Nietzsche and the Future of Art

by Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2007. Copyright © 2003 Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

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Among the fields of philosophical concern, aesthetics is distinguished by its having a reality test. The majority of areas of interest for the philosopher lie outside the reach of external evaluations. Ontological speculations stand as logically determined and demonstrable propositions and as presuppositions for the designing of scientific inquiries; they stipulate what must be taken for granted in order that science may be practiced without falling into an infinite regression of required proof. Ethical considerations are purposed to guide effort—they establish the standards by which actions may be judged, and so elude judgment by the actions they direct. But aesthetics engages the analysis of that which is done without the direction of philosophical texts. Artists create out of an internal motivation, and their creations are driven by impulses that resist instruction. Aesthetic theories assess what exists outside their tutelage, what is as fully given to the philosophical mind as is the reality of the world and the fact of human life. Even when an aesthetic theory is formulated in the prescriptive, even when the philosophy it delivers is devised as a recommendation to artists, it remains the case that the theory is evaluated by the degree to which artists, in fact, choose to follow its dictates. And, given the perennial difficulty in determining dependably artists’ motivations, such an aesthetics can never be unambiguously claimed as the cause of a change in artistic practice and may well be more a prediction than a prescription. And so, aesthetic theories must prove themselves valid more in the sense that scientific theories must than in the sense that ontological postulations can. Aesthetics is the science of art, for art precedes aesthetics, and aesthetic philosophies must demonstrate their worth—they must survive the test of matching what they specify to what artists actually provide.

The role of aesthetics in the body of Nietzsche’s philosophical work is well recognized. As is familiar to virtually all Nietzsche scholars, Nietzsche founded his ontology, his sense of the philosopher’s vocation, and his formulations for the future evolution of values on an aesthetic philosophy, first laid out in The Birth of Tragedy and rooted in his analysis of Greek tragedy, which gave him his conception of the difference between the Apollinian and Dionysian forms of artistic imagination and, with them, the Apollinian and Dionysian world views—two differing interpretations of the world. With these two forms of specifically artistic conception come, for Nietzsche, two essential forms of perception, which relate directly to interrelated aspects of his ontological philosophy—of his conception of the real. For Nietzsche, the Apollinian and Dionysian are capabilities of the truth, and it is art that possesses a unique capacity for insight into that truth.

It did not take long for the appreciation of the importance of aesthetics in Nietzsche’s work to be established. From the earliest reception of his thought, Nietzsche’s name has consistently been connected with a valorization of art that was taken to be central to his text and so to his overall concerns. Whether this is due to such early conceptions as that of Stefan George, who saw in Nietzsche the exemplary philosopher as poetic visionary whose idea of power was understood by George in the context of his own artistic motto “j’aime l’art comme pouvoir,”(1) or to the recognition of Nietzsche’s own artistic efforts—his musical compositions, occasional poetry, and his novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra—there can be little doubt that Nietzsche has in general long been understood to be the quintessential philosopher of art.

What is not so generally recognized is that Nietzsche’s views on art were reflected to a significant degree in the work of artists in the years following his death, a period of development in the arts that saw changes in artistic method and purpose that rival any that preceded it—the period of Modernism. It is the thesis of this paper that Nietzsche’s conception of art, and specifically his views as laid out in The Birth of Tragedy, directly foresaw and established a philosophical foundation for the primary developments in the art of the twentieth century in the Western tradition, laying out a role and vision for art that characterize the developments which define Modernism. It is an alignment of imagination, and a potential range of influence, that has been ratified by numerous artists who cite Nietzsche in their writings, and it can perhaps be most clearly observed in the principal achievement in visual art of the century—the development of pure, or nonrepresentational, abstraction.

Art, in Nietzsche’s conception and as reflected in the work of artists who have come since, carries the capability and responsibility of conveying the full weight of the philosopher’s ontological vision. It is an art of truth-telling, and the truth it tells is of a “Dionysian” comprehension of the world: a tragic insight into a world of Becoming, a processual conception of reality in which the world is an incessant interplay of forces. There are no enduring objects, no “things.” There are strictly events ceaselessly coming into being and simultaneously passing away and that are the function of oppositions of forces that never achieve equilibrium, that never come to resolution. It is a world of endless flux, of constantly incomplete, constantly open-ended experimentation, and which can be understood only through the rejection of oppositional thinking, the dismissal of all conceptions that are defined as the opposite of what they are not. Everything that can be said to exist—existing as a continual state of Becoming, of being created and being uncreated as its inherent condition—is both what it is and what it is not. It is what may be called a “chiasmic” unity—an integration of opposites, an interlacing of what the normative mind would think could not go together. This chiasmic condition is what Nietzsche called “excess”—that which is beyond definition, or limitation—and it was his claim that “Excess revealed itself as truth.”(2) What we are left with is a world of the goalless play of forces, a ceaseless Heraclitean strife, a world in which nothing can achieve a final state, in which nothing can complete itself and accomplish a perfected stability.

Nietzschean art is that whose purpose is to reveal the nature of such a worldview, not through the art’s assertions or renditions—it cannot state what inherently cannot be defined—but through simulation, through enacting this vision of the real and conveying as an aesthetic experience a sensory grasp of the truth, a truth that cannot be explained but can be achieved only through insight—a tragic, Dionysian insight—tragic in that it envisions the incessant making and unmaking of everything, including ourselves. This is the lesson Nietzsche acquired from ancient Greek tragic drama, from the beginning of our artistic tradition—a lesson lost, he felt, during the nearly 2,500 years of the dominance of logical thinking—and with no true irony, he saw it as marking the art of the future. Nietzsche saw his philosophy as a whole as a “Philosophy of the Future,”(3) and the characterization of an art charged with conveying that philosophical vision as an art of the future is more than just a direct implication. The philosopher stated it openly: “The future of art (when mankind grasps its point). I could think of an art that is forward-looking, that seeks its images in the future. Why isn’t there such an art? Art moves forward away from piety.”(4)

In observing Nietzsche’s assertions regarding an aesthetic of the future, one should appreciate what futurity meant for the philosopher. The future, like all that occurs in the world, is intrinsically and irrevocably open-ended. Nothing can be resolved, nothing can reach a completion—history cannot end in a fulfillment, nor can any aspect or portion of the play of forces that constitute history. The future is not a promise but an endless process of goalless experimentation in all that is possible. It is directionless, and in itself, it is featureless. Nietzsche remarks on the pure and dizzying, disorienting open expanse of time, referring to the “oceans of the future”(5) and “the abysms of the future.”(6) Nietzsche’s conception of an art of the future, an art appropriate to such a sense of the future, is distinctive in its implicit opposition to the aesthetic arguments of our time claiming we have reached the end of art. For Nietzsche, there can no more be an end for art than there can be a resolution and completion for anything else, and thus there is within his aesthetics a necessarily continuing possibility of art, and an unceasing, irrevocable, distinctive, and defining purpose to which art may be put—the continuing possibility of an art that makes an ontological claim.

Nietzsche’s devising of his aesthetic philosophy occurred at a particularly propitious moment in the history of the arts, and not just of the arts. He wrote and had his first influence in the heart of a time of profound ferment, a time of notable innovators and innovations, a time of foundational change in not only philosophy but also in the sciences and in the arts. Much of the most innovative work developing then in the arts was involved in what can be termed a break with fidelity to appearances. Symbolist poetry as devised by Stéphane Mallarmé was already turning away from the depiction of a material world occupied with substantial objects. He instructed poets to render, “for example, the horror of the forest, or the silent thunder afloat in the leaves; not the intrinsic, dense wood of the trees.”(7) In the avant-garde painting of Nietzsche’s lifetime, the first forays were being made into the deliberate break with mimesis, the break with the faithful representation of observable reality on the canvas, through the projects of the Impressionism of Monet and the Post-Impressionism of Van Gogh and Gauguin. Such developments clearly align with Nietzsche’s own rejection of material, enduring objects that appear to populate the world and seek a more mysterious, Dionysian realization.

With such developments, a trajectory of experimentation in art was being inaugurated that would lead through increasing divergences from the authentic reproduction of appearances and would culminate, 20 years after the philosopher’s death and most evidently, in the achievement of pure abstraction in the visual arts. As visual artists pushed further into the departure from apparent reality in the first decades of the twentieth century, the number of references to Nietzsche in their writings and in the writings of the commentators on the new art makes it clear that Nietzsche served a role as an inspiration, if not a guide, to the new artistic experimentation, and he did so to a degree that no other philosopher, no other thinker from any field, could match.

Many artists remarked on the importance of Nietzsche’s writings to them—the Expressionist artist Otto Dix, for example, noted that he carried a copy of Nietzsche into battle during World War I. Numerous artists did portraits of the philosopher, including two busts of Nietzsche by Dix, done in 1904 and 1914, a bust by Max Klinger in 1902, and a painted portrait by Edvard Munch, done in 1906. What is of the greatest significance, however, is the testimony of Nietzsche’s relation to the most important developments leading toward pure abstraction, toward the complete dismissal of the artistic recognition of the world of material objects: the creation of Analytic Cubism by Picasso and Georges Braque and of the first experiments in abstraction by the generally acknowledged creator of the mode: Wassily Kandinsky.

In the case of Analytic Cubism—the first and best-known form of Cubist painting, which was devised simultaneously by Picasso and Braque—the principal statements of artistic intent come from Guillaume Apollinaire, a French avant-garde poet and friend of many of the Cubist painters who served as something of a theoretician for the movement. In his book “The Cubist Painters,” published in 1913—in which he attempts to lay out in fairly systematic fashion the methods, history, and objectives of the movement in painting that had begun six years earlier—Apollinaire mentions Nietzsche by name, assigning to the philosopher not the origination of the impulse to the new art but the ability to have “divined” the opportunity for its arrival—to have foreseen the possibility and necessity of Cubist Art. According to Apollinaire:

Nietzsche divined the possibility of such an art:

“O divine Dionysus, why pull my ears?” Ariadne asks her philosophical lover during one of the celebrated dialogues on the Isle of Naxos. “I find something pleasant and delightful in your ears, Ariadne; why are they not even longer?”(8)

The quotation indicates that Apollinaire was conversant with Nietzsche’s criticism of beauty as an Apollinian attribute, as an attribute and thus an invocation of the world of distinct objects rather than of a Dionysian flux of forces. Within the context of Apollinaire’s essay, Nietzsche’s brief anecdote of Ariadne and her lover serves to demonstrate his prescience regarding the Cubists’ rejection of the ideal of beauty, an ideal that Apollinaire identifies specifically as “Greek,” and as “a purely human conception,” an ideal that he condemns in that it “took man as the measure of perfection”(9) and thus served human vanity rather than the purpose of truth. In this, Apollinaire agrees thoroughly with Nietzsche’s assessment of the psychological function of beauty. As Nietzsche put the same thought: “In the beautiful, man posits himself as the measure of perfection; in special cases he worships himself in it. . . . At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment ‘beautiful’ is the vanity of his species.”(10)

The rejection of beauty and its underlying human vanity serves to justify and illuminate the value of the compounded perspectives and the distortions in Cubist paintings. According to the French poet, for Cubist painters, “real resemblance no longer has any importance.”(11) Instead of duplicating appearances, and with them the supposition of human “perfection” implicit in beauty, these then-young painters sought to create an art “not from the reality of sight, but from the reality of insight.”(12) Apollinaire makes clear the aspect and objective of this art of “insight” rather than “sight”—it possesses the artistic nature of music (“Thus we are moving towards an entirely new art which will stand, with respect to painting as envisioned heretofore, as music stands to literature. It will be pure painting, just as music is pure literature.”(13)), and it is committed to the service of “truth,”(14) the end to which all efforts to paint resemblances are to be sacrificed. In this, it is clear that the purpose of the distortions in Cubist painting is precisely what Nietzsche saw as the purpose of the Dionysian quality of Greek tragedy: to mitigate the beauty and idealism of the Apollinian image and instill an insight into the mysterious depths of truth through the ecstatic, intoxicated Dionysian quality of music—“the music of tragedy”(15)—the music out of which, Nietzsche had argued in The Birth of Tragedy, the Dionysian, tragic insight initially arose.

Cubism was the first artistic gesture in the substantial movement away from the reproduction of appearances, rather than merely the emotionally expressive alteration of still-recognizable appearances that characterized such earlier artists as Courbet, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Egon Schiele, and many others. The complete step away from any fidelity to appearance was taken only a few years after the devising of Cubism—in 1911, by Kandinsky. Kandinsky’s reliance on Nietzsche’s thought can be more deliberately estimated than can Nietzsche’s effect on the ideas behind Cubism, for Kandinsky had a carefully contrived program behind his artistic revolution, a body of ideas worked out more systematically than Apollinaire had managed to do in his apologies for Cubism.

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