No More Learning

And yet in the innermost will of Nietzsche's thought the situation is altogether different. True, there is a perpetual discordance prevailing in what he achieves, an instability, an oscillation between these opposite poles which, perceived from the outside, can only confuse. In what follows we will confront the discordancy again and again. But above all else we must try to see what it is that is "altogether different" here.
All the same, in so trying we may not close our eyes to what Nietzsche's aesthetics-as-physiology says about art and how it says it. To be sure, a conclusive presentation of that aesthetics is seriously impaired by the fact that Nietzsche left behind only undetailed obser- vations, references, plans, and claims. We do not even possess an intrinsic, carefully projected outline of his aesthetics. True, among the plans for The Will to Power we find one of Nietzsche's own sketches with the title "Toward the Physiology of Art" (XVI, 432-34). But it is only a list of seventeen items, not arranged according to any visible guiding thought. We will present in full this collection of headings of investigations that remained to be carried out, because in terms of pure content it offers an immediate overview of what such an aesthetics was to treat.
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THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
TOWARD THE PHYSIOLOGY OF ART
1. Rapture as presupposition: causes of rapture.
2. Typical symptoms of rapture.
3. The feeling of force and plenitude in rapture: its idealizing effect.
4. The factual increase of force: its factual beautification. (The increase of
force, e. g. , in the dance of the sexes. ) The pathological element in rapture: the physiological danger of art-. For consideration: the extent to which our value "beautiful" is completely anthropocentric: based on biological presuppositions concerning growth and progress-.
5. The Apollonian, the Dionysian: basic types. In broader terms, compared with our specialized arts.
6. Question: where architecture belongs.
7. The part artistic capacities play in normal life, the tonic effect of their
exercise: as opposed to the ugly.
8. The question of epidemic and contagion.
9. Problem of "health" and "hysteria": genius = neurosis.
10. Artassuggestion,asmeansofcommunication,astherealmofinvention of the induction psycho-motrice.
11. The inartistic states: objectivity, the mania to mirror everything, neutral- ity. The impoverished will; loss of capital.
12. The inartistic states: abstractness. The impoverished senses.
13. The inartistic states: vitiation, impoverishment, depletion-will to noth-
ingness {Christian, Buddhist, nihilist). The impoverished body.
14. The inartistic states: the moral idiosyncrasy. The fear that characterizes the weak, the mediocre, before the senses, power, rapture {instinct of
those whom life has defeated).
15. How is tragic art possible?
16. The romantic type: ambiguous. Its consequence is "naturalism. "
17. Problem of the actor. The "dishonesty," the typical ability to metamor-
phose as a flaw in character. . . . Lack of shame, the Hanswurst, the satyr, the buffo, the Gil Bias, the actor who plays the artist. . . . *
*The new historical-critical edition of Nietzsche's works (CM VIII, 3, p. 328) lists an eighteenth note, printed in none of the earlier editions.
18. Die Kunst als Rausch, medizinisch: Amnestie. tonicum ganze und partielle lmpotenz.
The meaning of the passage is anything but obvious; it is easy to understand why previous editors let it fall. An attempt at translation:
18. Art as rapture, medically: tonic oblivion, complete and partial impotence.
Rapture as Aesthetic State 95
A multiplicity of different points of inquiry lies before us here, but no blueprint or outline of a structure, not even a preliminary mapping out of the space in which all this is to be joined. Yet at bottom the same is the case with those fragments assembled between numbers 794 and 853 in The Will to Power, except that these go beyond mere catch- words and headlines in providing greater detail. The same is also true of the pieces taken up into volume XIV, pp. 131-201, which belong here thematically. We must therefore try all the harder to bring a higher determination and an essential coherence to the materials that lie before us. To that end we will follow a twofold guideline: for one thing, we will try to keep in view the whole of the doctrine of will to power; for another, we will recall the major doctrines of traditional aesthetics.
But on our way we do not want merely to become cognizant of Nietzsche's teachings on aesthetics. Rather, we want to conceive how the apparently antithetical directions of his basic position with respect to art can be reconciled: art as countermovement to nihilism and art as object of physiology. If a unity prevails here, eventuating from the essence of art itself as Nietzsche sees it, and if art is a configuration of will to power, then insight into the possibility of unity between the antithetical determinations should provide us with a higher concept of the essence of will to power. That is the goal of our presentation of the major teachings of Nietzsche's aesthetics.
At the outset we must refer to a general peculiarity of most of the larger fragments: Nietzsche begins his reflections from various points of inquiry within the field of aesthetics, but he manages at once to touch upon the general context. So it is that many fragments treat the same thing, the only difference being in the order of the material and the distribution of weight or importance. In what follows we shall forego discussion of those sections that are easy to comprehend on the basis of ordinary experience.
Nietzsche's inquiry into art is aesthetics. According to the definitions provided earlier, art in aesthetics is experienced and defined by falling back upon the state of feeling in man that corresponds and pertains to the bringing-forth and the enjoyment of the beautiful. Nietzsche him- self uses the expression "aesthetic state" (WM, 801) and speaks of
96 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
"aesthetic doing and observing" (VIII, 122). But this aesthetics is to be "physiology. " That suggests that states of feeling, taken to be purely psychical, are to be traced back to the bodily condition proper to them. Seen as a whole, it is precisely the unbroken and indissoluble unity of the corporeal-psychical, the living, that is posited as the realm of the aesthetic state: the living "nature" of man.
When Nietzsche s~ys "physiology" he does mean to emphasize the bodily state; but the latter is in itself always already something psychi- cal, and therefore also a matter for "psychology. " The bodily state of an animal and even of man is essentially different from the property of a "natural body," for example, a stone. Every body is also a natural body, but the reverse does not hold. On the other hand, when Nietzsche says "psychology" he always means what also pertains to bodily states (the physiological). Instead of "aesthetic" Nietzsche often speaks more correctly of "artistic" or "inartistic" states. Although he sees art from the point of view of the artist, and demands that it be seen that way, Nietzsche does not mean the expression "artistic" only with reference to the artist. Rather, artistic and inartistic states are those that support and advance-or hamper and preclude-a relation to art of a creative or receptive sort.
The basic question of an aesthetics as physiology of art, and that means of the artist, must above all aim to reveal those special states in the essence of the corporeal-psychical, i. e. , living nature of man in which artistic doing and observing occur, as it were, in conformity with and confinement to nature. In defining the basic aesthetic state we shall at first not refer to the text of The Will to Power but restrict ourselves to what Nietzsche says in the last writing he himself published (Twi- light of the Idols, 1888; VIII, 122-23). The passage reads:
Toward the psychology of the artist. - If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and observing, one physiological precondition is indispensable: rapture. Rapture must first have augmented the excitability of the entire machine: else it does not come to art. All the variously condi- tioned forms of rapture have the requisite force: above all, the rapture of sexual arousal, the oldest and most original form of rapture. In addition, the rapture that comes as a consequence of all great desires, all strong affects;
Rapture as Aesthetic State 97
the rapture of the feast, contest, feat of daring, victory; all extreme move- ment; the rapture of cruelty; rapture in destruction; rapture under certain meteorological influences, for example, the rapture of springtime; or under the influence of narcotics; finally, the rapture of will, of an overfull, teeming will.
We can summarize these remarks with the general statement that rapture is the basic aesthetic state, a rapture which for its part is variously conditioned, released, and increased. The passage cited was not chosen simply because Nietzsche published it but because it achieves the greatest clarity and unity of all the Nietzschean definitions of the aesthetic state. We can readily discern what remains unresolved throughout the final period of Nietzsche's creative life, although in terms of the matter itself it does not deviate essentially from what has gone before, when we compare to this passage number 798 (and the beginning of 799) of The Will to Power. Here Nietzsche speaks of "two states in which art itself emerges as a force of nature in man. " According to the aphorism's title, the two states meant are the "Apol- lonian" and the "Dionysian. " Nietzsche developed the distinction and opposition in his first writing, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music (1872). Even here, at the very beginning of his distinguishing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the "physiological symp- toms" of "dream" and "rapture" were brought into respective relation. W e still find this connection in The Will to Power, number 798 (from the year 1888! ): "Both states are rehearsed in normal life as well, only more weakly: in dreams and in rapture. " Here, as earlier, rapture is but one of the two aesthetic states, juxtaposed to the dream. But from the passage in Twilight of the Idols we gather that rapture is the basic aesthetic state without qualification. Nonetheless, in terms of the genu- ine issue the same conception prevails also in The Will to Power. The first sentence of the following aphorism (WM, 799) reads: "In Diony- sian rapture there is sexuality and voluptuousness: in the Apollonian they are not lacking. " According to The Birth of Tragedy, to there- marks in The Will to Power, number 798, and elsewhere, the Diony- sian alone is the rapturous and the Apollonian the dreamlike; now, in
Twilight of the Idols, the Dionysian and the Apollonian are two kinds
98 TilE WILL TO PO'vVER AS ART
of rapture, rapture itself being the basic state. Nietzsche's ultimate doctrine must be grasped according to this apparently insignificant but really quite essential clarification. W e must read a second passage from Twilight of the Idols in company with the first (VIII, 124): "What is the meaning of the conceptual opposition, which I introduced into aesthetics, of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, both conceived as kinds of rapture? " After such clear testimony it can no longer be a matter simply of unraveling Nietzsche's doctrine of art from the oppo- sition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, an opposition quite com- mon ever since the time of its first publication, but not very commonly grasped, an opposition which nevertheless still retains its significance.
Before we pursue the opposition within the framework of our own presentation, let us ask what it is that according to Nietzsche's final explanation pervades that opposition. With this intention, let us pro- ceed with a double question. First, what is the general essence of rapture? Second, in what sense is rapture "indispensable if there is to be art"; in what sense is rapture the basic aesthetic state?
To the question of the general essence of rapture Nietzsche provides a succinct answer (Twilight of the Idols; VIII, 123): "What is essential in rapture is the feeling of enhancement of force and plenitude. " (Cf. "Toward the Physiology of Art," above: "The feeling of force and plenitude in rapture. ") Earlier he called rapture the "physiological precondition" of art; what is now essential about the precondition is feeling. According to what we clarified above, feeling means the way we find ourselves to be with ourselves, and thereby at the same time with things, with beings that we ourselves are not. Rapture is always rapturous feeling. Where is the physiological, or what pertains to bodily states, in this? Ultimately we dare not split up the matter in such a way, as though there were a bodily state housed in the basement with feelings dwelling upstairs. Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, is precisely the way we are corporeally. Bodily being does not mean that the soul is burdened by a hulk we call the body. In feeling oneself to be, the body is already contained in advance in that self, in such a way that the body in its bodily states permeates the self. We do not "have" a body in the way we carry a knife in a sheath. Neither is the body a natural
Rapture as Aesthetic State 99
body that merely accompanies us and which we can establish, expressly or not, as being also at hand. W e do not "have" a body; rather, we "are" bodily. Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, belongs to the essence of such Being. Feeling achieves from the outset the inherent internalizing tendency of the body in our Dasein. But because feeling, as feeling oneself to be, always just as essentially has a feeling for beings as a whole, every bodily state involves some way in which the things around us and the people with us lay a claim on us or do not do so. When our stomachs are "out of sorts" they can cast a pall over all things. What would otherwise seem indifferent to us suddenly becomes irritating and disturbing; what we usually take in stride now impedes us. True, the will can appeal to ways and means for suppressing the bad mood, but
it cannot directly awaken or create a countermood: for moods are overcome and transformed always only by moods. Here it is essential to observe that feeling is not something that runs its course in our "inner lives. " It is rather that basic mode of our Dasein by force of which and in accordance with which we are always already lifted beyond ourselves into being as a whole, which in this or that way matters to us or does not matter to us. Mood is never merely a way of being determined in our inner being for ourselves. It is above all a way of being attuned, and letting ourselves be attuned, in this or that way in mood. Mood is precisely the basic way in which we are outside our- selves. But that is the way we are essentially and constantly.
In all of this the bodily state swings into action. It lifts a man out beyond himself or it allows him to be enmeshed in himself and to grow listless. We are not first of all "alive," only then getting an apparatus to sustain our living which we call "the body," but we are some body who is alive. * Our being embodied is essentially other than merely being encumbered with an organism. Most of what we know from the
*Wir Ieben, indem wir leiben, "we live in that we are embodied. " Heidegger plays with the German expression wie man /eibt und lebt, "the way somebody actually is," and I have tried to catch the sense by playing on the intriguing English word "some- body. " Heidegger makes this play more than once: see NI, 565 (volume III of this series, p. 79); see also Early Greek Thinking, p. 65.
100 THE WILL TO POWER AS . -\RT
natural sciences about the body and the way it embodies are specifications based on the established misinterpretation of the body as a mere natural body. Through such means we do find out lots of things, but the essential and determinative aspects always elude our vision and grasp. We mistake the state of affairs even further when we subsequently search for the "psychical" which pertains to the body that has already been misinterpreted as a natural body.
Every feeling is an embodiment attuned in this or that way, a mood that embodies in this or that way. Rapture is a feeling, and it is all the more genuinely a feeling the more essentially a unity of embodying attunement prevails. Of someone who is intoxicated we can only say that he "has" something like rapture. But he is not enraptured. The rapture of intoxication is not a state in which a man rises by himself beyond himself. What we are here calling rapture is merely-to use the colloquialism-being "soused," something that deprives us of every possible state of being.
At the outset Nietzsche emphasizes two things about rapture: first, the feeling of enhancement of force; second, the feeling of plenitude. According to what we explained earlier, such enhancement of force must be understood as the capacity to extend beyond oneself, as a relation to beings in which beings themselves are experienced as being more fully in being, richer, more perspicuous, more essential. Enhance- ment does not mean that an increase, an increment of force, "objective- ly" comes about. Enhancement is to be understood in terms of mood: to be caught up in elation-and to be borne along by our buoyancy as such. In the same way, the feeling of plenitude does not suggest an inexhaustible stockpile of inner events, It means above all an attune- ment which is so disposed that nothing is foreign to it, nothing too much for it, which is open to everything and ready to tackle anything- the greatest enthusiasm and the supreme risk hard by one another.
With that we come up against a third aspect of the feeling of rapture: the reciprocal penetration of all enhancements of every ability to do and see, apprehend and address, communicate and achieve release. "-In this way states are ultimately interlaced which perhaps would have
Rapture as Aesthetic State 101
reason to remain foreign to one another. For example, the feeling of religious rapture and sexual arousal (-two profound feelings coor- dinated quite precisely to an all but astonishing degree)" (WM, 800).
What Nietzsche means by the feeling of rapture as the basic aesthet- ic state may be gauged by the contrary phenomenon, the inartistic states of the sober, weary, exhausted, dry as dust, wretched, timorous, pallid creatures "under whose regard life suffers" (WM, 801, 812). Rapture is a feeling. But from the contrast of the artistic and inartistic states it becomes especially clear that by the word Rausch Nietzsche does not mean a fugitive state that rushes over us and then goes up in smoke. Rapture may therefore hardly be taken as an affect, not even if we give the term "affect" the more precise definition gained earlier. Here as in the earlier case it remains difficult, if not impossible, to apply uncritically terms like affect, passion, and feeling as essential defini- tions. We can employ such concepts of psychology, by which one divides the faculties of the psyche into classes, only as secondary refer- ences-presupposing that we are inquiring, from the beginning and throughout, on the basis of the phenomena themselves in each in- stance. Then perhaps the artistic state of "rapture," if it is more than a fugitive affect, may be grasped as a passion. But then the question immediately arises: to what extent? In The Will to Power there is a passage that can give us a pointer. Nietzsche says (WM, 814), "Artists are not men of great passion, whatever they like to tell us-and them- selves as well. " Nietzsche adduces two reasons why artists cannot be men of great passion. First, simply because they are artists, i. e. , crea- tors, artists must examine themselves; they lack shame before them- selves, and above all they lack shame before great passion; as artists they have to exploit passion, hiding in ambush and pouncing on it, trans- forming it in the artistic process. Artists are too curious merely to _be magnificent in great passion; for what passion would have confronting it is not curiosity but a sense of shame. Second, artists are also always
the victims of the talent they possess, and that denies them the sheer extravagance of great passion. "One does not get over a passion by portraying it; rather, the passion is over when one portrays it" (WM,
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814). The artistic state itself is never great passion, but still it is passion. Thus it possesses a steady and extensive reach into beings as a whole, indeed in such a way that this reach can take itself up into its own grasp, keep it in view, and compel it to take form.
From everything that has been said to clarify the general essence of rapture it ought to have become apparent that we cannot succeed in our efforts to understand it by means of a pure "physiology," that Nietzsche's use of the term "physiology of art" rather has an essentially covert meaning.
What Nietzsche designates with the word Rausch, which in his final publications he grasps in a unified way as the basic aesthetic state, is bifurcated early in his work into two different states. The natural forms of the artistic state are those of dream and enchantment, as we may say, adopting an earlier usage of Nietzsche's in order to avoid here the word Rausch which he otherwise employs. For the state he calls rapture is one in which dream and ecstatic transport first attain their art-produc- ing essence and become the artistic states to which Nietzsche gives the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian. " The Apollonian and the Diony- sian are for Nietzsche two "forces of nature and art" (WM, 1050); in their reciprocity all "further development" of art consists. The conver- gence of the two in the unity of one configuration is the birth of the supreme work of Greek art, tragedy. But if Nietzsche both at the beginning and at the end of his path of thought thinks the essence of art, which is to say, the essence of the metaphysical activity of life, in the selfsame opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, still we must learn to know and to see that his interpretation in the two cases differs. For at the time of The Birth of Tragedy the opposition is still
thought in the sense of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, although- rather, because-it is part of a confrontation with such metaphyics; by way of contrast, at the time of The Will to Power the opposition is thought on the basis of the fundamental position designated in that title. So long as we do not discern the transformation with adequate clarity and so long as we do not grasp the essence of will to power, it would be good for us to put aside for a while this opposition, which
Rapture as Aesthetic State 103
all too often becomes a vacuous catchword. The formula of Apollonian and Dionysian opposites has long been the refuge of all confused and confusing talk and writing about art and about Nietzsche. For Nietz- sche the opposition remained a constant source of boundless obscuri- ties and novel questions.
Nietzsche may well lay claim to the first public presentation and development of the discovery of that opposition in Greek existence to which he gives the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian. " We can surmise from various clues, however, that Jacob Burckhardt in his Basel lectures on Greek culture, part of which Nietzsche heard, was already on the trail of the opposition; otherwise Nietzsche himself would not expressly refer to Burckhardt as he does in Twilight of the Idols (VIII, 170-71) when he says, ". . . the most profound expert on their [the Greeks'] culture living today, such as Jacob Burckhardt in Basel. " Of course, what Nietzsche could not have realized, even though since his youth he knew more clearly than his contemporaries who Holderlin was, was the fact that Holderlin had seen and conceived of the opposi- tion in an even more profound and lofty manner.
Holderlin's tremendous insight is contained in a letter to his friend Bohlendorff. He wrote it on December 4, 1801, shortly before his departure for France (Works, ed. Hellingrath, V, 318 ff. *). Here
*Holderlin's letter to Casimir Ulrich Bohlendorff (1775-1825), a member of Holder- lin's circle of poet-friends in Homburg, contains the following lines (Holder/in Werke und Briefe, Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1969, II, 940-41):
"My friend! You have attained much by way of precision and skillful articulation and sacrificed nothing by way of warmth; on the contrary, the elasticity of your spirit, like that of a fine steel blade, has but proven mightier as a result of the schooling to which it has been subjected. . . . Nothing is more difficult for us to learn than the free employ- ment of our national gift. And I believe that clarity of presentation is originally as natural to us as the fire of heaven was to the Greeks. On that account the Greeks are to he surpassed more in magnificent passion . . . than in the commanding intellect and repre- sentational skill which are typical of Homer.
"It sounds paradoxical. But I assert it once again and submit it for your examination and possible employment: what is properly national will come to have less and less priority as one's education progresses. For that reason the Greeks are not really masters of holy pathos, since it is innate in them, while from Homer on they excel in representa-
104 THE Vv"ILL TO POWER AS t\RT
Holderlin contrasts "the holy pathos" and "the Occidental funonian sobriety of representational skill" in the essence of the Greeks. The opposition is not to be understood as an indifferent historical finding. Rather, it becomes manifest to direct meditation on the destiny and determination of the German people. Here we must be satisfied with a mere reference, since Holderlin's way of knowing could receive adequate definition only by means of an interpretation of his work. It is enough if we gather from the reference that the variously named conflict of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, of holy passion and sober representation, is a hidden stylistic law of the historical determination of the German people, and that one day we must find ourselves ready and able to give it shape. The opposition is not a formula with the help of which we should be content to describe "culture. " By recognizing this antagonism Holderlin and Nietzsche early on placed a question mark after the task of the German people to find their essence historically. Will we understand this cipher? One thing is certain: history will wreak vengeance on us if we do not.
We are trying first of all to sketch the outline of Nietzsche's "aes- thetics" as a "physiology of art" by limiting ourselves to the general phenomenon of rapture as the basic artistic state. In that regard we
tiona! skill. For that extraordinary man was so profoundly sensitive that he could capture the funonian sobriety of the Western world for his Apollonian realm and adapt himself faithfully to the foreign element. . . .
"But what is one's own must be learned as thoroughly as what is foreign. For that reason the Greeks are indispensable to us. But precisely in what is our own, in what is our national gift, we will not be able to keep apace with them, since, as I said, the free employment of what is one's own is most difficult. "
Hiilderlin's letter has occasioned much critical debate. Heidegger discusses it in his contribution to the Tiibinger Gedenkschrift, "Andenken," reprinted in Erliiuterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung, fourth, expanded ed. (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1971), esp. pp. 82 and 87 ff. A critical review of the literature may be found in Peter Szondi, "Hiilderlins Brief an Biihlendorff vom 4. Dezember 1801," Euphorion: Zeitschrift fiir Literaturgeschichte, vol. 58 (1964), 260-75. Szondi's article hardly does justice to Hei- degger's reading of the letter and in general is too polemical to be very enlightening; but it does indicate the dimensions and sources of the critical discussion in, for example, Wilhelm Michel, Friedrich Beissner, Beda Allemann, Walter Brocker, and others.
Rapture as Aesthetic State 105
were to answer a second question: in what sense is rapture "indispens- able if there is to be art," if art is to be at all possible, if it is to be realized? What, and how, "is" art? Is art in the creation by the artist, or in the enjoyment of the work, or in the actuality of the work itself, or in all three together? How then is the conglomeration of these different things something actual? How, and where, is art? Is there "art-as-such" at all, or is the word merely a collective noun to which nothing actual corresponds?
But by now, as we inquire into the matter more incisively, everything becomes obscure and ambiguous. And if we want to know how "rap- ture" is indispensable if there is to be art, things become altogether opaque. Is rapture merely a condition of the commencement of art? If so, in what sense? Does rapture merely issue and liberate the aesthetic state? Or is rapture its constant source and support, and if the latter, how does such a state support "art," of which we know neither how nor what it "is"? When we say it is a configuration of will to power, then, given the current state of the question, we are not really saying anything. For what we want to grasp in the first place is what that determination means. Besides, it is questionable whether the essence of art is thereby defined in terms of art, or whether it isn't rather defined as a mode of the Being of beings. So there is only one way open to us by which we can penetrate and advance, and that is to ask further about the general essence of the aesthetic state, which we provisionally characterized as rapture. But how? Obviously, in the direction of a survey of the realm of aesthetics.
Rapture is feeling, an embodying attunement, an embodied being that is contained in attunement, attunement woven into embodiment. But attunement lays open Dasein as an enhancing, conducts it into the plenitude of its capacities, which mutually arouse one another aod foster enhancement. But while clarifying rapture as a state of feeling we emphasized more than once that we may not take such a state as something at hand "in" the body and "in" the psyche. Rather, we must take it as a mode of the embodying, attuned stance toward beings as a whole, beings which for their part determine the pitch of the attune-
106 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
ment. Hence, if we want to characterize more broadly and fully the essential structure of the basic aesthetic mode, it behooves us to ask: what is determinative in and for this basic mode, such that it may be spoken of as aesthetic?
15. Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful. Its Misinterpretation by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
At the outset, we know in a rough sort of way that just as "the true" determines our behavior in thinking and knowing, and just as "the good" determines the ethical attitude, so does "the beautiful" deter- mine the aesthetic state.
What does Nietzsche say about the beautiful and about beauty? For the answer to this question also Nietzsche provides us with only isolated statements-proclamations, as it were-and references. Nowhere do we find a structured and grounded presentation. A comprehensive, solid understanding of Nietzsche's statements about beauty might re- sult from study of Schopenhauer's aesthetic views; for in his definition of the beautiful Nietzsche thinks and judges by way of opposition and therefore of reversal. But such a procedure is always fatal if the chosen opponent does not stand on solid ground but stumbles about aimlessly. Such is the case with Schopenhauer's views on aesthetics, delineated in the third book of his major work, The World as Will and Representa- tion. It cannot be called an aesthetics that would be even remotely comparable to that of Hegel. In terms of content, Schopenhauer thrives on the authors he excoriates, namely, Schelling and Hegel. The one he does not excoriate is Kant. Instead, he thoroughly misunderstands him. Schopenhauer plays the leading role in the preparation and genesis of that misunderstanding of Kantian aesthetics to which Nietzsche too fell prey and which is still quite common today. One may say that Kant's
Critique ofJudgment, the work in which he presents his aesthetics, has
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been influential up to now only on the basis of misunderstandings, a happenstance of no little significance for the history of philosophy. Schiller alone grasped some essentials in relation to Kant's doctrine of the beautiful; but his insight too was buried in the debris of nineteenth- century aesthetic doctrines.
The misunderstanding of Kant's aesthetics involves an assertion by Kant concerning the beautiful. Kant's definition is developed in sec- tions 2-5 of The Critique of judgment. What is "beautiful" is what purely and simply pleases. The beautiful is the object of "sheer" de- light. Such delight, in which the beautiful opens itself up to us as beautiful, is in Kant's words "devoid of all interest. " He says, "Taste is the capacity to judge an object or mode of representation by means of delight or revulsion, devoid ofall interest. The object of such delight is called beautiful. "*
Aesthetic behavior, i. e. , our comportment toward the beautiful, is "delight devoid of all interest. " According to the common notion, disinterestedness is indifference toward a thing or person: we invest nothing of our will in relation to that thing or person. If the relation to the beautiful, delight, is defined as "disinterested," then, according to Schopenhauer, the aesthetic state is one in which the will is put out of commission and all striving brought to a standstill; it is pure repose, simply wanting nothing more, sheer apathetic drift.
And Nietzsche? He says that the aesthetic state is rapture. That is manifestly the opposite of all "disinterested delight" and is therefore at the same time the keenest opposition to Kant's definition of our comportment toward the beautiful. With that in mind we understand the following observation by Nietzsche (XIV, 132): "Since Kant, all talk of art, beauty, knowledge, and ~isdom has been smudged and besmirched by the concept 'devoid of interest. '" Since Kant? If this is thought to mean "through" Kant, then we have to say "No! " But if it is thought to mean since the Schopenhauerian misinterpretation of Kant, then by all means "Yes! " And for that reason Nietzsche's own effort too is misconceived.
*Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Akademieausgabe, B 16.
Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful 109
But then what does Kant mean by the definition of the beautiful as the object of "disinterested" delight? What does "devoid of all inter- est" mean? "Interest" comes from the Latin mihi interest, something is of importance to me. To take an interest in something suggests wanting to have it for oneself as a possession, to have disposition and control over it. When we take an interest in something we put it in the context of what we intend to do with it and what we want of it. Whatever we take an interest in is always already taken, i. e. , represent- ed, with a view to something else.
Kant poses the question of the essence of the beautiful in the follow- ing way. He asks by what means our behavior, in the situation where we find something we encounter to be beautiful, must let itself be determined in such a way that we encounter the beautiful as beautiful. What is the determining ground for our finding something beautiful?
Before Kant says constructively what the determining ground is, and therefore what the beautiful itself is, he first says by way of refutation what never can and never may propose itself as such a ground, namely, an interest. Whatever exacts of us the judgment "This is beautiful" can never be an interest. That is to say, in order to find something beautiful, we must let what encounters us, purely as it is in itself, come before us in its own stature and worth. We may not take it into account in advance with a view to something else, our goals and intentions, our possible enjoyment and advantage. Comportment toward the beautiful as such, says Kant, is unconstrained favoring. We must release what encounters us as such to its way to be; we must allow and grant it what belongs to it and what it brings to us.
But now we ask, is this free granting, this letting the beautiful be what it is, a kind of indifference; does it put the will out of commission? Or is not such unconstrained favoring rather the supreme effort of our essential nature, the liberation of our selves for the release of what has proper worth in itself, only in order that we may have it purely? Is the Kantian "devoid of interest" a "smudging" and even a "besmirching" of aesthetic behavior? Or is it not the magnificent discovery and appro- bation of it?
The misinterpretation of the Kantian doctrine of "disinterested de-
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light" consists in a double error. First, the definition "devoid of all interest," which Kant offers only in a preparatory and path-breaking way, and which in its very linguistic structure displays its negative character plainly enough, is given out as the single assertion (also held to be a positive assertion) by Kant on the beautiful. To the present day it is proffered as the Kantian interpretation of the beautiful. Second, the definition, misinterpreted in what it methodologically tries to achieve, at the same time is not thought in terms of the content that remains in aesthetic behavior when interest in the object falls away. The misinterpretation of "interest" leads to the erroneous opinion that with the exclusion of interest every essential relation to the object is suppressed. The opposite is the case. Precisely by means of the "devoid of interest" the essential relation to the object itself comes into play. The misinterpretation fails to see that now for the first time the object comes to the fore as pure object and that such coming forward into appearance is the beautiful. The word "beautiful" means appearing in
the radiance of such coming to the fore. *
What emerges as decisive about the double error is the neglect of
actual inquiry into what Kant erected upon a firm foundation with respect to the essence of the beautiful and of art. We will bring one example forward which shows how stubbornly the ostensibly self-evi- dent misinterpretation of Kant during the nineteenth century still obtains today. Wilhelm Dilthey, who labored at the history of aesthet- ics with a passion unequaled by any of his contemporaries, remarked in 1887 (Gesammelte Schriften VI, 119) that Kant's statement con-
*Das Wort "schiin" meint das Erscheinen im Schein so/chen Vorscheins. Although the words schOn and Schein vary even in their oldest forms {see Hermann Paul, Deut- sches Worterbuch, 6th ed. [Tiibingen, M. Niemeyer, 1966], pp. 537b f. and 569b f. ), their meanings converge early on in the sense of the English words "shine" and "shin- ing," related to the words "show," "showy. " Perhaps the similar relationship between the words "radiate" and "radiant" comes closest to the German Schein and schOn. But it is not simply a matter of alliterative wordplay: the nexus of schiin and Schein is, according to Heidegger, what Plato means by ekphanestaton (discussed in section 21, below); and if Nietzsche's task is to overturn Platonism, this issue must be near the very heart of the Heidegger-Nietzsche confrontation. On the relation of Schein and schiin see also Martin Heidegger, "Hegel und die Griechen," in Wegmarken, pp. 262, 267, and elsewhere.
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cerning disinterested delight "is presented by Schopenhauer with special brilliance. " The passage should read, "was fatally misinterpret- ed by Schopenhauer. "
Had Nietzsche inquired of Kant himself, instead of trusting in Scho- penhauer's guidance, then he would have had to recognize that Kant alone grasped the essence of what Nietzsche in his own way wanted to comprehend concerning the decisive aspects of the beautiful. Nietz- sche could never have continued, in the place cited (XIV, 132), after the impossible remark about Kant, "In my view what is beautiful (observed historically) is what is visible in the most honored men of an era, as an expression of what is most worthy of honor. " For just this-purely to honor what is of worth in its appearance-is for Kant the essence of the beautiful, although unlike Nietzsche he does not expand the meaning directly to all historical significance and greatness.
And when Nietzsche says (WM, 804), "The beautiful exists just as little as the good, the true," that too corresponds to the opinion of Kant.
But the purpose of our reference to Kant, in the context of an account of Nietzsche's conception of beauty, is not to eradicate the firmly rooted misinterpretation of the Kantian doctrine. It is to provide a possibility of grasping what Nietzsche himself says about beauty on the basis of its own original, historical context. That Nietzsche himself did not see the context draws a boundary line that he shares with his era and its relation to Kant and to German Idealism. It would be inexcusable for us to allow the prevailing misinterpretation of Kantian aesthetics to continue; but it would also be wrongheaded to try to trace Nietzsche's conception of beauty and the beautiful back to the Kantian. Rather, what we must now do is to allow Nietzsche's definition of the beautiful to sprout and flourish in its own soil-and in that way to see to what discordance it is transplanted.
Nietzsche too defines the beautiful as what pleases. But everything depends on the operative concept of pleasure and of what pleases as such. What pleases we take to be what corresponds to us, what speaks to us. What pleases someone, what speaks to him, depends on who that someone is to whom it speaks and corresponds. Who such a person is,
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is defined by what he demands of himself. Hence we call "beautiful'' whatever corresponds to what we demand of ourselves. Furthermore, such demanding is measured by what we take ourselves to be, what we trust we are capable of, and what we dare as perhaps the extreme challenge, one we may just barely withstand.
In that way we are to understand Nietzsche's assertion about the beautiful and about the judgment by which we find something to be beautiful (WM, 852): "To pick up the scent of what would nearly finish us off if it were to confront us in the flesh, as danger, problem, temptation-this determines even our aesthetic 'yes. ' ('That is beauti- ful' is an affirmation. )" So also with The Will to Power, number 819: "The firm, mighty, solid, the life that rests squarely and sovereignly and conceals its strength-that is what 'pleases,' i. e. , that corresponds to what one takes oneself to be. "
The beautiful is what we find honorable and worthy, as the image of our essential nature. It is that upon which we bestow "unconstrained favor," as Kant says, and we do so from the very foundations of our essential nature and for its sake. In another place Nietzsche says (XIV, 134), "Such 'getting rid of interest and the ego' is nonsense and impre- cise observation: on the contrary, it is the thrill that comes of being in our world now, of getting rid of our anxiety in the face of things foreign! " Certainly such "getting rid of interest" in the sense of Scho- penhauer's interpretation is nonsense. But what Nietzsche describes as the thrill that comes of being in our world is what Kant means by the "pleasure of reflection. " Here also, as with the concept of "interest," the basic Kantian concepts of "pleasure" and "reflection" are to be discussed in terms of the Kantian philosophical effort and its transcen- dental procedure, not flattened out with the help of everyday notions. Kant analyzes the essence of the "pleasure of reflection," as the basic comportment toward the beautiful, in The Critique of Judgment, sections 37 and 39. *
*Neske prints $$57 and 59, but this is obviously an error: die Lust am SchOnen, as Lust der blossen Reflexion, is not mentioned in S57 or S59, but is discussed indirectly in S37 and explicitly in S39. See especially B 155.
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According to the quite "imprecise observation" on the basis of which Nietzsche conceives of the essence of interest, he would have to desig- nate what Kant calls "unconstrained favoring" as an interest of the highest sort. Thus what Nietzsche demands of comportment toward the beautiful would be fulfilled from Kant's side. However, to the extent that Kant grasps more keenly the essence of interest and there- fore excludes it from aesthetic behavior, he does not make such behav- ior indifferent; rather, he makes it possible for such comportment toward the beautiful object to be all the purer and more intimate. Kant's interpretation of aesthetic behavior as "pleasure of reflection" propels us toward a basic state of human being in which man for the first time arrives at the well-grounded fullness of his essence.