Nietzsche & The Fate of Art
By Philip Pothen
Ashgate, 2004
Reviewed by Nicholas Birns
Philip Pothen's new book looks at Nietzsche's views on art
in a way vitally important to contemporary discussion about
that much-debated term .the aesthetic. The category of the
aesthetic has recently been refurbished to serve as the rallying-cry
for those determined to resist an overly social perspective.
Pothen makes clear, however, that though Nietzsche would have
also rejected any vision of art subjugated to social control
or to external social criteria, the category of the aesthetic
in his work is neither positive nor self-sufficient. As Pothen
says early on in his treatment of The Birth of Tragedy,
discussion of art must criticize art, not celebrate it, if
it wishes to be truly artistic. It must lay the entire idea
of art open to scrutiny, expose it, highlight its fissures,
rather than offer it up as a perfected, lacquered artifact
to be imposed on the human mind as its inevitable crowning
product.
Pothen recognizes that a discussion of art does not just mean
discussion of the artwork, and that regarding the philosophy
of art as the philosophy of how best to explain or exalt the
artwork is misleading. Nietzsche, as the source of much of
'contemporary theory', helps show us why discussion of individual
works of art are not necessarily crucial to theory. Of course,
discussion of individual works can be important. But the constraint
of being bound by particular artworks, and by a kind of reverent
connoisseurship that may be appropriate to discussing works
of art as such, is hardly supple in diagnosing the essential
presuppositions of the possibility of art. The art work, conventionally
the fons et origo of the aesthetic, in Nietzschean
terms points to .the failure of human creativity. (38) and
precludes an alternate existence where we would 'view existence
as aesthetic and ourselves as works of art' (38).
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Why did Nietzsche dislike aesthetic idealism so much? Why did he find it so
repellent? Pothen finds a hint in Nietzsche's characterization of the aesthetic spectator as
permitting an 'overwhelming' (106) by the art-object, which prompts him to make an
abdication into 'trusting, awe-struck, loving reception;. (106) In an aesthetic response to
the art-object, there is the danger of excessive veneration. Without accusing aestheticism
of being per se a displacement of Christianity, Nietzsche feels that the veneration of art
involved an overly transcendental mode of worship, as evinced by the admirers of
Nietzsche's own toppled idol, Wagner. Pothen cites a very interesting passage in Beyond
Good and Evil. Here. Nietzsche denounces the notion of 'books for all'. "Books for all
the world are foul-smelling books; the smell of small people clings to them' (qtd. 76).
Nietzsche means by this to incorporate both canonical Scriptures, holy books as denoted
by the Islamic appellation of peoples of the Books to describe Islam and the other faiths
it recognized as lesser versions of itself, and non-scriptural books popular with a general
audience: bestsellers and books with what would come to be called middlebrow currency.
Nietzsche endorses esoteric books designed to be read by an
elite, but the always astute and moderate Pothen comments
that here, Nietzsche, perhaps, ignores the fact that Christianity
too, like Platonism, Islam, and most other faiths, also operates
within, at least to an extent, something of an 'esoteric framework'
(76). In other words, there are esoteric and exoteric readings
of, say, the Bible, and perhaps through the most dedicated
reading of scripture or even a bestseller books for all the
world can be reclaimed through a different mode of reading.
To make his wording a bit less elitist (Nietzsche's championship
of tribal, esoteric warrior aristocracies must be regarded
as rhetorical), one needs only to recall Flaubert.s observation
that it is enough to have read five or six books well. The
Dionysian is both anti-art and anti-Christianity. But the
fact that the Dionysiac serves as a weapon against both does
not mean that aestheticism is Christianity in another coin,
or that Christianity is a sacralized aestheticism. It means
thar, in Nietzsche's view, the aesthetic and the Christian
both need to be rescued from lapsing into propaganda, into
what Nietzsche might call an illusion.
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Nietzsche is not just debunking here, but undermining, in a very root sense of that
word. By going under rather than over the work of art, by excavating its rationale and not
elevating its appearance, Nietzsche actually provides a space for philosophy to become
distant enough from art so it can meaningfully discuss it in a way emancipated from
immediate enthusiasm. Veneration, far from being understanding's friend, can be its
most inveterate enemy. I would perhaps not hire Nietzsche as a museum curator, but to
have him be professor of art history at a university nearby the museum might well end up
bringing more, rather than fewer, people within the museum's confines. One would grant,
though, that Nietzsche might well gnash his teeth at this.
Nietzsche's rhetoric sometimes becomes, to most viewpoints,
overheated. No one who upholds any one of several mainstream
doctrinal allegiances can avoid finding a good deal of what
Nietzsche seems to say preposterous. Pothen is very sensible
in not trying to explain this away or see it as only metaphorical.
But Pothen also sees that sometimes it is wise not to take
the implications of what Nietzsche says so literally. It is
very easy for people who are writing within an Anglo-American
tradition to simply see Nietzsche as somewhat of a wild man
filled with Continental abstractions, uninformed of the subtler
and more gentlemanly distinctions at play in the Anglophone
academy. This can be observed in William Gass's review of
Curtis Cate's Nietzsche biography in the August 2005 Harper's,
where even a writer of the philosophical acumen and aesthetic
brio of Gass seems to be puzzled that Nietzsche writes in
aphorisms and seems frenzied and indecorous. Gass acts as
if it would have been preferable if Nietzsche were an ironic
comedian in the style of Henry James or even George Meredith.
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