*
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.
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.
Heidegger - Nietzsche - v1-2
But that is the way we are essentially and constantly.
In all of this the bodily state swings into action. It lifts a man out beyond himself or it allows him to be enmeshed in himself and to grow listless. We are not first of all "alive," only then getting an apparatus to sustain our living which we call "the body," but we are some body who is alive. * Our being embodied is essentially other than merely being encumbered with an organism. Most of what we know from the
*Wir Ieben, indem wir leiben, "we live in that we are embodied. " Heidegger plays with the German expression wie man /eibt und lebt, "the way somebody actually is," and I have tried to catch the sense by playing on the intriguing English word "some- body. " Heidegger makes this play more than once: see NI, 565 (volume III of this series, p. 79); see also Early Greek Thinking, p. 65.
100 THE WILL TO POWER AS . -\RT
natural sciences about the body and the way it embodies are specifications based on the established misinterpretation of the body as a mere natural body. Through such means we do find out lots of things, but the essential and determinative aspects always elude our vision and grasp. We mistake the state of affairs even further when we subsequently search for the "psychical" which pertains to the body that has already been misinterpreted as a natural body.
Every feeling is an embodiment attuned in this or that way, a mood that embodies in this or that way. Rapture is a feeling, and it is all the more genuinely a feeling the more essentially a unity of embodying attunement prevails. Of someone who is intoxicated we can only say that he "has" something like rapture. But he is not enraptured. The rapture of intoxication is not a state in which a man rises by himself beyond himself. What we are here calling rapture is merely-to use the colloquialism-being "soused," something that deprives us of every possible state of being.
At the outset Nietzsche emphasizes two things about rapture: first, the feeling of enhancement of force; second, the feeling of plenitude. According to what we explained earlier, such enhancement of force must be understood as the capacity to extend beyond oneself, as a relation to beings in which beings themselves are experienced as being more fully in being, richer, more perspicuous, more essential. Enhance- ment does not mean that an increase, an increment of force, "objective- ly" comes about. Enhancement is to be understood in terms of mood: to be caught up in elation-and to be borne along by our buoyancy as such. In the same way, the feeling of plenitude does not suggest an inexhaustible stockpile of inner events, It means above all an attune- ment which is so disposed that nothing is foreign to it, nothing too much for it, which is open to everything and ready to tackle anything- the greatest enthusiasm and the supreme risk hard by one another.
With that we come up against a third aspect of the feeling of rapture: the reciprocal penetration of all enhancements of every ability to do and see, apprehend and address, communicate and achieve release. "-In this way states are ultimately interlaced which perhaps would have
Rapture as Aesthetic State 101
reason to remain foreign to one another. For example, the feeling of religious rapture and sexual arousal (-two profound feelings coor- dinated quite precisely to an all but astonishing degree)" (WM, 800).
What Nietzsche means by the feeling of rapture as the basic aesthet- ic state may be gauged by the contrary phenomenon, the inartistic states of the sober, weary, exhausted, dry as dust, wretched, timorous, pallid creatures "under whose regard life suffers" (WM, 801, 812). Rapture is a feeling. But from the contrast of the artistic and inartistic states it becomes especially clear that by the word Rausch Nietzsche does not mean a fugitive state that rushes over us and then goes up in smoke. Rapture may therefore hardly be taken as an affect, not even if we give the term "affect" the more precise definition gained earlier. Here as in the earlier case it remains difficult, if not impossible, to apply uncritically terms like affect, passion, and feeling as essential defini- tions. We can employ such concepts of psychology, by which one divides the faculties of the psyche into classes, only as secondary refer- ences-presupposing that we are inquiring, from the beginning and throughout, on the basis of the phenomena themselves in each in- stance. Then perhaps the artistic state of "rapture," if it is more than a fugitive affect, may be grasped as a passion. But then the question immediately arises: to what extent? In The Will to Power there is a passage that can give us a pointer. Nietzsche says (WM, 814), "Artists are not men of great passion, whatever they like to tell us-and them- selves as well. " Nietzsche adduces two reasons why artists cannot be men of great passion. First, simply because they are artists, i. e. , crea- tors, artists must examine themselves; they lack shame before them- selves, and above all they lack shame before great passion; as artists they have to exploit passion, hiding in ambush and pouncing on it, trans- forming it in the artistic process. Artists are too curious merely to _be magnificent in great passion; for what passion would have confronting it is not curiosity but a sense of shame. Second, artists are also always
the victims of the talent they possess, and that denies them the sheer extravagance of great passion. "One does not get over a passion by portraying it; rather, the passion is over when one portrays it" (WM,
102 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
814). The artistic state itself is never great passion, but still it is passion. Thus it possesses a steady and extensive reach into beings as a whole, indeed in such a way that this reach can take itself up into its own grasp, keep it in view, and compel it to take form.
From everything that has been said to clarify the general essence of rapture it ought to have become apparent that we cannot succeed in our efforts to understand it by means of a pure "physiology," that Nietzsche's use of the term "physiology of art" rather has an essentially covert meaning.
What Nietzsche designates with the word Rausch, which in his final publications he grasps in a unified way as the basic aesthetic state, is bifurcated early in his work into two different states. The natural forms of the artistic state are those of dream and enchantment, as we may say, adopting an earlier usage of Nietzsche's in order to avoid here the word Rausch which he otherwise employs. For the state he calls rapture is one in which dream and ecstatic transport first attain their art-produc- ing essence and become the artistic states to which Nietzsche gives the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian. " The Apollonian and the Diony- sian are for Nietzsche two "forces of nature and art" (WM, 1050); in their reciprocity all "further development" of art consists. The conver- gence of the two in the unity of one configuration is the birth of the supreme work of Greek art, tragedy. But if Nietzsche both at the beginning and at the end of his path of thought thinks the essence of art, which is to say, the essence of the metaphysical activity of life, in the selfsame opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, still we must learn to know and to see that his interpretation in the two cases differs. For at the time of The Birth of Tragedy the opposition is still
thought in the sense of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, although- rather, because-it is part of a confrontation with such metaphyics; by way of contrast, at the time of The Will to Power the opposition is thought on the basis of the fundamental position designated in that title. So long as we do not discern the transformation with adequate clarity and so long as we do not grasp the essence of will to power, it would be good for us to put aside for a while this opposition, which
Rapture as Aesthetic State 103
all too often becomes a vacuous catchword. The formula of Apollonian and Dionysian opposites has long been the refuge of all confused and confusing talk and writing about art and about Nietzsche. For Nietz- sche the opposition remained a constant source of boundless obscuri- ties and novel questions.
Nietzsche may well lay claim to the first public presentation and development of the discovery of that opposition in Greek existence to which he gives the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian. " We can surmise from various clues, however, that Jacob Burckhardt in his Basel lectures on Greek culture, part of which Nietzsche heard, was already on the trail of the opposition; otherwise Nietzsche himself would not expressly refer to Burckhardt as he does in Twilight of the Idols (VIII, 170-71) when he says, ". . . the most profound expert on their [the Greeks'] culture living today, such as Jacob Burckhardt in Basel. " Of course, what Nietzsche could not have realized, even though since his youth he knew more clearly than his contemporaries who Holderlin was, was the fact that Holderlin had seen and conceived of the opposi- tion in an even more profound and lofty manner.
Holderlin's tremendous insight is contained in a letter to his friend Bohlendorff. He wrote it on December 4, 1801, shortly before his departure for France (Works, ed. Hellingrath, V, 318 ff. *). Here
*Holderlin's letter to Casimir Ulrich Bohlendorff (1775-1825), a member of Holder- lin's circle of poet-friends in Homburg, contains the following lines (Holder/in Werke und Briefe, Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1969, II, 940-41):
"My friend! You have attained much by way of precision and skillful articulation and sacrificed nothing by way of warmth; on the contrary, the elasticity of your spirit, like that of a fine steel blade, has but proven mightier as a result of the schooling to which it has been subjected. . . . Nothing is more difficult for us to learn than the free employ- ment of our national gift. And I believe that clarity of presentation is originally as natural to us as the fire of heaven was to the Greeks. On that account the Greeks are to he surpassed more in magnificent passion . . . than in the commanding intellect and repre- sentational skill which are typical of Homer.
"It sounds paradoxical. But I assert it once again and submit it for your examination and possible employment: what is properly national will come to have less and less priority as one's education progresses. For that reason the Greeks are not really masters of holy pathos, since it is innate in them, while from Homer on they excel in representa-
104 THE Vv"ILL TO POWER AS t\RT
Holderlin contrasts "the holy pathos" and "the Occidental funonian sobriety of representational skill" in the essence of the Greeks. The opposition is not to be understood as an indifferent historical finding. Rather, it becomes manifest to direct meditation on the destiny and determination of the German people. Here we must be satisfied with a mere reference, since Holderlin's way of knowing could receive adequate definition only by means of an interpretation of his work. It is enough if we gather from the reference that the variously named conflict of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, of holy passion and sober representation, is a hidden stylistic law of the historical determination of the German people, and that one day we must find ourselves ready and able to give it shape. The opposition is not a formula with the help of which we should be content to describe "culture. " By recognizing this antagonism Holderlin and Nietzsche early on placed a question mark after the task of the German people to find their essence historically. Will we understand this cipher? One thing is certain: history will wreak vengeance on us if we do not.
We are trying first of all to sketch the outline of Nietzsche's "aes- thetics" as a "physiology of art" by limiting ourselves to the general phenomenon of rapture as the basic artistic state. In that regard we
tiona! skill. For that extraordinary man was so profoundly sensitive that he could capture the funonian sobriety of the Western world for his Apollonian realm and adapt himself faithfully to the foreign element. . . .
"But what is one's own must be learned as thoroughly as what is foreign. For that reason the Greeks are indispensable to us. But precisely in what is our own, in what is our national gift, we will not be able to keep apace with them, since, as I said, the free employment of what is one's own is most difficult. "
Hiilderlin's letter has occasioned much critical debate. Heidegger discusses it in his contribution to the Tiibinger Gedenkschrift, "Andenken," reprinted in Erliiuterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung, fourth, expanded ed. (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1971), esp. pp. 82 and 87 ff. A critical review of the literature may be found in Peter Szondi, "Hiilderlins Brief an Biihlendorff vom 4. Dezember 1801," Euphorion: Zeitschrift fiir Literaturgeschichte, vol. 58 (1964), 260-75. Szondi's article hardly does justice to Hei- degger's reading of the letter and in general is too polemical to be very enlightening; but it does indicate the dimensions and sources of the critical discussion in, for example, Wilhelm Michel, Friedrich Beissner, Beda Allemann, Walter Brocker, and others.
Rapture as Aesthetic State 105
were to answer a second question: in what sense is rapture "indispens- able if there is to be art," if art is to be at all possible, if it is to be realized? What, and how, "is" art? Is art in the creation by the artist, or in the enjoyment of the work, or in the actuality of the work itself, or in all three together? How then is the conglomeration of these different things something actual? How, and where, is art? Is there "art-as-such" at all, or is the word merely a collective noun to which nothing actual corresponds?
But by now, as we inquire into the matter more incisively, everything becomes obscure and ambiguous. And if we want to know how "rap- ture" is indispensable if there is to be art, things become altogether opaque. Is rapture merely a condition of the commencement of art? If so, in what sense? Does rapture merely issue and liberate the aesthetic state? Or is rapture its constant source and support, and if the latter, how does such a state support "art," of which we know neither how nor what it "is"? When we say it is a configuration of will to power, then, given the current state of the question, we are not really saying anything. For what we want to grasp in the first place is what that determination means. Besides, it is questionable whether the essence of art is thereby defined in terms of art, or whether it isn't rather defined as a mode of the Being of beings. So there is only one way open to us by which we can penetrate and advance, and that is to ask further about the general essence of the aesthetic state, which we provisionally characterized as rapture. But how? Obviously, in the direction of a survey of the realm of aesthetics.
Rapture is feeling, an embodying attunement, an embodied being that is contained in attunement, attunement woven into embodiment. But attunement lays open Dasein as an enhancing, conducts it into the plenitude of its capacities, which mutually arouse one another aod foster enhancement. But while clarifying rapture as a state of feeling we emphasized more than once that we may not take such a state as something at hand "in" the body and "in" the psyche. Rather, we must take it as a mode of the embodying, attuned stance toward beings as a whole, beings which for their part determine the pitch of the attune-
106 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
ment. Hence, if we want to characterize more broadly and fully the essential structure of the basic aesthetic mode, it behooves us to ask: what is determinative in and for this basic mode, such that it may be spoken of as aesthetic?
15. Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful. Its Misinterpretation by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
At the outset, we know in a rough sort of way that just as "the true" determines our behavior in thinking and knowing, and just as "the good" determines the ethical attitude, so does "the beautiful" deter- mine the aesthetic state.
What does Nietzsche say about the beautiful and about beauty? For the answer to this question also Nietzsche provides us with only isolated statements-proclamations, as it were-and references. Nowhere do we find a structured and grounded presentation. A comprehensive, solid understanding of Nietzsche's statements about beauty might re- sult from study of Schopenhauer's aesthetic views; for in his definition of the beautiful Nietzsche thinks and judges by way of opposition and therefore of reversal. But such a procedure is always fatal if the chosen opponent does not stand on solid ground but stumbles about aimlessly. Such is the case with Schopenhauer's views on aesthetics, delineated in the third book of his major work, The World as Will and Representa- tion. It cannot be called an aesthetics that would be even remotely comparable to that of Hegel. In terms of content, Schopenhauer thrives on the authors he excoriates, namely, Schelling and Hegel. The one he does not excoriate is Kant. Instead, he thoroughly misunderstands him. Schopenhauer plays the leading role in the preparation and genesis of that misunderstanding of Kantian aesthetics to which Nietzsche too fell prey and which is still quite common today. One may say that Kant's
Critique ofJudgment, the work in which he presents his aesthetics, has
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been influential up to now only on the basis of misunderstandings, a happenstance of no little significance for the history of philosophy. Schiller alone grasped some essentials in relation to Kant's doctrine of the beautiful; but his insight too was buried in the debris of nineteenth- century aesthetic doctrines.
The misunderstanding of Kant's aesthetics involves an assertion by Kant concerning the beautiful. Kant's definition is developed in sec- tions 2-5 of The Critique of judgment. What is "beautiful" is what purely and simply pleases. The beautiful is the object of "sheer" de- light. Such delight, in which the beautiful opens itself up to us as beautiful, is in Kant's words "devoid of all interest. " He says, "Taste is the capacity to judge an object or mode of representation by means of delight or revulsion, devoid ofall interest. The object of such delight is called beautiful. "*
Aesthetic behavior, i. e. , our comportment toward the beautiful, is "delight devoid of all interest. " According to the common notion, disinterestedness is indifference toward a thing or person: we invest nothing of our will in relation to that thing or person. If the relation to the beautiful, delight, is defined as "disinterested," then, according to Schopenhauer, the aesthetic state is one in which the will is put out of commission and all striving brought to a standstill; it is pure repose, simply wanting nothing more, sheer apathetic drift.
And Nietzsche? He says that the aesthetic state is rapture. That is manifestly the opposite of all "disinterested delight" and is therefore at the same time the keenest opposition to Kant's definition of our comportment toward the beautiful. With that in mind we understand the following observation by Nietzsche (XIV, 132): "Since Kant, all talk of art, beauty, knowledge, and ~isdom has been smudged and besmirched by the concept 'devoid of interest. '" Since Kant? If this is thought to mean "through" Kant, then we have to say "No! " But if it is thought to mean since the Schopenhauerian misinterpretation of Kant, then by all means "Yes! " And for that reason Nietzsche's own effort too is misconceived.
*Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Akademieausgabe, B 16.
Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful 109
But then what does Kant mean by the definition of the beautiful as the object of "disinterested" delight? What does "devoid of all inter- est" mean? "Interest" comes from the Latin mihi interest, something is of importance to me. To take an interest in something suggests wanting to have it for oneself as a possession, to have disposition and control over it. When we take an interest in something we put it in the context of what we intend to do with it and what we want of it. Whatever we take an interest in is always already taken, i. e. , represent- ed, with a view to something else.
Kant poses the question of the essence of the beautiful in the follow- ing way. He asks by what means our behavior, in the situation where we find something we encounter to be beautiful, must let itself be determined in such a way that we encounter the beautiful as beautiful. What is the determining ground for our finding something beautiful?
Before Kant says constructively what the determining ground is, and therefore what the beautiful itself is, he first says by way of refutation what never can and never may propose itself as such a ground, namely, an interest. Whatever exacts of us the judgment "This is beautiful" can never be an interest. That is to say, in order to find something beautiful, we must let what encounters us, purely as it is in itself, come before us in its own stature and worth. We may not take it into account in advance with a view to something else, our goals and intentions, our possible enjoyment and advantage. Comportment toward the beautiful as such, says Kant, is unconstrained favoring. We must release what encounters us as such to its way to be; we must allow and grant it what belongs to it and what it brings to us.
But now we ask, is this free granting, this letting the beautiful be what it is, a kind of indifference; does it put the will out of commission? Or is not such unconstrained favoring rather the supreme effort of our essential nature, the liberation of our selves for the release of what has proper worth in itself, only in order that we may have it purely? Is the Kantian "devoid of interest" a "smudging" and even a "besmirching" of aesthetic behavior? Or is it not the magnificent discovery and appro- bation of it?
The misinterpretation of the Kantian doctrine of "disinterested de-
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,
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is defined by what he demands of himself. Hence we call "beautiful'' whatever corresponds to what we demand of ourselves. Furthermore, such demanding is measured by what we take ourselves to be, what we trust we are capable of, and what we dare as perhaps the extreme challenge, one we may just barely withstand.
In that way we are to understand Nietzsche's assertion about the beautiful and about the judgment by which we find something to be beautiful (WM, 852): "To pick up the scent of what would nearly finish us off if it were to confront us in the flesh, as danger, problem, temptation-this determines even our aesthetic 'yes. ' ('That is beauti- ful' is an affirmation. )" So also with The Will to Power, number 819: "The firm, mighty, solid, the life that rests squarely and sovereignly and conceals its strength-that is what 'pleases,' i. e. , that corresponds to what one takes oneself to be. "
The beautiful is what we find honorable and worthy, as the image of our essential nature. It is that upon which we bestow "unconstrained favor," as Kant says, and we do so from the very foundations of our essential nature and for its sake. In another place Nietzsche says (XIV, 134), "Such 'getting rid of interest and the ego' is nonsense and impre- cise observation: on the contrary, it is the thrill that comes of being in our world now, of getting rid of our anxiety in the face of things foreign! " Certainly such "getting rid of interest" in the sense of Scho- penhauer's interpretation is nonsense. But what Nietzsche describes as the thrill that comes of being in our world is what Kant means by the "pleasure of reflection. " Here also, as with the concept of "interest," the basic Kantian concepts of "pleasure" and "reflection" are to be discussed in terms of the Kantian philosophical effort and its transcen- dental procedure, not flattened out with the help of everyday notions. Kant analyzes the essence of the "pleasure of reflection," as the basic comportment toward the beautiful, in The Critique of Judgment, sections 37 and 39. *
*Neske prints $$57 and 59, but this is obviously an error: die Lust am SchOnen, as Lust der blossen Reflexion, is not mentioned in S57 or S59, but is discussed indirectly in S37 and explicitly in S39. See especially B 155.
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. "
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.
In all of this the bodily state swings into action. It lifts a man out beyond himself or it allows him to be enmeshed in himself and to grow listless. We are not first of all "alive," only then getting an apparatus to sustain our living which we call "the body," but we are some body who is alive. * Our being embodied is essentially other than merely being encumbered with an organism. Most of what we know from the
*Wir Ieben, indem wir leiben, "we live in that we are embodied. " Heidegger plays with the German expression wie man /eibt und lebt, "the way somebody actually is," and I have tried to catch the sense by playing on the intriguing English word "some- body. " Heidegger makes this play more than once: see NI, 565 (volume III of this series, p. 79); see also Early Greek Thinking, p. 65.
100 THE WILL TO POWER AS . -\RT
natural sciences about the body and the way it embodies are specifications based on the established misinterpretation of the body as a mere natural body. Through such means we do find out lots of things, but the essential and determinative aspects always elude our vision and grasp. We mistake the state of affairs even further when we subsequently search for the "psychical" which pertains to the body that has already been misinterpreted as a natural body.
Every feeling is an embodiment attuned in this or that way, a mood that embodies in this or that way. Rapture is a feeling, and it is all the more genuinely a feeling the more essentially a unity of embodying attunement prevails. Of someone who is intoxicated we can only say that he "has" something like rapture. But he is not enraptured. The rapture of intoxication is not a state in which a man rises by himself beyond himself. What we are here calling rapture is merely-to use the colloquialism-being "soused," something that deprives us of every possible state of being.
At the outset Nietzsche emphasizes two things about rapture: first, the feeling of enhancement of force; second, the feeling of plenitude. According to what we explained earlier, such enhancement of force must be understood as the capacity to extend beyond oneself, as a relation to beings in which beings themselves are experienced as being more fully in being, richer, more perspicuous, more essential. Enhance- ment does not mean that an increase, an increment of force, "objective- ly" comes about. Enhancement is to be understood in terms of mood: to be caught up in elation-and to be borne along by our buoyancy as such. In the same way, the feeling of plenitude does not suggest an inexhaustible stockpile of inner events, It means above all an attune- ment which is so disposed that nothing is foreign to it, nothing too much for it, which is open to everything and ready to tackle anything- the greatest enthusiasm and the supreme risk hard by one another.
With that we come up against a third aspect of the feeling of rapture: the reciprocal penetration of all enhancements of every ability to do and see, apprehend and address, communicate and achieve release. "-In this way states are ultimately interlaced which perhaps would have
Rapture as Aesthetic State 101
reason to remain foreign to one another. For example, the feeling of religious rapture and sexual arousal (-two profound feelings coor- dinated quite precisely to an all but astonishing degree)" (WM, 800).
What Nietzsche means by the feeling of rapture as the basic aesthet- ic state may be gauged by the contrary phenomenon, the inartistic states of the sober, weary, exhausted, dry as dust, wretched, timorous, pallid creatures "under whose regard life suffers" (WM, 801, 812). Rapture is a feeling. But from the contrast of the artistic and inartistic states it becomes especially clear that by the word Rausch Nietzsche does not mean a fugitive state that rushes over us and then goes up in smoke. Rapture may therefore hardly be taken as an affect, not even if we give the term "affect" the more precise definition gained earlier. Here as in the earlier case it remains difficult, if not impossible, to apply uncritically terms like affect, passion, and feeling as essential defini- tions. We can employ such concepts of psychology, by which one divides the faculties of the psyche into classes, only as secondary refer- ences-presupposing that we are inquiring, from the beginning and throughout, on the basis of the phenomena themselves in each in- stance. Then perhaps the artistic state of "rapture," if it is more than a fugitive affect, may be grasped as a passion. But then the question immediately arises: to what extent? In The Will to Power there is a passage that can give us a pointer. Nietzsche says (WM, 814), "Artists are not men of great passion, whatever they like to tell us-and them- selves as well. " Nietzsche adduces two reasons why artists cannot be men of great passion. First, simply because they are artists, i. e. , crea- tors, artists must examine themselves; they lack shame before them- selves, and above all they lack shame before great passion; as artists they have to exploit passion, hiding in ambush and pouncing on it, trans- forming it in the artistic process. Artists are too curious merely to _be magnificent in great passion; for what passion would have confronting it is not curiosity but a sense of shame. Second, artists are also always
the victims of the talent they possess, and that denies them the sheer extravagance of great passion. "One does not get over a passion by portraying it; rather, the passion is over when one portrays it" (WM,
102 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
814). The artistic state itself is never great passion, but still it is passion. Thus it possesses a steady and extensive reach into beings as a whole, indeed in such a way that this reach can take itself up into its own grasp, keep it in view, and compel it to take form.
From everything that has been said to clarify the general essence of rapture it ought to have become apparent that we cannot succeed in our efforts to understand it by means of a pure "physiology," that Nietzsche's use of the term "physiology of art" rather has an essentially covert meaning.
What Nietzsche designates with the word Rausch, which in his final publications he grasps in a unified way as the basic aesthetic state, is bifurcated early in his work into two different states. The natural forms of the artistic state are those of dream and enchantment, as we may say, adopting an earlier usage of Nietzsche's in order to avoid here the word Rausch which he otherwise employs. For the state he calls rapture is one in which dream and ecstatic transport first attain their art-produc- ing essence and become the artistic states to which Nietzsche gives the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian. " The Apollonian and the Diony- sian are for Nietzsche two "forces of nature and art" (WM, 1050); in their reciprocity all "further development" of art consists. The conver- gence of the two in the unity of one configuration is the birth of the supreme work of Greek art, tragedy. But if Nietzsche both at the beginning and at the end of his path of thought thinks the essence of art, which is to say, the essence of the metaphysical activity of life, in the selfsame opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, still we must learn to know and to see that his interpretation in the two cases differs. For at the time of The Birth of Tragedy the opposition is still
thought in the sense of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, although- rather, because-it is part of a confrontation with such metaphyics; by way of contrast, at the time of The Will to Power the opposition is thought on the basis of the fundamental position designated in that title. So long as we do not discern the transformation with adequate clarity and so long as we do not grasp the essence of will to power, it would be good for us to put aside for a while this opposition, which
Rapture as Aesthetic State 103
all too often becomes a vacuous catchword. The formula of Apollonian and Dionysian opposites has long been the refuge of all confused and confusing talk and writing about art and about Nietzsche. For Nietz- sche the opposition remained a constant source of boundless obscuri- ties and novel questions.
Nietzsche may well lay claim to the first public presentation and development of the discovery of that opposition in Greek existence to which he gives the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian. " We can surmise from various clues, however, that Jacob Burckhardt in his Basel lectures on Greek culture, part of which Nietzsche heard, was already on the trail of the opposition; otherwise Nietzsche himself would not expressly refer to Burckhardt as he does in Twilight of the Idols (VIII, 170-71) when he says, ". . . the most profound expert on their [the Greeks'] culture living today, such as Jacob Burckhardt in Basel. " Of course, what Nietzsche could not have realized, even though since his youth he knew more clearly than his contemporaries who Holderlin was, was the fact that Holderlin had seen and conceived of the opposi- tion in an even more profound and lofty manner.
Holderlin's tremendous insight is contained in a letter to his friend Bohlendorff. He wrote it on December 4, 1801, shortly before his departure for France (Works, ed. Hellingrath, V, 318 ff. *). Here
*Holderlin's letter to Casimir Ulrich Bohlendorff (1775-1825), a member of Holder- lin's circle of poet-friends in Homburg, contains the following lines (Holder/in Werke und Briefe, Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1969, II, 940-41):
"My friend! You have attained much by way of precision and skillful articulation and sacrificed nothing by way of warmth; on the contrary, the elasticity of your spirit, like that of a fine steel blade, has but proven mightier as a result of the schooling to which it has been subjected. . . . Nothing is more difficult for us to learn than the free employ- ment of our national gift. And I believe that clarity of presentation is originally as natural to us as the fire of heaven was to the Greeks. On that account the Greeks are to he surpassed more in magnificent passion . . . than in the commanding intellect and repre- sentational skill which are typical of Homer.
"It sounds paradoxical. But I assert it once again and submit it for your examination and possible employment: what is properly national will come to have less and less priority as one's education progresses. For that reason the Greeks are not really masters of holy pathos, since it is innate in them, while from Homer on they excel in representa-
104 THE Vv"ILL TO POWER AS t\RT
Holderlin contrasts "the holy pathos" and "the Occidental funonian sobriety of representational skill" in the essence of the Greeks. The opposition is not to be understood as an indifferent historical finding. Rather, it becomes manifest to direct meditation on the destiny and determination of the German people. Here we must be satisfied with a mere reference, since Holderlin's way of knowing could receive adequate definition only by means of an interpretation of his work. It is enough if we gather from the reference that the variously named conflict of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, of holy passion and sober representation, is a hidden stylistic law of the historical determination of the German people, and that one day we must find ourselves ready and able to give it shape. The opposition is not a formula with the help of which we should be content to describe "culture. " By recognizing this antagonism Holderlin and Nietzsche early on placed a question mark after the task of the German people to find their essence historically. Will we understand this cipher? One thing is certain: history will wreak vengeance on us if we do not.
We are trying first of all to sketch the outline of Nietzsche's "aes- thetics" as a "physiology of art" by limiting ourselves to the general phenomenon of rapture as the basic artistic state. In that regard we
tiona! skill. For that extraordinary man was so profoundly sensitive that he could capture the funonian sobriety of the Western world for his Apollonian realm and adapt himself faithfully to the foreign element. . . .
"But what is one's own must be learned as thoroughly as what is foreign. For that reason the Greeks are indispensable to us. But precisely in what is our own, in what is our national gift, we will not be able to keep apace with them, since, as I said, the free employment of what is one's own is most difficult. "
Hiilderlin's letter has occasioned much critical debate. Heidegger discusses it in his contribution to the Tiibinger Gedenkschrift, "Andenken," reprinted in Erliiuterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung, fourth, expanded ed. (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1971), esp. pp. 82 and 87 ff. A critical review of the literature may be found in Peter Szondi, "Hiilderlins Brief an Biihlendorff vom 4. Dezember 1801," Euphorion: Zeitschrift fiir Literaturgeschichte, vol. 58 (1964), 260-75. Szondi's article hardly does justice to Hei- degger's reading of the letter and in general is too polemical to be very enlightening; but it does indicate the dimensions and sources of the critical discussion in, for example, Wilhelm Michel, Friedrich Beissner, Beda Allemann, Walter Brocker, and others.
Rapture as Aesthetic State 105
were to answer a second question: in what sense is rapture "indispens- able if there is to be art," if art is to be at all possible, if it is to be realized? What, and how, "is" art? Is art in the creation by the artist, or in the enjoyment of the work, or in the actuality of the work itself, or in all three together? How then is the conglomeration of these different things something actual? How, and where, is art? Is there "art-as-such" at all, or is the word merely a collective noun to which nothing actual corresponds?
But by now, as we inquire into the matter more incisively, everything becomes obscure and ambiguous. And if we want to know how "rap- ture" is indispensable if there is to be art, things become altogether opaque. Is rapture merely a condition of the commencement of art? If so, in what sense? Does rapture merely issue and liberate the aesthetic state? Or is rapture its constant source and support, and if the latter, how does such a state support "art," of which we know neither how nor what it "is"? When we say it is a configuration of will to power, then, given the current state of the question, we are not really saying anything. For what we want to grasp in the first place is what that determination means. Besides, it is questionable whether the essence of art is thereby defined in terms of art, or whether it isn't rather defined as a mode of the Being of beings. So there is only one way open to us by which we can penetrate and advance, and that is to ask further about the general essence of the aesthetic state, which we provisionally characterized as rapture. But how? Obviously, in the direction of a survey of the realm of aesthetics.
Rapture is feeling, an embodying attunement, an embodied being that is contained in attunement, attunement woven into embodiment. But attunement lays open Dasein as an enhancing, conducts it into the plenitude of its capacities, which mutually arouse one another aod foster enhancement. But while clarifying rapture as a state of feeling we emphasized more than once that we may not take such a state as something at hand "in" the body and "in" the psyche. Rather, we must take it as a mode of the embodying, attuned stance toward beings as a whole, beings which for their part determine the pitch of the attune-
106 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
ment. Hence, if we want to characterize more broadly and fully the essential structure of the basic aesthetic mode, it behooves us to ask: what is determinative in and for this basic mode, such that it may be spoken of as aesthetic?
15. Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful. Its Misinterpretation by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
At the outset, we know in a rough sort of way that just as "the true" determines our behavior in thinking and knowing, and just as "the good" determines the ethical attitude, so does "the beautiful" deter- mine the aesthetic state.
What does Nietzsche say about the beautiful and about beauty? For the answer to this question also Nietzsche provides us with only isolated statements-proclamations, as it were-and references. Nowhere do we find a structured and grounded presentation. A comprehensive, solid understanding of Nietzsche's statements about beauty might re- sult from study of Schopenhauer's aesthetic views; for in his definition of the beautiful Nietzsche thinks and judges by way of opposition and therefore of reversal. But such a procedure is always fatal if the chosen opponent does not stand on solid ground but stumbles about aimlessly. Such is the case with Schopenhauer's views on aesthetics, delineated in the third book of his major work, The World as Will and Representa- tion. It cannot be called an aesthetics that would be even remotely comparable to that of Hegel. In terms of content, Schopenhauer thrives on the authors he excoriates, namely, Schelling and Hegel. The one he does not excoriate is Kant. Instead, he thoroughly misunderstands him. Schopenhauer plays the leading role in the preparation and genesis of that misunderstanding of Kantian aesthetics to which Nietzsche too fell prey and which is still quite common today. One may say that Kant's
Critique ofJudgment, the work in which he presents his aesthetics, has
108 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
been influential up to now only on the basis of misunderstandings, a happenstance of no little significance for the history of philosophy. Schiller alone grasped some essentials in relation to Kant's doctrine of the beautiful; but his insight too was buried in the debris of nineteenth- century aesthetic doctrines.
The misunderstanding of Kant's aesthetics involves an assertion by Kant concerning the beautiful. Kant's definition is developed in sec- tions 2-5 of The Critique of judgment. What is "beautiful" is what purely and simply pleases. The beautiful is the object of "sheer" de- light. Such delight, in which the beautiful opens itself up to us as beautiful, is in Kant's words "devoid of all interest. " He says, "Taste is the capacity to judge an object or mode of representation by means of delight or revulsion, devoid ofall interest. The object of such delight is called beautiful. "*
Aesthetic behavior, i. e. , our comportment toward the beautiful, is "delight devoid of all interest. " According to the common notion, disinterestedness is indifference toward a thing or person: we invest nothing of our will in relation to that thing or person. If the relation to the beautiful, delight, is defined as "disinterested," then, according to Schopenhauer, the aesthetic state is one in which the will is put out of commission and all striving brought to a standstill; it is pure repose, simply wanting nothing more, sheer apathetic drift.
And Nietzsche? He says that the aesthetic state is rapture. That is manifestly the opposite of all "disinterested delight" and is therefore at the same time the keenest opposition to Kant's definition of our comportment toward the beautiful. With that in mind we understand the following observation by Nietzsche (XIV, 132): "Since Kant, all talk of art, beauty, knowledge, and ~isdom has been smudged and besmirched by the concept 'devoid of interest. '" Since Kant? If this is thought to mean "through" Kant, then we have to say "No! " But if it is thought to mean since the Schopenhauerian misinterpretation of Kant, then by all means "Yes! " And for that reason Nietzsche's own effort too is misconceived.
*Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Akademieausgabe, B 16.
Kant's Doctrine of the Beautiful 109
But then what does Kant mean by the definition of the beautiful as the object of "disinterested" delight? What does "devoid of all inter- est" mean? "Interest" comes from the Latin mihi interest, something is of importance to me. To take an interest in something suggests wanting to have it for oneself as a possession, to have disposition and control over it. When we take an interest in something we put it in the context of what we intend to do with it and what we want of it. Whatever we take an interest in is always already taken, i. e. , represent- ed, with a view to something else.
Kant poses the question of the essence of the beautiful in the follow- ing way. He asks by what means our behavior, in the situation where we find something we encounter to be beautiful, must let itself be determined in such a way that we encounter the beautiful as beautiful. What is the determining ground for our finding something beautiful?
Before Kant says constructively what the determining ground is, and therefore what the beautiful itself is, he first says by way of refutation what never can and never may propose itself as such a ground, namely, an interest. Whatever exacts of us the judgment "This is beautiful" can never be an interest. That is to say, in order to find something beautiful, we must let what encounters us, purely as it is in itself, come before us in its own stature and worth. We may not take it into account in advance with a view to something else, our goals and intentions, our possible enjoyment and advantage. Comportment toward the beautiful as such, says Kant, is unconstrained favoring. We must release what encounters us as such to its way to be; we must allow and grant it what belongs to it and what it brings to us.
But now we ask, is this free granting, this letting the beautiful be what it is, a kind of indifference; does it put the will out of commission? Or is not such unconstrained favoring rather the supreme effort of our essential nature, the liberation of our selves for the release of what has proper worth in itself, only in order that we may have it purely? Is the Kantian "devoid of interest" a "smudging" and even a "besmirching" of aesthetic behavior? Or is it not the magnificent discovery and appro- bation of it?
The misinterpretation of the Kantian doctrine of "disinterested de-
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,
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is defined by what he demands of himself. Hence we call "beautiful'' whatever corresponds to what we demand of ourselves. Furthermore, such demanding is measured by what we take ourselves to be, what we trust we are capable of, and what we dare as perhaps the extreme challenge, one we may just barely withstand.
In that way we are to understand Nietzsche's assertion about the beautiful and about the judgment by which we find something to be beautiful (WM, 852): "To pick up the scent of what would nearly finish us off if it were to confront us in the flesh, as danger, problem, temptation-this determines even our aesthetic 'yes. ' ('That is beauti- ful' is an affirmation. )" So also with The Will to Power, number 819: "The firm, mighty, solid, the life that rests squarely and sovereignly and conceals its strength-that is what 'pleases,' i. e. , that corresponds to what one takes oneself to be. "
The beautiful is what we find honorable and worthy, as the image of our essential nature. It is that upon which we bestow "unconstrained favor," as Kant says, and we do so from the very foundations of our essential nature and for its sake. In another place Nietzsche says (XIV, 134), "Such 'getting rid of interest and the ego' is nonsense and impre- cise observation: on the contrary, it is the thrill that comes of being in our world now, of getting rid of our anxiety in the face of things foreign! " Certainly such "getting rid of interest" in the sense of Scho- penhauer's interpretation is nonsense. But what Nietzsche describes as the thrill that comes of being in our world is what Kant means by the "pleasure of reflection. " Here also, as with the concept of "interest," the basic Kantian concepts of "pleasure" and "reflection" are to be discussed in terms of the Kantian philosophical effort and its transcen- dental procedure, not flattened out with the help of everyday notions. Kant analyzes the essence of the "pleasure of reflection," as the basic comportment toward the beautiful, in The Critique of Judgment, sections 37 and 39. *
*Neske prints $$57 and 59, but this is obviously an error: die Lust am SchOnen, as Lust der blossen Reflexion, is not mentioned in S57 or S59, but is discussed indirectly in S37 and explicitly in S39. See especially B 155.
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. "
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
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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-
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.
