1. Nietzsche
On Art
“Die Wahrheit
is häßlich: wir
haben die Kunst
damit wir nicht
an der Wahrheit
zu Grunde gehn.”

2. The Birth of Tragedy
(1972)
• Nietzsche’s first book.
• The later Nietzsche is highly critical of
metaphysics, regarding it as the hang-over of
Christianity.
• But in BoT, Nietzsche still “peddled in artists’
metaphysics” and expressed himself in
Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas.

3. The Birth of Tragedy
• Wagner was obviously a great
influence at the time.
• Nietzsche was hoping for a
new art, an art of
metaphysical comfort (he says
later in 1886: “No, no! I
spoiled my project by
appending hopes where there
was no ground for hope.”)

4. Human, all too human
(1878)
• Fell out with Wagner, became more skeptical of
Schopenhauer.
• “Our all-too-human humanity leaves a good deal
to be desired, and yet gives us something to work
with... one of those things is art, the human
impulse to beauty” (Ridley)

5. HH II.174
• “Art is above and before all supposed to beautify life, thus
make us ourselves endurable, if possible pleasing to
others [...] art is supposed to conceal or reinterpret
everything ugly, those painful, dreadful, disgusting things
which... again and again insist on breaking forth.”
• “The work of art is merely an appendage. A man who
feels within himself an excess of such beautifying,
concealing and reinterpreting powers will in the end seek
to discharge this excess in works of art as well; so, under
the right circumstances, will an entire people.”
• (Freud’s libido attachment at a mass-scale; C&D)

6. The real task of art
• To make oneself tolerable to oneself (and thus to
others).
• To beautify, conceal, or reinterpret one’s “raw
materials.” (character)
• Works of art ought to be a happy side effect of the
process of self-beautification.
• Art of the self must come first.

7. But...
• “The ceaseless desire to
create on the part of the
artists, together with his
ceaseless observation of the
world outside him, [should
not] prevent him from
becoming better and more
beautiful as a person, that
is to say from creating
himself.” (HH II.102)

8. The Gay Science
(1882)
• God is dead. How do we now grapple with life?
• Nietzsche’s thoughts on art and artists begin to
develop further.
• “The gaiety of the Gay Science is thus of a
rather ambivalent kind: on the one hand it
is an exhilarated laugh at our newly-found
freedom, on the other, it is a kind of
nervously light-hearted laugh in the face of
the unknown.” (Ridley 64)

9. The need for Art
• So what is the use of art?
• It can’t mean to give us an insight into the world as
it is in itself, since “either nothing can, or no insight
might be had if I am right.”
• But it must be able to do two things...

10. Art must...
• 1.) Take the edge off the more unbearable truths of
science, and so steer off “nausea and suicide.”
• 2.) Satisfy our need for “faith in reason in life.”
• Q: But isn’t this a paradox, Nietzsche?
• A: No, not exactly.

11. nietzsche’s distinction
• There’s a difference between the “good will to
appearance” (to untruth) and the acceptance or
promotion of untruth out of a “bad intellectual
conscience”
• He insists on honesty. (artist’s intent)
• One must first face the truth and then embark
upon one’s (modest) falsifications and roundings off
of it.

12. The Good Will To
Appearance
• Requires the maximum
amount of honesty,
courageousness in the
face of truth, and
modesty.
• Art must be modest if it
is to be an expression of
a good intellectual
conscience.

13. Bad intellectual conscience
• Falsification (art) without
regard for the demands of
honesty.
• What about religious art?
• (I’m sure Nietzsche would love this painting, huht?)

14. Bad intellectual conscience
(Religious Art)
• Nietzsche says yes,
religion does promote
the life of the species, by
promoting faith in life.
• BUT -- they are
engaged in the project of
falsification, of
purposelessness and
dishonesty.
But what about using religion symbolically, myth as allegory and representation?

15. Bad intellectual conscience
(Religious Art)
• Like the artist, the ethical teacher promotes untruths that
make existence bearable.
• BUT -- unlike the artist, the ethical teacher does not
merely join up a few dots so as to create a pattern, but
jettisons all truth in favor of a different, invented ‘reality’.
It is this immodesty that makes him out as a man of bad
intellectual conscience. (Ridley 82)

16. The Gay Science (con’t)
• Truth is the problem (häßlich)
• Art, which is meant to evade truth, can’t offer justifications
of existence. It can, at most, make life livable.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El2l__hRta0

17. • [Nietzsche] is stern about the art of intoxication — ‘Does he that is enthusiastic need
wine?’ he asks: ‘The strongest ideas and passions brought before those who are not
capable of ideas and passions but only of intoxication!’ (GS 86); and he criticizes
artists for often being ‘too vain’ and for fixing ‘their minds on something prouder
than those small plants seem to be that really can grow on their soil to perfection’ (GS
87). And the reason for this insistence on modesty is that it is crucial to his claim that
art represents ‘the good will to appearance’. It is, indeed, only in falsifying
things that art can hope to render life bearable; but it is only in falsifying
them as little as possible that art can also discharge its responsibility to the
demands of the ‘intellectual conscience’ (Ridley, p. 80).

18. Amor Fati
• First mentioned in Book IV of The Gay Science.
• Nietzsche writes: “I want to learn more and more to see as
beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall too be one
of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be
my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what
is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to
accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only
negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish
to be only a Yes-sayer.” (GS 276)
• What is necessary in things = the course of nature and its
conditions.
• Idea of eternal recurrence vs. Amor Fati?

19. The Gay Science (con’t)
• What ought we to do? Turn existence into an
aesthetic phenomenon, to the least possible degree
consistent with making life bearable.
• “One can dispose of one’s drives like a gardener
and [...] cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity,
vanity as productively and profitable as a beautiful
fruit tree” (Daybreak 560).
• “We want to be the poets of our life -- first of all in
the smallest, most everyday matters” (GS 299).

20. Will to Power (814)
• Artists are not men of great passion, despite all their assertions
to the contrary both to themselves and to others. And for the
following two reasons: they lack all shyness towards themselves
(they watch themselves live, they spy upon themselves, they are
much too inquisitive), and they also lack shyness in the presence
of passion (as artists they exploit it). Secondly, however, that
vampire, their talent, generally forbids them such an
expenditure of energy as passion demands. A man who has a
talent is sacrificed to that talent; he lives under the vampirism of
his talent. A man does not get rid of his passion by producing
it, but rather he is rid of it if he is able to reproduce it.
• Do you agree?

21. Will to Power (815)
• The artist is perhaps in his way necessarily a sensual man,
generally susceptible, accessible to everything, and capable of
responding to the remotest stimulus or suggestion of a
stimulus. Nevertheless, as a rule he is in the power of his work,
of his will to mastership, really a sober and often even a
chaste man. His dominating instinct will have him so: it does
not allow him to spend himself haphazardly. It is one and the
same form of strength which is spent in artistic conception
and in the sexual act: there is only one form of strength. The
artist who yields in this respect, and who spends himself, is
betrayed: by so doing he reveals his lack of instinct, his lack of
will in general. It may be a sign of decadence -- in any case it
reduces the value of his art to an incalculable degree.