No More Learning

13. Six Basic Developments in the History of Aesthetics
We shall begin with the second question. In order to come to terms with it we must characterize Nietzsche's procedure for defining the essence of art with greater penetration and must place it in the context of previous efforts to gain knowledge of art.
With the five statements on art that we brought forward the essential aspects of Nietzsche's interrogation of art have been estab- lished. From them one thing is clear: Nietzsche does not inquire into art in order to describe it as a cultural phenomenon or as a monument to civilization. Rather, by means of art and a characterization of the essence of art, he wants to show what will to power is. Nevertheless, Nietzsche's meditation on art keeps to the traditional path. The path is defined in its peculiarity by the term "aesthetics. " True, Nietzsche speaks against feminine aesthetics. But in so doing he speaks for mascu- line aesthetics, hence for aesthetics. In that way Nietzsche's interroga- tion of art is aesthetics driven to the extreme, an aesthetics, so to speak, that somersaults beyond itself. But what else should inquiry into art and knowledge of it be than "aesthetics"? What does "aesthetics" mean?
The term "aesthetics" is formed in the same manner as "logic" and "ethics. " The word episteme, knowledge, must always complete these terms. Logic: logike episteme: knowledge of logos, that is, the doctrine of assertion or judgment as the basic form of thought. Logic is knowl- edge of thinking, of the forms and rules of thought. Ethics: ethike episteme: knowledge of ethos, of the inner character of man and of the way it determines his behavior. Logic and ethics both refer to human behavior and its lawfulness.
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The word "aesthetics" is formed in the corresponding way: aisthetike episteme: knowledge of human behavior with regard to sense, sensa- tion, and feeling, and knowledge of how these are determined.
What determines thinking, hence logic, and what thinking comports itself toward, is the true. What determines the character and behavior of man, hence ethics, and what human character and behavior comport themselves toward, is the good. What determines man's feeling, hence aesthetics, and what feeling comports itself toward, is the beautiful. The true, the good, and the beautiful are the objects of logic, ethics, and aesthetics.
Accordingly, aesthetics is consideration of man's state of feeling in its relation to the beautiful; it is consideration of the beautiful to the extent that it stands in relation to man's state of feeling. The beautiful itself is nothing other than what in its self-showing brings forth that state. But the beautiful can pertain to either nature or art. Because art in its way brings forth the beautiful, inasmuch as it is "fine" art, meditation on art becomes aesthetics. With relation to knowledge of art and inquiry into it, therefore, aesthetics is that kind of meditation on art in which man's affinity to the beautiful represented in art sets the standard for all definitions and explanations, man's state of feeling remaining the point of departure and the goal of the meditation. The relation of feeling toward art and its bringing-forth can be one of production or of reception and enjoyment.
Now, since in the aesthetic consideration of art the artwork is defined as the beautiful which has been brought forth in art, the work is represented as the bearer and provoker of the beautiful with relation to our state of feeling. The artwork is posited as the "object" for a "subject"; definitive for aesthetic consideration is the subject-object relation, indeed as a relation of feeling. The work becomes an object in terms of that surface which is accessible to "lived experience. "
Just as we say that a judgment that satisfies the laws of thought promulgated in logic is "logical," so do we apply the designation "aes- thetic," which really only means a kind of observation and investigation with regard to a relation of feeling, to this sort of behavior itself. We speak of aesthetic feeling and an aesthetic state. Strictly speaking, a
History of Aesthetics 79
state of feeling is not "aesthetic. " It is rather something that can become the object of aesthetic consideration. Such consideration is called "aesthetic" because it observes from the outset the state of feeling aroused by the beautiful, relates everything to that state, and defines all else in terms of it.
The name "aesthetics," meaning meditation on art and the beautiful, is recent. It arises in the eighteenth century. But the matter which the word so aptly names, the manner of inquiry into art and the beautiful on the basis of the state of feeling in enjoyers and producers, is old, as old as meditation on art and the beautiful in Western thought. Philo- sophical meditation on the essence of art and the beautiful even begins as aesthetics.
In recent decades we have often heard the complaint that the innu- merable aesthetic considerations of and investigations into art and the beautiful have achieved nothing, that they have not helped anyone to gain access to art, that they have contributed virtually nothing to artistic creativity and to a sound appreciation of art. That is certainly true, especially with regard to the kind of thing bandied about today under the name "aesthetics. " But we dare not derive our standards for judging aesthetics and its relation to art from such contemporary work. For, in truth, the fact whether and how an era is committed to an aesthetics, whether and how it adopts a stance toward art of an aesthetic character, is decisive for the way art shapes the history of that era-or remains irrelevant for-it.
Because what stands in question for us is art as a configuration of will to power, which is to say, as a configuration of Being in general, indeed the distinctive one, the question of aesthetics as the basic sort of meditation on art and the knowledge of it can be treated only with respect to fundamentals. Only with the help of a reflection on th~ essence of aesthetics developed in this way can we get to the point where we can grasp Nietzsche's interpretation of the essence of art; only with the help of such a reflection can we at the same time take a position with regard to Nietzsche's interpretation, so that on this basis a confrontation can flourish.
In order to characterize the essence of aesthetics, its role in Western
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thought, and its relation to the history of Western art, we shall in- troduce six basic developments for con~ideration. Such consideration, of course, can only be by way of brief reference.
I. The magnificent art of Greece remains without a corresponding cognitive-conceptual meditation on it, such meditation not having to be identical with aesthetics. The lack of such a simultaneous reflection or meditation on great art does not imply that Greek art was only "lived," that the Greeks wallowed in a murky brew of "experiences" braced by neither concepts nor knowledge. It was their good fortune that the Greeks had no "lived experiences. " On the contrary, they had such an originally mature and luminous knowledge, such a passion for knowledge, that in their luminous state of knowing they had no need of "aesthetics. "
2. Aesthetics begins with the Greeks only at that moment when their great art and also the great philosophy that flourished along with it comes to an end. At that time, during the age of Plato and Aristotle, in connection with the organization of philosophy as a whole, those basic concepts are formed which mark off the boundaries for all future inquiry into art. One of those basic notions is the conceptual pair hyle-morphe, materia-forma, matter-form. The distinction has its ori- gin in the conception of beings founded by Plato, the conception of beings with regard to their outer appearance: eidos, idea. Where beings are apprehended as beings, and distinguished from other beings, in view of their outer appearance, the demarcation and arrangement of beings in terms of outer and inner limits enters on the scene. But what limits is form, what is limited is matter. Whatever comes into view as soon as the work of art is experienced as a self-showing according to its eidos, as phainesthai, is now subsumed under these definitions. The ekphanestaton, what properly shows itself and is most radiant of all, is the beautiful. By way of the idea, the work of art comes to appear in the designation of the beautiful as ekphanestaton.
With the distinction of hyle-morphe, which pertains to beings as such, a second concept is coupled which comes to guide all inquiry into art: art is techne. We have long known that the Greeks name art as well as handicraft with the same word, techne, and name correspond-
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ingly both the craftsman and the artist technites. In accordance with the later "technical" use of the word techne, where it designates (in a way utterly foreign to the Greeks) a mode of production, we seek even in the original and genuine significance of the word such later content: we aver that techne means hand manufacture. But because what we call fine art is also designated by the Greeks as techne, we believe that this implies a glorification of handicraft, or else that the exercise of art is degraded to the level of a handicraft.
However illuminating the common belief may be, it is not adequate to the actual state of affairs; that is to say, it does not penetrate to the basic position from which the Greeks define art and the work of art. But this will become clear when we examine the fundamental word techne. In order to catch hold of its true significance, it is advisable to establish the concept that properly counters it. The latter is named in the word physis. W e translate it with "nature," and think little enough about it. For the Greeks, physis is the first and the essential name for beings themselves and as a whole. For them the being is what flourishes on its own, in no way compelled, what rises and comes forward, and what goes back into itself and passes away. It is the rule that rises and resides in itself.
If man tries to win a foothold and establish himself among the beings (physis) to which he is exposed, if he proceeds to master beings in this or that way, then his advance against beings is borne and guided by a knowledge of them. Such knowledge is called techne. From the very outset the word is not, and never is, the designation of a "making" and a producing; rather, it designates that knowledge which supports and conducts every human irruption into the midst of beings. For that reason techne is often the word for human knowledge without qualifi- cation. The kind of knowledge that guides and grounds confrontatio~ with and mastery over beings, in which new and other beings are expressly produced and generated in addition to and on the basis of the beings that have already come to be (physis), in other words, the kind of knowledge that produces utensils and works of art, is then specially designated by the word techne. But even here, techne never means making or manufacturing as such; it always means knowledge, the
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disclosing of beings as such, in the manner of a knowing guidance of bringing-forth. Now, since the manufacture of utensils and the creation of artworks each in its way inheres in the immediacy of everyday existence, the knowledge that guides such procedures and modes of bringing-forth is called techne in an exceptional sense. The artist is a technites, not because he too is a handworker, but because the bring- ing-forth of artworks as well as utensils is an irruption by the man who knows and who goes forward in the midst of physis and upon its basis. Nevertheless, such "going forward," thought in Greek fashion, is no kind of attack: it lets what is already coming to presence arrive.
With the emergence of the distinction between matter and form, the essence of techne undergoes an interpretation in a particular direction; it loses the force of its original, broad significance. In Aristotle techne is still a mode of knowing, if only one among others (see the Nicoma- chean Ethics, Bk. VI). If we understand the word "art" quite generally to mean every sort of human capacity to bring forth, and if in addition we grasp the capacity and ability more originally as a knowing, then the word "art" corresponds to the Greek concept of techne also in its broad significance. But to the extent that techne is then brought expressly into relation with the production of beautiful things, or their represen- tation, meditation on art is diverted by way of the beautiful into the realm of aesthetics. What in truth is decided in the apparently extrinsic and, according to the usual view, even misguided designation of art as techne never comes to light, neither with the Greeks nor in later times.
But here we cannot show how the conceptual pair "matter and form" came to be the really principal schema for all inquiry into art and all further definition of the work of art. Nor can we show how the distinction of "form and content" ultimately came to be a concept applicable to everything under the sun, a concept under which any- thing and everything was to be subsumed. It suffices to know that the distinction of "matter and form" sprang from the area of manufacture of tools or utensils, that it was not originally acquired in the realm of art in the narrower sense, i. e. , fine art and works of art, but that it was merely transferred and applied to this realm. Which is reason enough to be dominated by a deep and abiding doubt concerning the tren-
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chancy of these concepts when it comes to discussions about art and works of art.
3. The third basic development for the history of knowledge about art, and that now means the origin and formation of aesthetics, is once again a happenstance that does not flow immediately from art or from meditation on it. On the contrary, it is an occurrence that involves our entire history. It is the beginning of the modern age. Man and his unconstrained knowledge of himself, as of his position among beings, become the arena where the decision falls as to how beings are to be experienced, defined, and shaped. Falling back upon the state and condition of man, upon the way man stands before himself and before
things, implies that now the very way man freely takes a position toward things, the way he finds and feels them to be, in short, his "taste," becomes the court of judicature over beings. In metaphysics that becomes manifest in the way in which certitude of all Being and all truth is grounded in the self-consciousness of the individual ego: ego cogito ergo sum. Such finding ourselves before ourselves in our own state and condition, the cogito me cogitare, also provides the first "object" which is secured in its Being. I myself, and my states, are the primary and genuine beings. Everything else that may be said to be is measured against the standard of this quite certain being. My having various states-the ways I find myself to be with something-partici- pates essentially in defining how I find the things themselves and everything I encounter to be.
Meditation on the beautiful in art now slips markedly, even exclu- sively, into the relationship of man's state of feeling, aisthesis. No wonder that in recent centuries aesthetics as such has been grounded and conscientiously pursued. That also explains why the name only now comes into use as a mode of observation for which the way had long. been paved: "aesthetics" is to be in the field of sensuousness and feeling precisely what logic is in the area of thinking-which is why it is also called "logic of sensuousness. "
Parallel to the formation of aesthetics and to the effort to clarify and ground the aesthetic state, another decisive process unfolds within the history of art. Great art and its works are great in their historical
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emergence and Being because in man's historical existence they accom- plish a decisive task: they make manifest, in the way appropriate to works, what beings as a whole are, preserving such'manifestation in the work. Art and its works are necessary only as an itinerary and sojourn for man in which the truth of beings as a whole, i. e. , 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).
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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
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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
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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,
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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.
94
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?