HEIDEGGER ON NIETZSCHE

NIETZSCHE VOL 1, HEIDEGGER

⇓Art/Artist/Artist-Philosopher

⇓Aesthetics

⇓Art and Rapture

⇓Art and Truth

⇓Overturning Platonism

⇓Art and Truth II

⇓Overturning Platonism II

⇓6 Part History of Platonism

ART/ARTIST/ARTIST-PHILOSOPHER

Why is art of decisive importance for the task of grounding the principle of the new valuation? [69]

The immediate answer is found in number 797 of The Will to Power […]: ‘The phenomenon ‘artist’ is still the most perspicuous.’ […] with this being, the artist, Being lights up for us most immediately and brightly. […] To be an artist is to be able to bring something forth. But to bring forth means to establish in Being something that does not yet exist. [69]

[…] the being of an artist is the most perspicuous mode of life. Life is for us the most familiar form of Being. The innermost essence of Being is will to power. In the being of the artist we encounter the most perspicuous and most familiar mode of the will to power. Since it is a matter of illuminating the Being of beings, meditation on art has in this regard decisive priority. [70]

[…] we derive at once two essential statements about art:

1. Art is the most perspicuous and familiar configuration of will to power;
2. Art must be grasped in terms of the artist.

And a third:

3. According to the expanded concept of artist, art is the basic occurrence of all beings; to the extent that they are, beings are self-creating, created.

According to N’s interpretation of the very first principle of morality, of Christian religion, and of the philosophy determined by Plato reads as follows: This world is worth nothing; there must be a ‘better’ world than this one, enmeshed as it is in sensuality; there must be a ‘true world’ beyond, a supersensuous world; the world of the senses is but a world of appearances. [73]

[…] But N says that the ‘true world’ of morality is a world of lies, that the true, the supersensuous, is an error. The sensuous world – which in Platonism means the world of semblance and errancy, the realm of error – is the true world. But the sensuous, the sense-semblant, is the very element of art

[…] we attain a fourth statement about art:

4. Art is the distinctive countermovement to nihilism.

[…] The concept of philosophy may no longer be defined according to the pattern of the teacher of morality who posits another higher world in opposition to this presumably worthless one. Against the nihilistic philosopher of morality[…] must be deployed the philosopher who goes counter, who emerges from a countermovement the ‘artist-philosopher’. […]

The artist-philosopher. Higher concept of art. Whether a man can remove himself far enough from other men, in order to give them form? (Preliminary exercises: 1. The one who gives himself form, the hermit; 2. The artist hitherto, as the insignificant perfecter of a piece of raw material.) WP 795

Art is the will to semblance as the sensuous. […] N says (xiv, 369): ‘The will to semblance, to illusion, to deception, to Becoming and change is deeper, more ‘metaphysical’, than the will to truth, to reality, to Being.’

The true is meant here in Plato’s sense, as being in itself, the Ideas, the supersensuous. [74]

Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief – that it is not possible to live with truth, that the ‘will to truth’ is already a symptom of degeneration. (xiv, 368)

‘Will to truth’ here (and with N always) means the will to the ‘true world’ in the sense of Plato and Christianity, the will to supersensuousness , to being in itself. The will to such ‘true beings’ is in truth a no-saying to our present world, precisely the one in which art is at home. Because this world is the genuinely real and only true world, N can declare with respect to the relation of art and truth that ‘art is worth more than truth’ (WP, 853)

That is to say, the sensuous stands in a higher place and is more genuinely than the supersensuous.

In that regard N says ‘We have art in order not to perish from the truth’. Again ‘truth’ means the ‘true world’ of the supersensuous, which conceals in itself the danger that life may perish, ‘life’ in N’s sense always meaning ‘life which is on the ascent’. [75]

The supersensuous lures life away from invigorating sensuality, drains lifes forces, weakens it.

When we aim at the supersensuous, submission, capitualation, pity, mortification, and abasement become positive ‘virtues’.

But we have life so that we do not perish from such supersensuous ‘truth’, so that the supersensuous does not vitiate life to the point of general debility and ultimate collapse.

So:

5. Art is worth more than ‘the truth’.

N on art: ‘… we find it to be the greatest stimulans of life –‘

[…] we can easily see that this definition of art as the stimulant of life menas nothing else than that art is a configuration of will to power. For a ‘stimulant’ is what propels and advances, what lifts a thing beyond itself; it is increase of power and thus power pure and simple, which is to say, will to power.

Hence we cannot merely append to the five statements the one about art as the greatest stimulant of life. On the contrary, it is N’s major statement on art. Those five statements enlarge upon it.

AESTHETICS

[…] N’s interrogation of art is aesthetics driven to the extreme, an aesthetics, so to speak, that somersaults beyond itself. [77]

The term ‘aesthetics’ is formed in the same manner as ‘logic’ and ‘ethics’. The word episteme, knowledge, nust always complete these terms. Logic: logike episteme: knowledge if logos, that is, the doctrine of assertion or judgement as the basic fome of thought, Logic is knowledge 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 behaviour. Logic and ethics both refer to human behaviour and its lawfulness.

The word ‘aesthetics’ is formed in the corresponding way: aisthetike episteme: knowledge of human behaviour with regard to sense, sensation, and feeling, and knowledge of how these are determined.

What determines thinking, hence logic, and what thinking comports itself toward, is the true. What determined the character and behaviour of man, hence ethics, and what human character and behaviour 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. [78]

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 the essence of aesthetics developed in this way can we get to the point where we can grasp N’s interpretation of the essence of art […] [79]

1. The Greeks […] had such an originally mature and luminous knowledge […] that 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 organisation of philosophy as a whole, those basic concepts are formed which mark off the boundaries for all future enquiry into art.

[…] 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 way or that, 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 that supports and conducts every human irruption into the midst of beings.

3. [In the modern period – with the grounding of certitude in the self-consciousness of the individual ego] meditation on the beautiful now slips markedly, even exclusively, into the relationship of man’s state of feeling, aesthesis.
4. At the historical moment when aesthetics achieves its greatest possible height, breadth, and rigour of form, great art comes to an end. The achievement of aesthetics derives its greatness from the fact that it recognises and gives utterance to the end of great art as such. The final and greatest aesthetics in the Western tradition is that of Hegel. […] Here the following statements appear:

…yet in this regard there is at least no absolute need at hand for it [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, 1. P.16)

The magnificent days of Greek art, like the golden era of the later Middle Ages, are gone (X, 1, pp.15-16)

On the basis of such loss the position of art and the kind of knowledge concerning it are defined for the 19^th C.

5. Catching a glimpse of the decline of art from its essence, the 19^th C once more dares to attempt the ‘collective art-work’. That effort is associated with the name Richard Wagner.
6. What Hegel asserted concerning art – that it had lost its power to be the definite fashioner and preserver of the absolute – N recognised 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 non-actual, for N art is to be pursued as the countermovement.

ART AND RAPTURE

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 N’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. [92]

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, it is at the same time to be grasped by way of physiology and with its means.

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. [93]

Then how could art also ground and determine the genuine and decisive valuation?

Art as the countermovement to nihilism and art as the object of physiology – that’s like trying to mix fire and water. [93]

If a unity prevails here, eventuating from the essence of art itself as N 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. [95]

[…] this aesthetics is to be physiology – that suggests that states of feeling, taken to by purely psychical, are to be traced back to the bodily condition proper to them. [96]

When N says ‘physiology’ he does mean to emphasise the bodily state; but the latter is in itself always already something psychical, and therefore also a matter of ‘psychology’. [96]

Although he sees art from the point of view of the artist, and demands that it be seen that way, N does not mean the expression ‘artistic’ 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. [96][NB Stiegler/Beuys]

[…] rapture is the basic aesthetic state, a rapture which for its part is variously conditioned, released, and increased.

‘What is essential in rapture is the feeling of enhancement of force and plenitude’ [98]

Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, is precisely the way we are corporeally. […] We do not ‘have’ a body; rather we ‘are’ bodily.

[…] 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. [99]

N emphasises two things about rapture:

1. The feeling of enhancement of force – […] must be understood as the capacity to extend beyond oneself. […] 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.
2. The feeling of plenitude – […] does not suggest an inexhaustible stockpile of inner events. It means an attunement which is so disposed that nothing is foreign to it, nothing too much for it, which is open to everything and ready to tackle everything – the greatest enthusiasm and the most supreme risk hard by one another. [100]

What N means by the feeling of rapture as the basic aesthetic 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’ (WP 801) [101]

We are trying first to sketch the outline of N’s ‘aesthetics’ as a ‘physiology of art’ by limiting ourselves to the general phenomenon of rapture as the basic artistic state. In that regard we were to answer a second question: in what sense is rapture ‘indispensable of there is to be art’ […]? [105]

Rapture is feeling, an embodying attunement, an embodied being that is contained in attunement, attunement woven into embodiment.

But attunement lays open Dasein as an enhancing, conducts it into the plenitude of its capacities, which mutually arouse one another and foster enhancement.

But while clarifying rapture as a state of feeling we emphasised more than once that we may not take such a state as something at hand ‘in’ the body and ‘in’ the psyche. Rather, we must take it as a mode of the embodying, attuned stance toward beings as a whole, beings which for their part determine the pitch of the attunement. [105-6]

KANT ON THE BEAUTIFUL (MISINTEPRETATION BY N AND SCHOPENHAUER)

What does N say about the beautiful and beauty? [107]

Schopenhauer plays the leading role in the preparation and genesis of that misunderstanding of Kantian aesthetics to which N too fell prey and which is still quite common today.

Schiller alone grasped some essentials in relation to Kant’s doctrine of the beautiful […]

The misunderstanding of Kant’s aesthetics involves an assertation by Kant concerning the beautiful. […] He says [The Critique of Judgement 2-5] ‘Taste is the capacity to judge an object or mode of representation by means of delight or revulsion, devoid of all interest. The object of delight is called beautiful’ [108]

According to the common notion, disinterestedness is indifference toward a thing or person: we invest nothing of our will in relation to that thing or person. If the relation to the beautiful, delight, is defined as ‘disinterested’, then, according to Schop, the aesthetic state is one in which the will is put out of commission and all striving brought to a standstill; it is pure repose, simply wanting nothing more, sheer apathetic drift. [108]

The misinterpretation of [Kantian] ‘interest’ leads to the erroneous opinion that with the exclusion of interest every essential relation to the object is suppressed. The opposite is the case. Precisely by means of the ‘devoid of interest’ the essential relation to the object itself comes into play. The misinterpretation fails to see that now for the first time the object comes to the fore as pure object and that such coming forward into appearance is the beautiful. The word ‘beautiful’ means appearing in the radiance of such coming to the fore. [110]

Had N inquired of Kant himself, instead of trusting in Schop’s guidance, then he would have to recognise that Kant alone grasped the essence of what N in his own way wanted to comprehend concerning the decisive aspects of the beautiful.

[…] when N says ‘The beautiful exists just as little as the good, the true’ (WP 804), that too corresponds to the opinion of Kant.

N too defines the beautiful as what pleases. But everything depends on the operative concept of pleasure and of what pleases as such. [111]

The beautiful is what we find honourable and worthy, as the image of essential nature. It is that upon which we bestow ‘unconstrained favour’, as Kant says, and we do so from the very foundations of our essential nature and for its sake. [112]

[…] the beautiful is disclosed in rapture. [113] The beautiful itself is what transports us into the feeling of rapture.

From this elucidation of the essence of the beautiful the characterisation of rapture, of the basic aesthetic state, acquires enhanced clarity. If the beautiful is what sets the standard for what we trust we are essentially capable of, then the feeling of rapture, as our relation to the beautiful, can be no mere turbulence and ebullition. The mood of rapture is rather an attunement in the sense of the supreme and most measured determinateness. [113]

RAPTURE AS FORM ENGENDERING FORCE

If we ask what the essence of creation is, then on the basis of what has gone before we can answer that it is the rapture of bringing forth the beautiful in the work. [115]

‘Artists should see nothing as it is, but more fully, simply, strongly: for that, a kind of youth and spring, a kind of habitual rapture, must be proper to their lives.’ [116] [WP 800]

THE GRAND STYLE

[…] art as countermovement to nihilism is to lay the groundwork for the establishment of new standards and values; it is therefore to be rank, distinction, and decision. [126]

Art as countermovement to nihilism and art as state of rapture, as object of physiology (‘physiscs’ in the broadest sense) and as object of metaphysics – these aspects of art include rather than exclude on another. [126]

In order to draw near to the essential will of N’s thinking, and remain close to it, our thinking must acquire enormous range, plus the ability to see beyond everything that is fatally contemporary in it. [127]

The artistic states are – and that means art is – nothing else than will to power. Now we understand N’s principle declaration concerning art as the great ‘stimulant of life’. ‘Stimulant means what conducts one into the sphere of command of the grand style. [130]

‘What does all expansion of the means of expression matter when that which expresses, namely art itself, has lost the law that governs it!’ [130]

Art is not only subject to rules, must not only obey laws, but is itself legislation. Only as legislation is it truly art. What is inexhaustible, what is to be created, is the law. [130]

For N art is the essential way in which beings are made to be beings. Because what matters is the creative, legislative, form-grounding aspect of art, we can aim at the essential definition of art by asking what the creative aspect of art at any given time is.

[…] the distinction of active and reactive intersects with another, which distinguishes whether ‘the cause of creativity is longing after immobility, eternity, Being’ or longing after destruction, change, Becoming’.

The latter distinction thinks the difference between Being and Becoming, a juxtaposition that has remained dominant from the early period of Occidental thought, through its entire history, up to and including N. [132-3]

The ambiguity can be transformed into a clear distinction by an examination of the distinction between active and reactive. The latter ‘schema’ is to be given preference over the former one and must be posited as the basic schema for the determination of the possibilities of the creative principle in art.

In The Will to Power, num 846, N exhibits the twofold significance of longing after Being and longing after Becoming with the help of the schema of the active and the reactive.

Longing after Becoming, alteration, and therefore destruction too, can be – but need not necessarily be – ‘an expression of superabundant strength, pregnant with the future’. Such is Dionysian art.

But longing after change and Becoming can also spring from the dissatisfaction of those who hate everything that exists simply because it exists and stands. Operative here is the counterwill typical of the superfluous, the underprivileged, the disadvantaged, for whom every existent superiority constitutes in its very superiority an objection to its right to exist. [133]

Correspondingly, the longing after Being, the will to eternalise it, may derive from the possession of plenitude, from thankfulness for what is; or the perduring and binding may be erected as law and compulsion by the tyranny of a willing that wants to be rid of its inmost suffering. [133]

N interprets the Being of beings as will to power. Art he considers the supreme configuration of will to power. The proper essence of art is exemplified in the grand style. But the latter, because of its own essential unity, points to an original, concrescive unity of the active and the reactive, of Being and Becoming.

Will to power is properly there where power no longer needs the accoutrements of battle, in the sense of being merely reactive; its superiority binds all things, in that the will releases all things to their essence and their own bounds. [137]

The fifth statement says: art is worth more than truth. ‘Truth’ here means the true, in the sense of true beings; more precisely, beings that may be considered true being, being-in-itself. Since Plato, being-in-itself has been taken to be the supersensuous. In N’s view the value of a thing is measured by what it contributes to the enhancement of the actuality of beings. That art is of more value than truth means that art, as ‘sensuous’, is more in being than the supersensuous. Granted that supersensuous being served heretofore as what is highest, if art is more in being, then it proves to be the being most in being, the basic occurrence within beings as a whole.

Yet what does ‘Being’ mean, if the sensuous can be said to be more in being? What does ‘sensuous’ mean here? What does it have to do with ‘truth’? How can it be even higher in value than truth? What does ‘truth’ mean here? How does N define its essence? [140]

Such questionalbelness radiates over all the other statements, above all, the third, which obviously can be decided and grounded only when the fifth statement has been grounded. But the fifth statement must be presupposed if we are to understand the fourth as well, according to which art is the countermovement to nihilism. For nihilism, i.e., Platonism, posts the supersensuous as true being on the basis of which all remaining beings are demoted to the level of proper nonbeing, demoted, denigrated and declared nugatory.

Thus everything hangs on the explanation and grounding of the fifth statement: art is worth more than truth. What is truth? In what does its essence consist?

That question is always already included in the guiding question and the grounding question of philosophy. It runs ahead of them and yet is most intrinsic to these very questions. It is the primal question of philosophy. [140-41]

ART AND TRUTH

[…] our previous clarification of the essence of art will […] be brought to a fitting conclusion only in terms of the question of truth. [142]

‘Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: and even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance’ (xiv, 368) [142]

In order to see to what extent art as such comes into relation to truth, we must say more clearly than we have before what N understands by ‘truth’.

Such clarification becomes indispensable from the moment we experience the fact that human Dasein, insofar as it is […] is steered directly toward whatever is named in such basic words [truth, beauty, Being, art, knowledge, history, freedom, etc] and is inextricably caught up in relations with them. [143]

That becomes manifest whenever human Dasein becomes historical […]

Basic words are historical. That does not mean simply that they have various meanings for various ages which, because they are past, we can survey historically; it means that they ground history now and in the times to come in accordance with the interpretation of them that comes to prevail. [144]

[…] because in the very foundations of our being language as resonant signification roots us to our earth and transports and ties us to our world, meditation on language and its historical dominion is always the action that gives shape to Dasein itself.

The name ‘truth’ is in an essential sense ambiguous. Truth means the one essence and also the many that satisfy the essence.

It is said that the essence – here the essence of the true, which makes everything true be what it is – because it is valid form many true things, is the generally and universally valid. […] Thus truth, as the essence of the true, is the universal. However, the ‘truth’ which is one of a plurality, ‘truths’, the individual truth, true propositions, are ‘cases’ that fall under the universal. [147]

The equating of essence with the character of the universal, even as an essential conclusion which has but conditional validity, would of itself not have been so fatal had it not for centuries barred the way to a decisive question.

[…] universal validity, which is valid for many things that belong together, is now made what is universally valid without qualification. ‘Universally valid’ now means not only valid for many particular items that belong together, but also what is always and everywhere valid in itself, immutable, eternal, transcending time.

The result is the proposition of the immutability of essences, including the essence of truth. The proposition is logically correct but metaphysically untrue.

If one stands by the conception of the selfsameness of the essence of truth which is derived from traditional logic, he will immediately (and from that point of view quite correctly) say: ‘The notion of a change of essence leads to relativism; there is only one truth and it is the same for everybody; every relativism is disruptive of the general order and leads to sheer caprice and anarchy’.

It is of decisive importance to know that N does not pose the question of truth proper, the question concerning the essence of the true and the truth of essence, and with it the question of the ineluctable possibility of its essential transformation. [148-9]

That the question of the essence of truth is missing in N’s thought is an oversight unlike any other; it cannot be blamed on him alone, or him first of all – if it can be blamed on anyone. The ‘oversight’ pervades the entire history of Occidental philosophy since Plato and Aristotle.

OVERTURNING PLATONISM

For Platonism, the Idea, the supersensuous, is the true, true being. In contrast, the sensuous is me on. The latter suggests, not nonbeing pure and simple, ouk on, but me – what may not be addressed as being even though it is not simply nothing. [154]

To overturn Platonism thus means to reverse the standard relation: what languishes below in Platonism, as it were, and would be measured against the supersensuous, must now be put on top; by way of a reversal, the supersensuous must now be placed in its service.

When the inversion is fully executed, the sensuous becomes being proper, i.e., the true, i.e., truth. The true is sensuous. That is what ‘positivism’ teaches.

It is indisputable that prior to the time of his work on his magnum opus, The Will to Power, N went through a period of extreme positivism; these were the years 1879-81, the years of his decisive development towards maturity. [154]

Such positivism, though transformed, became a part of his later fundamental position also. But what matters is precisely the transformation, especially in relation to the overturning of Platonism as a whole. In that inversion N’s philosophical thought proper comes to completion. [154]

N’s fundamental experience is his growing insight into the basic development of our history. In his view it is nihilism.

N expresses incessantly and passionately the fundamental experience of his existence as a thinker.

One of the essential formulations that designate the event of nihilism says, ‘God is dead’.

The phrase ‘God is dead’ is not an atheistic proclamation: it is a formula for the fundamental experience of an event in Occidental history. [156]

Only in the light of that basic experience does N’s utterance, ‘My philosophy is inverted Platonism’, receive its proper range and intensity.

In the same broad scope of significance, therefore, N’s interpretation and conception of the essence of truth must be conceived.

For that reason we ought to remember what N understands by nihilism and in what sense alone that word may be used as a term for the history of philosophy. [156]

By nihilism, N means the historical development, i.e., event, that the uppermost values devalue themselves, that all goals are annihilated, and that all estimates of value collide against one another.

There is no longer any goal in and through which all the forces of the historical existence of peoples can cohere and in the direction of which they can develop; no goal of such a kind, which means at the same time and above all else no goal of such power that it can by virtue of its power conduct Dasein to its realm in a unified way and bring it to creative evolution. [157]

By establishment of the goal N understands the metaphysical task of ordering beings as a whole, not merely the announcement of a provisional whither and wherefore.

N has all this in view when he speaks of nihilism, goals, and establishment of goals. But he also sees the necessary range of such establishment, a range determined by the incipient dissolution of all kinds of order all over the earth. [158]

Meditation of such kind on the historical event of nihilism and on the condition for overcoming it utterly – meditation on the basic metaphysical position needed to that end, thinking through the ways and means of awakening and outfitting such conditions – N sometimes calls ‘grand politics’.

In the decade between 1880 and 1890 N thinks and questions by means of the standards of the ‘grand style’ and in the field of vision of ‘grand politics’. [see opening quotation above]

Here a new interpretation of Platonism emerges. It flows from a fundamental experience of the development of nihilism. It sees in Platonism the primordial and determining grounds of the possibility of nihilism’s upsurgence and the rise of life negation. [159]

Christianity is in N’s eyes nothing other than ‘Platonism for the people’. As Platonism, however, it is nihilism.

But with the reference to N’s opposition to the nihilistic tendency of Christianity, his position as a whole with respect to the historical development of Christianity is not delineated exhaustively. N is far too perspicacious and sovereignly intelligent not to know and acknowledge that an essential presupposition for his own behaviour, the probity and discipline of his enquiry, is a consequence of the Christian education that has prevailed for centuries. [160]

Overturning Platonism means, first, shattering the pre-eminence of the supersensuous as the ideal.

If the ‘should’ is the supersensuous, then being itself, that which is, conceived as liberated from the ‘should’, can only be the sensuous. [160]

Since, according to the inversion, the sensuous is now the true, and since the sensuous, as being, is now to provide the basis for the new foundation of Dasein, the question concerning the sensuous and with it the determination of the true and of truth receive enhanced significance. [161]

[…] such inversion, and along with it the interpretation of the true as what is given in the senses, must be understood in terms of the overcoming of nihilism. [161]

Against Platonism, the question ‘What is true being?’ must be posed, and the answer to it must be, ‘The true is the sensuous’. Against nihilism, the creative life, pre-eminently in art, must be set to work. But art creates out of the sensuous. [161]

Art and truth, creating and knowing, meet one another in the single guiding perspective of the rescue and configuration of the sensuous.

According to their essence, intrinsically, art and truth come together in the realm of a new historical significance.

What sort of relationship do they have? [161]

ART AND TRUTH II

Art is affirmation of the sensuous. According to the doctrine of Platonism, however, the supersensuous is affirmed as genuine being. [162]

Platonism and Plato would therefore logically have to condemn art, the affirmation of the sensuous, as a form of nonbeing […]

If N’s philosophy is a reversal of Platonism, and if truth is thereby affirmation of the sensuous, then truth is the same as what art affirms, i.e. the sensuous. [162]

During the same period when N says that the sole true reality, i.e. the true, is the sensuous world, he writes concerning the relationship of art and truth, ‘… and even now [autumn 1888] I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance.’

[…] we must show at the outset, even if quite briefly, how the depreciation of art in favour of truth appears in Plato, and see to what extent it proves to be necessary. [163]

On the basis of our consideration of Plato […] we want to gain an indication of where and how we can find traces of discordance in n’s inversion of Platonism. [164]

We pose two questions:

1. What is the scope of those determinations which in Plato’s view apply to what we call ‘art’?
2. In what context is the question of the relationship of art and truth discussed

1.

[…] the Greeks have no word at all that corresponds to what we mean by the word ‘art’ in the narrower sense.

If by ‘art’ we mean primarily an ability in the sense of being well versed in something, of a thoroughgoing and therefore masterful know-how, then this for the Greeks is techne.

In contrast, if by ‘art’ we mean an ability in the sense of an acquired capacity to carry something out which, as it were, has become second nature and basic to Dasein, ability as behaviour that accomplishes something, then the Greeks say melete, epimeleia, carefulness of concern.

Finally, if by ‘art’ we mean what is brought forward in a process of bringing-forth, what is produced in production, and the producing itself, then the Greek speaks of poiein and poiesis. [165]

[…] the way he poses and pursues that question determines the form of the interpretation for the whole of Plato’s multifaceted meditation on art.

Plato poses the question in the ‘dialogue which bears the title Politeia [Republic], his magnificent discussion of the ‘state’ as the basic form of man’s communal life.

If we are to grasp Plato’s teaching concerning art as ‘political’, we should understand that word solely in accordance with the concept of the essence of the polis that emerges from the dialogue itself. [165]

That is all the more necessary as this tremendous dialogue in its entire structure and movement aims to show that the sustaining ground and determining essence of all political Being consists in nothing less than the ‘theoretical’, that is, in essential knowledge of dike and dikaiosyne. This Greek word is translated as ‘justice’, but that at times misses the proper sense inasmuch as justice is transposed straightaway into the moral or even the merely ‘legal’ realm. But dike is a metaphysical concept, not originally one of morality.

It names Being with reference to the essentially appropriate articulation of all beings.

Knowledge of dike, of the articulating laws of the Being of beings, is philosophy. [166]

Therefore the decisive insight of the entire dialogue on the state says: it is essentially necessary that philosophers be the rulers.

[On Autonomy]

The statement does not mean that philosophy professors should conduct the affairs of state. It means that the basic modes of behaviour that sustain and define the community must be grounded in essential knowledge, assuming of course that the community, as an order of being, grounds itself on its own basis, and that it does not wish to adopt standards from any other order. [166]

The unconstrained self-grounding of historical Dasein places itself under the jurisdiction of knowledge, and not of faith, inasmuch as the latter is understood as the proclamation of truth sanctioned by divine revelation. All knowledge is at bottom commitment to beings that come to light under their own power. Being becomes visible, according to Plato, in the ‘Ideas’. They constitute the Being of beings, and therefore are themselves the true beings, the true. [166]

Hence, if one still wants to say that Plato is here inquiring politically into art, it can only mean that he evaluates art, with reference to its position in the state, upon the essence and sustaining grounds of the state, upon knowledge of ‘truth’. Such inquiry into art is ‘theoretical’ in the highest degree.

In the context of the [Republic’s] guiding question concerning the state, how does the question of art come up? Plato asks about the structure of communal life, what must guide it as a whole and in totality, and what component parts belong to it as what is to be guided.

[..] the inner order of communal life is projected on the basis of Being and man’s fundamental relation to Being. [168]

In Book Three (1-8) […] P shows in a preliminary way that what art conveys and provides is always a portrayal of beings; although it is not inactive, its producing and making, poiein, remain mimesis, imitation, copying and transforming, poetizing in the sense of inventing. [168]

Thus art in itself is exposed to the danger of continual deception and falsehood.

In accord with the essence of its activity, art has no direct, definitive relation to the true and true being. [168]

MIMESIS (REPUBLIC)

[…] all art is mimesis. We translate that word as ‘imitation’.

[…] the clarification of the essence of mimesis which is carried out in Book 10 not only defines the word more precisely but also traces the matter designated in the word back to its inner possibility and grounds that sustain such possibility. [169]

Those grounds are nothing other than basic representations the Greeks entertained concerning beings as such, their understanding of Being.

Since the question of truth is sister to that of Being, the Greek concept of truth serves as the basis of the interpretation of art as mimesis. Only on that basis does mimesis possess sense and significance – but also necessity.

ART AND TRUTH III (CH.22)

THE DISTANCE OF ART (MIMESIS) FROM TRUTH (IDEA)

How does art relate to truth?

Where does art stand in the relationship?

Art is mimesis. Its relation to truth must be ascertainable in terms of the essence of mimesis.

What is mimesis?

Mimesis means copying, that is, presenting and producing something in a manner which is typical of something else.

To Being […] seen Platonically, permanence belongs. All that becomes and suffers alteration, as impermanent, has no Being. Therefore, in the view of Platonism, ‘Being’ stands always in exclusive opposition to ‘Becoming’ and change.

[…] whenever N says ‘Being’ he always means it Platonically – even after the reversal of Platonism. That is to say, he means it in antithesis to ‘Becoming’.

[…] it is an essential matter of fact that the table maker cannot manufacture the Idea with his tools; and it is every bit as essential that he look to the Idea in order to be who he is, the producer of tables. [175]

The Idea is prescribed to him and he must subscribe to it.

Thus, as a maker, he is already somehow one who copies or imitates. [175]

Mirroring does produce beings, indeed as self-showing, but not as being in un-concealment or nondistortion. [178]

In one case the ‘house’ becomes present by showing itself and appearing in, and by means of, the glittering surface of the mirror; in the other the ‘house’ is present by showing itself in stone and wood.

Plato is here wrestling with the conception of the varying topos, that is, at the same time and above all, with the determination of that ‘way’ in which on itself shows itself most purely, so that it does not portray itself by means of something else by presents itself in such a way that its outward appearance, eidos, constitutes its Being.

‘For I believe that the painter too belongs to that kind of pro-ducing’, which is to say the mirroring kind

[…] when the carpenter manufactures this or that table, any given table, does he thereby produce the table that is in being; or is manufacturing a kind of bringing forward that will never be able to produce the table ‘itself’?

But we have already heard that there is also something which does not pro-duce, something which he as frame maker, with the means available to him, cannot pro-duce: ‘but he does not produce the pure outward appearance [eidos] (of something like a bedframe) in itself’. He presupposes it as already granted to him and thereby brought forth unto and produces for him. [179]

Now, what is the eidos itself? What is it in relation to the individual bedframe that the framemaker produces? […] ‘the outward appearance, of which we say that it is what the bedframe is’, and thereby what it is as such […]

It is obviously that which is essential in beings, by means of which they ‘first and last are’

But if the craftsman does not pro-duce precisely this iedos in itself, but in each case merely looks to it as something already brought to him; and if eidos is what is properly in being among beings; then the craftsman does not produce the Being of beings either. Rather he always produces this or that being […], ‘not the what-being of the bedframe, but some bedframe or other’. [180]

The wood of the bedframe, the amassed stone of the house, in each case bring the idea forth into appearance; yet such pro-duction dulls and darkens the original luster of the idea. Hence the house which we call ‘real’ is in a certain way reduced to the level of an image of the house in a mirror or painting. [180]

The first (one), produced by the god, (the pure) one-and-the-same outward appearance, the Idea;

The second, what is manufactured by the carpenter;

The third, what the painter conjures in images. [180]

Man cannot pro-duce the idea; he can only be stationed before it.

‘Thus the painter, the framemaker, the god – these three are epistatai, those who dedicate themselves to, or preside over, three types of outward appearance of the bedframe.’

The interpretation of Being as eidos, presencing in outward appearance, presupposes the interpretation of truth as aletheia, nondistortion. We must heed that if we wish to grasp the relation of art (mimesis) and truth in Plato’s conception […] [182]

In what then is the essence of the Idea, and thereby of Being, ultimately grounded for Plato? In the initiating action of a creator whose essentiality appears to be saved only when what he creates is in each case something singular, a one […]

The way the painter pro-duces a ‘table’ into visibility is even further removed from the Idea, the Being of the being, than the way the carpenter produces it. [185]

The distance from Being and its pure visibility is definitive for the definition of the essence of the mimetes.

What is decisive for the Greek-Platonic concept of mimesis or imitation is not reproduction or portraiture, nor the fact that the painter provides us with the same thing once again; what is decisive is that this is precisely what he cannot do, that he is even less capable than the craftsman of duplicating the same thing.

Imitation is subordinate pro-duction.

We need to clarify in what way the painter is subordinate to the carpenter as well.  [185]

[…] the painter can bring the table into view only from one particular angle. What he pro-duces is consequently but one aspect, one way in which the table appears. [186]

But mimesis is the essence of all art. Hence a position of distance with respect to Being, to immediate and undistorted outward appearance, to the idea, is proper to art.

Where, then, according to Plato, does art stand in relation to truth (aletheia)? The answer (598b): ‘So, then, art stands far removed from truth’. […] Such diminution of the way of pro-ducing is a darkening an distorting.

BEAUTY AND TRUTH IV (PHAEDRUS) CH.23

According to his own words, N’s philosophy is inverted Platonism. If we grant that there is in Platonism a discordance between art and truth, it follows that such discordance would in N’s view have to vanish as a result of the cancellation which overturns Platonism. [188]

But we have just seen that there is no discordance in Platonism, merely a distance.

The result is the following proposition, which would apply to Plato, although couched in N’s manner of speech: truth is worth more than art. N says, on the contrary: art is worth more than truth. [188]

From the metaphysical founding of communal life in Plato’s dialogue on the state we know that what properly sets the standard is manifested in dike and dikaiosyne, that is, in the well-wrought jointure of the order of Being.

In the P, P says accordingly: ‘In justice and temperance, and in whatever men ultimately must respect above all else, there dwells no radiance whenever men encounter them as fleeting appearances.’ [195] ‘On the contrary, we grasp Being with blunt instruments, clumsily, scarcely at all; and few of those who approach the appearances in question catch a glimpse of the original source, i.e., the essential origin, of what offers itself in fleeting appearances.’

‘with beauty it is different’

The beautiful is an element which is disparate within itself; it grants entry into immediate sensuous appearance and yet at the same time soars toward Being […] [196]

According to its most proper essence, the beautiful is what is most radiant and sparkling in the sensuous realm, in a way that, as such brilliance, it lets Being scintillate at the same time. [197]

Since the beautiful allows Being to scintillate, and since the beautiful itself is what is most attractive, it draws man through and beyond itself to Being as such. [197]

From what we have presented, the essence of the beautiful has become clear. It is what makes possible the recovery and preservation of the view upon Being […]

When we consider very carefully that art, by bringing forth the beautiful, resides in the sensuous, and that it is therefore far removed from truth, it then becomes clear why truth and beauty, their belonging together in one notwithstanding, still must be two, must separate from one another. But the severance, discordance in the broad sense, is not in Plato’s view one which arouses dread; it is a felicitous one.

The beautiful elevates us beyond the sensuous and brings us back into the true. Accord prevails in the severance, because the beautiful, as radiant and sensuous, has in advance sheltered its essence in the truth of Being as supersensuous. [198]

OVERTURNING PLATONISM II

We ask: in what sense does the relation of beauty and truth which is peculiar to Platonism become a different sort of relation through the overturning? [200]

Only late in his life, shortly before the cessation of his labours in thinking, does the full scope required by such an inversion become clear to him. [201]

That clarity waxes as N grasps the necessity of overturning, which is demanded by the task of overcoming nihilism.

For Plato the supersensuous is the true world.

It stands over all, as what sets the standard

The sensuous lies below, as the world of appearances

What stands over all is alone and from the start what sets the standard; it is therefore what is desired.

After the inversion […] the sensuous, the world of appearances, stands above; the suprsensuous, the true world, lies below.

[…] as long as the ‘above and below’ define the formal structure of Platonism, Platonism in its essence perdures. [201] The inversion does not achieve what it must, as an overcoming of nihilism, namely, an overcoming of Platonism in its very foundations.

Such overcoming succeeds only when the ‘above’ in general is set aside as such, when the former positing of something true and desirable no longer arises, when the true world – in the sense of the ideal – is expunged.

If the true world collapses, so must the world of appearances. Only then is Platonism overcome, which is to say, inverted in such a way that philosophical thinking twists free of it. [201]

During the time the overturning of Platonism became for N a twisting free of it, madness befell him.

HOW THE TRUE WORLD BECAME A FABLE (TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS)

The title, ‘How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable’, says that here a history is to be recounted in the course of which the supersensuous, posited by Plato as true being, not only is reduced from the higher to the lower rank but also collapses into the unreal and nugatory. N divides the history into 6 parts, which can readily be recognised as the most important epochs of Western thought, and which lead directly to the doorstep of N’s philosophy proper. [202]

The greater a revolution is to be, the more profoundly must it plunge into its history.

6 PART HISTORY OF PLATONISM

1. The true world, attainable for the wise, the pious, the virtuous man – he lives it, he is it

Here the founding doctrine by Plato is established.

The implication is that virtue consists in repudiation of the sensuous, since denial of the world that is closest to us, the sensuous world, is proper to the Being of beings.

2. The true world, unattainable for now, but promised for the wise, the pious, the virtuous man (‘for the sinner who repents’)

With the positing of the supersensuous as true being, the break with the sensuous is now expressly ordained, although here again not straightaway: the true world is unattainable only in this life, for the duration of earthly existence. [204]

In that way earthly existence is denigrated and yet receives its proper tension, since the suprsensuous is promised as the ‘beyond’.

In Plato’s stread, Platonism now rules.

Thus: ‘(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, ungraspable – it becomes woma, it becomes Christian)’

[…] the whole of human existence becomes this-wordly to the extent that the supersensuous is interpreted as the ‘beyond’.

3. The true world, unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable, but even as thought, a consolation, an obligation, an imperative

This division designates the form of Platonism that is achieved by Kantian philosophy. The supersensuous is now a postulate of practical reason; even outside the scope of all experience and demonstration it is demanded as what is necessarily existent, in order to salvage adequate grounds for the lawfulness of reason. [205]

To be sure, the accessibility of the supersensuous by way of cognition is subjected to critical doubt, but only in order to make room for belief in the requisition of reason.

Nothing of the substance and structure of the Christian view of the world changes by virtue of Kant […]. Whatever lies outside of the knowledge possessed by the sciences of nature is not denied as to its existence but is relegated to the indeterminateness of the unknowable. [205]

4. The true world – unattainable? In any case, unattained. And as unattained also unknown. Consequently, also, not consolatory, redemptive, obligating: to what could something unknown obligate us?

With the fourth division, the form to which Platonism commits itself as a consequence of the bygone Kantian philosophy is historically attained, although without an originally creative overcoming. It is the age following the dominance of German Idealism, at about the middle of the last (18^th) C. With the help of its own chief principle, the theoretical unknowability of the supersensous, the Kantian system is unmasked and exploded. [206]

It becomes manifest that the supersensuous does not come on the scene as part of the Kantian philosophy on the grounds of basic philosophical principles of knowledge but as a consequence of uneradicated Christian-theological principles. [206]

N descries the rise of a new day. Reason, which here means man’s knowing and inquiring, awakens and comes to its senses.

5. The ‘true world’ – an idea which is of use for nothing, which is no longer even obligating – an idea become useless, superfluous, consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!

With this division N designates the first segment of his own way in philosophy.

The ‘true world’ is abolished. But notice the reason: because it has become useless, superfluous.

Platonism is overcome inasmuch as the supersensuous world, as the true world, is abolished; but by way of compensation the sensuous world remains, and positivism occupies it.

What is now required is a confrontation with the latter.

In spite of the fact that the supersensous world as the true world has been cast aside, the vacant niche of the higher world remains, and so does the blueprint of an ‘above and below’, which is to say, so does Platonism. The inquiry must go one step further.

6. The true world we abolished: which world was left? The apparent one perhaps? … But no! along with the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!

That N appends a 6^th division here shows that, and how, he must advance beyond himself and beyond sheer abolition of the supersensuous.

(Midday; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; highpoint of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA).

Thus the onset of the final stage of his own philosophy. [208]

[…] the overturning of Platonism and the ultimate twist out of it imply a metamorphosis of man.

At the end of Platonism stands a decision concerning the transformation of man. [208]

[…] man as he has been hitherto is the one whose Dasein and relation to Being have been determined by Platonism […]

The great danger N sees is that it will all culminate in the last man, that it will peter out in the spread of the increasingly insipid last man.

‘The opposite of the overman is the last man: I created him at the same time I created the former’.

What results when, along with the true world, the apparent world too is abolished?

[…] the sensuous world is the ‘apparent world’ only according to the interpretation of Platonism.

[…] what must be cast aside is the misinterpretation, the depreciation, of the sensuous, as well as the extravagant elevation of the supersensuous. [209]

NEW INTERPRETATION OF THE SENSUOUS (CH25)

We are now asking what new interpretation and ordering of the sensuous and nonsensuous results from the overturning of Platonism. [211]

What transformation accompanies the inversion? What metamorphosis underlies it?

[…] the overturning derives the force and direction of its motion from the new inquiry and its fundamental experience, in which true being, what is real, ‘reality’, is to be defined afresh. [211]

[…] the presentation of N’s ‘psychological aesthetics’ was elaborated in such a way that we now only need to grasp in a more fundamental manner what was said there.

N recognised rapture as the basic reality of art. [212]

What lives is exposed to other forces, but in such a way that, striving against them, it deals with them according to their form and rhythm, in order to estimate them in relation to possible incorporation or elimination. According to this angle of vision, everything that is encountered is interpreted in terms of the living creature’s capacity for life.

THE ORGANIC AND THE INORGANIC (SEE WHITEHEAD)

[…] the creature develops a kind of interpretation of its surroundings and thereby of all occurrence, not incidentally, but as the fundamental process of life itself: ‘The perspectival [is] the basic condition of all life’. [212]

‘The essential aspect of organic beings is a new manifold, which is itself an occurrence’. (xiii, 63)

The living creature possesses the character of a perspectival preview which circumscribes a ‘line of horizon’ about him, within whose scope something can come forward into appearance for him at all.

Now, in the ‘organic’ there is a multiplicity of drives and forces, each of which has its perspective. The manifold of perspectives distinguishes the organic from the inorganic. Yet even the latter has its perspective; it is just that in the inorganic, in attraction and repulsion, the ‘power relations’ are clearly fixed.

The mechanistic representation of ‘inanimate’ nature is only a hypothesis for purposes of calculation; it overlooks the fact that here too relations of forces and concatenations of perspectives hold sway.

Every point of force per se is perspectival. As a result it becomes manifest ‘that there is no inorganic world’ (xiii, 81). Everything ‘real’ is alive, is ‘perspectival’ in itself, and asserts itself in its persopective against others.

All being is in itself perspectival-perceptual, and that means, in the sense now delineated, ‘sensuous’. [213]

The sensuous is no longer the ‘apparent’ no longer the penumbra; it alone is what is real, hence ‘true’

Man’s logic serves to make what he encounters identical, constant, ascertainable. Being, the true, which logic ‘firmly locates’ (petrifies), is but semblance; a semblance, an apparentness, that is essentially necessary to the creature as such, which is to say, a semblance that pertains to his survival, his establishment of self amidst ceaseless change. [214]

Because the real is perspectival in itself, apparentness as such is proper to reality. Truth, i.e., true being, i.e., what is constant and fixed, because it is the petrifying of any single given perspective, is always only an apparentness that has come to prevail, which it to say, it is always error.

N: ‘ Truth is a kind of error without which a certain kind of living being could not live. The value for life ultimately decides’. (WP 493)

Truth, that is, the true constant, is a kind of semblance that is justified as a necessary condition of the assertion of life. But upon deeper meditation it becomes clear that all appearances and all apparentness are possible if something comes to the fore and shows itself at all. What in advance enables such appearing is the perspectival itself.

If truth is taken to be semblance, that is, as mere appearance and error, the implication is that truth is the fixed semblance which is neccesarily inherent in perspectival shining – it is illusion. [215]

Art in the proper sense is art in the grand style, desirousof bringing waxing life itself to power. It is not an immobilising but a liberating for expansion, a clarifying to the point of transfiguration […]

It is ‘not possible… to live with the truth’, if life is always enhancement of life; the ‘will to truth’ i.e., to fixed apparition, is ‘already a symptom of degeneration’.

ART IS WORTH MORE THAN TRUTH

Both art and truth are modes of perspectival shining. But the value of the real is measured according to how it satisfies the essence of reality, how it accomplishes the shining and enhances reality. Art, as transfiguration, is more enhancing to life than truth, as fixation of an apparition. [217]

ART AND TRUTH AS DISCORDANCE

Discordance is present only where the elements which sever the unity of their belonging-together diverge from one another by virtue of that very unity.

In order for the real (the living creature) to be real, it must on the one hand ensconce itself within a particular horizon, thus perduring in the illusion of truth. But in order for the real to remain real, it must on the other hand simultaneously transfigure itself by going beyond itself, surpassing itself in the scintillation of what is creatied in art – and that means it has to advance against the truth.

‘The will to semblance, to illusion, to deception, to Becoming and change is deeper, more ‘metaphysical’ [that is to say, corresponding more to the essence of Being] than the will to truth, to actuality, to Being’ (xiv, 369)

Art and truth are equally necessary for reality. […] But their relationship first arouses dread when we consider that creation, i.e., the metaphysical activity of art, receives yet another essential impulse the moment we descry the most tremendous event – the death of the God of morality.