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Art and Truth in Raging Discord:
Heideggerand Nietzsche on the Will to Power
379
This paper raises the question of the relation between art and
truth in three thinkers
Plato
Nietzsche
Heidegger.
These five theses elaborate what Nietzsche says most simply when
he designates art as "the greatest stimulant to life" (WM, 808). In a more
diffuse formulation:
Art must be viewed as the creative production of the artist (not in
terms of the purely receptive/reactive aesthetics of enjoyment) who
participates in the life-enhancing will to power at work everywhere in the
fundamentally creative cosmos and who therefore struggles against the
life-negation of moralists and metaphysicians - whose atavistic "truth" is
380
no more than a symptom of decadence, ressentiment, and impotence to
power. Yet his struggle against these others must be by way of indirection,
since the artist's creative life must be ruled by a yes-saying response to the
chaos of Becoming. This yes-saying response is productive frenzy, and it
constitutes "the grand style." The achievement of art in the grand style
shatters the subject-object relation, fusing worker and work. It is the
artist's self-production.
The essence of creation in the grand style is, according to
Heidegger, "the frenzied production of the beautiful in the work"
(NI, 135). But because Nietzsche does not interpret the essence of creation
(Schaffen) in terms of the work of art - he speaks instead of the artist's
"aesthetic behavior" - the joint production in the grand style of the art
work and the artist is not adequately determined in his thought (NI, 138).
Here Heidegger makes hidden reference to his own starting point in Der
Ursprung des Kunstwerkes ("The Origin of the Work of Art").3
In that essay Heidegger begins with the originating circle of art
and artist. Art is the work of the artist who becomes what he is only
through the work of art (H, 7-8; English ed., 17-18). In the Nietzsche
lecture Heidegger speaks of Schaffen, but the circle is the same. Creation is
the pathos of the artist who becomes what he is only through the work of
creation. But Heidegger complains that Nietzsche's analyses of "aesthetic
behavior"
especially when they try to ground creativity in a physiology that
is in turn grounded in the metaphysics of life-enhancing will to power, by
reference to its erotic/sexual stirrings, the excitement of its play of forms,
the sensuality of Protean shapes, the remarkable similarity to nervous
conditions and morbid symptoms
exert a centrifugal force on reflection on the matrix of the artist
and the art work. A silence obtrudes which Heidegger's own interpretation
dares to break, since it too pursues the question of art with Zarathustran
dedication. "Precisely because the grand style is a gift-giving, yes-saying
will toward Being, it reveals its essential nature only when a decision has
been made, indeed through the grand style itself, about what the Being of
beings means" (Nl, 158). Nietzsche identifies the grand style as the
"classical," yet this identification fails to penetrate the circle of art and
artist in the work, and so fails to determine the grand style as such.
"Nietzsche never expressed himself otherwise about it; for every great
thinker thinks always one jump more originally than he directly speaks.
Our interpretation must therefore try to say what is unsaid in his"
(Nl, 158).
II
Heidegger brings the issues of will to power as art and truth into
the sphere of his fundamental questioning of metaphysics (Grundfragen
381
der Metaphysik), whose predominant question is that of the truth of Being
(die Wahrheitsfrage). He seeks enlightenment concerning Nietzsche's
understanding of art in the grand style through his understanding of
"truth." But the question of the essence of truth is precisely the one
Heidegger cannot find in Nietzsche. "It is of decisive significance to know
that Nietzsche did not pose the authentic question of truth, the question
of the essence of the true and the truth of essence, and thereby the
question of the necessary possibility of its essential transformation - and
that Nietzsche therefore never unfolded the domain of this question"
(N1,175). The "unsaid" of Nietzsche's philosophy is precisely the
Wahrheitsfrage.
However, no one knew better than Nietzsche that the prevailing
interpretation of "truth" in philosophy devolved from Plato. From his
experience of nihilism Nietzsche came to understand his life's task as -
overturning Platonism.
For Platonism truth resides in supersensuous being (to on). Yet if
the truth of Platonism is in fact a nihilistic flight from the sensuous, and if
this flight is the fundamental event of occidental history, then Nietzsche's
project becomes that of "rescuing and giving form to the sensuous"
(Nl, 189). Inasmuch as philosophy and science strive to know the true -
which remains supersensuous and eidetic - Nietzsche rejects them.
Art is worth more than truth.
For Plato, on the other hand, truth is clearly worth more than
art.4 Yet in the Dialogues the relation between art and truth cannot be
called a discord, although a division does obtain between them. In the
Republic (Bks. III and X) Plato interprets art as mimesis and criticizes it
because of its distance from the Ideas (eidei). Porro ara pou tou alethous
he mimetike estin: "Art is far away from the truth" (Rep. 598 b; NI, 216).
But not hopelessly far. In the Symposium eros appears as that process
whereby beauty - which is what most brightly shines - calls men away
from the sensuous world (me on) to the realm of permanent being (to on)
(NI, 195; 226). The Phaedrus takes up this calling most explicitly. Beauty
awakens us from forgetfulness of Being and grants us a view on the Ideas.
But its action is most mysterious. If Being is supersensuous, and if the
sensuous is nonbeing, how can essential beauty shine through sensuous
appearance? How can beauty conduct the soul from me on (the eidolon)
to to on (the eidos)?
In Plato there is a division between the sensuous and super-
sensuous, the transient and the permanent, and hence a division
between art and philosophy -
382
because beauty, as what shines, the sensuous, has in
advance secured its essential nature in the truth of Being
as supersensuous. (NI1,230)
Ill
383
this sense Nietzsche may be said to have overturned Platonism - by
invertingthe divided-linesketched in Plato'sRepublic (509 d ff.):
Nietzsche identifies true knowledge (episteme) as mere imaging
(eikasia).
Instead of progressing up the divided-line from the merely
apparentrealm to true Being, Platonic dialectic unwittingly regressesto
mere shadowplay and image; inasmuchas metaphysicsplants its feet on
the floating ground of the eidoletic eidei it may be said to be standingon
its head. By exposing the genuine characterof the Ideas to be illusory
fixations NietzscheoverturnsPlatonismand sets it upright.
Or? Perhaps it would be more correct to say that, far from
overturning the divided-line, Nietzsche completes its advance by
identifying the state of mind that correspondsto the highest reality, the
Good, a state of mind Plato himself was never able to define, as
value-judgments(Werturteile) executed by perspectivalwill to power.
Actually Nietzsche does both. He advancesbeyond dianoietic knowledge
of the Ideas to an intuition of their essential nature.They are valuative
projectionsof and by will to power
and particularly that negative/reactive will to power that
maintainsthe moral prejudiceof the exclusivity of opposites on this side
of Good and Evil.
correctness
adaequatio
correspondentia
homoiosis
384
obscure. One might say that "chaos" is the last name conceivable for the
Being of beings in the manner of metaphysics, the final and most desperate
appellation of being as a whole, because its inadequacy does not simply
result from oversight or incapacity on the thinker's part to determine
(correctly) what is true.
Neither in Bestand nor in Sicherung does the horizon upon which
man and world meet take recognizable or cognizable form. What the
horizon could be Nietzsche cannot say - unless it is precisely what the
grand style in each case must create for itself. Heidegger insists that the
new horizon can appear only in "a more original, essential form of human
Being (in Da-sein)."5
IV
385
the manifold possibilities of Becoming by transfiguring it in frenzied
creativity, and so enhances itself. From the point of view of the
enhancement of life the latter is of greater worth. But with the expression
of "worth" the structure of Platonism - and even its secret maneuver -
survives.
That Nietzsche did not simply reverse the Over and Under of
to on and me on, eidos and eidolon, the supersensuous and the sensuous,
or at least that he knew such a reversal would not decisively leave behind
the nihilism entrenched in the Platonistic mode of thought, Heidegger
attests toward the close of his lecture on "Will to Power as Art." Here he
cites Nietzsche's six theses entitled, "How the 'True World' Finally Became
a Fable" (1888). As they recount a succinct comic history of metaphysics
these fragments address a kind of ultimatum to metaphysicians. Most
important for our discussion is the final thesis:
6. We have done away with the 'true world': which
world remains? The apparent one perhaps? But no!
Along with the true world we have also done away with
the worldof appearances!(SII, 963)
Nietzsche appears to realize full well that Dionysian loyalty
to the earth
to Becoming rather than Being
386
to semblance rather than essence
to art rather than "the truth"
387
Truth, that is, the true as the permanent, is a form of
appearance which justifies itself as a necessary condition
of self-assertive life. However, upon deeper reflection it
becomes clear that all apparition and all semblance are
possible only if something shows itself and comes into
prominence. (NI, 247)
Of course the only lastingly effective therapy is art in the grand style. But
Heidegger notes that if truth is ugly, so much so that man cannot bear it
but must either recreate it in Dionysian frenzy or flee from it to the
metaphysical realm, then Becoming must somehow disclose its ugliness:
somehow in spite of all metaphysico-moral screens Nietzschean
man knows why he must fear his knowing. In order not to succumb to his
knowing he transfigures the sensuous world in the creative fulguration of
art in the grand style. "Art is, as transfiguration,more enhancingto life
than truth, as fixation on an apparition" (NI, 250). Truth is necessary for
the maintenance of life, but at some critical point in its epiphany becomes
destructive of it. Nietzsche stands at that critical juncture and pleas for art
and creativity; Heidegger occupies the same point and urges meditation on
Dasein's disclosedness - and that means on the essence of truth.
But thought on the essence of truth demands attention to the
work of art, so that Heidegger's thought from hence - at least partly as a
result of its encounter with Nietzsche - will strive to rethink the raging
discord between art and truth.
The third of his Frankfurt lectures on art, and hence the final
part of "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heidegger entitled "Truth and
Art." There he defined art - poetry in the sense of essential poiesis - as
"the becoming and happening of truth" (H, 59; Eng. ed., 71). How had it
388
fallen out with truth - that Heidegger had to ascribe to it a "becoming"?
Two earlier statements in his essay relate Heidegger's
interpretation of art and truth to the Nietzsche-material just considered.
1. Das Sein des Seienden [im Werkder Kunst] kommt in das
Standige seines Scheinens. ("The Being of the being [in the work of art]
comes into the steadiness of its shining.") (H, 25; Eng. ed., 36)
2. So ware denn das Wesen der Kunst dieses: das
Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheitdes Seienden. ("Thus the essence of art
would be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work.") (H, 25; Eng.
ed., 36)
The first proposition invites a critical question. Can the Standige
des Scheinens here named be identified with the Bestandigkeit of the
Platonic Ideas, of to on, and is it therefore exposed to the Nietzschean
critique of Bestandigkeit as Bestandsicherung (see Section III above)? The
second invites a more neutral question. What is the character of the Setzen
that takes place in the work of art?
To the first we must reply that the Standige, far from indicating
permanence of presence, suggests the double character of presence and
absence. What comes to appear in Van Gogh's "Shoes of the Peasant" for
example is insight into the world of the peasant; yet this insight is steeped
in shadow almost from the start by a turn in which earth becomes the
prevailing force. The background of the painting is "an undetermined
space" - even "nothing." The opening of the shoes depicted there is
"dark." These are woman's shoes. They are heavy - like the peasant
woman's steps through the wintry field. As she goes in them the shoes sink
into the obscure realm of pure dependability. In short, everything about
the painting calls the shoes back to the earth: theirs is no eternal truth but
one of numbered seasons.
as is the world of Paestum. "The works are no longer the works they
were" (H, 30; Eng. ed., 41). The art trade sells objets because it cannot
hold on to works.
What comes to stand in the shining of the work of art stands in
the moment of time, and that means it falls. Not that its shining is mere
semblance, which is the obverse of metaphysically conceived truth, but
that the art work originates in a region where
389
That may not be ugly but it does induce a certain anxiety.
arrival-departure
approach-withdrawal
presence-absence
390
concealment in both truth and art. Such thoughtful attention requires at
least two traits manifested by James Joyce's Leopold Bloom, "the
distinguished phenomenologist," about whom there is "a touch of the
artist."7
In Twilight of the Idols a man possessed of both
phenomenological acuity and artistic creativity offers a first lesson in
Gelassenheit and an exhibition of thinking in the grand style:
Universit3t Freiburg-im-Breisgau
NOTES
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, 3 vols. ed. by Karl Schlechta, 6th ed. (Munich:
Carl Hanser Verlag, 1969), I, 20. References in the text appear as: (SI, 20).
References to The Will to Power are from the Gast Forster edition, issued in
the Kroner series, which Heidegger assigned as the textbook for his courses;
the references appear in the text as: (WM, with aphorism number). See the
English edition by W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1968).
391
3 Heidegger had delivered an abbreviated form of this lecture in Freiburg on 13
November 1935, repeating it in Zurich in January 1936. Over the next few
months he expanded it and delivered the new version in Frankfurt during the
autumn. This expansion took place while the first Nietzsche course was in
session. The text of "The Origin of the Art Work" that we have today bears
closely on the question of Nietzsche's ideas on art, just as these at least partly
shape Heidegger's single most important pronouncement on that subject. See
M. Heidegger, "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," in Holzwege (Frankfurt am
Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 1950), pp. 7-68, which we cite in the text
as: (H, with page number). See the English translation in M. Heidegger, Poetry,
Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971), pp. 17-87.
4 We should note that for all three thinkers "art" means primarily poiesis,
poesy, Dichtkunst. See NI, 193.
7 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Modern Library, 1961), pp. 343 and 235.
392