For that his point of
departure
would have to have been the work of art.
Heidegger - Nietzsche - v1-2
" 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-
110 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
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.
Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful Ill
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,
112 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
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.
Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful 113
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. It is the state that Schiller conceives of as the condition of the possibility of man's existence as historical, as grounding history.
According to the explanations by Nietzsche which we have cited, the beautiful is what determines us, our behavior and our capability, to the extent that we are claimed supremely in our essence, which is to say, to the extent that we ascend beyond ourselves. Such ascent beyond ourselves, to the full of our essential capability, occurs according to Nietzsche in rapture. Thus the beautiful is disclosed in rapture. The beautiful itself is what transports us into the feeling of rapture. From this elucidation of the essence of the beautiful the characterization of rapture, of the basic aesthetic state, acquires enhanced clarity. If the beautiful is what sets the standard for what we trust we are essentially capable of, then the feeling of rapture, as our relation to the beautiful, can be no mere turbulence and ebullition. The mood of rapture is rather an attunement in the sense of the supreme and most measured determinateness. However much Nietzsche's manner of speech and presentation sounds like Wagner's turmoil of feelings and sheer sub- mergence in mere "experiences," it is certain that in this regard he wants to achieve the exact opposite. What is strange and almost incom- prehensible is the fact that he tries to make his conception of the aesthetic state accessible to his contemporaries, and tries to convince
them of it, by speaking the language of physiology and biology.
In terms of its concept, the beautiful is what is estimable and worthy
114 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
as such. In connection with that, number 852 of The Will to Power says, "It is a question of strength (of an individual or a nation), whether and where the judgment ·beautiful' is made. " But such strength is not sheer muscle power, a reservoir of "brachial brutality. " What Nietz- sche here calls "strength" is the capacity of historical existence to come to grips with and perfect its highest essential determination. Of course, the essence of "strength" does not come to light purely and decisively. Beauty is taken to be a "biological value":
For consideration: the extent to which our value "beautiful" is completely anthropocentric: based on biological presuppositions concerning growth and progress-. ("Toward the Physiology of Art," no. 4 [cf. p. 94, above]. )
The fundament of all aesthetics (is given in] the general principle that aesthetic values rest on biological values, that aesthetic delights are biological delights (XIV, 165).
That Nietzsche conceives of the beautiful "biologically" is indisputa- ble. Yet the question remains what "biological," bios, "life," mean here. In spite of appearances created by the words, they do not mean what biology understands them to be.
16. Rapture as Farm-engendering Force
Now that the aesthetic state too has been clarified by way of an elucida- tion of the beautiful, we can try to survey more precisely the realm of that state. W e can do this by studying the basic modes of behavior that are operative in the aesthetic state: aesthetic doing and aesthetic observ- ing-or creation by the artist and reception by those who examine works of art.
If we ask what the essence of creation is, then on the basis of what has gone before we can answer that it is the rapturous bringing-forth of the beautiful in the work. Only in and through creation is the work realized. But because that is so, the essence of creation for its part remains dependent upon the essence of the work; therefore it can be grasped only from the Being of the work. Creation creates the work. But the essence of the work is the origin of the essence of creation.
If we ask how Nietzsche defines the work, we receive no answer. For Nietzsche's meditation on art-and precisely this meditation, as aes- thetics in the extreme-does not inquire into the work as such, at least not in the first place. For that reason we hear little, and nothing essential, about the essence of creation as bringing-forth. On the con- trary, only creation as a life-process is discussed, a life-process condi- tioned by rapture. The creative state is accordingly "an explosive state" (WM, 811). That is a chemical description, not a philosophical inter- pretation. If in the same place Nietzsche refers to vascular changes, alterations in skin tone, temperature, and secretion, his findings involve nothing more than changes in the body grasped in an extrinsic manner, even if he draws into consideration "the automatism of the entire muscular system. " Such findings may be correct, but they hold also for
ll6 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
other, pathological, bodily states. Nietzsche says it is not possible to be an artist and not be ill. And when he says that making music, making art of any kind, is also a kind of making children, it merely corresponds to that designation of rapture according to which "sexual rapture is its oldest and most original form. "
But if we were to restrict ourselves to these references by Nietzsche we would heed only one side of the creative process. The other side, if it makes sense to speak here of sides at all, we must present by recalling the essence of rapture and of beauty, namely ascent beyond oneself. By such ascent we come face to face with that which corre- sponds to what we take ourselves to be. With that we touch upon the character of decision in creation, and what has to do with standards and with hierarchy. Nietzsche enters that sphere when he says (WM, 800), "Artists should see nothing as it is, but more fully, simply, strongly: for that, a kind of youth and spring, a kind of habitual rapture, must be proper to their lives. "
Nietzsche also calls the fuller, simpler, stronger vision in creation an "idealizing. " To the essential definition of rapture as a feeling of enhancement of power and plenitude (Twilight of the Idols, VIII, 123) Nietzsche appends: "From this feeling, one bestows upon things, one compels them to take from us, one violates them-this process is called idealization. " But to idealize is not, as one might think, merely to omit, strike, or otherwise discount what is insignificant and ancillary. Ideali- zation is not a defensive action. Its essence consists in a "sweeping emphasis upon the main features. " What is decisive therefore is an- ticipatory discernment of these traits, reaching out toward what we believe we can but barely overcome, barely survive. It is that attempt to grasp the beautiful which Rilke's '! First Elegy" describes wholly in Nietzsche's sense:
. . . For the beautiful is nothing
but the beginning of the terrible, a beginning we but barely endure; and it amazes us so, since calmly it disdains
to destroy us. "'
*Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke in drei Banden (Frankfurt/Main: lnsel, 1966) I, 441, from lines 4-7 of the first Duino Elegy:
Rapture as Form-engendering Force 117
Creation is an emphasizing of major features, a seeing more simply and strongly. It is bare survival before the court of last resort. It commends itself to the highest law and therefore celebrates to the full its survival in the face of such danger.
For the artist "beauty" is something outside all hierarchical order, since in it opposites are joined-the supreme sign of power, power over things in opposition; furthermore, without tension: -that there is no further need of force, that everything so easily follows, obeys, and brings to its obedience the most amiable demeanor-this fascinates the will to power of the artist (WM, 803).
Nietzsche understands the aesthetic state of the observer and recipi- ent on the basis of the state of the creator. Thus the effect of the artwork is nothing else than a reawakening of the creator's state in the one who enjoys the artwork. Observation of art follows in the wake of creation. Nietzsche says (WM, 821), "-the effect of artworks is arous- al of the art-creating state, rapture. " Nietzsche shares this conception with the widely prevalent opinion of aesthetics. On that basis we under- stand why he demands, logically, that aesthetics conform to the creator, the artist. Observation of works is only a derivative form and offshoot of creation. Therefore what was said of creation corresponds precisely, though derivatively, to observation of art. Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist (XIV, 136). But because Nietzsche does not unfold the essence of creation from what is to be created, namely, the work; because he develops it from the state of aesthetic behavior; the bringing-forth of the work does not receive an adequately delineated interpretation which would distin- guish it from the bringing-forth of utensils by way of handicraft. Not only that. The behavior of observation is not set in relief against creation, and so it remains undefined. The view that the observation of works somehow follows in the wake of creation is so little true that
. . . Denn das Schone ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen, und wir bewundern es so, wei) es gelassen verschmiiht,
uns zu zerstiiren.
118 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
not even the relation of the artist to the work as something created is one that would be appropriate to the creator. But that could be demon- strated only by way of an inquiry into art that would begin altogether differently, proceeding from the work itself; through the presentation of Nietzsche's aesthetics offered here it ought to have become clear by now how little he treats the work of art. *
And yet, just as a keener conception of the essence of rapture led us to the inner relation to beauty, so here examination of creation and observation enables us to encounter more than mere corporeal-psychi- cal processes. The relation to "major features" emphasized in "idealiza- tion," to the simpler and stronger aspects which the artist anticipates in what he meets, once again becomes manifest in the aesthetic state. Aesthetic feeling is neither blind and boundless emotion nor a pleasant contentment, a comfortable drifting that permeates our state of being. Rapture in itself is drawn to major features, that is, to a series of traits, to an articulation. So we must once more turn away from the apparently one-sided consideration of mere states and turn toward what this mood defines in our attunement. In connection with the usual conceptual language of aesthetics, which Nietzsche too speaks, we call it "form. "
The artist-out of whom, back to whom, and within whom Nietz- sche always casts his glance, even when he speaks of form and of the work-has his fundamental character in this: he "ascribes to no thing a value unless it knows how to become form" (WM, 817). Nietzsche explains such becoming-form here in an aside as "giving itself up," "making itself public. " Although at first blush these words seem quite strange, they define the essence of form. Without Nietzsche's making explicit mention of it here or elsewhere, the definition corresponds to the original concept of form as it develops with the Greeks. W e cannot discuss that origin here in greater detail.
But by way of a commentary on Nietzsche's definition let us say only·
*The reference to an inquiry that would begin "altogether differently" is to that series of lectures Heidegger was reworking during the winter semester of 1936-37 (which is to say, during the period of these Nietzsche lectures), later published as "The Origin of the Work of Art. "
Rapture as Form-engendering Force 119
this: form, forma, corresponds to the Greek morphe. It is the enclosing limit and boundary, what brings and stations a being into that which it is, so that it stands in itself: its configuration. Whatever stands in this way is what the particular being shows itself to be, its outward appear- ance, eidos, through which and in which it emerges, stations itself there as publicly present, scintillates, and achieves pure radiance.
The artist-we may now understand that name as a designation of the aesthetic state-does not comport himself to form as though it were expressive of something else. The artistic relation to form is love of form for its own sake, for what it is. Nietzsche says as much on one occasion (WM, 828), putting it in a negative way with a view to contemporary painters:
Not oneof them is simply a painter: they are all archeologists, psychologists, people who devise a scenario for any given recollection or theory. They take their pleasure from our erudition, our philosophy. . . . They do not love a form for what it is; they love it for what it expresses. They are the sons of a learned, tormented and reflective generation-a thousand miles removed from the old masters who did not read and whose only thought was to give their eyes a feast.
Form, as what allows that which we encounter to radiate in appear- ance, first brings the behavior that it determines into the immediacy of a relation to beings. Form displays the relation itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open. Form defines and demarcates for the first time the realm in which the state of waxing force and plenitude of being comes to fulfillment. Form founds the realm in which rapture as such becomes possible. Wherever form holds sway, as the supreme simplicity of the most resourceful lawfulness, there is rapture.
Rapture does not mean mere chaos that churns and foams, the drunken bravado of sheer riotousness and tumult. When Nietzsche says "rapture" the word has a sound and sense utterly opposed to Wagner's. For Nietzsche rapture means the most glorious victory of form. With respect to the question of form in art, and with a view to
120 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
Wagner, Nietzsche says at one point (WM, 835): "An error-that what Wagner has created is a form: - i t is formlessness. The possibility of dramatic structure remains to be discovered. . . . Whorish in- strumentation. "
Of course, Nietzsche does not conduct a meditation devoted express- ly to the origin and essence of form in relation to art.
For that his point of departure would have to have been the work of art. Yet with a bit of extra effort we can still discern, at least approximately, what Nietz- sche means by form.
By "form" Nietzsche never understands the merely "formal," that is to say, what stands in need of content, what is only the external border of such content, circumscribing it but not influencing it. Such a border does not give bounds; it is itself the result of sheer cessation. It is only a fringe, not a component, not what lends consistency and pith by pervading the content and fixing it in such a way that its character as "contained" evanesces. Genuine form is the only true content.
What it takes to be an artist is that one experience what all nonartists call "form" as content, as "the matter itself. " With that, of course, one is relegated to an inverted world. For from now on one takes content to be something merely formal-including one's own life (WM, 818).
When Nietzsche tries to characterize lawfulness of form, however, he does not do so with a view to the essence of the work and the work's form. He cites only that lawfulness of form which is most common and familiar to us, the "logical," "arithmetical," and "geometrical. " But logic and mathematics are for him not merely representative names designating the purest sort of lawfulness; rather, Nietzsche suggests that lawfulness of form must be traced back to logical definition, in a way that corresponds to his explanation of thinking and Being. By such tracing back of formal lawfulness, however, Nietzsche does not mean that art is nothing but logic and mathematics.
"Estimates of aesthetic value"-which is to say, our finding some- thing to be beautiful-have as their "ground floor" those feelings that relate to logical, arithmetical, and geometrical lawfulness (XIV, 133).
Rapture as Form-engendering Force 121
The basic logical feelings are those of delight "in the ordered, the surveyable, the bounded, and in repetition. " The expression "logical feelings" is deceptive. It does not mean that the feelings themselves are logical, that they proceed according to the laws of thought. The ex- pression "logical feelings" means having a feeling for, letting one's mood be determined by, order, boundary, the overview.
Because estimates of aesthetic value are grounded on the logical feelings, they are also "more fundamental than moral estimates. " Nietzsche's decisive valuations have as their standard enhancement and securement of "life. " B_ut in his view the basic logical feelings, delight in the ordered and bounded, are nothing else than "the pleasurable feelings among all organic creatures in relation to the danger of their situation or to the difficulty of finding nourishment; the familiar does one good, the sight of something that one trusts he can easily over- power does one good, etc. " (XIV, 133).
The result, to put it quite roughly, is the following articulated struc- ture of pleasurable feelings: underlying all, the biological feelings of pleasure that arise when life asserts itself and survives; above these, but at the same time in service to them, the logical, mathematical feelings; these in turn serve as the basis for aesthetic feelings. Hence we can trace the aesthetic pleasure derived from form back to certain conditions of the life-process as such. Our view, originally turned toward lawfulness of form, is deflected once more and is directed toward sheer states of life.
Our way through Nietzsche's aesthetics has up to now been deter- mined by Nietzsche's basic position toward art: taking rapture, the basic aesthetic state, as our point of departure, we proceeded to consid- er beauty; from it we went back to the states of creation and reception; from these we advanced to what they are related to, to what determines them, i. e. , form; from form we advanced to the pleasure derived from what is ordered, as a fundamental condition of embodying life; with that, we are back where we started, for life is life-enhancement, and ascendant life is rapture. The realm in which the whole process forward and backward itself takes place, the whole within which and as which rapture and beauty, creation and form, form and life have their recipro-
122 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
cal relation, at first remains undefined. So does the kind of context for and relationship between rapture and beauty, creation and form. All are proper to art. But then art would only be a collective noun and not the name of an actuality grounded and delineated in itself.
For Nietzsche, however, art is more than a collective noun. Art is a configuration of will to power. The indeterminateness we have indi- cated can be eliminated only through consideration of will to power. The essence of art is grounded in itself, clarified, and articulated in its structure only to the extent that the same is done for will to power. Will to power must originally ground the manner in which all things that are proper to art cohere.
Of course, one might be tempted to dispose of the indeterminateness in a simple way. We have only to call whatever is related to rapture "subjective," and whatever is related to beauty "objective," and in the same fashion understand creation as subjective behavior and form as objective law. The unknown variable would be the relation of the subjective to the objective: the subject-object relation. What could be more familiar than that? And yet what is more questionable than the subject-object relation as the starting point for man as subject and as the definition of the nonsubjective as object? The commonness of the distinction is not yet proof of its clarity; neither is it proof that the distinction is truly grounded.
The illusory clarity and concealed groundlessness of this schema do not help us much. The schema simply casts aside what is worthy of question in Nietzsche's aesthetics, what is worthwhile in the confronta- tion and therefore to be emphasized. The less we do violence to Nietzsche's "aesthetics" by building it up as an edifice of apparently obvious doctrines; the more we allow his quest and questioning to go its own way; the more surely do we come across those perspectives and basic notions in which the whole for Nietzsche possesses a unity that is fully mature, albeit obscure and amorphous. If we want to grasp the basic metaphysical position of Nietzsche's thought, we ought to clarify these notions. Therefore we must now try to simplify Nietzsche's presentations concerning art to what is essential; yet we may not relin-
Rapture as Form-engendering Force 123
quish the multiplicity of perspectives there, nor impose on his thoughts some dubious schema from the outside.
For our summary, which is to simplify our previous characterization of Nietzsche's conception of art, we can limit ourselves to the two predominant basic determinations, rapture and beauty. They are recip- rocally related. Rapture is the basic mood; beauty does the attuning. But just how little the distinction between the subjective and the objective can contribute to our present commentary we can see easily in what follows. Rapture, which does constitute the state of the subject, can every bit as well be conceived as objective, as an actuality for which beauty is merely subjective, since there is no beauty in itself. It is certain that Nietzsche never achieved conceptual clarity here and was never able to ground these matters successfully. Even Kant, who be- cause of his transcendental method possessed a larger number of more highly refined possibilities for interpreting aesthetics, remained
trapped within the limits of the modern concept of the subject. In spite of everything, we must try to make more explicit what is essential in Nietzsche as well, going beyond him.
Rapture as a state of feeling explodes the very subjectivity of the subject. By having a feeling for beauty the subject has already come out of himself; he is no longer subjective, no longer a subject. On the other side, beauty is not something at hand like an object of sheer representa- tion. As an attuning, it thoroughly determines the state of man. Beauty breaks through the confinement of the "object" placed at a distance, standing on its own, and brings it into essential and original correlation to the "subject. " Beauty is no longer objective, no longer an object. The aesthetic state is neither subjective nor objective. Both basic words of Nietzsche's aesthetics, rapture and beauty, designate with an identi- cal breadth the entire aesthetic state, what is opened up in it and what
pervades it.
17. The Grand Style
Nietzsche has in view the whole of artistic actuality whenever he speaks of that in which art comes to its essence. He calls it the grand style. Here too we seek in vain when we look for an essential definition and fundamental explanation of the meaning of "style. " As is typical for the realm of art, everything named in the word "style" belongs to what is most obscure. Yet the way Nietzsche ever and again invokes the "grand style," even if only in brief references, casts light on everything we have mentioned heretofore about Nietzsche's aesthetics.
The "masses" have never had a sense for three good things in art, for elegance, logic, and beauty-pulchrum est paucorum hominum-; to say nothing of an even better thing, the grand style. Farthest removed from the grand style is Wagner: the dissipatory character and heroic swagger of his artistic means are altogether opposed to the grand style (XIV, 154).
Three good things are proper to art: elegance, logic, beauty; along with something even better: the grand style. When Nietzsche says that these remain foreign to the "masses," he does not mean the class concept of the "lower strata" of the population. He means "educated" people, in the sense of mediocre cultural Philistines, the kind of people who promoted and sustained the Wagner cult. The farmer and the worker who is really caught up in his machine world remain entirely unmoved by swaggering heroics. These are craved only by the frenetic petit bourgeois. His world-rather, his void-is the genuine obstacle that prevents the expansion and growth of what Nietzsche calls the grand style.
Now, in what does the grand style consist? "The grand style consists
The Grand Style 125
in contempt for trivial and brief beauty; it is a sense for what is rare and what lasts long" (XIV, 145).
W e recall that the essence of creation is emphasis of major traits. In the grand style occurs
. . . a triumph over the plenitude of living things; measure becomes master, that tranquillity which lies at the base of the strong soul, a soul that is slow to be moved and that resists what is all too animated. The general case, the rule, is revered and emphasized; the exception is on the contrary thrust aside, the nuance obliterated (WM, 819).
W e think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength to revere is alive. To revere is not a thing for the petty and lowly, the incapacitated and underdeveloped. It is a matter of tremen- dous passion; only what flows from such passion is in the grand style (cf. WM, 1024). *
What Nietzsche calls the grand style is most closely approximated by the rigorous style, the classical style: "The classical style represents essentially such tranquillity, simplification, abbreviation, concentration - i n the classical type the supreme feeling of power is concentrated. Slow to react: a tremendous consciousness: no feeling of struggle" (WM, 799). The grand style is the highest feeling of power. From that it is clear that if art is a configuration of will to power, then "art" here is grasped always in its highest essential stature. The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank. Art is not just one among a number of items, activities one engages in and enjoys now and then; art places the whole of Dasein in decision and keeps it there. For that reason art itself is subject to altogether singular conditions. In Nietzsche's view the task therefore arises: "To think to the end, without prejudice and faintness of heart, in what soil a classical
*Number 1024 of The Will to Power reads: "A period in which the old masquerade and the moralistic laundering of the affects arouses revulsion; naked nature; where quanta of power are simply admitted as being decisive (as determining rank); where the grand style emerges once again as a consequence of grand passion. "
126 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
taste may grow. To make man hard, natural, strong, more wicked: all these belong together" (WM, 849).
But not only do the grand style and wickedness belong together, emblematic of the unification of flagrant contradictions in Dasein. Two other things belong together which at first seemed incompatible to us: art as countermovement to nihilism and art as object of a physiological aesthetics.
Physiology of art apparently takes its object to be a process of nature that bubbles to the surface in the manner of an eruptive state of rapture. Such a state would evanesce without deciding anything, since nature knows no realm of decision.
But art as countermovement to nihilism is to lay the groundwork for establishment of new standards and values; it is therefore to be rank, distinction, and decision. If art has its proper essence in the grand style, this now means that measure and law are confirmed only in the subju- gation and containment of chaos and the rapturous. Such is demanded of the grand style as the condition of its own possibility. Accordingly, the physiological is the basic condition for art's being able to be a creative countermovement. Decision presupposes divergence between opposites; its height increases in proportion to the depths of the con- flict.
Art in the grand style is the simple tranquillity resulting from the protective mastery of the supreme plenitude of life. To it belongs the original liberation of life, but one which is restrained; to it belongs the most terrific opposition, but in the unity of the simple; to it belongs fullness of growth, but with the long endurance of rare things. Where art is to be grasped in its supreme form, in terms of the grand style, we must reach back into the most original states of embodying life, into physiology. Art as countermovement to nihilism and art as state of rapture, as object of physiology ("physics" in the broadest sense) and as object of metaphysics-these aspects of art include rather than exclude one another. The unity of such antitheses, grasped in its entire essential fullness, provides an insight into what Nietzsche himself knew -and that means willed-concerning art, its essence and essential determination.
The Grand Style 127
However often and however fatally Nietzsche both in language and in thought was diverted into purely physiological, naturalistic assertions about art, it is an equally fatal misunderstanding on our part when we isolate such physiological thoughts and bandy them about as a "biolog- istic" aesthetics. It is even worse to confuse them with Wagner. We turn everything inside out when we make a philosophy of orgiastics out of it, as Klages does, thoroughly falsifying matters by proclaiming it Nietzsche's authentic teaching and genuine accomplishment.
In order to draw near to the essential will of Nietzsche's thinking, and remain close to it, our thinking must acquire enormous range, plus the ability to see beyond everything that is fatally contemporary in Nietzsche. His knowledge of art and his struggle on behalf of the possibility of great art are dominated by one thought, which he at one point expresses briefly in the following way: "What alone can regener- ate us? Envisionment of what is perfect" (XIV, 171).
But Nietzsche was also aware of the immense difficulty of such a task. For who is to determine what the perfect is? It could only be those who are themselves perfect and who therefore know what it means. Here yawns the abyss of that circularity in which the whole of human Dasein moves. What health is, only the healthy can say. Yet healthful- ness is measured according to the essential starting point of health. What truth is, only one who is truthful can discern; but the one who is truthful is determined according to the essential starting point of truth.
When Nietzsche associates art in the grand style with classical taste, he does not fall prey to some sort of classicism. Nietzsche is the first-if we discount for the moment Holderlin-to release the "classical" from the misinterpretations of classicism and humanism. His position vis-a- vis the age of Winckelmann and Goethe is expressed clearly enough (WM, 849):
It is an amusing comedy, which we are only now learning to laugh at, which we are now for the first time seeing, that the contemporaries of Herder, Winckelmann, Goethe, and Hegel claimed to have rediscovered the classical ideal . . . and Shakespeare at the same time! And this same generation had in a rather nasty way declared itself independent of the French classical
128 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
school, as if the essential matters could not have been learned there as well as here! But they wanted "nature," "naturalness": oh, stupidity! They be- lieved that the classic was a form of naturalness!
If Nietzsche emphasizes constantly and with conscious exaggeration the physiological aspects of the aesthetic state, it is in reaction to the poverty and lack of antithesis within classicism; he wants to put in relief the original conflict of life and thereby the roots of the necessity for a victory. The "natural" to which Nietzsche's aesthetics refers is not that of classicism: it is not something accessible to and calculable for a human reason which is apparently unruffled and quite sure of itself; it is not something without hazard, comprehensible to itself. On the contrary, Nietzsche means what is bound to nature, which the Greeks of the Golden Age call deinon and deinotaton, the frightful. *
In contrast to classicism, the classical is nothing that can be immedi- ately divined from a particular past period of art. It is instead a basic structure of Dasein, which itself first creates the conditions for any such period and must first open itself and devote itself to those condi- tions. But the fundamental condition is an equally original freedom with regard to the extreme opposites, chaos and law; not the mere subjection of chaos to a form, but that mastery which enables the primal wilderness of chaos and the primordiality of law to advance under the same yoke, invariably bound to one another with equal necessity. Such mastery is unconstrained disposition over that yoke, which is as equally removed from the paralysis of form in what is dogmatic and formalistic as from sheer rapturous tumult. Wherever unconstrained disposition over that yoke is an event's self-imposed law, there is the grand style; wherever the grand style prevails, there art in
the purity of its essential plenitude is actual. A;t may be adjudged only in accordance with what its essential actuality is; only in accordance
*During the summer semester of 1935 Heidegger had elaborated the meaning of deinon, deinotaton in a course entitled "Introduction to Metaphysics. " There he trans- lated the word also as das Unheimliche, the uncanny, and das Cewaltige, the powerful, in his interpretation of a choral song (verses 332-75) from Sophocles' Antigone. See Martin Heidegger, Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik, pp. 112 ff. ; in the English translation pp. 123 ff.
The Grand Style 129
with its essential actuality should it be conceived as a configuration of beings, that is to say, as will to power.
Whenever Nietzsche deals with art in the essential and definitive sense, he always refers to art in the grand style. Against this backdrop, his innermost antipathy to Wagner comes to light most sharply, above all because his conception of the grand style includes at the same time a fundamental decision, not only about Wagner's music, but about the essence of music as such. [Cf. these remarks from the period of The Dawn, 1880-81: "Music has no resonance for the transports of the spirit" (XI, 336); "The poet allows the drive for knowledge to play; the musician lets it take a rest" (XI, 337). Especially illuminating is a longer sketch from the year 1888 with the title " 'Music'-and the Grand Style" (WM, 842). ]*
Nietzsche's meditation on art is "aesthetics" because it examines the state of creation and enjoyment. It is the "extreme" aesthetics inas- much as that state is pursued to the farthest perimeter of the bodily state as such, to what is farthest removed from the spirit, from the spirituality of what is created, and from its formalistic lawfulness. However, precisely in that far remove of physiological aesthetics a sudden reversal occurs. For this "physiology" is not something to which everything essential in art can be traced back and on the basis of which it can be explained. While the bodily state as such continues to participate as a condition of the creative process, it is at the same time what in the created thing is to be restrained, overcome, and surpassed. The aesthetic state is the one which places itself under the law of the grand style which is taking root in it. The aesthetic state itself is truly what it is only as the grand style. Hence such aesthetics, within
*The brackets appear in Heidegger's text, presumably because the reference is a kind of "footnote"; it is not likely that these remarks were added to the manuscript at the time of publication. The opening lines of The Will to Power number 842 are perhaps most relevant here: "The greatness of an artist is not measured by the 'beautiful feelings' he arouses: that is what the little ladies like to believe. Rather, it is measured by gradients of approximation to the grand style, by the extent to which the artist is capable of the grand style. That style has in common with great passion that it disdains to please; that it forgets about persuading; that it commands; that it wills. . . . To become master of the chaos that one is; to compel one's chaos to become form: logical, simple, unequivocal; to become mathematics, Jaw-that is the grand ambition here. -"
130 THE WILL TO POWER . AS ART
itself, is led beyond itself. The artistic states are those which place themselves under the supreme command of measure and law, taking themselves beyond themselves in their will to advance. Such states are what they essentially are when, willing out beyond themselves, they are more than they are, and when they assert themselves in such mastery.
The artistic states are-and that means art is-nothing else than will to power. Now we understand Nietzsche's principal declaration con- cerning art as the great "stimulant of life. " "Stimulant" means what conducts one into the sphere of command of the grand style.
But now we also see more clearly in what sense Nietzsche's statement about art as the great stimulant of life represents a reversal of Schopen- hauer's statement which defines art as a "sedative of life. " The reversal does not consist merely in the fact that "sedative" is replaced by "stimulant," that the calming agent is exchanged for an excitant. The reversal is a transformation of the essential definition of art. Such thinking about art is philosophical thought, setting the standards through which historical confrontation comes to be, prefiguring what is to come. This is something to consider, if we wish to decide in what sense Nietzsche's question concerning art can still be aesthetics, and to what extent it in any case must be such. What Nietzsche says at first with respect to music and in regard to Wagner applies to art as a whole: " . . . we no longer know how to ground the concepts 'model,' 'mastery,' 'perfection'-in the realm of values we grope blindly with the instincts of old love and admiration; we nearly believe that 'what is good is what
pleases us' " (WM, 838).
In opposition to the "complete dissolution of style" in Wagner, rules
and standards, and above all the grounding of such, are here demanded clearly and unequivocally; they are identified as what comes first and is essential, beyond all sheer technique and mere invention and en- hancement of "means of expression. " "What does all expansion of the means of expression matter when that which expresses, namely art itself, has lost the law that governs it! " Art is not only subject to rules, must not only obey laws, but is in itself legislation. Only as legislation is it truly art. What is inexhaustible, what is to be created, is the law. Art that dissolves style in sheer ebullition of feelings misses the mark,
The Grand Style 131
in that its discovery of law is essentially disturbed; such discovery can become actual in art only when the law drapes itself in freedom of form, in order in that way to come openly into play.
Nietzsche's aesthetic inquiry explodes its own position when it ad- vances to its own most far-flung border. But aesthetics is by no means overcome. Such overcoming requires a still more original metamor- phosis of our Dasein and our knowledge, which is something that Nietzsche only indirectly prepares by means of the whole of his meta- physical thought. Our sole concern is to know the basic position of Nietzsche's thought. At first glance, Nietzsche's thinking concerning art is aesthetic; according to its innermost will, it is metaphysical, which means it is a definition of the Being of beings. The historical fact that every true aesthetics-for example, the Kantian-explodes itself is an unmistakable sign that, although the aesthetic inquiry into art does not come about by accident, it is not what is essential.
For Nietzsche art is the essential way in which beings are made to be beings.
*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-
110 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
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.
Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful Ill
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,
112 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
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.
Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful 113
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. It is the state that Schiller conceives of as the condition of the possibility of man's existence as historical, as grounding history.
According to the explanations by Nietzsche which we have cited, the beautiful is what determines us, our behavior and our capability, to the extent that we are claimed supremely in our essence, which is to say, to the extent that we ascend beyond ourselves. Such ascent beyond ourselves, to the full of our essential capability, occurs according to Nietzsche in rapture. Thus the beautiful is disclosed in rapture. The beautiful itself is what transports us into the feeling of rapture. From this elucidation of the essence of the beautiful the characterization of rapture, of the basic aesthetic state, acquires enhanced clarity. If the beautiful is what sets the standard for what we trust we are essentially capable of, then the feeling of rapture, as our relation to the beautiful, can be no mere turbulence and ebullition. The mood of rapture is rather an attunement in the sense of the supreme and most measured determinateness. However much Nietzsche's manner of speech and presentation sounds like Wagner's turmoil of feelings and sheer sub- mergence in mere "experiences," it is certain that in this regard he wants to achieve the exact opposite. What is strange and almost incom- prehensible is the fact that he tries to make his conception of the aesthetic state accessible to his contemporaries, and tries to convince
them of it, by speaking the language of physiology and biology.
In terms of its concept, the beautiful is what is estimable and worthy
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as such. In connection with that, number 852 of The Will to Power says, "It is a question of strength (of an individual or a nation), whether and where the judgment ·beautiful' is made. " But such strength is not sheer muscle power, a reservoir of "brachial brutality. " What Nietz- sche here calls "strength" is the capacity of historical existence to come to grips with and perfect its highest essential determination. Of course, the essence of "strength" does not come to light purely and decisively. Beauty is taken to be a "biological value":
For consideration: the extent to which our value "beautiful" is completely anthropocentric: based on biological presuppositions concerning growth and progress-. ("Toward the Physiology of Art," no. 4 [cf. p. 94, above]. )
The fundament of all aesthetics (is given in] the general principle that aesthetic values rest on biological values, that aesthetic delights are biological delights (XIV, 165).
That Nietzsche conceives of the beautiful "biologically" is indisputa- ble. Yet the question remains what "biological," bios, "life," mean here. In spite of appearances created by the words, they do not mean what biology understands them to be.
16. Rapture as Farm-engendering Force
Now that the aesthetic state too has been clarified by way of an elucida- tion of the beautiful, we can try to survey more precisely the realm of that state. W e can do this by studying the basic modes of behavior that are operative in the aesthetic state: aesthetic doing and aesthetic observ- ing-or creation by the artist and reception by those who examine works of art.
If we ask what the essence of creation is, then on the basis of what has gone before we can answer that it is the rapturous bringing-forth of the beautiful in the work. Only in and through creation is the work realized. But because that is so, the essence of creation for its part remains dependent upon the essence of the work; therefore it can be grasped only from the Being of the work. Creation creates the work. But the essence of the work is the origin of the essence of creation.
If we ask how Nietzsche defines the work, we receive no answer. For Nietzsche's meditation on art-and precisely this meditation, as aes- thetics in the extreme-does not inquire into the work as such, at least not in the first place. For that reason we hear little, and nothing essential, about the essence of creation as bringing-forth. On the con- trary, only creation as a life-process is discussed, a life-process condi- tioned by rapture. The creative state is accordingly "an explosive state" (WM, 811). That is a chemical description, not a philosophical inter- pretation. If in the same place Nietzsche refers to vascular changes, alterations in skin tone, temperature, and secretion, his findings involve nothing more than changes in the body grasped in an extrinsic manner, even if he draws into consideration "the automatism of the entire muscular system. " Such findings may be correct, but they hold also for
ll6 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
other, pathological, bodily states. Nietzsche says it is not possible to be an artist and not be ill. And when he says that making music, making art of any kind, is also a kind of making children, it merely corresponds to that designation of rapture according to which "sexual rapture is its oldest and most original form. "
But if we were to restrict ourselves to these references by Nietzsche we would heed only one side of the creative process. The other side, if it makes sense to speak here of sides at all, we must present by recalling the essence of rapture and of beauty, namely ascent beyond oneself. By such ascent we come face to face with that which corre- sponds to what we take ourselves to be. With that we touch upon the character of decision in creation, and what has to do with standards and with hierarchy. Nietzsche enters that sphere when he says (WM, 800), "Artists should see nothing as it is, but more fully, simply, strongly: for that, a kind of youth and spring, a kind of habitual rapture, must be proper to their lives. "
Nietzsche also calls the fuller, simpler, stronger vision in creation an "idealizing. " To the essential definition of rapture as a feeling of enhancement of power and plenitude (Twilight of the Idols, VIII, 123) Nietzsche appends: "From this feeling, one bestows upon things, one compels them to take from us, one violates them-this process is called idealization. " But to idealize is not, as one might think, merely to omit, strike, or otherwise discount what is insignificant and ancillary. Ideali- zation is not a defensive action. Its essence consists in a "sweeping emphasis upon the main features. " What is decisive therefore is an- ticipatory discernment of these traits, reaching out toward what we believe we can but barely overcome, barely survive. It is that attempt to grasp the beautiful which Rilke's '! First Elegy" describes wholly in Nietzsche's sense:
. . . For the beautiful is nothing
but the beginning of the terrible, a beginning we but barely endure; and it amazes us so, since calmly it disdains
to destroy us. "'
*Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke in drei Banden (Frankfurt/Main: lnsel, 1966) I, 441, from lines 4-7 of the first Duino Elegy:
Rapture as Form-engendering Force 117
Creation is an emphasizing of major features, a seeing more simply and strongly. It is bare survival before the court of last resort. It commends itself to the highest law and therefore celebrates to the full its survival in the face of such danger.
For the artist "beauty" is something outside all hierarchical order, since in it opposites are joined-the supreme sign of power, power over things in opposition; furthermore, without tension: -that there is no further need of force, that everything so easily follows, obeys, and brings to its obedience the most amiable demeanor-this fascinates the will to power of the artist (WM, 803).
Nietzsche understands the aesthetic state of the observer and recipi- ent on the basis of the state of the creator. Thus the effect of the artwork is nothing else than a reawakening of the creator's state in the one who enjoys the artwork. Observation of art follows in the wake of creation. Nietzsche says (WM, 821), "-the effect of artworks is arous- al of the art-creating state, rapture. " Nietzsche shares this conception with the widely prevalent opinion of aesthetics. On that basis we under- stand why he demands, logically, that aesthetics conform to the creator, the artist. Observation of works is only a derivative form and offshoot of creation. Therefore what was said of creation corresponds precisely, though derivatively, to observation of art. Enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist (XIV, 136). But because Nietzsche does not unfold the essence of creation from what is to be created, namely, the work; because he develops it from the state of aesthetic behavior; the bringing-forth of the work does not receive an adequately delineated interpretation which would distin- guish it from the bringing-forth of utensils by way of handicraft. Not only that. The behavior of observation is not set in relief against creation, and so it remains undefined. The view that the observation of works somehow follows in the wake of creation is so little true that
. . . Denn das Schone ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen, und wir bewundern es so, wei) es gelassen verschmiiht,
uns zu zerstiiren.
118 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
not even the relation of the artist to the work as something created is one that would be appropriate to the creator. But that could be demon- strated only by way of an inquiry into art that would begin altogether differently, proceeding from the work itself; through the presentation of Nietzsche's aesthetics offered here it ought to have become clear by now how little he treats the work of art. *
And yet, just as a keener conception of the essence of rapture led us to the inner relation to beauty, so here examination of creation and observation enables us to encounter more than mere corporeal-psychi- cal processes. The relation to "major features" emphasized in "idealiza- tion," to the simpler and stronger aspects which the artist anticipates in what he meets, once again becomes manifest in the aesthetic state. Aesthetic feeling is neither blind and boundless emotion nor a pleasant contentment, a comfortable drifting that permeates our state of being. Rapture in itself is drawn to major features, that is, to a series of traits, to an articulation. So we must once more turn away from the apparently one-sided consideration of mere states and turn toward what this mood defines in our attunement. In connection with the usual conceptual language of aesthetics, which Nietzsche too speaks, we call it "form. "
The artist-out of whom, back to whom, and within whom Nietz- sche always casts his glance, even when he speaks of form and of the work-has his fundamental character in this: he "ascribes to no thing a value unless it knows how to become form" (WM, 817). Nietzsche explains such becoming-form here in an aside as "giving itself up," "making itself public. " Although at first blush these words seem quite strange, they define the essence of form. Without Nietzsche's making explicit mention of it here or elsewhere, the definition corresponds to the original concept of form as it develops with the Greeks. W e cannot discuss that origin here in greater detail.
But by way of a commentary on Nietzsche's definition let us say only·
*The reference to an inquiry that would begin "altogether differently" is to that series of lectures Heidegger was reworking during the winter semester of 1936-37 (which is to say, during the period of these Nietzsche lectures), later published as "The Origin of the Work of Art. "
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this: form, forma, corresponds to the Greek morphe. It is the enclosing limit and boundary, what brings and stations a being into that which it is, so that it stands in itself: its configuration. Whatever stands in this way is what the particular being shows itself to be, its outward appear- ance, eidos, through which and in which it emerges, stations itself there as publicly present, scintillates, and achieves pure radiance.
The artist-we may now understand that name as a designation of the aesthetic state-does not comport himself to form as though it were expressive of something else. The artistic relation to form is love of form for its own sake, for what it is. Nietzsche says as much on one occasion (WM, 828), putting it in a negative way with a view to contemporary painters:
Not oneof them is simply a painter: they are all archeologists, psychologists, people who devise a scenario for any given recollection or theory. They take their pleasure from our erudition, our philosophy. . . . They do not love a form for what it is; they love it for what it expresses. They are the sons of a learned, tormented and reflective generation-a thousand miles removed from the old masters who did not read and whose only thought was to give their eyes a feast.
Form, as what allows that which we encounter to radiate in appear- ance, first brings the behavior that it determines into the immediacy of a relation to beings. Form displays the relation itself as the state of original comportment toward beings, the festive state in which the being itself in its essence is celebrated and thus for the first time placed in the open. Form defines and demarcates for the first time the realm in which the state of waxing force and plenitude of being comes to fulfillment. Form founds the realm in which rapture as such becomes possible. Wherever form holds sway, as the supreme simplicity of the most resourceful lawfulness, there is rapture.
Rapture does not mean mere chaos that churns and foams, the drunken bravado of sheer riotousness and tumult. When Nietzsche says "rapture" the word has a sound and sense utterly opposed to Wagner's. For Nietzsche rapture means the most glorious victory of form. With respect to the question of form in art, and with a view to
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Wagner, Nietzsche says at one point (WM, 835): "An error-that what Wagner has created is a form: - i t is formlessness. The possibility of dramatic structure remains to be discovered. . . . Whorish in- strumentation. "
Of course, Nietzsche does not conduct a meditation devoted express- ly to the origin and essence of form in relation to art.
For that his point of departure would have to have been the work of art. Yet with a bit of extra effort we can still discern, at least approximately, what Nietz- sche means by form.
By "form" Nietzsche never understands the merely "formal," that is to say, what stands in need of content, what is only the external border of such content, circumscribing it but not influencing it. Such a border does not give bounds; it is itself the result of sheer cessation. It is only a fringe, not a component, not what lends consistency and pith by pervading the content and fixing it in such a way that its character as "contained" evanesces. Genuine form is the only true content.
What it takes to be an artist is that one experience what all nonartists call "form" as content, as "the matter itself. " With that, of course, one is relegated to an inverted world. For from now on one takes content to be something merely formal-including one's own life (WM, 818).
When Nietzsche tries to characterize lawfulness of form, however, he does not do so with a view to the essence of the work and the work's form. He cites only that lawfulness of form which is most common and familiar to us, the "logical," "arithmetical," and "geometrical. " But logic and mathematics are for him not merely representative names designating the purest sort of lawfulness; rather, Nietzsche suggests that lawfulness of form must be traced back to logical definition, in a way that corresponds to his explanation of thinking and Being. By such tracing back of formal lawfulness, however, Nietzsche does not mean that art is nothing but logic and mathematics.
"Estimates of aesthetic value"-which is to say, our finding some- thing to be beautiful-have as their "ground floor" those feelings that relate to logical, arithmetical, and geometrical lawfulness (XIV, 133).
Rapture as Form-engendering Force 121
The basic logical feelings are those of delight "in the ordered, the surveyable, the bounded, and in repetition. " The expression "logical feelings" is deceptive. It does not mean that the feelings themselves are logical, that they proceed according to the laws of thought. The ex- pression "logical feelings" means having a feeling for, letting one's mood be determined by, order, boundary, the overview.
Because estimates of aesthetic value are grounded on the logical feelings, they are also "more fundamental than moral estimates. " Nietzsche's decisive valuations have as their standard enhancement and securement of "life. " B_ut in his view the basic logical feelings, delight in the ordered and bounded, are nothing else than "the pleasurable feelings among all organic creatures in relation to the danger of their situation or to the difficulty of finding nourishment; the familiar does one good, the sight of something that one trusts he can easily over- power does one good, etc. " (XIV, 133).
The result, to put it quite roughly, is the following articulated struc- ture of pleasurable feelings: underlying all, the biological feelings of pleasure that arise when life asserts itself and survives; above these, but at the same time in service to them, the logical, mathematical feelings; these in turn serve as the basis for aesthetic feelings. Hence we can trace the aesthetic pleasure derived from form back to certain conditions of the life-process as such. Our view, originally turned toward lawfulness of form, is deflected once more and is directed toward sheer states of life.
Our way through Nietzsche's aesthetics has up to now been deter- mined by Nietzsche's basic position toward art: taking rapture, the basic aesthetic state, as our point of departure, we proceeded to consid- er beauty; from it we went back to the states of creation and reception; from these we advanced to what they are related to, to what determines them, i. e. , form; from form we advanced to the pleasure derived from what is ordered, as a fundamental condition of embodying life; with that, we are back where we started, for life is life-enhancement, and ascendant life is rapture. The realm in which the whole process forward and backward itself takes place, the whole within which and as which rapture and beauty, creation and form, form and life have their recipro-
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cal relation, at first remains undefined. So does the kind of context for and relationship between rapture and beauty, creation and form. All are proper to art. But then art would only be a collective noun and not the name of an actuality grounded and delineated in itself.
For Nietzsche, however, art is more than a collective noun. Art is a configuration of will to power. The indeterminateness we have indi- cated can be eliminated only through consideration of will to power. The essence of art is grounded in itself, clarified, and articulated in its structure only to the extent that the same is done for will to power. Will to power must originally ground the manner in which all things that are proper to art cohere.
Of course, one might be tempted to dispose of the indeterminateness in a simple way. We have only to call whatever is related to rapture "subjective," and whatever is related to beauty "objective," and in the same fashion understand creation as subjective behavior and form as objective law. The unknown variable would be the relation of the subjective to the objective: the subject-object relation. What could be more familiar than that? And yet what is more questionable than the subject-object relation as the starting point for man as subject and as the definition of the nonsubjective as object? The commonness of the distinction is not yet proof of its clarity; neither is it proof that the distinction is truly grounded.
The illusory clarity and concealed groundlessness of this schema do not help us much. The schema simply casts aside what is worthy of question in Nietzsche's aesthetics, what is worthwhile in the confronta- tion and therefore to be emphasized. The less we do violence to Nietzsche's "aesthetics" by building it up as an edifice of apparently obvious doctrines; the more we allow his quest and questioning to go its own way; the more surely do we come across those perspectives and basic notions in which the whole for Nietzsche possesses a unity that is fully mature, albeit obscure and amorphous. If we want to grasp the basic metaphysical position of Nietzsche's thought, we ought to clarify these notions. Therefore we must now try to simplify Nietzsche's presentations concerning art to what is essential; yet we may not relin-
Rapture as Form-engendering Force 123
quish the multiplicity of perspectives there, nor impose on his thoughts some dubious schema from the outside.
For our summary, which is to simplify our previous characterization of Nietzsche's conception of art, we can limit ourselves to the two predominant basic determinations, rapture and beauty. They are recip- rocally related. Rapture is the basic mood; beauty does the attuning. But just how little the distinction between the subjective and the objective can contribute to our present commentary we can see easily in what follows. Rapture, which does constitute the state of the subject, can every bit as well be conceived as objective, as an actuality for which beauty is merely subjective, since there is no beauty in itself. It is certain that Nietzsche never achieved conceptual clarity here and was never able to ground these matters successfully. Even Kant, who be- cause of his transcendental method possessed a larger number of more highly refined possibilities for interpreting aesthetics, remained
trapped within the limits of the modern concept of the subject. In spite of everything, we must try to make more explicit what is essential in Nietzsche as well, going beyond him.
Rapture as a state of feeling explodes the very subjectivity of the subject. By having a feeling for beauty the subject has already come out of himself; he is no longer subjective, no longer a subject. On the other side, beauty is not something at hand like an object of sheer representa- tion. As an attuning, it thoroughly determines the state of man. Beauty breaks through the confinement of the "object" placed at a distance, standing on its own, and brings it into essential and original correlation to the "subject. " Beauty is no longer objective, no longer an object. The aesthetic state is neither subjective nor objective. Both basic words of Nietzsche's aesthetics, rapture and beauty, designate with an identi- cal breadth the entire aesthetic state, what is opened up in it and what
pervades it.
17. The Grand Style
Nietzsche has in view the whole of artistic actuality whenever he speaks of that in which art comes to its essence. He calls it the grand style. Here too we seek in vain when we look for an essential definition and fundamental explanation of the meaning of "style. " As is typical for the realm of art, everything named in the word "style" belongs to what is most obscure. Yet the way Nietzsche ever and again invokes the "grand style," even if only in brief references, casts light on everything we have mentioned heretofore about Nietzsche's aesthetics.
The "masses" have never had a sense for three good things in art, for elegance, logic, and beauty-pulchrum est paucorum hominum-; to say nothing of an even better thing, the grand style. Farthest removed from the grand style is Wagner: the dissipatory character and heroic swagger of his artistic means are altogether opposed to the grand style (XIV, 154).
Three good things are proper to art: elegance, logic, beauty; along with something even better: the grand style. When Nietzsche says that these remain foreign to the "masses," he does not mean the class concept of the "lower strata" of the population. He means "educated" people, in the sense of mediocre cultural Philistines, the kind of people who promoted and sustained the Wagner cult. The farmer and the worker who is really caught up in his machine world remain entirely unmoved by swaggering heroics. These are craved only by the frenetic petit bourgeois. His world-rather, his void-is the genuine obstacle that prevents the expansion and growth of what Nietzsche calls the grand style.
Now, in what does the grand style consist? "The grand style consists
The Grand Style 125
in contempt for trivial and brief beauty; it is a sense for what is rare and what lasts long" (XIV, 145).
W e recall that the essence of creation is emphasis of major traits. In the grand style occurs
. . . a triumph over the plenitude of living things; measure becomes master, that tranquillity which lies at the base of the strong soul, a soul that is slow to be moved and that resists what is all too animated. The general case, the rule, is revered and emphasized; the exception is on the contrary thrust aside, the nuance obliterated (WM, 819).
W e think of beauty as being most worthy of reverence. But what is most worthy of reverence lights up only where the magnificent strength to revere is alive. To revere is not a thing for the petty and lowly, the incapacitated and underdeveloped. It is a matter of tremen- dous passion; only what flows from such passion is in the grand style (cf. WM, 1024). *
What Nietzsche calls the grand style is most closely approximated by the rigorous style, the classical style: "The classical style represents essentially such tranquillity, simplification, abbreviation, concentration - i n the classical type the supreme feeling of power is concentrated. Slow to react: a tremendous consciousness: no feeling of struggle" (WM, 799). The grand style is the highest feeling of power. From that it is clear that if art is a configuration of will to power, then "art" here is grasped always in its highest essential stature. The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank. Art is not just one among a number of items, activities one engages in and enjoys now and then; art places the whole of Dasein in decision and keeps it there. For that reason art itself is subject to altogether singular conditions. In Nietzsche's view the task therefore arises: "To think to the end, without prejudice and faintness of heart, in what soil a classical
*Number 1024 of The Will to Power reads: "A period in which the old masquerade and the moralistic laundering of the affects arouses revulsion; naked nature; where quanta of power are simply admitted as being decisive (as determining rank); where the grand style emerges once again as a consequence of grand passion. "
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taste may grow. To make man hard, natural, strong, more wicked: all these belong together" (WM, 849).
But not only do the grand style and wickedness belong together, emblematic of the unification of flagrant contradictions in Dasein. Two other things belong together which at first seemed incompatible to us: art as countermovement to nihilism and art as object of a physiological aesthetics.
Physiology of art apparently takes its object to be a process of nature that bubbles to the surface in the manner of an eruptive state of rapture. Such a state would evanesce without deciding anything, since nature knows no realm of decision.
But art as countermovement to nihilism is to lay the groundwork for establishment of new standards and values; it is therefore to be rank, distinction, and decision. If art has its proper essence in the grand style, this now means that measure and law are confirmed only in the subju- gation and containment of chaos and the rapturous. Such is demanded of the grand style as the condition of its own possibility. Accordingly, the physiological is the basic condition for art's being able to be a creative countermovement. Decision presupposes divergence between opposites; its height increases in proportion to the depths of the con- flict.
Art in the grand style is the simple tranquillity resulting from the protective mastery of the supreme plenitude of life. To it belongs the original liberation of life, but one which is restrained; to it belongs the most terrific opposition, but in the unity of the simple; to it belongs fullness of growth, but with the long endurance of rare things. Where art is to be grasped in its supreme form, in terms of the grand style, we must reach back into the most original states of embodying life, into physiology. Art as countermovement to nihilism and art as state of rapture, as object of physiology ("physics" in the broadest sense) and as object of metaphysics-these aspects of art include rather than exclude one another. The unity of such antitheses, grasped in its entire essential fullness, provides an insight into what Nietzsche himself knew -and that means willed-concerning art, its essence and essential determination.
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However often and however fatally Nietzsche both in language and in thought was diverted into purely physiological, naturalistic assertions about art, it is an equally fatal misunderstanding on our part when we isolate such physiological thoughts and bandy them about as a "biolog- istic" aesthetics. It is even worse to confuse them with Wagner. We turn everything inside out when we make a philosophy of orgiastics out of it, as Klages does, thoroughly falsifying matters by proclaiming it Nietzsche's authentic teaching and genuine accomplishment.
In order to draw near to the essential will of Nietzsche's thinking, and remain close to it, our thinking must acquire enormous range, plus the ability to see beyond everything that is fatally contemporary in Nietzsche. His knowledge of art and his struggle on behalf of the possibility of great art are dominated by one thought, which he at one point expresses briefly in the following way: "What alone can regener- ate us? Envisionment of what is perfect" (XIV, 171).
But Nietzsche was also aware of the immense difficulty of such a task. For who is to determine what the perfect is? It could only be those who are themselves perfect and who therefore know what it means. Here yawns the abyss of that circularity in which the whole of human Dasein moves. What health is, only the healthy can say. Yet healthful- ness is measured according to the essential starting point of health. What truth is, only one who is truthful can discern; but the one who is truthful is determined according to the essential starting point of truth.
When Nietzsche associates art in the grand style with classical taste, he does not fall prey to some sort of classicism. Nietzsche is the first-if we discount for the moment Holderlin-to release the "classical" from the misinterpretations of classicism and humanism. His position vis-a- vis the age of Winckelmann and Goethe is expressed clearly enough (WM, 849):
It is an amusing comedy, which we are only now learning to laugh at, which we are now for the first time seeing, that the contemporaries of Herder, Winckelmann, Goethe, and Hegel claimed to have rediscovered the classical ideal . . . and Shakespeare at the same time! And this same generation had in a rather nasty way declared itself independent of the French classical
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school, as if the essential matters could not have been learned there as well as here! But they wanted "nature," "naturalness": oh, stupidity! They be- lieved that the classic was a form of naturalness!
If Nietzsche emphasizes constantly and with conscious exaggeration the physiological aspects of the aesthetic state, it is in reaction to the poverty and lack of antithesis within classicism; he wants to put in relief the original conflict of life and thereby the roots of the necessity for a victory. The "natural" to which Nietzsche's aesthetics refers is not that of classicism: it is not something accessible to and calculable for a human reason which is apparently unruffled and quite sure of itself; it is not something without hazard, comprehensible to itself. On the contrary, Nietzsche means what is bound to nature, which the Greeks of the Golden Age call deinon and deinotaton, the frightful. *
In contrast to classicism, the classical is nothing that can be immedi- ately divined from a particular past period of art. It is instead a basic structure of Dasein, which itself first creates the conditions for any such period and must first open itself and devote itself to those condi- tions. But the fundamental condition is an equally original freedom with regard to the extreme opposites, chaos and law; not the mere subjection of chaos to a form, but that mastery which enables the primal wilderness of chaos and the primordiality of law to advance under the same yoke, invariably bound to one another with equal necessity. Such mastery is unconstrained disposition over that yoke, which is as equally removed from the paralysis of form in what is dogmatic and formalistic as from sheer rapturous tumult. Wherever unconstrained disposition over that yoke is an event's self-imposed law, there is the grand style; wherever the grand style prevails, there art in
the purity of its essential plenitude is actual. A;t may be adjudged only in accordance with what its essential actuality is; only in accordance
*During the summer semester of 1935 Heidegger had elaborated the meaning of deinon, deinotaton in a course entitled "Introduction to Metaphysics. " There he trans- lated the word also as das Unheimliche, the uncanny, and das Cewaltige, the powerful, in his interpretation of a choral song (verses 332-75) from Sophocles' Antigone. See Martin Heidegger, Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik, pp. 112 ff. ; in the English translation pp. 123 ff.
The Grand Style 129
with its essential actuality should it be conceived as a configuration of beings, that is to say, as will to power.
Whenever Nietzsche deals with art in the essential and definitive sense, he always refers to art in the grand style. Against this backdrop, his innermost antipathy to Wagner comes to light most sharply, above all because his conception of the grand style includes at the same time a fundamental decision, not only about Wagner's music, but about the essence of music as such. [Cf. these remarks from the period of The Dawn, 1880-81: "Music has no resonance for the transports of the spirit" (XI, 336); "The poet allows the drive for knowledge to play; the musician lets it take a rest" (XI, 337). Especially illuminating is a longer sketch from the year 1888 with the title " 'Music'-and the Grand Style" (WM, 842). ]*
Nietzsche's meditation on art is "aesthetics" because it examines the state of creation and enjoyment. It is the "extreme" aesthetics inas- much as that state is pursued to the farthest perimeter of the bodily state as such, to what is farthest removed from the spirit, from the spirituality of what is created, and from its formalistic lawfulness. However, precisely in that far remove of physiological aesthetics a sudden reversal occurs. For this "physiology" is not something to which everything essential in art can be traced back and on the basis of which it can be explained. While the bodily state as such continues to participate as a condition of the creative process, it is at the same time what in the created thing is to be restrained, overcome, and surpassed. The aesthetic state is the one which places itself under the law of the grand style which is taking root in it. The aesthetic state itself is truly what it is only as the grand style. Hence such aesthetics, within
*The brackets appear in Heidegger's text, presumably because the reference is a kind of "footnote"; it is not likely that these remarks were added to the manuscript at the time of publication. The opening lines of The Will to Power number 842 are perhaps most relevant here: "The greatness of an artist is not measured by the 'beautiful feelings' he arouses: that is what the little ladies like to believe. Rather, it is measured by gradients of approximation to the grand style, by the extent to which the artist is capable of the grand style. That style has in common with great passion that it disdains to please; that it forgets about persuading; that it commands; that it wills. . . . To become master of the chaos that one is; to compel one's chaos to become form: logical, simple, unequivocal; to become mathematics, Jaw-that is the grand ambition here. -"
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itself, is led beyond itself. The artistic states are those which place themselves under the supreme command of measure and law, taking themselves beyond themselves in their will to advance. Such states are what they essentially are when, willing out beyond themselves, they are more than they are, and when they assert themselves in such mastery.
The artistic states are-and that means art is-nothing else than will to power. Now we understand Nietzsche's principal declaration con- cerning art as the great "stimulant of life. " "Stimulant" means what conducts one into the sphere of command of the grand style.
But now we also see more clearly in what sense Nietzsche's statement about art as the great stimulant of life represents a reversal of Schopen- hauer's statement which defines art as a "sedative of life. " The reversal does not consist merely in the fact that "sedative" is replaced by "stimulant," that the calming agent is exchanged for an excitant. The reversal is a transformation of the essential definition of art. Such thinking about art is philosophical thought, setting the standards through which historical confrontation comes to be, prefiguring what is to come. This is something to consider, if we wish to decide in what sense Nietzsche's question concerning art can still be aesthetics, and to what extent it in any case must be such. What Nietzsche says at first with respect to music and in regard to Wagner applies to art as a whole: " . . . we no longer know how to ground the concepts 'model,' 'mastery,' 'perfection'-in the realm of values we grope blindly with the instincts of old love and admiration; we nearly believe that 'what is good is what
pleases us' " (WM, 838).
In opposition to the "complete dissolution of style" in Wagner, rules
and standards, and above all the grounding of such, are here demanded clearly and unequivocally; they are identified as what comes first and is essential, beyond all sheer technique and mere invention and en- hancement of "means of expression. " "What does all expansion of the means of expression matter when that which expresses, namely art itself, has lost the law that governs it! " Art is not only subject to rules, must not only obey laws, but is in itself legislation. Only as legislation is it truly art. What is inexhaustible, what is to be created, is the law. Art that dissolves style in sheer ebullition of feelings misses the mark,
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in that its discovery of law is essentially disturbed; such discovery can become actual in art only when the law drapes itself in freedom of form, in order in that way to come openly into play.
Nietzsche's aesthetic inquiry explodes its own position when it ad- vances to its own most far-flung border. But aesthetics is by no means overcome. Such overcoming requires a still more original metamor- phosis of our Dasein and our knowledge, which is something that Nietzsche only indirectly prepares by means of the whole of his meta- physical thought. Our sole concern is to know the basic position of Nietzsche's thought. At first glance, Nietzsche's thinking concerning art is aesthetic; according to its innermost will, it is metaphysical, which means it is a definition of the Being of beings. The historical fact that every true aesthetics-for example, the Kantian-explodes itself is an unmistakable sign that, although the aesthetic inquiry into art does not come about by accident, it is not what is essential.
For Nietzsche art is the essential way in which beings are made to be beings.
