Competencias matemáticas

in order to reinstate some Platonic distinction between the true and its copy. His critique of metaphysics cannot allow such an idea to enter into the game. Hence his use of the Platonic notion of art as a form of lie does not serve to discredit art, but rather to add weight to his general argument which brings into question the belief in truth per se. Art is not mendacious because of some deficiency in art, but because there is no truth of which it could be the mimesis.

Given Nietzsche’s frequent assertion that art is a form of lie, a claim which serves primarily as a rhetorical device to aggravate the raging discord between art and the truth, it is clear that he will have no time for either Idealist theories of tragedy or for the positivist pretensions of Realism. It is significant that in his mid­ dle works, supposedly sympathetic to a positivist understanding of truth, Nietzsche is critical of the Realist movement in the arts, which would function as an artistic analogue to the scientific positivism of the nineteenth century. Amongst the verses

of ‘Jest, Cunning and Revenge’ preceding the main text of The Gay Science he

writes the following;

‘The realistic painter

“Nature is true and complete !” - How does he begin: When would Nature ever be represented in his picture ? Infinite is the smallest portion of the world ! - In the end he paints of it what he likes.

And what does he like ? Whatever he can paint I ’

(ibid. p. 365) On the basis of this rather charmless verse alone, we can observe that Nietzsche’s work of the so-called middle period consists of more than a mere overturning of the super-sensualism of Plato into a purely sensualist Positivism. For not only is Nietzsche challenging the idea that nature can simply be ‘reproduced’ in its entirety through art, he is also challenging the idea of nature as a simple given. Referring implicitly to Perspectivism, nature is instead seen as an infinity, which cannot be depicted as an empirical totality. It is a criticism we see repeated in notes from 1884, where the object this time is Flaubert and photography. Here Nietzsche observes that ‘The “will-to-be-objective” e.g. in Flaubert is a modern misunderstanding . . . Gentlemen, there is no “thing-in-itself ’ ! What they achieve is scientism or photography, i.e. description without perspective, a type of Chinese painting, pure foreground and everything full to bursting’ (KSA 11: 25 [164] p. 57). The attempt at self-transcendence on the part of the Realist author or painter is, quite simply, a delusion. The desire by the author to efface himself, to submerse himself completely in the objective world being described is to ignore the

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role of the author in constituting that world, in having access to only certain per­

spectives on the world and not others. In describing that world and not another. As

if continuing his criticism of the same delusion, Nietzsche writes some three years

later, ‘It is not possible to remain objective or to suspend the interpretative, addi­

tive, supplementing, poetising power ( - which latter forges the chain that affirms the Beautiful)’ (KSA 12:10 [167] p. 555).

Clearly, when Nietzsche later comes to claim, in Nietzsche contra Wagner,

that ‘Aesthetics is indeed nothing but applied physiology’ (KSA 6 p. 418), and to argue in a note from 1887 that ‘The desire for art and beauty is an indirect desire for the ecstasies of the sexual drive, which it communicates to the cerebrum’ (KSA 12:

8 [1] pp. 325-6), he is consolidating on his earlier goal of driving a wedge between 4

art and any notion of revealed truth. By describing art in terms of physiology, Nietzsche is bringing it within the broader compass of his project of immanence, a wider strategy which embraces both Nietzsche’s physiologically based perspec­ tivism and his doctrine of Eternal Return.

Art ‘discloses’ neither the truth of the sensuous world nor that of some su-

persensuous realm. In fact it ‘discloses’ nothing at all. Art creates a world. It car­

ries out a selective, world-constitutive, operation in a manner analogous to the in­ terpretative process of will to power, an insight which causes Nietzsche to speak of the ‘states in which we plant [“legen” - the root of the verb “hineinlegen” which Nietzsche employs to describe the process of scientific ‘discovery] a transfiguration and plenitude into things . . . until they reflect back our own plenitude and joy in life’ (KSA 12: 9 [102] p. 393). Beauty and art are less a matter of truth than one of strength. As Nietzsche says, ‘It is a question of power (of an individual or of a

people), whether and where [the] judgement “beautiful” is given . . . the feel­

ing of power even passes the judgement “beautiful” on things and states of affairs which the impotent instinct can only estimate as being hateful, as “ugly” ‘ (KSA 12: 10 [168] pp. 555-6). With this assertion of the unity of the question of art and that of power we see, too, the unity of Nietzsche’s critique of disinterestedness in the name of physiology, and the critique of artistic truth in the name of lying. For both features reveal the status of art as a form of interpretative will to power.

Giving Room to the Artist

In the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche remarks of Kant that

‘like all philosophers, instead of gauging the aesthetic problem on the basis of the experience of the artist (the creator) [he] pondered art and the Beautiful solely from the point of view of the spectator, and thereby imperceptibly let the “spectator” into the concept “beautiful” itself’ (KSA 5 p. 346).

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I

Nietzsche is here making two, not unrelated, claims. The first is that Kant neglects the artist. The second is that consequently questions of ‘beauty’, ‘sublimity’, even ‘ugliness’ only have meaning when related to a passive, contem­ plative viewer, listener, reader and so forth. As interpretations of Kant the first is partially incorrect, while the second is partially correct.

As regards the first criticism, Nietzsche displays either neglect or sloppy

reading of the extensive passages of the Critique of Judgement which Kant de­

votes to the creativity of the artist^. If his criticism is simply that Kant’s talk of ‘Genius’ merely perpetuates the cult of genius, a concept, which Gadamer, too, contends is ‘basically conceived from the position of the spectator,then he is in­ correct here as well. Far from submitting to the contemporary cult of the genius in­ herited from the “Sturm und Drang” movement of the 1770’s and 80’s, Kant is rather attempting to counterbalance such wild notions by stressing the extent to which creative genius (which he prefers to term merely a “talent”) is guided by technique and rules of artistic production, hence his disdain for what he terms ‘original nonsense’, in other words artistic creativity which is determined solely by the inner subjective feeling of the artist.^

As regards the second criticism, Nietzsche is partially correct when he sees the Kantian spectator as the determining ground of any judgement of Beauty. I say

partially correct because Kant resists any conclusion that taste is just a matter of

subjective preferences through his recourse to the notion of subjective universality, and in addition suggests that certain kinds of formal, objective qualities, e.g. par- ergonal ornamentation, may be inappropriate objects of any judgement of taste. Furthermore Nietzsche is only partially correct since the “subjectification” of Aesthetics in Kant does not occur “imperceptibly” [“unvermerkt”] but quite con­ sciously, since it occupies a central place in the architectonics of the Critical project.

Having defended Kant against these criticisms we must turn to a more fun­ damental issue: namely, why does Nietzsche consider the “subjective turn” in Kant’s aesthetic theory remiss ? What is the virtue of an aesthetic of the artist over and against the womanly aesthetics [“Weibs-Aesthetik”] of the spectator, of the re­ cipient ? Nietzsche writes that we ‘should not demand of the artist who gives, that he become a woman - that he “receives” ’ (KSA 13: 14 [170] p. 357). Yet why should we be interested in the artist in any case ?

The answer to the question cannot be seen as an attempt on the part of Nietzsche to counteract an imbalance of perspectives in Kant, for in practice Nietzsche devotes considerable space and time to arguing for the constitutive role of the spectator in the determination of the Beautiful. Without being reducible to the Kantian ‘subjectivist’ aesthetic, Nietzsche’s physiology of beauty does present many parallels with Kant’s account of aesthetic judgement. Hence we shall run into

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