living confused " z i g z a g " lives (WR 1,
303). For him, however, this is as a result of lack of self-knowledge;
ignorance or real desires as a result of repression or ignorance (because
it is very difficult to work out) of the relative strengths of one's various
desires, values, and aspirations (see Willing and Unwilling, ch. v, sees.
5-6). The task, therefore, of achieving style is the task of self-discovery.
For Nietzsche, however, as we will see, it is a task of self-creation. The
contrast between the two is at this point very stark.
10 The self of the Dionysian solution cannot be authentic in a sense which
implies uniqueness. For, as will become clearer, there are many " h o n e s t "
constructions of the self.
See Kaufmann's translation of The Gay Science (New York: Vintage
Press, 1974), "Translator's Introduction," sec. 3.
12 An interesting question is why this evocation of ecstasy was eliminated
from the 1887 edition. Does this suggest, perhaps, an underlying
darkness of mood in 1887 absent in 1882? See section 20 below.
13 Also (1) a practical and (2) a never-ending process. (1) Discovering a
"personal providence" in one's life is, says Nietzsche, a matter of
"practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events"
(GS 277). The theoretical skill is the construction o f t h a t "artistic p l a n "
which constitutes one's character, the practical skill is the disciplined
adherence to that plan, the living of one's life in character. (2) As future
moves into past the character of the fate that one is to love is constantly
altering. This means that one's account of who one is must be fluid,
flexible, open always to revision. On the title page of the second edition
of The Gay Science Nietzsche replaces the quotation from Emerson with
a new epigraph of his own composition: " I live in my own place,/ I
have never copied nobody even half,/ and at any master who lacks the
grace to laugh at himself- I laugh." This, in addition to the injunction
to originality, contains an injunction to a degree of ironic self-
Notes to pages ioj-15 163
detachment, to not taking one's self-image too seriously. Otherwise the

personality becomes ossified and defensive (middle-aged) - another
form of inauthenticity. T h e life Nietzsche requires is, therefore, a
difficult, dialectical combination of definiteness and openness, fixity and
fluidity.
14 I have been alerted to the relevance of this term to the understanding
of Nietzsche by Kathleen Higgins' lively and refreshing Nietzsche's
Zarathustra (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). Higgins
persuasively argues that a central aspect of Zarathustra is that it is a
Bildungsroman (see ch. 4).
15 A very different account of why, in Nietzsche's view, one cannot will the
recurrence of one's own life without willing the recurrence of world
history is given by Alexander Nehamas {Nietzsche, ch. 5). My reasons for
rejecting Nehamas' account will be given in section 20 below.
16 See note 21 below.
17 At / / / / l i b , 217, Nietzsche makes it explicit that fear of the future is what
he regards as the fundamental ground of " r o m a n t i c i s m " : "Both those
spirits of a classical and those of a romantic bent - these two species exist
at all times - entertain a vision of the future: but the former do out of
a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness"
18 Kathleen Higgins observes pertinently that, as the title of the section
indicates, we are dealing here with a " D r u n k e n song," not a lecture in
logic {Nietzsche's Zarathustra, p. 198).
19 An allusion, surely, to Faust's promise of his soul to Mephistopheles
" W e r d ' ich zum Augenblicke sagen: verweile doch! Du bist so schön!"
("If I should ever say to the moment: abide! You are so beautiful").
3p Here I disagree with Kathleen Higgins who, worried that Nietzsche
requires us to "love atrocities" {Nietzsche's Zaratnusira^ P- r97)>
represents Zarathustra as a "blues singer" who does not attempt to
"white w a s h " the negative into the positive but who suggests, rather,
that life as a whole is valuable even if some of its parts are "horrible or
tragic" (pp. 198-9). I cannot find this interpretation to agree with
either the letter or spirit of amor fati.
21 See Wittgenstein: "How things are in the world is a matter of complete
indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.
The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution"
{Tractatus 6.432). A n d : " T o believe in God is to see that life has a
m e a n i n g " i.e. "stops being problematic" {Notebooks 1914-16, ed. G. H.
von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 74).
"Belief in God," in other words, is a matter of seeing the "solution of
the problem of life... in the vanishing of the problem " (Tractatus 6.521),
seeing that " The riddle does not exist" {Tractatus 6.5). For further
discussion see my "Wittgenstein, Kant, Schopenhauer and critical
philosophy," Theoria 50, 2-3 (1984), 73-105. Wittgenstein's early
thought on what it is to inhabit " t h e world of the happy person"
(sec. 17 above) is close to and may have been influenced by Nietzsche's.
164 Notes to pages uy-26
5 TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS

The publication of Nietzsche Contra Wagner was motivated by a desire to
"set the record straight": to prove that the attack on the (now dead)
Wagner in The Case of Wagner was not the expression of a sudden fit of
pique but was rather the continuation of a critique that had been
sustained for over a decade. It follows that the views expressed in the
work do not necessarily belong to 1888, that the compilation of the work
in that year does not imply that the compiler necessarily endorsed
everything it contains. I shall, accordingly, not consider the work in this
chapter.
2 Daybreak, tr. R. J. Hollingdale with an introduction by M. Tanner
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. xiv-xv.
3 Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 508.
4 Insofar as we are discussing the "subjective" form of aesthetic pleasure
(see ch. , sec. 6).
5 At GM in, 6, Nietzsche observes correctly that Schopenhauer gives a
particuar twist to Kant's association between disinterestedness and
aesthetic pleasure. But his suggestion that for Schopenhauer, aesthetic
pleasure is pleasure in being free of, specifically, the sexual will is
indicative of his own rather than Schopenhauer's obsessions. It is, of
course, willing in general from which, for Schopenhauer, we are delivered
in aesthetic experience. Nietzsche further observes in the same section
that Schopenhauer had a strong interest in achieving the aesthetic
condition. This is true but is not, as Nietzsche seems to think,
paradoxical. (Kant, too, believes that we can have [moral and
theological] interests in achieving disinterestedness.)
6 Schopenhauer (see WR 1, 185, 194; WR 11, 407-8) agrees with this
assumption. The model that provides its basis is a picture of linguistic
communication: the artist, like the speaker (1) is in a certain mental
state she wishes to communicate, (2) selects, creates an appropriate
vehicle of communication that, with luck, (3) succeeds in recreating a
similar mental state in the spectator.
7 The substance in hops which accounts for their (and beer's) bitter taste.
I have failed to discover any other reference to its supposed anti-
aphrodisiacal power.
8 Nietzsche continues to think of " T h e painter, the sculptor, the epic
p o e t " as Apollonian "visionaries par excellence" (ibid.). Why, then, is
"representation, imitation, transfiguration, transformation" reckoned
as an expression of Dionysian Rausch! The answer, I think, is that
Dionysian representation he regards as a mere vehicle for the expression
of emotion, and Apollonian representation as representation for its own
sake. Had Nietzsche been acquainted with expressionism and abstract
expressionism in painting he would, I think, have abandoned the
unsustainable idea that, paradigmatically, the visual arts represent
without expression.
9 Remember the Nietzschean axiom that the state which produces is the
same as that produced by art.
10 See also section 12 below.
11 This passage of uncertain date is actually presented as a summary of the
outlook of The Birth of Tragedy. It seems to me, however, that while in
some respects seriously inaccurate as an account of The Birth ( " T h e
antithesis of a real and apparent world is lacking"!), it accurately
expresses one of the two art solutions to the riddle of life offered by
Nietzsche in his final year.
12 Goethe, for most of Nietzsche's life, was one of his supreme heroes. But
in 1888 he seems to have turned against him. In addition to the above
remark, consider: " I have no words, only a look for those who dare say
the word Faust in the presence of [Byron's] Manfred. The Germans are
incapable of any conception of greatness" (EH 11, 4).
13 The case of Rubens is symptomatic of a deeper tension. For if, as
Nietzsche's metaphysics holds, reality is "flux," "becoming," from
which all " b e i n g " is absent, and if, moreover, as Nietzsche sometimes
holds, " h o n e s t y " in one's perception of the world is a value, then art too
should be honest and should reflect the flux-ridden character of the
world. But this means that art must be rco/zclassical since classical art is
dedicated to the deification of reposeful being (see GS 370).
f4 The Importance of Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988),
p. 166.
EPILOGUE
1 W. Kaufmann in his translation of Ecce Homo (EH, p. 258, fn.).
<ß R. Hollingdale, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973),
P- 157-
Texts and translations
For Nietzsche's texts I have used Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli
and M. Montinari, 30 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967-78) and Werke in drei
Banden, ed. K. Schlechta, 3rd edn. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1965). For
Schopenhauer's texts, the Zürcher Ausgabe, 10 vols. (Zurich: Diogenes,
1977). This is a paperback version of the Sämtliche Werke, ed. A. Hubscher
(Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1946-50). T h e translations on which I have
generally depended (significant emendations are accompanied by the
German original) are the following:
The Antichrist, tr. W. Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. W
Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954).
Beyond Good and Evil, tr. W Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1966).
The Birth of Tragedy, tr. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1966).
This volume contains also The Case of Wagner, tr. W. Kaufmann.
Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, tr. R. Hollingdale (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
On the Genealogy of Morals, tr. W Kaufmann and R. Hollingdale (New
York: Vintage Press, 1968). This volume contains also Ecce Homo, tr. W
Kaufmann.
The Gay Science, tr. W Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1974).
Human, All-too-human, tr. R. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1986). This volume contains also Assorted Opinions and
Maxims, tr. R. Hollingdale, and The Wanderer and his Shadow, tr. R.
Hollingdale.
Nietzsche Contra Wagner, tr. W Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, which
contains also Twilight of the Idols, tr. W Kaufmann.
Richard Wagner at Bayreuth, the fourth of the Untimely Meditations, R.
Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
The Will to Power, tr. W Kaufmann and R. Hollingdale (New York:
Vintage Press, 1968).
Thus Spoke ârathustra, tr. W Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche.
166
Index
action, 42, 46-7, 63-4, 121 baroque, 80-1, 85, 142

Aeschylus, 31, 57 Baudelaire, Charles, 140
aesthetic corruption, 84-6 Bayreuth Festival, first (1876), 29, 55
Aesthetic Movement, 127-8 beautiful, the, 120-1, 123
aesthetic state, 10-13, n 9> I 2 o ~ 2 becoming, 102-3, I07> "G* !33> l3^* l<$~9
alienation, 140-5, 147 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 69-70
Allen, Woody, 155 being, 138, 139
altruism, 8-10, 53 Bellini, Vincenzo, Norma, 20, 22
amorfati, 103, 104, 146, 150 Berlioz, Hector, 140
analytic philosophy, 67, 68 Beyond Good and Evil, 92, 93, 96, 100, 101,
Angus, Rita, 75 108
■o Antichrist, The, 40, 117 Bildungsroman, 107
Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, 32-5 biography, idealized, 55-7
Apollonianism, 30-3, 42-5, 71-2, 76, Birth of Tragedy, The, 3, 7, 18, 25-57, 88>
i35"9> Ho 94, 95, 118, 133, 134, 139-40;
Archilochus, 19 comparison with Human, All-too-human,
architecture, 16, 142 59-62, 64-5
Aristotle, 7, 19, 136 birth-of-tragedy thesis, 30, 35-8
sart: of apotheosis, 140, 142; cognitive value Boscovich, Roger, 95-6, 154; Philosophia
for Schopenhauer, 14, 16-17, lb%\ Naturalis, 63
hidden metaphysical curriculum, 37-8; Brahms, Johannes, 140
life-affirming character of, 118, 119-25, Buddhism, 39, 42, 47
127-30; 133-5; and philosophy, 17; Burckhardt, Jacob, 152
plurality of functions, 73, 79; and
religion, 48-50; role of signposting the Calvinism, 90
future, 73-84; as seductive, 70-1, 135; Case of Wagner, The, 117, 142, 147, 164
sexual origin of, 126-30; as solution to cheerfulness, 155, 157
terror of life, 39-47; value related to its chorus in Greek tragedy, 46, 156
medium, 35; of works of art, 82-3, Christian art, 140
99-100, 117 Christianity, 25, 40, 42, 48-9, 50, 51, 64-5,
artist: as agent of cultural regeneration, 89-90, 101, i n , 128
73-84; as genius, 37, 66, 68-70; circle, 40, 150, 157
psychology of the, 125-30 classical art, and good art, 77, 78-81, 86-7,
artist-god, 51-2, 55, 157 142
asceticism, 9-10, 72, 119, 150 classicism, and romanticism, 141-3, 144
Assorted Opinions and Maxims, 54, 58, 73-84, cognitive function of art, Schopenhauer, 14,
99 16-17, 158
atomism, 96, 153 composer, as priest, 18, 23, 69-70
autobiography, dangers of, 29-30 convalescence, 103, 118
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 129 Dahlhaus, Carl, 156, 159

barbarism, 34-5, 156, 159 Danto, Arthur, 96-7
67
168 Index
Darwinianism, 7-8 Hafiz, 140

Dawn, 58, 88-91 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 144
death, 106, 149 Hellenism-and-pessimism thesis, 30, 31,
death of God, 1, 94, 95 38-47
decadence, 134, 142, 143, 144 Hellenism and Pessimism, see Birth of Tragedy,
Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugene, 140 The
" d e m a g o g i c a r t , " critique of, 88-91 Heller, Eric, 145
depression, 88, 134, 145 Heraclitus, 157
determinism, and action, 63-4 heroes, 43, 47
Dionysian solution, 4 5 - 7 , 51-4, 101-9, Higgins, Kathleen, 163
136-7 history, 17-18, 3 9 - 4 1 , 62, 108
Dionysianism, 30-2, 3 3 - 5 , 41-2 Hobbes, Thomas, 8
disinterestedness, of aesthetic pleasure, Homer, 42, 43, 79, 86, 132, 140
I
3~ I 5> 73» 118-21, 120-5, l 6 4 homesickness, 140, 144
distance, artistic, 99, 102 Human, All-too-human, 6, 28, 44, 55, 58-73,
dreams, 33, 36, 42, 155-6 94» 95, i35> 146
Ecce Homo, 2, 28, 29, 49, 58, 102, 105, idealizing process, 123-6, 129, 130-1
136, 150, 151-2, 158 idealism: biological, 5-6, 60; K a n t i a n , 5-6,
ecstasy, see Rausch 41, 153; rejection of, 64, 6 6 - 8
egoism, 8-9, 121 illusion, 6 1 - 2 , 101, 139-40, 148; in
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 105, 109 Apollonian art, 4 2 - 5 ; redemptive power
emotion: and art, 13-15; and music, 22-3 of, 135; veil of, 42, 47
energy, 8 1 , 83, 1 0 9 - n , 115-16, 141; "in-itself," 7
sexual, 128-30 individuation, 39, 46, 52
Engels, Friedrich, 132 Ingres, J e a n Auguste Dominique, 140, 142
Enlightenment, 65 instrumentalism, 5-6, 11
Erasmus, Desiderius, interpretations, 2, 96, 161
errors, 5, 95-7 intoxication, see Rausch
eternal recurrence, 1, 100-1, 103-4, 107-9,
136, 137-9, 151; problem of, 112-13, joy, concept of, 113-14
115-16 justification of life, aesthetic, 28, 5 1 - 3 ,
Euripides, 30 54-5, 157
evil, as something we need, 156
K a n t , Immanuel, 5, 12, 14-15, 65, 118,
force, 6, 154 119-20, 123, 144; Critique of Judgment,
form, beauty in significant, 15-16, 43, 14-15; Critique of Pure Reason, 5
122-3 Kaufmann, Walter, 27-9, 44, 125, 161
free spirit, 58, 64-6, 74 knowledge: and action, 4 2 ; as reward for
frenzy, see Rausch altruism, 9-10
Freud, Sigmund, 100, 129-30, 149
Lange, F A., History of Materialism, 6 2 - 3
Gay Science, The, 6, 28, 81, 82, 83-4, 88, Langer, Suzanne K., Feeling and Form, 22-3
92-116, 118, 135, 138, 139, 142-3, 144 Laocoon, 77
Genealogy of Morals, On the, 110, 119, 126, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 20, 144
132 liberation, 58, 6 6 - 8 , 135
genetic fallacy, 145 lies, 4 2 - 5 , 149
genius, artist as, 10, 37, 58, 66, 68-9, 83 life-affirmation, 27, 29, 118
G e r m a n : character, 50; nationalism, 55 Locke, J o h n , 6
Gibbon, Edward, 40 Lutheranism, 49
Goethe, J o h a n n Wolfgang von, 77, 137, lyric poetry, Schopenhauer on, 18-19
165; Mignon, 17
Goldmark, Carl, 140 M c C a h o n , Colin, 75
Greek tragedy, 30-2, 45-7 M a r x , Karl, 132
Greeks, 27, 28, 137; Homeric, 42-5 mass, compared with opera, 21-2
Index 169
materialism, 50 philosophy and art, 17

metaphysical art, critique of, 65-88, 89 philosophy of art, Schopenhauer's, 10-24;
"metaphysical comfort," 29, 45, 47, 48, 57, general theory, 10-16; hierarchy of the
61, 94, 137 arts, 16-24
metaphysics, Schopenhauer's, 5-10, 98 Plato, 78, 126-7, I 58» critique of art, 16,
modern art, 57, 85, 87 17, 7 1 ; Gorgias, 9 1 , 160; Republic, 79,
modernity, crisis of, 98-100 159; TimaeuSy 161
Montinari, M., 151 " P l a t o n i c I d e a s , " Schopenhauer's, 13,
morality, i n , 127, 150; and world- i ö " 1 ^ 33, 43, 122-3
justification, 5 1 - 3 , 5 4 - 5 poems, 76
Morgenröte^ see Dawn poetic arts, Schopenhauer on, 16-18
Morstein, Petra von, 158 poets of our lives, 99^-100, 102-3, I J 8
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 22, 79, 91 politics, 4 6 - 7 , 130
M u n c h , Edvard, 85 pornography, distinguished from art, 13,
music: " a b s o l u t e , " 21, 23, 38, 156, 157; 132
abstract character of, 2 0 - 1 ; as the postmodernism, 100
Dionysian art, 35-7, 76, 126; and Priestley, Joseph, 153
religious feeling, 66; Schopenhauer on, primal unity, 7, 34, 5 1 , 53, 6 1 , 94
16, 18, 2 0 - 4 ; since the Renaissance, 140, principium individuationis, 7, 9, 3 2 - 3 , 35, 56,
143 6 2 - 3 , 139; nullification of, 35, 46
mysticism, 10 p r o p a g a n d a , and philosophy, 36, 38
myths, tragic Greek, 4 1 - 2 , 49-50, 59-60 providence, personal, 104-5, 108, 162
psychology, 145-7; of Dionysianism, 5 2 - 3
naturalism, 6 0 - 1 , 131-4, 158;
Schopenhauer's rejection of, 16 Quine, W. V., 41
n a t u r e : Nietzsche's view of, 39-40, 6 0 - 1 ,
62, 72; Schopenhauer on, 6, 7-8 Raphael, 128, 140
nausea, 39, 42, 97, 107 Rausch, 33, 88-9, 1 o i , 114, 115, 116,
Nehamas, Alexander, 112-13, 160-1, 163 125-6, 128, 130, 146-7
New Zealand art, 75 redemption, 29, 43, 57, 106, 110-11, 116,
Nietzsche Contra Wagner, 117, 164 119, 146, 149
Nietzsche, Friedrich: break with pessimism religion, 62, 97; and art, 4 8 - 5 0 ; and
(1876), 26, 28; break with Wagner metaphysical need, 64-6
(1876), 26, 5 5 ; conversion, 29; influence representation: and Apollonianism, 3 7 - 8 ,
of Schopenhauer on, 5-24, 25-7, 148-50; 164; Schopenhauer's account of
megalomania and madness, 151-2; aesthetic, 15-16
monomania, 79; productivity in 1888, repression, 100, 149
117; psychological romanticism, 143-4, resignation, 19, 28, 131, 135
147; self-critique, 53 rhetoric, uses of, 6 7 - 8 , 8 5 - 7 , 89
Richard Wagner at Bayreuth, 25, 32, 5 5 - 7 , 9 1 ,
objectivity, 12, 118-19 100
one and the many, 7 Rohde, Erwin, 26
opera, Schopenhauer on, 21-4 romanticism: identification with pessimism,
26, 28-9, 163; Nietzsche on, 140-5, 146
Pagnol, Marcel, Manon des Sources, 20 Rossini, Giocchino Antonio, 22
pain, n - 1 2 , 71, 93, 94, 133-4 Rubens, Peter Paul, 140, 142, 165
Pascal, Blaise, 100
perception, immaculate, 120-1 sacred, the, 115
perspectivism, 2, 9 5 - 7 , 102, 160-1 salvation, 89-90
pessimism, 1, 28-30, 109, 148, 162; and Sargesson, Frank, 75
Hellenism, 3 8 - 4 7 ; rejection of, 5 9 - 6 3 ; Schacht, Richard, 92, i n , 118, 155
romantic, 28-9, 150, 163; Schaffer, Peter, Amadeus, 145
Schopenhauerian, 3, 7-10, 26, 27-30, Schein, 33, 44, 155
135 Schiller, J o h a n n Christoph Friedrich von,
phenomenalism, 95 77
170 Index
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3-4, 5-24, 33, 34, Thus Spoke £arathustra, 53, 75, 92, 93, 101,
118-19, H 0 ' 144; as antipode to 103, 105, 113, 119, 120-1, 137, 138, 139,
Nietzsche's philosophy, 3, 26-7, 148; 157-8
influence on Nietzsche, 25-6, 58-60 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 9
Schopenhauerian character of Birth of tragedy, 19-20, 131, 135-7
Tragedy, The, 25-6, 27-8, 48-55 " t r a g i c effect,", 19-20, 45-7, 51
science, 6 0 - 3 ; foundations of natural, 6; Twilight of the Idols, 117-47, 126, 127,
and rationality, 41 129-30
scientific optimism, 4 0 - 1 , 59-63, 71-2,
73-4, 9 4 - 5 , 97 Übermenschlichkeit, 75, 109-11, 114, 137,
secularization, 49-50, 65 139, 146, 151
self, artistic creation of, 99, 102-3, I 0 5 - 7> ugly, the, 127, 131-2, 134
162 Upanishads, 9
self-deception, 44, 48, 100
sexual origin of art, 126-30 von Gersdorff, Karl, 26
sexuality, 137, 138
sickness, 3, 26-7, 101 Wagner, Richard, 21, 23, 24, 25-6, 31,
skepticism, classical, 122 55-7, 58, 80, 105, 140; Götterdämmerung,
socialism, 132-4 25; Opera and Drama, 36; Parsifal, 25, 5 5 ;
Socrates, 27, 30, 49, 158, 160 Ring, 56; Tristan, 47, 56
Socratism, 4 0 - 1 , 56 Wagnerian art, critique of, 88-91
solipsism, metaphysical, 9, 34 Wanderer and his Shadow, The, 58, 84-7
song, 126, 156 " W e Philologists, 31
Sophocles, 31 Weimar classicism, 77
spiritual health, 115-16 western culture, 50
Stalinism, 79, 82 Wilde, Oscar, 100
state, 8, 46, 103 will: Buddhistic negation of the, 39, 4 2 ;
Stein, Heinrich von, 94 denial of the, 9-10, 119; music as
Stendhal, 120, 126 expression of the inner, 2 0 - 1 , 2 3 ; the
style for a character, 105, 162 world as, 5-7, 34
subjectivity, Schopenhauer on, 11-13 will to life, 5 0 - 3 , 136-8
sublimation thesis, 126-30 will to power, 1, 154
sublime, the, 14-15, 18, 19, 45, 137, 139, Will to Power, The, 4/^28, 117, 118, 120,
126, 127, 129, 131, 136, 143
suffering, solutions to, 25, 5 4 - 5 , 98-116, will to truth, 9 8 - 9 , 149
also Apollonianism, Dionysian solution Willing and Unwilling (Young), 15, 153
suicide, 39, 97 Winckelmann, J o h a n n J o a c h i m , 77, 142
superficiality, profound, 44, 99-100, 101, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 11, 107, 109, 123,
i n , 112, 115, 116, 139, 151 163
world-affirmation, aesthetic criteria and,
T a n n e r , Michael, 118 5"-3> 54-5
Taylor, Charles Sen, 155 World as Will and Representation, The
theater, 17; see also tragedy (Schopenhauer), 5
" t h i n g in itself," 60, 160; music and, 2 0 - 1 ,
23 Zola, Emile, 131, 132-4

YOUNG, J. Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art

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NIETZSCHE'S

The right of the

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

© Cambridge University Press 1992

First published 1992

Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data applied for

ISBN o 521 41124 6 hardback

I am grateful to the University of Mainz and the German Academic

Nietzsche's works are abbreviated as follows (textual references are

And Schopenhauer's works as follows (textual references are to page

Full bibliographical information can be found under "Texts and

i This, first of all, is a book about Nietzsche's philosophy of art,

2 My first chapter is about Schopenhauer. It is well known that as

3 Any work on Nietzsche has to express a policy with respect to the

i Nietzsche's thought about art is, I suggested in the Introduction,

2 Schopenhauer's metaphysics, propounded mainly in the first two

3 What is this metaphysical yet natural substratum upon which we

4 The best-known fact about Schopenhauer is that he was a

5 H u m a n beings, we have seen, are compelled to cause suffering to

6 How, to come finally to the center of our concern, does

pain and anxiety. Aesthetic consciousness is marked by the

7 In aesthetic consciousness there is, we have seen, a radical

8 Before passing to Schopenhauer's treatment of the particular arts,

in the audience - it would further follow that art cannot express

immortality, a coming alive, in Kant's words, to the "supersensible

9 The second issue I want to raise is that of the nature and

10 Schopenhauer holds, as has been mentioned, that the Platonic

12 Schopenhauer experiences some difficulty in applying his general

13 Schopenhauer says (as he must given both pessimism and the

14 Schopenhauer regards music as an exception to his general

(Though Schopenhauer, of course, does not, it is perhaps helpful

15 Notice that Schopenhauer's account of the aboutness of music

solfeggio, mere sounds (PP n, pp. 434-5'). And of Rossini's operatic

16 To be set against these kinds of remarks, however, is the fact that

rhythmic and melodic) in the music. The constant deviation of

17 I have labored the ambivalence in Schopenhauer's theory of

The Birth of Tragedy

Wagner to Karl von Gersdorff in 1869, " w h o reveals to me what

2 In some ways, that there is a Schopenhauerian influence is

3 After his break with Wagner in 1876 Nietzsche began to describe

pessimism: in opposition to Schopenhauer's " d e n i a l " of life, the

can establish this overridingly central point then we will be justified

4 Nietzsche's own retrospective comments on The Birth are, on the

6 Nietzsche's talk of the Apollonian is hard to understand until one

7 If dreams stand for the Apollonian, Rausch - "intoxication,"

8 I want to turn now to the birth-of-tragedy thesis. T o understand

Qua Wagner propagandist, Nietzsche J was constrained to ac-

9 Must art have a hidden metaphysical curriculum? Is the

10 I turn now to the Hellenism-and-pessimism thesis. The Greeks,

teleology: its course resembles that of not an arrow but a circle. 13

"optimism," "rationality," and "utilitarianism" (BT, "Attempts

The Apollonian "prophylactic" (BT 11) against pessimism is

12 Why, given that Apollonian art does acknowledge the terrible,

14 We are now in a position to return to the question of whether or

15 Exception might be taken to the implicit assumption in the above

16 Let me begin to answer these charges by attending to the last

17 Let me bring the discussion of The Birth to a close. The question

18 Is there then no difference between the Schopenhauerian and

19 After The Birth, Nietzsche's only other sustained discussion of art

21 It is clear from the foregoing precis that Wagner at Bayreuth both

i At about the time Richard Wagner at Bayreuth appeared Nietzsche

2 Human, All-too-human is subtitled A Book for Free Spirits. The

3 Human, All-too-human marks, it is clear, a tremendous departure