The
impoverished
will; loss of capital.
Heidegger - Nietzsche - v1-2
, the unconditioned, the absolute, opens itself up to him.
What makes art great is not only and not in the first place the high quality of what is created.
Rather, art is great because it is an "absolute need.
" Because it is that, and to the extent it is that, it also can and must be great in rank.
For only on the basis of the magnitude of its essential character does it also create a dimension of magnitude for the rank and stature of what is brought forth.
Concurrent with the formation of a dominant aesthetics and of the aesthetic relation to art in modern times is the decline of great art, great in the designated sense. Such decline does not result from the fact that the "quality" is poorer and the style less imposing; it is rather that art forfeits its essence, loses its immediate relation to the basic task of representing the absolute, i. e. , of establishing the absolute definitively as such in the realm of historical man. From this vantage point we can grasp the fourth basic development.
4. At the historical moment when aesthetics achieves its greatest possible height, breadth, and rigor of form, great art comes to an end. The achievement of aesthetics derives its greatness from the fact that it recognizes and gives utterance to the end of great art as such. The final and greatest aesthetics in the Western tradition is that of Hegel. It is recorded in his Lectures on Aesthetics, held for the last time at the University of Berlin in 1828-29 (see Hegel's Works, vol. X, parts l, 2 and 3). Here the following statements appear:
. . . yet in this regard there is at least no absolute need at hand for it [the matter] to be brought to representation by art (X, 2, p. 233).
In all these relations art is and remains for us, with regard to its highest determination, something past (X, I, p. I6).
The magnificent days of Greek art, like the golden era of the later Middle Ages, are gone (X, I, pp. I5-I6).
History of Aesthetics 85
One cannot refute these statements and overcome all the history and happenings that stand behind them by objecting against Hegel that since 1830 we have had many considerable works of art which we might point to. Hegel never wished to deny the possibility that also in the future individual works of art would originate and be esteemed. The fact of such individual works, which exist as works only for the enjoy- ment of a few sectors of the population, does not speak against Hegel but for him. It is proof that art has lost its power to be the absolute, has lost its absolute power. On the basis of such loss the position of art and the kind of knowledge concerning it are defined for the nine- teenth century. This we can demonstrate briefly in a fifth point.
5. Catching a glimpse of the decline of art from its essence, the nineteenth ~entury once more dares to attempt the "collective art- work. " That effort is associated with the name Richard Wagner. It is no accident that his effort does not limit itself to the creation of works that might serve such an end. His effort is accompanied and undergird- ed by reflections on the principles of such works, and by corresponding treatises, the most important of which are Art and Revolution (1849), The Artwork of the Future (1850), Opera and Drama (1851), German Art and German Politics (1865). It is not possible here to clarify to any great extent the complicated and confused historical and intellectual milieu of the mid-nineteenth ceniury. In the decade 1850-1860 two streams interpenetrate in a remarkable fashion, the genuine and well- preserved tradition of the great age of the German movement, and the slowly expanding wasteland, the uprooting of human existence, which comes to light fully during the Gilded Age. One can never understand this most ambiguous century by describing the sequence of its periods. It must be demarcated simultaneously from both ends, i. e. , from the last third of the eighteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. .
Here we have to be satisfied with one indication, delineated by our guiding area of inquiry. With reference to the historical position of art, the effort to produce the "collective artwork" remains essential. The very name is demonstrative. For one thing, it means that the arts should no longer be realized apart from one another, that they should be conjoined in one work. But beyond such sheer quantitative unification,
86 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
the artwork should be a celebration of the national community, it should be the religion. In that respect the definitive arts are literary and musical. Theoretically, music is to be a means for achieving effective drama; in reality, however, music in the form of opera becomes the authentic art. Drama possesses its importance and essential character, not in poetic originality, i. e. , not in the well-wrought truth of the linguistic work, but in things pertaining to the stage, theatrical arrange- ments and gala productions. Architecture serves merely for theater construction, painting provides the backdrops, sculpture portrays the gestures of actors. Literary creation and language remain without the essential and decisive shaping force of genuine knowledge. What is wanted is the domination of art as music, and thereby the domination of the pure state of feeling-the tumult and delirium of the senses, tremendous contraction, the felicitous distress that swoons in enjoy- ment, absorption in "the bottomless sea of harmonies," the plunge into frenzy and the disintegration into sheer feeling as redemptive. The "lived experience" as such becomes decisive. The work is merely what arouses such experience. All portrayal is to work its effects as fore- ground and superficies, aiming toward the impression, the effect, want- ing to work on and arouse the audience: theatrics. Theater and orchestra determine art. Of the orchestra Wagner says:
The orchestra is, so to speak, the basis of infinite, universally common feeling, from which the individual feeling of the particular artist can blossom to the greatest fullness: it dissolves to a certain extent the static, motionless basis of the scene of reality into a liquid-soft, flexible, impressionable, ethereal surface, the immeasurable ground of which is the sea of feeling itself. (The Artwork of the Future, in Cesammelte Schriften und Dich- tungen, 2nd ed. , 1887, p. 157. )
To this we should compare what Nietzsche says in The Will to Power (WM, 839) about Wagner's "means of achieving effects":
Consider the means of achieving effects to which Wagner most likes to turn (and which for the most part he had to invent): to an astonishing extent they resemble the means by which the hypnotist achieves his effect (his selection
History of Aesthetics 87
of tempi and tonal hues for his orchestra; a repulsive avoidance of the logic and intervals of rhythm; the lingering, soothing, mysterious, hysterical qual- ity of his "endless melody"). And is the state to which the prelude to Lohengrin reduces its listeners, especially the lady listeners, essentially dif- ferent from that of a somnambulistic trance? -1 heard an Italian woman who had just listened to that prelude say, flashing those lovely mesmerized eyes that Wagneriennes know how to affect, "Come si dorme con questa musi-
! " ca.
Here the essential character of the conception "collective artwork" comes to unequivocal expression: the dissolution of everything solid into a fluid, flexible, malleable state, into a swimming and floundering; the unmeasured, without laws or borders, clarity or definiteness; the boundless night of sheer submergence. In other words, art is once again to become an absolute need. But now the absolute is experienced as sheer indeterminacy, total dissolution into sheer feeling, a hovering that gradually sinks into nothingness. No wonder Wagner found the metaphysical confirmation and explanation of his art in Schopenhauer's main work, which he studied diligently four different times.
However persistently Wagner's will to the "collective artwork" in its results and influence became the very opposite of great art, the will itself remains singular for his time. It raises Wagner-in spite of his theatricality and recklessness-above the level of other efforts focusing on art and its essential role in existence. In that regard Nietzsche writes (XIV, 150-51):
Without any doubt, Wagner gave the Germans of this era the most consid- erable indication of what an artist could be: reverence for "the artist" suddenly grew to great heights; he awakened on all sides new evaluations, new desires, new hopes; and this perhaps not least of all because of the merely preparatory, incomplete, imperfect nature of his artistic products: Who has not learned from him!
That Richard Wagner's attempt had to fail does not result merely from the predominance of music with respect to the other arts in his work. Rather, that the music could assume such preeminence at all has its
88 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
grounds in the increasingly aesthetic posture taken toward art as a whole-it is the conception and estimation of art in terms of the unalloyed state of feeling and the growing barbarization of the very state to the point where it becomes the sheer bubbling and boiling of feeling abandoned to itself.
And yet such arousal of frenzied feeling and unchaining of "affects" could be taken as a rescue of "life," especially in view of the growing impoverishment and deterioration of existence occasioned by industry, technology, and finance, in connection with the enervation and deple- tion of the constructive forces of knowledge and tradition, to say nothing of the lack of every establishment of goals for human existence. Rising on swells of feeling would have to substitute for a solidly grounded and articulated position in the midst of beings, the kind of thing that only great poetry and thought can create.
It was the frenzied plunge into the whole of things in Richard Wagner's person and work that captivated the young Nietzsche; yet his captivation was possible only because something correlative came from him, what he then called the Dionysian. But since Wagner sought sheer upsurgence of the Dionysian upon which one might ride, while Nietzsche sought to leash its force and give it form, the breach between the two was already predetermined.
Without getting into the history of the friendship between Wagner and Nietzsche here, we shall indicate briefly the proper root of the conflict that developed early on, slowly, but ever more markedly and decisively. On Wagner's part, the reason for the breach was personal in the widest sense: Wagner did not belong to that group of men for whom their own followers are the greatest source of revulsion. Wagner required Wagnerians and Wagneriennes. So far as the personal aspect is concerned, Nietzsche loved and respected Wagner all his life. His struggle with Wagner was an essential one, involving real issues. Nietzsche waited for many years, hoping for the possibility of a fruitful confrontation with Wagner. His opposition to Wagner involved two things. First, Wagner's neglect of inner feeling and proper style. Nietz- sche expressed it once this way: with Wagner it is all "floating and swimming" instead of "striding and dancing," which is to say, it is a
History of Aesthetics 89
floundering devoid of measure and pace. Second, Wagner's deviation into an insincere, moralizing Christianity mixed with delirium and tumult. (See Nietzsche contra Wagner, 1888; on the relationship of Wagner and Nietzsche, cf. Kurt Hildebrandt, Wagner und Nietzsche: ihr Kampf gegen das 19. fahrhundert, Breslau, 1924).
We hardly need to note explicitly that in the nineteenth century there were sundry essential works in the various artistic genres besides those of Wagner's and even opposed to his. We know, for example, in what high esteem Nietzsche held such a work as Adalbert Stifter's Late Summer, whose world is well-nigh the perfect antithesis to that of Wagner.
But what matters is the question of whether and how art is still known and willed as the definitive formation and preservation of beings as a whole. The question is answered by the reference to the attempt to develop a collective artwork on the basis of music and to its inevitable demise. Corresponding to the growing incapacity for metaphysical knowledge, knowledge of art in the nineteenth century is transformed into discovery and investigation of mere developments in art history. What in the age of Herder and Winckelmann stood in service to a magnificent self-meditation on historical existence is now carried on for its own sake, i. e. , as an academic discipline. Research into the history of art as such begins. (Of course, figures like Jacob Burckhardt and Hippolyte Taine, as different from one another as they may be, cannot be measured according to such academic standards. ) Examination of literary works now enters the realm of philology; "it developed in its sense for the minuscule, for genuine philology" (Wilhelm Dilthey,
Gesammelte Schriften, XI, 216). Aesthetics becomes a psychology that proceeds in the manner of the natural sciences: states of feeling are taken to be facts that come forward of themselves and may be subjected to experiments, observation, and measurement. (Here Friedrich Theo- · dor Vischer and Wilhelm Dilthey are also exceptions, supported and guided by the tradition of Hegel and Schiller. ) The history of literature and creative art is ostensibly of such a nature that there can be a science of art and literature that brings to light important insights and at the same time keeps alive the cultivation of thought. Pursuit of such
90 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
science is taken to be the proper actuality of the "spirit. " Science itself is, like art, a cultural phenomenon and an area of cultural activity. But wherever the "aesthetic" does not become an object of research but determines the character of man, the aesthetic state becomes one among other possible states, e. g. , the political or the scientific. The "aesthetic man" is a nineteenth-century hybrid.
The aesthetic man seeks to realize balance and harmony of feelings in himself and in others. On the basis of this need he forms his feeling for life and his intuitions of the world. His estimation of reality depends on the extent to which reality guarantees the conditions for such an existence. (Dilthey, in commemoration of the literary historian Julian Schmidt, 1887; Gesammelte Schriften, XI, 232. )
But there must be culture, because man must progress-whither, no one knows, and no one is seriously asking anymore. Besides, one still has his "Christianity" at the ready, and his Church; these are already becoming essentially more political than religious institutions.
The world is examined and evaluated on the basis of its capacity to produce the aesthetic state. The aesthetic man believes that he is protected and vindicated by the whole of a culture. In all of that there is still a good bit of ambition and labor, and at times even good taste and genuine challenge. Nevertheless, it remains the mere foreground of that occurrence which Nietzsche is the first to recognize and pro- claim with full clarity: nihilism. With that we come to the final devel- opment to be mentioned. We already know its contents, but they now require explicit definition.
6. What Hegel asserted concerning art-that it had lost its power to be the definite fashioner and preserver of the absolute-Nietzsche recognized to be the case with the "highest values," religion, morality, and philosophy: the lack of creative force and cohesion in grounding man's historical existence upon beings as a whole.
Whereas for Hegel it was art-in contrast to religion, morality, and philosophy-that fell victim to nihilism and became a thing of the past, something nonactual, for Nietzsche art is to be pursued as the counter- movement. In spite of Nietzsche's essential departure from Wagner,
History of Aesthetics 91
we see in this an outgrowth of the Wagnerian will to the "collective artwork. " Whereas for Hegel art as a thing of the past became an object of the highest speculative knowledge, so that Hegel's aesthetics as- sumed the shape of a metaphysics of spirit, Nietzsche's meditation on art becomes a "physiology of art. "
In the brief work Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888) Nietzsche says (VIII, 187): "Of course, aesthetics is nothing else than applied physi- ology. " It is therefore no longer even "psychology," as it usually is in the nineteenth century, but investigation of bodily states and processes and their activating causes by methods of natural science.
We must keep the state of affairs quite clearly in view: on the one hand, art in its historical determination as the countermovement to nihilism; on the other, knowledge of art as "physiology"; art is delivered over to explanation in terms of natural science, relegated to an area of the science of facts. Here indeed the aesthetic inquiry into art in its ultimate consequences is thought to an end. The state of feeling is to be traced back to excitations of the nervous system, to bodily condi- tions.
With that we have defined more closely both Nietzsche's basic position toward art as historical actuality and the way in which he knows and wants to know about art: aesthetics as applied physiology. But at the same time we have assigned places to both in the broad context of the history of art, in terms of the relation of that history to the knowl- edge of art prevailing at a given time.
14. Rapture as Aesthetic State*
But our genuine intention is to conceive of art as a configuration of will to power, indeed as its distinctive form. This means that on the basis of Nietzsche's conception of art and by means of that very conception we want to grasp will to power itself in its essence, and thereby being as a whole with regard to its basic character. To do that we must now try to grasp Nietzsche's conception of art in a unified way, which is to say, to conjoin in thought things that at first blush seem to run wholly contrary ways. On the one hand, art is to be the countermovement to nihilism, that is, the establishment of the new supreme values; it is to prepare and ground standards and laws for historical, intellectual existence. On the other hand, art is at the same time to be properly grasped by way of physiology and with its means.
Viewed extrinsically, it seems easy to designate Nietzsche's position toward art as senseless, nonsensical, and therefore nihilistic. For if art is just a matter of physiology, then the essence and reality of art dissolve into nervous states, into processes in the nerve cells. Where in such
*Der Rausch als iisthetischer Zustand. Rausch is commonly rendered as "frenzy" in translations of Nietzsche's writings, but "rapture," from the past participle of rapere, to seize, seems in some respects a better alternative. No single English word-rapture, frenzy, ecstasy, transport, intoxication, delirium-can capture all the senses of Rausch. Our word "rush" is related to it: something "rushes over" us and sweeps us away. In modern German Rausch most often refers to drunken frenzy or narcotic intoxication, as Heidegger will indicate below; but Nietzsche's sense for the Dionysian is both more variegated and more subtle than that, and I have chosen the word "rapture" because of its complex erotic and religious background. But Rausch is more than a problem of translation. The reader is well advised to examine Nietzsche's analyses of Rausch in the works Heidegger cites in this section, especially Die Ceburt der Tragodie and Cotzen- Diimmerung.
Rapture as Aesthetic State 93
blind transactions are we to find something that could of itself deter- mine meaning, posit values, and erect standards?
In the realm of natural processes, conceived scientifically, where the only law that prevails is that of the sequence and commensurability (or incommensurability) of cause-effect relations, every result is equally essential and inessential. In this area there is no establishment of rank or positing of standards. Everything is the way it is, and remains what it is, having its right simply in the fact that it is. Physiology knows no arena in which something could be set up for decision and choice. To deliver art over to physiology seems tantamount to reducing art to the functional level of the gastric juices. Then how could art also ground and determine the genuine and decisive valuation? Art as the counter- movement to nihilism and art as the object of physiology-that's like trying to mix fire and water. If a unification is at all possible here, it can only occur in such a way that art, as an object of physiology, is declared the utter apotheosis of nihilism-and not at all the counter- movement to it.
And yet in the innermost will of Nietzsche's thought the situation is altogether different. True, there is a perpetual discordance prevailing in what he achieves, an instability, an oscillation between these opposite poles which, perceived from the outside, can only confuse. In what follows we will confront the discordancy again and again. But above all else we must try to see what it is that is "altogether different" here.
All the same, in so trying we may not close our eyes to what Nietzsche's aesthetics-as-physiology says about art and how it says it. To be sure, a conclusive presentation of that aesthetics is seriously impaired by the fact that Nietzsche left behind only undetailed obser- vations, references, plans, and claims. We do not even possess an intrinsic, carefully projected outline of his aesthetics. True, among the plans for The Will to Power we find one of Nietzsche's own sketches with the title "Toward the Physiology of Art" (XVI, 432-34). But it is only a list of seventeen items, not arranged according to any visible guiding thought. We will present in full this collection of headings of investigations that remained to be carried out, because in terms of pure content it offers an immediate overview of what such an aesthetics was to treat.
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THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
TOWARD THE PHYSIOLOGY OF ART
1. Rapture as presupposition: causes of rapture.
2. Typical symptoms of rapture.
3. The feeling of force and plenitude in rapture: its idealizing effect.
4. The factual increase of force: its factual beautification. (The increase of
force, e. g. , in the dance of the sexes. ) The pathological element in rapture: the physiological danger of art-. For consideration: the extent to which our value "beautiful" is completely anthropocentric: based on biological presuppositions concerning growth and progress-.
5. The Apollonian, the Dionysian: basic types. In broader terms, compared with our specialized arts.
6. Question: where architecture belongs.
7. The part artistic capacities play in normal life, the tonic effect of their
exercise: as opposed to the ugly.
8. The question of epidemic and contagion.
9. Problem of "health" and "hysteria": genius = neurosis.
10. Artassuggestion,asmeansofcommunication,astherealmofinvention of the induction psycho-motrice.
11. The inartistic states: objectivity, the mania to mirror everything, neutral- ity.
The impoverished will; loss of capital.
12. The inartistic states: abstractness. The impoverished senses.
13. The inartistic states: vitiation, impoverishment, depletion-will to noth-
ingness {Christian, Buddhist, nihilist). The impoverished body.
14. The inartistic states: the moral idiosyncrasy. The fear that characterizes the weak, the mediocre, before the senses, power, rapture {instinct of
those whom life has defeated).
15. How is tragic art possible?
16. The romantic type: ambiguous. Its consequence is "naturalism. "
17. Problem of the actor. The "dishonesty," the typical ability to metamor-
phose as a flaw in character. . . . Lack of shame, the Hanswurst, the satyr, the buffo, the Gil Bias, the actor who plays the artist. . . . *
*The new historical-critical edition of Nietzsche's works (CM VIII, 3, p. 328) lists an eighteenth note, printed in none of the earlier editions.
18. Die Kunst als Rausch, medizinisch: Amnestie. tonicum ganze und partielle lmpotenz.
The meaning of the passage is anything but obvious; it is easy to understand why previous editors let it fall. An attempt at translation:
18. Art as rapture, medically: tonic oblivion, complete and partial impotence.
Rapture as Aesthetic State 95
A multiplicity of different points of inquiry lies before us here, but no blueprint or outline of a structure, not even a preliminary mapping out of the space in which all this is to be joined. Yet at bottom the same is the case with those fragments assembled between numbers 794 and 853 in The Will to Power, except that these go beyond mere catch- words and headlines in providing greater detail. The same is also true of the pieces taken up into volume XIV, pp. 131-201, which belong here thematically. We must therefore try all the harder to bring a higher determination and an essential coherence to the materials that lie before us. To that end we will follow a twofold guideline: for one thing, we will try to keep in view the whole of the doctrine of will to power; for another, we will recall the major doctrines of traditional aesthetics.
But on our way we do not want merely to become cognizant of Nietzsche's teachings on aesthetics. Rather, we want to conceive how the apparently antithetical directions of his basic position with respect to art can be reconciled: art as countermovement to nihilism and art as object of physiology. If a unity prevails here, eventuating from the essence of art itself as Nietzsche sees it, and if art is a configuration of will to power, then insight into the possibility of unity between the antithetical determinations should provide us with a higher concept of the essence of will to power. That is the goal of our presentation of the major teachings of Nietzsche's aesthetics.
At the outset we must refer to a general peculiarity of most of the larger fragments: Nietzsche begins his reflections from various points of inquiry within the field of aesthetics, but he manages at once to touch upon the general context. So it is that many fragments treat the same thing, the only difference being in the order of the material and the distribution of weight or importance. In what follows we shall forego discussion of those sections that are easy to comprehend on the basis of ordinary experience.
Nietzsche's inquiry into art is aesthetics. According to the definitions provided earlier, art in aesthetics is experienced and defined by falling back upon the state of feeling in man that corresponds and pertains to the bringing-forth and the enjoyment of the beautiful. Nietzsche him- self uses the expression "aesthetic state" (WM, 801) and speaks of
96 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
"aesthetic doing and observing" (VIII, 122). But this aesthetics is to be "physiology. " That suggests that states of feeling, taken to be purely psychical, are to be traced back to the bodily condition proper to them. Seen as a whole, it is precisely the unbroken and indissoluble unity of the corporeal-psychical, the living, that is posited as the realm of the aesthetic state: the living "nature" of man.
When Nietzsche s~ys "physiology" he does mean to emphasize the bodily state; but the latter is in itself always already something psychi- cal, and therefore also a matter for "psychology. " The bodily state of an animal and even of man is essentially different from the property of a "natural body," for example, a stone. Every body is also a natural body, but the reverse does not hold. On the other hand, when Nietzsche says "psychology" he always means what also pertains to bodily states (the physiological). Instead of "aesthetic" Nietzsche often speaks more correctly of "artistic" or "inartistic" states. Although he sees art from the point of view of the artist, and demands that it be seen that way, Nietzsche does not mean the expression "artistic" only with reference to the artist. Rather, artistic and inartistic states are those that support and advance-or hamper and preclude-a relation to art of a creative or receptive sort.
The basic question of an aesthetics as physiology of art, and that means of the artist, must above all aim to reveal those special states in the essence of the corporeal-psychical, i. e. , living nature of man in which artistic doing and observing occur, as it were, in conformity with and confinement to nature. In defining the basic aesthetic state we shall at first not refer to the text of The Will to Power but restrict ourselves to what Nietzsche says in the last writing he himself published (Twi- light of the Idols, 1888; VIII, 122-23). The passage reads:
Toward the psychology of the artist. - If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and observing, one physiological precondition is indispensable: rapture. Rapture must first have augmented the excitability of the entire machine: else it does not come to art. All the variously condi- tioned forms of rapture have the requisite force: above all, the rapture of sexual arousal, the oldest and most original form of rapture. In addition, the rapture that comes as a consequence of all great desires, all strong affects;
Rapture as Aesthetic State 97
the rapture of the feast, contest, feat of daring, victory; all extreme move- ment; the rapture of cruelty; rapture in destruction; rapture under certain meteorological influences, for example, the rapture of springtime; or under the influence of narcotics; finally, the rapture of will, of an overfull, teeming will.
We can summarize these remarks with the general statement that rapture is the basic aesthetic state, a rapture which for its part is variously conditioned, released, and increased. The passage cited was not chosen simply because Nietzsche published it but because it achieves the greatest clarity and unity of all the Nietzschean definitions of the aesthetic state. We can readily discern what remains unresolved throughout the final period of Nietzsche's creative life, although in terms of the matter itself it does not deviate essentially from what has gone before, when we compare to this passage number 798 (and the beginning of 799) of The Will to Power. Here Nietzsche speaks of "two states in which art itself emerges as a force of nature in man. " According to the aphorism's title, the two states meant are the "Apol- lonian" and the "Dionysian. " Nietzsche developed the distinction and opposition in his first writing, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music (1872). Even here, at the very beginning of his distinguishing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the "physiological symp- toms" of "dream" and "rapture" were brought into respective relation. W e still find this connection in The Will to Power, number 798 (from the year 1888! ): "Both states are rehearsed in normal life as well, only more weakly: in dreams and in rapture. " Here, as earlier, rapture is but one of the two aesthetic states, juxtaposed to the dream. But from the passage in Twilight of the Idols we gather that rapture is the basic aesthetic state without qualification. Nonetheless, in terms of the genu- ine issue the same conception prevails also in The Will to Power. The first sentence of the following aphorism (WM, 799) reads: "In Diony- sian rapture there is sexuality and voluptuousness: in the Apollonian they are not lacking. " According to The Birth of Tragedy, to there- marks in The Will to Power, number 798, and elsewhere, the Diony- sian alone is the rapturous and the Apollonian the dreamlike; now, in
Twilight of the Idols, the Dionysian and the Apollonian are two kinds
98 TilE WILL TO PO'vVER AS ART
of rapture, rapture itself being the basic state. Nietzsche's ultimate doctrine must be grasped according to this apparently insignificant but really quite essential clarification. W e must read a second passage from Twilight of the Idols in company with the first (VIII, 124): "What is the meaning of the conceptual opposition, which I introduced into aesthetics, of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, both conceived as kinds of rapture? " After such clear testimony it can no longer be a matter simply of unraveling Nietzsche's doctrine of art from the oppo- sition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, an opposition quite com- mon ever since the time of its first publication, but not very commonly grasped, an opposition which nevertheless still retains its significance.
Before we pursue the opposition within the framework of our own presentation, let us ask what it is that according to Nietzsche's final explanation pervades that opposition. With this intention, let us pro- ceed with a double question. First, what is the general essence of rapture? Second, in what sense is rapture "indispensable if there is to be art"; in what sense is rapture the basic aesthetic state?
To the question of the general essence of rapture Nietzsche provides a succinct answer (Twilight of the Idols; VIII, 123): "What is essential in rapture is the feeling of enhancement of force and plenitude. " (Cf. "Toward the Physiology of Art," above: "The feeling of force and plenitude in rapture. ") Earlier he called rapture the "physiological precondition" of art; what is now essential about the precondition is feeling. According to what we clarified above, feeling means the way we find ourselves to be with ourselves, and thereby at the same time with things, with beings that we ourselves are not. Rapture is always rapturous feeling. Where is the physiological, or what pertains to bodily states, in this? Ultimately we dare not split up the matter in such a way, as though there were a bodily state housed in the basement with feelings dwelling upstairs. Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, is precisely the way we are corporeally. Bodily being does not mean that the soul is burdened by a hulk we call the body. In feeling oneself to be, the body is already contained in advance in that self, in such a way that the body in its bodily states permeates the self. We do not "have" a body in the way we carry a knife in a sheath. Neither is the body a natural
Rapture as Aesthetic State 99
body that merely accompanies us and which we can establish, expressly or not, as being also at hand. W e do not "have" a body; rather, we "are" bodily. Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, belongs to the essence of such Being. Feeling achieves from the outset the inherent internalizing tendency of the body in our Dasein. But because feeling, as feeling oneself to be, always just as essentially has a feeling for beings as a whole, every bodily state involves some way in which the things around us and the people with us lay a claim on us or do not do so. When our stomachs are "out of sorts" they can cast a pall over all things. What would otherwise seem indifferent to us suddenly becomes irritating and disturbing; what we usually take in stride now impedes us. True, the will can appeal to ways and means for suppressing the bad mood, but
it cannot directly awaken or create a countermood: for moods are overcome and transformed always only by moods. Here it is essential to observe that feeling is not something that runs its course in our "inner lives. " It is rather that basic mode of our Dasein by force of which and in accordance with which we are always already lifted beyond ourselves into being as a whole, which in this or that way matters to us or does not matter to us. Mood is never merely a way of being determined in our inner being for ourselves. It is above all a way of being attuned, and letting ourselves be attuned, in this or that way in mood. Mood is precisely the basic way in which we are outside our- selves. But that is the way we are essentially and constantly.
In all of this the bodily state swings into action. It lifts a man out beyond himself or it allows him to be enmeshed in himself and to grow listless. We are not first of all "alive," only then getting an apparatus to sustain our living which we call "the body," but we are some body who is alive. * Our being embodied is essentially other than merely being encumbered with an organism. Most of what we know from the
*Wir Ieben, indem wir leiben, "we live in that we are embodied. " Heidegger plays with the German expression wie man /eibt und lebt, "the way somebody actually is," and I have tried to catch the sense by playing on the intriguing English word "some- body. " Heidegger makes this play more than once: see NI, 565 (volume III of this series, p. 79); see also Early Greek Thinking, p. 65.
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natural sciences about the body and the way it embodies are specifications based on the established misinterpretation of the body as a mere natural body. Through such means we do find out lots of things, but the essential and determinative aspects always elude our vision and grasp. We mistake the state of affairs even further when we subsequently search for the "psychical" which pertains to the body that has already been misinterpreted as a natural body.
Every feeling is an embodiment attuned in this or that way, a mood that embodies in this or that way. Rapture is a feeling, and it is all the more genuinely a feeling the more essentially a unity of embodying attunement prevails. Of someone who is intoxicated we can only say that he "has" something like rapture. But he is not enraptured. The rapture of intoxication is not a state in which a man rises by himself beyond himself. What we are here calling rapture is merely-to use the colloquialism-being "soused," something that deprives us of every possible state of being.
At the outset Nietzsche emphasizes two things about rapture: first, the feeling of enhancement of force; second, the feeling of plenitude. According to what we explained earlier, such enhancement of force must be understood as the capacity to extend beyond oneself, as a relation to beings in which beings themselves are experienced as being more fully in being, richer, more perspicuous, more essential. Enhance- ment does not mean that an increase, an increment of force, "objective- ly" comes about. Enhancement is to be understood in terms of mood: to be caught up in elation-and to be borne along by our buoyancy as such. In the same way, the feeling of plenitude does not suggest an inexhaustible stockpile of inner events, It means above all an attune- ment which is so disposed that nothing is foreign to it, nothing too much for it, which is open to everything and ready to tackle anything- the greatest enthusiasm and the supreme risk hard by one another.
With that we come up against a third aspect of the feeling of rapture: the reciprocal penetration of all enhancements of every ability to do and see, apprehend and address, communicate and achieve release. "-In this way states are ultimately interlaced which perhaps would have
Rapture as Aesthetic State 101
reason to remain foreign to one another. For example, the feeling of religious rapture and sexual arousal (-two profound feelings coor- dinated quite precisely to an all but astonishing degree)" (WM, 800).
What Nietzsche means by the feeling of rapture as the basic aesthet- ic state may be gauged by the contrary phenomenon, the inartistic states of the sober, weary, exhausted, dry as dust, wretched, timorous, pallid creatures "under whose regard life suffers" (WM, 801, 812). Rapture is a feeling. But from the contrast of the artistic and inartistic states it becomes especially clear that by the word Rausch Nietzsche does not mean a fugitive state that rushes over us and then goes up in smoke. Rapture may therefore hardly be taken as an affect, not even if we give the term "affect" the more precise definition gained earlier. Here as in the earlier case it remains difficult, if not impossible, to apply uncritically terms like affect, passion, and feeling as essential defini- tions. We can employ such concepts of psychology, by which one divides the faculties of the psyche into classes, only as secondary refer- ences-presupposing that we are inquiring, from the beginning and throughout, on the basis of the phenomena themselves in each in- stance. Then perhaps the artistic state of "rapture," if it is more than a fugitive affect, may be grasped as a passion. But then the question immediately arises: to what extent? In The Will to Power there is a passage that can give us a pointer. Nietzsche says (WM, 814), "Artists are not men of great passion, whatever they like to tell us-and them- selves as well. " Nietzsche adduces two reasons why artists cannot be men of great passion. First, simply because they are artists, i. e. , crea- tors, artists must examine themselves; they lack shame before them- selves, and above all they lack shame before great passion; as artists they have to exploit passion, hiding in ambush and pouncing on it, trans- forming it in the artistic process. Artists are too curious merely to _be magnificent in great passion; for what passion would have confronting it is not curiosity but a sense of shame. Second, artists are also always
the victims of the talent they possess, and that denies them the sheer extravagance of great passion. "One does not get over a passion by portraying it; rather, the passion is over when one portrays it" (WM,
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814). The artistic state itself is never great passion, but still it is passion. Thus it possesses a steady and extensive reach into beings as a whole, indeed in such a way that this reach can take itself up into its own grasp, keep it in view, and compel it to take form.
From everything that has been said to clarify the general essence of rapture it ought to have become apparent that we cannot succeed in our efforts to understand it by means of a pure "physiology," that Nietzsche's use of the term "physiology of art" rather has an essentially covert meaning.
What Nietzsche designates with the word Rausch, which in his final publications he grasps in a unified way as the basic aesthetic state, is bifurcated early in his work into two different states. The natural forms of the artistic state are those of dream and enchantment, as we may say, adopting an earlier usage of Nietzsche's in order to avoid here the word Rausch which he otherwise employs. For the state he calls rapture is one in which dream and ecstatic transport first attain their art-produc- ing essence and become the artistic states to which Nietzsche gives the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian. " The Apollonian and the Diony- sian are for Nietzsche two "forces of nature and art" (WM, 1050); in their reciprocity all "further development" of art consists. The conver- gence of the two in the unity of one configuration is the birth of the supreme work of Greek art, tragedy. But if Nietzsche both at the beginning and at the end of his path of thought thinks the essence of art, which is to say, the essence of the metaphysical activity of life, in the selfsame opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, still we must learn to know and to see that his interpretation in the two cases differs. For at the time of The Birth of Tragedy the opposition is still
thought in the sense of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, although- rather, because-it is part of a confrontation with such metaphyics; by way of contrast, at the time of The Will to Power the opposition is thought on the basis of the fundamental position designated in that title. So long as we do not discern the transformation with adequate clarity and so long as we do not grasp the essence of will to power, it would be good for us to put aside for a while this opposition, which
Rapture as Aesthetic State 103
all too often becomes a vacuous catchword. The formula of Apollonian and Dionysian opposites has long been the refuge of all confused and confusing talk and writing about art and about Nietzsche. For Nietz- sche the opposition remained a constant source of boundless obscuri- ties and novel questions.
Nietzsche may well lay claim to the first public presentation and development of the discovery of that opposition in Greek existence to which he gives the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian. " We can surmise from various clues, however, that Jacob Burckhardt in his Basel lectures on Greek culture, part of which Nietzsche heard, was already on the trail of the opposition; otherwise Nietzsche himself would not expressly refer to Burckhardt as he does in Twilight of the Idols (VIII, 170-71) when he says, ". . . the most profound expert on their [the Greeks'] culture living today, such as Jacob Burckhardt in Basel. " Of course, what Nietzsche could not have realized, even though since his youth he knew more clearly than his contemporaries who Holderlin was, was the fact that Holderlin had seen and conceived of the opposi- tion in an even more profound and lofty manner.
Holderlin's tremendous insight is contained in a letter to his friend Bohlendorff. He wrote it on December 4, 1801, shortly before his departure for France (Works, ed. Hellingrath, V, 318 ff. *). Here
*Holderlin's letter to Casimir Ulrich Bohlendorff (1775-1825), a member of Holder- lin's circle of poet-friends in Homburg, contains the following lines (Holder/in Werke und Briefe, Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1969, II, 940-41):
"My friend! You have attained much by way of precision and skillful articulation and sacrificed nothing by way of warmth; on the contrary, the elasticity of your spirit, like that of a fine steel blade, has but proven mightier as a result of the schooling to which it has been subjected. . . . Nothing is more difficult for us to learn than the free employ- ment of our national gift. And I believe that clarity of presentation is originally as natural to us as the fire of heaven was to the Greeks. On that account the Greeks are to he surpassed more in magnificent passion . . . than in the commanding intellect and repre- sentational skill which are typical of Homer.
"It sounds paradoxical. But I assert it once again and submit it for your examination and possible employment: what is properly national will come to have less and less priority as one's education progresses. For that reason the Greeks are not really masters of holy pathos, since it is innate in them, while from Homer on they excel in representa-
104 THE Vv"ILL TO POWER AS t\RT
Holderlin contrasts "the holy pathos" and "the Occidental funonian sobriety of representational skill" in the essence of the Greeks. The opposition is not to be understood as an indifferent historical finding. Rather, it becomes manifest to direct meditation on the destiny and determination of the German people. Here we must be satisfied with a mere reference, since Holderlin's way of knowing could receive adequate definition only by means of an interpretation of his work. It is enough if we gather from the reference that the variously named conflict of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, of holy passion and sober representation, is a hidden stylistic law of the historical determination of the German people, and that one day we must find ourselves ready and able to give it shape. The opposition is not a formula with the help of which we should be content to describe "culture.
Concurrent with the formation of a dominant aesthetics and of the aesthetic relation to art in modern times is the decline of great art, great in the designated sense. Such decline does not result from the fact that the "quality" is poorer and the style less imposing; it is rather that art forfeits its essence, loses its immediate relation to the basic task of representing the absolute, i. e. , of establishing the absolute definitively as such in the realm of historical man. From this vantage point we can grasp the fourth basic development.
4. At the historical moment when aesthetics achieves its greatest possible height, breadth, and rigor of form, great art comes to an end. The achievement of aesthetics derives its greatness from the fact that it recognizes and gives utterance to the end of great art as such. The final and greatest aesthetics in the Western tradition is that of Hegel. It is recorded in his Lectures on Aesthetics, held for the last time at the University of Berlin in 1828-29 (see Hegel's Works, vol. X, parts l, 2 and 3). Here the following statements appear:
. . . yet in this regard there is at least no absolute need at hand for it [the matter] to be brought to representation by art (X, 2, p. 233).
In all these relations art is and remains for us, with regard to its highest determination, something past (X, I, p. I6).
The magnificent days of Greek art, like the golden era of the later Middle Ages, are gone (X, I, pp. I5-I6).
History of Aesthetics 85
One cannot refute these statements and overcome all the history and happenings that stand behind them by objecting against Hegel that since 1830 we have had many considerable works of art which we might point to. Hegel never wished to deny the possibility that also in the future individual works of art would originate and be esteemed. The fact of such individual works, which exist as works only for the enjoy- ment of a few sectors of the population, does not speak against Hegel but for him. It is proof that art has lost its power to be the absolute, has lost its absolute power. On the basis of such loss the position of art and the kind of knowledge concerning it are defined for the nine- teenth century. This we can demonstrate briefly in a fifth point.
5. Catching a glimpse of the decline of art from its essence, the nineteenth ~entury once more dares to attempt the "collective art- work. " That effort is associated with the name Richard Wagner. It is no accident that his effort does not limit itself to the creation of works that might serve such an end. His effort is accompanied and undergird- ed by reflections on the principles of such works, and by corresponding treatises, the most important of which are Art and Revolution (1849), The Artwork of the Future (1850), Opera and Drama (1851), German Art and German Politics (1865). It is not possible here to clarify to any great extent the complicated and confused historical and intellectual milieu of the mid-nineteenth ceniury. In the decade 1850-1860 two streams interpenetrate in a remarkable fashion, the genuine and well- preserved tradition of the great age of the German movement, and the slowly expanding wasteland, the uprooting of human existence, which comes to light fully during the Gilded Age. One can never understand this most ambiguous century by describing the sequence of its periods. It must be demarcated simultaneously from both ends, i. e. , from the last third of the eighteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. .
Here we have to be satisfied with one indication, delineated by our guiding area of inquiry. With reference to the historical position of art, the effort to produce the "collective artwork" remains essential. The very name is demonstrative. For one thing, it means that the arts should no longer be realized apart from one another, that they should be conjoined in one work. But beyond such sheer quantitative unification,
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the artwork should be a celebration of the national community, it should be the religion. In that respect the definitive arts are literary and musical. Theoretically, music is to be a means for achieving effective drama; in reality, however, music in the form of opera becomes the authentic art. Drama possesses its importance and essential character, not in poetic originality, i. e. , not in the well-wrought truth of the linguistic work, but in things pertaining to the stage, theatrical arrange- ments and gala productions. Architecture serves merely for theater construction, painting provides the backdrops, sculpture portrays the gestures of actors. Literary creation and language remain without the essential and decisive shaping force of genuine knowledge. What is wanted is the domination of art as music, and thereby the domination of the pure state of feeling-the tumult and delirium of the senses, tremendous contraction, the felicitous distress that swoons in enjoy- ment, absorption in "the bottomless sea of harmonies," the plunge into frenzy and the disintegration into sheer feeling as redemptive. The "lived experience" as such becomes decisive. The work is merely what arouses such experience. All portrayal is to work its effects as fore- ground and superficies, aiming toward the impression, the effect, want- ing to work on and arouse the audience: theatrics. Theater and orchestra determine art. Of the orchestra Wagner says:
The orchestra is, so to speak, the basis of infinite, universally common feeling, from which the individual feeling of the particular artist can blossom to the greatest fullness: it dissolves to a certain extent the static, motionless basis of the scene of reality into a liquid-soft, flexible, impressionable, ethereal surface, the immeasurable ground of which is the sea of feeling itself. (The Artwork of the Future, in Cesammelte Schriften und Dich- tungen, 2nd ed. , 1887, p. 157. )
To this we should compare what Nietzsche says in The Will to Power (WM, 839) about Wagner's "means of achieving effects":
Consider the means of achieving effects to which Wagner most likes to turn (and which for the most part he had to invent): to an astonishing extent they resemble the means by which the hypnotist achieves his effect (his selection
History of Aesthetics 87
of tempi and tonal hues for his orchestra; a repulsive avoidance of the logic and intervals of rhythm; the lingering, soothing, mysterious, hysterical qual- ity of his "endless melody"). And is the state to which the prelude to Lohengrin reduces its listeners, especially the lady listeners, essentially dif- ferent from that of a somnambulistic trance? -1 heard an Italian woman who had just listened to that prelude say, flashing those lovely mesmerized eyes that Wagneriennes know how to affect, "Come si dorme con questa musi-
! " ca.
Here the essential character of the conception "collective artwork" comes to unequivocal expression: the dissolution of everything solid into a fluid, flexible, malleable state, into a swimming and floundering; the unmeasured, without laws or borders, clarity or definiteness; the boundless night of sheer submergence. In other words, art is once again to become an absolute need. But now the absolute is experienced as sheer indeterminacy, total dissolution into sheer feeling, a hovering that gradually sinks into nothingness. No wonder Wagner found the metaphysical confirmation and explanation of his art in Schopenhauer's main work, which he studied diligently four different times.
However persistently Wagner's will to the "collective artwork" in its results and influence became the very opposite of great art, the will itself remains singular for his time. It raises Wagner-in spite of his theatricality and recklessness-above the level of other efforts focusing on art and its essential role in existence. In that regard Nietzsche writes (XIV, 150-51):
Without any doubt, Wagner gave the Germans of this era the most consid- erable indication of what an artist could be: reverence for "the artist" suddenly grew to great heights; he awakened on all sides new evaluations, new desires, new hopes; and this perhaps not least of all because of the merely preparatory, incomplete, imperfect nature of his artistic products: Who has not learned from him!
That Richard Wagner's attempt had to fail does not result merely from the predominance of music with respect to the other arts in his work. Rather, that the music could assume such preeminence at all has its
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grounds in the increasingly aesthetic posture taken toward art as a whole-it is the conception and estimation of art in terms of the unalloyed state of feeling and the growing barbarization of the very state to the point where it becomes the sheer bubbling and boiling of feeling abandoned to itself.
And yet such arousal of frenzied feeling and unchaining of "affects" could be taken as a rescue of "life," especially in view of the growing impoverishment and deterioration of existence occasioned by industry, technology, and finance, in connection with the enervation and deple- tion of the constructive forces of knowledge and tradition, to say nothing of the lack of every establishment of goals for human existence. Rising on swells of feeling would have to substitute for a solidly grounded and articulated position in the midst of beings, the kind of thing that only great poetry and thought can create.
It was the frenzied plunge into the whole of things in Richard Wagner's person and work that captivated the young Nietzsche; yet his captivation was possible only because something correlative came from him, what he then called the Dionysian. But since Wagner sought sheer upsurgence of the Dionysian upon which one might ride, while Nietzsche sought to leash its force and give it form, the breach between the two was already predetermined.
Without getting into the history of the friendship between Wagner and Nietzsche here, we shall indicate briefly the proper root of the conflict that developed early on, slowly, but ever more markedly and decisively. On Wagner's part, the reason for the breach was personal in the widest sense: Wagner did not belong to that group of men for whom their own followers are the greatest source of revulsion. Wagner required Wagnerians and Wagneriennes. So far as the personal aspect is concerned, Nietzsche loved and respected Wagner all his life. His struggle with Wagner was an essential one, involving real issues. Nietzsche waited for many years, hoping for the possibility of a fruitful confrontation with Wagner. His opposition to Wagner involved two things. First, Wagner's neglect of inner feeling and proper style. Nietz- sche expressed it once this way: with Wagner it is all "floating and swimming" instead of "striding and dancing," which is to say, it is a
History of Aesthetics 89
floundering devoid of measure and pace. Second, Wagner's deviation into an insincere, moralizing Christianity mixed with delirium and tumult. (See Nietzsche contra Wagner, 1888; on the relationship of Wagner and Nietzsche, cf. Kurt Hildebrandt, Wagner und Nietzsche: ihr Kampf gegen das 19. fahrhundert, Breslau, 1924).
We hardly need to note explicitly that in the nineteenth century there were sundry essential works in the various artistic genres besides those of Wagner's and even opposed to his. We know, for example, in what high esteem Nietzsche held such a work as Adalbert Stifter's Late Summer, whose world is well-nigh the perfect antithesis to that of Wagner.
But what matters is the question of whether and how art is still known and willed as the definitive formation and preservation of beings as a whole. The question is answered by the reference to the attempt to develop a collective artwork on the basis of music and to its inevitable demise. Corresponding to the growing incapacity for metaphysical knowledge, knowledge of art in the nineteenth century is transformed into discovery and investigation of mere developments in art history. What in the age of Herder and Winckelmann stood in service to a magnificent self-meditation on historical existence is now carried on for its own sake, i. e. , as an academic discipline. Research into the history of art as such begins. (Of course, figures like Jacob Burckhardt and Hippolyte Taine, as different from one another as they may be, cannot be measured according to such academic standards. ) Examination of literary works now enters the realm of philology; "it developed in its sense for the minuscule, for genuine philology" (Wilhelm Dilthey,
Gesammelte Schriften, XI, 216). Aesthetics becomes a psychology that proceeds in the manner of the natural sciences: states of feeling are taken to be facts that come forward of themselves and may be subjected to experiments, observation, and measurement. (Here Friedrich Theo- · dor Vischer and Wilhelm Dilthey are also exceptions, supported and guided by the tradition of Hegel and Schiller. ) The history of literature and creative art is ostensibly of such a nature that there can be a science of art and literature that brings to light important insights and at the same time keeps alive the cultivation of thought. Pursuit of such
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science is taken to be the proper actuality of the "spirit. " Science itself is, like art, a cultural phenomenon and an area of cultural activity. But wherever the "aesthetic" does not become an object of research but determines the character of man, the aesthetic state becomes one among other possible states, e. g. , the political or the scientific. The "aesthetic man" is a nineteenth-century hybrid.
The aesthetic man seeks to realize balance and harmony of feelings in himself and in others. On the basis of this need he forms his feeling for life and his intuitions of the world. His estimation of reality depends on the extent to which reality guarantees the conditions for such an existence. (Dilthey, in commemoration of the literary historian Julian Schmidt, 1887; Gesammelte Schriften, XI, 232. )
But there must be culture, because man must progress-whither, no one knows, and no one is seriously asking anymore. Besides, one still has his "Christianity" at the ready, and his Church; these are already becoming essentially more political than religious institutions.
The world is examined and evaluated on the basis of its capacity to produce the aesthetic state. The aesthetic man believes that he is protected and vindicated by the whole of a culture. In all of that there is still a good bit of ambition and labor, and at times even good taste and genuine challenge. Nevertheless, it remains the mere foreground of that occurrence which Nietzsche is the first to recognize and pro- claim with full clarity: nihilism. With that we come to the final devel- opment to be mentioned. We already know its contents, but they now require explicit definition.
6. What Hegel asserted concerning art-that it had lost its power to be the definite fashioner and preserver of the absolute-Nietzsche recognized to be the case with the "highest values," religion, morality, and philosophy: the lack of creative force and cohesion in grounding man's historical existence upon beings as a whole.
Whereas for Hegel it was art-in contrast to religion, morality, and philosophy-that fell victim to nihilism and became a thing of the past, something nonactual, for Nietzsche art is to be pursued as the counter- movement. In spite of Nietzsche's essential departure from Wagner,
History of Aesthetics 91
we see in this an outgrowth of the Wagnerian will to the "collective artwork. " Whereas for Hegel art as a thing of the past became an object of the highest speculative knowledge, so that Hegel's aesthetics as- sumed the shape of a metaphysics of spirit, Nietzsche's meditation on art becomes a "physiology of art. "
In the brief work Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888) Nietzsche says (VIII, 187): "Of course, aesthetics is nothing else than applied physi- ology. " It is therefore no longer even "psychology," as it usually is in the nineteenth century, but investigation of bodily states and processes and their activating causes by methods of natural science.
We must keep the state of affairs quite clearly in view: on the one hand, art in its historical determination as the countermovement to nihilism; on the other, knowledge of art as "physiology"; art is delivered over to explanation in terms of natural science, relegated to an area of the science of facts. Here indeed the aesthetic inquiry into art in its ultimate consequences is thought to an end. The state of feeling is to be traced back to excitations of the nervous system, to bodily condi- tions.
With that we have defined more closely both Nietzsche's basic position toward art as historical actuality and the way in which he knows and wants to know about art: aesthetics as applied physiology. But at the same time we have assigned places to both in the broad context of the history of art, in terms of the relation of that history to the knowl- edge of art prevailing at a given time.
14. Rapture as Aesthetic State*
But our genuine intention is to conceive of art as a configuration of will to power, indeed as its distinctive form. This means that on the basis of Nietzsche's conception of art and by means of that very conception we want to grasp will to power itself in its essence, and thereby being as a whole with regard to its basic character. To do that we must now try to grasp Nietzsche's conception of art in a unified way, which is to say, to conjoin in thought things that at first blush seem to run wholly contrary ways. On the one hand, art is to be the countermovement to nihilism, that is, the establishment of the new supreme values; it is to prepare and ground standards and laws for historical, intellectual existence. On the other hand, art is at the same time to be properly grasped by way of physiology and with its means.
Viewed extrinsically, it seems easy to designate Nietzsche's position toward art as senseless, nonsensical, and therefore nihilistic. For if art is just a matter of physiology, then the essence and reality of art dissolve into nervous states, into processes in the nerve cells. Where in such
*Der Rausch als iisthetischer Zustand. Rausch is commonly rendered as "frenzy" in translations of Nietzsche's writings, but "rapture," from the past participle of rapere, to seize, seems in some respects a better alternative. No single English word-rapture, frenzy, ecstasy, transport, intoxication, delirium-can capture all the senses of Rausch. Our word "rush" is related to it: something "rushes over" us and sweeps us away. In modern German Rausch most often refers to drunken frenzy or narcotic intoxication, as Heidegger will indicate below; but Nietzsche's sense for the Dionysian is both more variegated and more subtle than that, and I have chosen the word "rapture" because of its complex erotic and religious background. But Rausch is more than a problem of translation. The reader is well advised to examine Nietzsche's analyses of Rausch in the works Heidegger cites in this section, especially Die Ceburt der Tragodie and Cotzen- Diimmerung.
Rapture as Aesthetic State 93
blind transactions are we to find something that could of itself deter- mine meaning, posit values, and erect standards?
In the realm of natural processes, conceived scientifically, where the only law that prevails is that of the sequence and commensurability (or incommensurability) of cause-effect relations, every result is equally essential and inessential. In this area there is no establishment of rank or positing of standards. Everything is the way it is, and remains what it is, having its right simply in the fact that it is. Physiology knows no arena in which something could be set up for decision and choice. To deliver art over to physiology seems tantamount to reducing art to the functional level of the gastric juices. Then how could art also ground and determine the genuine and decisive valuation? Art as the counter- movement to nihilism and art as the object of physiology-that's like trying to mix fire and water. If a unification is at all possible here, it can only occur in such a way that art, as an object of physiology, is declared the utter apotheosis of nihilism-and not at all the counter- movement to it.
And yet in the innermost will of Nietzsche's thought the situation is altogether different. True, there is a perpetual discordance prevailing in what he achieves, an instability, an oscillation between these opposite poles which, perceived from the outside, can only confuse. In what follows we will confront the discordancy again and again. But above all else we must try to see what it is that is "altogether different" here.
All the same, in so trying we may not close our eyes to what Nietzsche's aesthetics-as-physiology says about art and how it says it. To be sure, a conclusive presentation of that aesthetics is seriously impaired by the fact that Nietzsche left behind only undetailed obser- vations, references, plans, and claims. We do not even possess an intrinsic, carefully projected outline of his aesthetics. True, among the plans for The Will to Power we find one of Nietzsche's own sketches with the title "Toward the Physiology of Art" (XVI, 432-34). But it is only a list of seventeen items, not arranged according to any visible guiding thought. We will present in full this collection of headings of investigations that remained to be carried out, because in terms of pure content it offers an immediate overview of what such an aesthetics was to treat.
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TOWARD THE PHYSIOLOGY OF ART
1. Rapture as presupposition: causes of rapture.
2. Typical symptoms of rapture.
3. The feeling of force and plenitude in rapture: its idealizing effect.
4. The factual increase of force: its factual beautification. (The increase of
force, e. g. , in the dance of the sexes. ) The pathological element in rapture: the physiological danger of art-. For consideration: the extent to which our value "beautiful" is completely anthropocentric: based on biological presuppositions concerning growth and progress-.
5. The Apollonian, the Dionysian: basic types. In broader terms, compared with our specialized arts.
6. Question: where architecture belongs.
7. The part artistic capacities play in normal life, the tonic effect of their
exercise: as opposed to the ugly.
8. The question of epidemic and contagion.
9. Problem of "health" and "hysteria": genius = neurosis.
10. Artassuggestion,asmeansofcommunication,astherealmofinvention of the induction psycho-motrice.
11. The inartistic states: objectivity, the mania to mirror everything, neutral- ity.
The impoverished will; loss of capital.
12. The inartistic states: abstractness. The impoverished senses.
13. The inartistic states: vitiation, impoverishment, depletion-will to noth-
ingness {Christian, Buddhist, nihilist). The impoverished body.
14. The inartistic states: the moral idiosyncrasy. The fear that characterizes the weak, the mediocre, before the senses, power, rapture {instinct of
those whom life has defeated).
15. How is tragic art possible?
16. The romantic type: ambiguous. Its consequence is "naturalism. "
17. Problem of the actor. The "dishonesty," the typical ability to metamor-
phose as a flaw in character. . . . Lack of shame, the Hanswurst, the satyr, the buffo, the Gil Bias, the actor who plays the artist. . . . *
*The new historical-critical edition of Nietzsche's works (CM VIII, 3, p. 328) lists an eighteenth note, printed in none of the earlier editions.
18. Die Kunst als Rausch, medizinisch: Amnestie. tonicum ganze und partielle lmpotenz.
The meaning of the passage is anything but obvious; it is easy to understand why previous editors let it fall. An attempt at translation:
18. Art as rapture, medically: tonic oblivion, complete and partial impotence.
Rapture as Aesthetic State 95
A multiplicity of different points of inquiry lies before us here, but no blueprint or outline of a structure, not even a preliminary mapping out of the space in which all this is to be joined. Yet at bottom the same is the case with those fragments assembled between numbers 794 and 853 in The Will to Power, except that these go beyond mere catch- words and headlines in providing greater detail. The same is also true of the pieces taken up into volume XIV, pp. 131-201, which belong here thematically. We must therefore try all the harder to bring a higher determination and an essential coherence to the materials that lie before us. To that end we will follow a twofold guideline: for one thing, we will try to keep in view the whole of the doctrine of will to power; for another, we will recall the major doctrines of traditional aesthetics.
But on our way we do not want merely to become cognizant of Nietzsche's teachings on aesthetics. Rather, we want to conceive how the apparently antithetical directions of his basic position with respect to art can be reconciled: art as countermovement to nihilism and art as object of physiology. If a unity prevails here, eventuating from the essence of art itself as Nietzsche sees it, and if art is a configuration of will to power, then insight into the possibility of unity between the antithetical determinations should provide us with a higher concept of the essence of will to power. That is the goal of our presentation of the major teachings of Nietzsche's aesthetics.
At the outset we must refer to a general peculiarity of most of the larger fragments: Nietzsche begins his reflections from various points of inquiry within the field of aesthetics, but he manages at once to touch upon the general context. So it is that many fragments treat the same thing, the only difference being in the order of the material and the distribution of weight or importance. In what follows we shall forego discussion of those sections that are easy to comprehend on the basis of ordinary experience.
Nietzsche's inquiry into art is aesthetics. According to the definitions provided earlier, art in aesthetics is experienced and defined by falling back upon the state of feeling in man that corresponds and pertains to the bringing-forth and the enjoyment of the beautiful. Nietzsche him- self uses the expression "aesthetic state" (WM, 801) and speaks of
96 THE WILL TO POWER AS ART
"aesthetic doing and observing" (VIII, 122). But this aesthetics is to be "physiology. " That suggests that states of feeling, taken to be purely psychical, are to be traced back to the bodily condition proper to them. Seen as a whole, it is precisely the unbroken and indissoluble unity of the corporeal-psychical, the living, that is posited as the realm of the aesthetic state: the living "nature" of man.
When Nietzsche s~ys "physiology" he does mean to emphasize the bodily state; but the latter is in itself always already something psychi- cal, and therefore also a matter for "psychology. " The bodily state of an animal and even of man is essentially different from the property of a "natural body," for example, a stone. Every body is also a natural body, but the reverse does not hold. On the other hand, when Nietzsche says "psychology" he always means what also pertains to bodily states (the physiological). Instead of "aesthetic" Nietzsche often speaks more correctly of "artistic" or "inartistic" states. Although he sees art from the point of view of the artist, and demands that it be seen that way, Nietzsche does not mean the expression "artistic" only with reference to the artist. Rather, artistic and inartistic states are those that support and advance-or hamper and preclude-a relation to art of a creative or receptive sort.
The basic question of an aesthetics as physiology of art, and that means of the artist, must above all aim to reveal those special states in the essence of the corporeal-psychical, i. e. , living nature of man in which artistic doing and observing occur, as it were, in conformity with and confinement to nature. In defining the basic aesthetic state we shall at first not refer to the text of The Will to Power but restrict ourselves to what Nietzsche says in the last writing he himself published (Twi- light of the Idols, 1888; VIII, 122-23). The passage reads:
Toward the psychology of the artist. - If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and observing, one physiological precondition is indispensable: rapture. Rapture must first have augmented the excitability of the entire machine: else it does not come to art. All the variously condi- tioned forms of rapture have the requisite force: above all, the rapture of sexual arousal, the oldest and most original form of rapture. In addition, the rapture that comes as a consequence of all great desires, all strong affects;
Rapture as Aesthetic State 97
the rapture of the feast, contest, feat of daring, victory; all extreme move- ment; the rapture of cruelty; rapture in destruction; rapture under certain meteorological influences, for example, the rapture of springtime; or under the influence of narcotics; finally, the rapture of will, of an overfull, teeming will.
We can summarize these remarks with the general statement that rapture is the basic aesthetic state, a rapture which for its part is variously conditioned, released, and increased. The passage cited was not chosen simply because Nietzsche published it but because it achieves the greatest clarity and unity of all the Nietzschean definitions of the aesthetic state. We can readily discern what remains unresolved throughout the final period of Nietzsche's creative life, although in terms of the matter itself it does not deviate essentially from what has gone before, when we compare to this passage number 798 (and the beginning of 799) of The Will to Power. Here Nietzsche speaks of "two states in which art itself emerges as a force of nature in man. " According to the aphorism's title, the two states meant are the "Apol- lonian" and the "Dionysian. " Nietzsche developed the distinction and opposition in his first writing, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music (1872). Even here, at the very beginning of his distinguishing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the "physiological symp- toms" of "dream" and "rapture" were brought into respective relation. W e still find this connection in The Will to Power, number 798 (from the year 1888! ): "Both states are rehearsed in normal life as well, only more weakly: in dreams and in rapture. " Here, as earlier, rapture is but one of the two aesthetic states, juxtaposed to the dream. But from the passage in Twilight of the Idols we gather that rapture is the basic aesthetic state without qualification. Nonetheless, in terms of the genu- ine issue the same conception prevails also in The Will to Power. The first sentence of the following aphorism (WM, 799) reads: "In Diony- sian rapture there is sexuality and voluptuousness: in the Apollonian they are not lacking. " According to The Birth of Tragedy, to there- marks in The Will to Power, number 798, and elsewhere, the Diony- sian alone is the rapturous and the Apollonian the dreamlike; now, in
Twilight of the Idols, the Dionysian and the Apollonian are two kinds
98 TilE WILL TO PO'vVER AS ART
of rapture, rapture itself being the basic state. Nietzsche's ultimate doctrine must be grasped according to this apparently insignificant but really quite essential clarification. W e must read a second passage from Twilight of the Idols in company with the first (VIII, 124): "What is the meaning of the conceptual opposition, which I introduced into aesthetics, of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, both conceived as kinds of rapture? " After such clear testimony it can no longer be a matter simply of unraveling Nietzsche's doctrine of art from the oppo- sition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, an opposition quite com- mon ever since the time of its first publication, but not very commonly grasped, an opposition which nevertheless still retains its significance.
Before we pursue the opposition within the framework of our own presentation, let us ask what it is that according to Nietzsche's final explanation pervades that opposition. With this intention, let us pro- ceed with a double question. First, what is the general essence of rapture? Second, in what sense is rapture "indispensable if there is to be art"; in what sense is rapture the basic aesthetic state?
To the question of the general essence of rapture Nietzsche provides a succinct answer (Twilight of the Idols; VIII, 123): "What is essential in rapture is the feeling of enhancement of force and plenitude. " (Cf. "Toward the Physiology of Art," above: "The feeling of force and plenitude in rapture. ") Earlier he called rapture the "physiological precondition" of art; what is now essential about the precondition is feeling. According to what we clarified above, feeling means the way we find ourselves to be with ourselves, and thereby at the same time with things, with beings that we ourselves are not. Rapture is always rapturous feeling. Where is the physiological, or what pertains to bodily states, in this? Ultimately we dare not split up the matter in such a way, as though there were a bodily state housed in the basement with feelings dwelling upstairs. Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, is precisely the way we are corporeally. Bodily being does not mean that the soul is burdened by a hulk we call the body. In feeling oneself to be, the body is already contained in advance in that self, in such a way that the body in its bodily states permeates the self. We do not "have" a body in the way we carry a knife in a sheath. Neither is the body a natural
Rapture as Aesthetic State 99
body that merely accompanies us and which we can establish, expressly or not, as being also at hand. W e do not "have" a body; rather, we "are" bodily. Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, belongs to the essence of such Being. Feeling achieves from the outset the inherent internalizing tendency of the body in our Dasein. But because feeling, as feeling oneself to be, always just as essentially has a feeling for beings as a whole, every bodily state involves some way in which the things around us and the people with us lay a claim on us or do not do so. When our stomachs are "out of sorts" they can cast a pall over all things. What would otherwise seem indifferent to us suddenly becomes irritating and disturbing; what we usually take in stride now impedes us. True, the will can appeal to ways and means for suppressing the bad mood, but
it cannot directly awaken or create a countermood: for moods are overcome and transformed always only by moods. Here it is essential to observe that feeling is not something that runs its course in our "inner lives. " It is rather that basic mode of our Dasein by force of which and in accordance with which we are always already lifted beyond ourselves into being as a whole, which in this or that way matters to us or does not matter to us. Mood is never merely a way of being determined in our inner being for ourselves. It is above all a way of being attuned, and letting ourselves be attuned, in this or that way in mood. Mood is precisely the basic way in which we are outside our- selves. But that is the way we are essentially and constantly.
In all of this the bodily state swings into action. It lifts a man out beyond himself or it allows him to be enmeshed in himself and to grow listless. We are not first of all "alive," only then getting an apparatus to sustain our living which we call "the body," but we are some body who is alive. * Our being embodied is essentially other than merely being encumbered with an organism. Most of what we know from the
*Wir Ieben, indem wir leiben, "we live in that we are embodied. " Heidegger plays with the German expression wie man /eibt und lebt, "the way somebody actually is," and I have tried to catch the sense by playing on the intriguing English word "some- body. " Heidegger makes this play more than once: see NI, 565 (volume III of this series, p. 79); see also Early Greek Thinking, p. 65.
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natural sciences about the body and the way it embodies are specifications based on the established misinterpretation of the body as a mere natural body. Through such means we do find out lots of things, but the essential and determinative aspects always elude our vision and grasp. We mistake the state of affairs even further when we subsequently search for the "psychical" which pertains to the body that has already been misinterpreted as a natural body.
Every feeling is an embodiment attuned in this or that way, a mood that embodies in this or that way. Rapture is a feeling, and it is all the more genuinely a feeling the more essentially a unity of embodying attunement prevails. Of someone who is intoxicated we can only say that he "has" something like rapture. But he is not enraptured. The rapture of intoxication is not a state in which a man rises by himself beyond himself. What we are here calling rapture is merely-to use the colloquialism-being "soused," something that deprives us of every possible state of being.
At the outset Nietzsche emphasizes two things about rapture: first, the feeling of enhancement of force; second, the feeling of plenitude. According to what we explained earlier, such enhancement of force must be understood as the capacity to extend beyond oneself, as a relation to beings in which beings themselves are experienced as being more fully in being, richer, more perspicuous, more essential. Enhance- ment does not mean that an increase, an increment of force, "objective- ly" comes about. Enhancement is to be understood in terms of mood: to be caught up in elation-and to be borne along by our buoyancy as such. In the same way, the feeling of plenitude does not suggest an inexhaustible stockpile of inner events, It means above all an attune- ment which is so disposed that nothing is foreign to it, nothing too much for it, which is open to everything and ready to tackle anything- the greatest enthusiasm and the supreme risk hard by one another.
With that we come up against a third aspect of the feeling of rapture: the reciprocal penetration of all enhancements of every ability to do and see, apprehend and address, communicate and achieve release. "-In this way states are ultimately interlaced which perhaps would have
Rapture as Aesthetic State 101
reason to remain foreign to one another. For example, the feeling of religious rapture and sexual arousal (-two profound feelings coor- dinated quite precisely to an all but astonishing degree)" (WM, 800).
What Nietzsche means by the feeling of rapture as the basic aesthet- ic state may be gauged by the contrary phenomenon, the inartistic states of the sober, weary, exhausted, dry as dust, wretched, timorous, pallid creatures "under whose regard life suffers" (WM, 801, 812). Rapture is a feeling. But from the contrast of the artistic and inartistic states it becomes especially clear that by the word Rausch Nietzsche does not mean a fugitive state that rushes over us and then goes up in smoke. Rapture may therefore hardly be taken as an affect, not even if we give the term "affect" the more precise definition gained earlier. Here as in the earlier case it remains difficult, if not impossible, to apply uncritically terms like affect, passion, and feeling as essential defini- tions. We can employ such concepts of psychology, by which one divides the faculties of the psyche into classes, only as secondary refer- ences-presupposing that we are inquiring, from the beginning and throughout, on the basis of the phenomena themselves in each in- stance. Then perhaps the artistic state of "rapture," if it is more than a fugitive affect, may be grasped as a passion. But then the question immediately arises: to what extent? In The Will to Power there is a passage that can give us a pointer. Nietzsche says (WM, 814), "Artists are not men of great passion, whatever they like to tell us-and them- selves as well. " Nietzsche adduces two reasons why artists cannot be men of great passion. First, simply because they are artists, i. e. , crea- tors, artists must examine themselves; they lack shame before them- selves, and above all they lack shame before great passion; as artists they have to exploit passion, hiding in ambush and pouncing on it, trans- forming it in the artistic process. Artists are too curious merely to _be magnificent in great passion; for what passion would have confronting it is not curiosity but a sense of shame. Second, artists are also always
the victims of the talent they possess, and that denies them the sheer extravagance of great passion. "One does not get over a passion by portraying it; rather, the passion is over when one portrays it" (WM,
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814). The artistic state itself is never great passion, but still it is passion. Thus it possesses a steady and extensive reach into beings as a whole, indeed in such a way that this reach can take itself up into its own grasp, keep it in view, and compel it to take form.
From everything that has been said to clarify the general essence of rapture it ought to have become apparent that we cannot succeed in our efforts to understand it by means of a pure "physiology," that Nietzsche's use of the term "physiology of art" rather has an essentially covert meaning.
What Nietzsche designates with the word Rausch, which in his final publications he grasps in a unified way as the basic aesthetic state, is bifurcated early in his work into two different states. The natural forms of the artistic state are those of dream and enchantment, as we may say, adopting an earlier usage of Nietzsche's in order to avoid here the word Rausch which he otherwise employs. For the state he calls rapture is one in which dream and ecstatic transport first attain their art-produc- ing essence and become the artistic states to which Nietzsche gives the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian. " The Apollonian and the Diony- sian are for Nietzsche two "forces of nature and art" (WM, 1050); in their reciprocity all "further development" of art consists. The conver- gence of the two in the unity of one configuration is the birth of the supreme work of Greek art, tragedy. But if Nietzsche both at the beginning and at the end of his path of thought thinks the essence of art, which is to say, the essence of the metaphysical activity of life, in the selfsame opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, still we must learn to know and to see that his interpretation in the two cases differs. For at the time of The Birth of Tragedy the opposition is still
thought in the sense of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, although- rather, because-it is part of a confrontation with such metaphyics; by way of contrast, at the time of The Will to Power the opposition is thought on the basis of the fundamental position designated in that title. So long as we do not discern the transformation with adequate clarity and so long as we do not grasp the essence of will to power, it would be good for us to put aside for a while this opposition, which
Rapture as Aesthetic State 103
all too often becomes a vacuous catchword. The formula of Apollonian and Dionysian opposites has long been the refuge of all confused and confusing talk and writing about art and about Nietzsche. For Nietz- sche the opposition remained a constant source of boundless obscuri- ties and novel questions.
Nietzsche may well lay claim to the first public presentation and development of the discovery of that opposition in Greek existence to which he gives the names "Apollonian" and "Dionysian. " We can surmise from various clues, however, that Jacob Burckhardt in his Basel lectures on Greek culture, part of which Nietzsche heard, was already on the trail of the opposition; otherwise Nietzsche himself would not expressly refer to Burckhardt as he does in Twilight of the Idols (VIII, 170-71) when he says, ". . . the most profound expert on their [the Greeks'] culture living today, such as Jacob Burckhardt in Basel. " Of course, what Nietzsche could not have realized, even though since his youth he knew more clearly than his contemporaries who Holderlin was, was the fact that Holderlin had seen and conceived of the opposi- tion in an even more profound and lofty manner.
Holderlin's tremendous insight is contained in a letter to his friend Bohlendorff. He wrote it on December 4, 1801, shortly before his departure for France (Works, ed. Hellingrath, V, 318 ff. *). Here
*Holderlin's letter to Casimir Ulrich Bohlendorff (1775-1825), a member of Holder- lin's circle of poet-friends in Homburg, contains the following lines (Holder/in Werke und Briefe, Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1969, II, 940-41):
"My friend! You have attained much by way of precision and skillful articulation and sacrificed nothing by way of warmth; on the contrary, the elasticity of your spirit, like that of a fine steel blade, has but proven mightier as a result of the schooling to which it has been subjected. . . . Nothing is more difficult for us to learn than the free employ- ment of our national gift. And I believe that clarity of presentation is originally as natural to us as the fire of heaven was to the Greeks. On that account the Greeks are to he surpassed more in magnificent passion . . . than in the commanding intellect and repre- sentational skill which are typical of Homer.
"It sounds paradoxical. But I assert it once again and submit it for your examination and possible employment: what is properly national will come to have less and less priority as one's education progresses. For that reason the Greeks are not really masters of holy pathos, since it is innate in them, while from Homer on they excel in representa-
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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.
