Art and Identity - Nietzsche

columbia university press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

Translation copyright © 2006 Columbia University Press

Originally published as Dialogo con Nietzsche. Saggi 1961 –2000

Copyright © 2000 Garzanti Libri s.p.a.

All rights reserved

The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vattimo, Gianni, 1936–

[Dialogo con Nietzsche. English]

Dialogue with Nietzsche / Gianni Vattimo ; translated by William McCuaig.

p. cm. — (European perspectives)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0–231–13240–9 (cloth : alk. paper)

I. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. I. Title. II. Series.

B3317.V359313 2005

193—dc22 2005051899

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

and durable acid-free paper

Printed in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

c h a p t e r 7

Art and IdentityOn the Relevance of Nietzsche’s Aesthetics

M uch of the debate taking place today on Nietzsche’s thought and

its possible relevance arises out of a basic problem: how should we read

his reversal of Platonism?1 For in overthrowing Plato, Nietzsche rejected west-

ern metaphysics in the archetypal form from which (as far as he and his major

interpreters, especially Heidegger, are concerned) all of its subsequent develop-

ment had flowed. This problem is also the best place to begin a discussion of

how a Nietzschean aesthetics might be configured and its possible relevance

today. Indeed, when it comes to aesthetics, the connection to Plato turns out to

be particularly illuminating and significant, for on the question of art, it seems

clear—to me at least—that Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism is not, as Hei-

degger at bottom believes,2 a partial one that leaves unchanged the dichotomies

and oppositions (sensible versus intelligible, appearance versus reality, and so

on) established by Plato but rather that it goes right to their core and radically

contests them.

At the threshold of western aesthetics stands the famous condemnation of

imitative art delivered by Plato in The Republic. This “condemnation” was re-

futed, beginning with Aristotle. But the western tradition moves for the most

part within the alternatives established by Plato, not questioning them but cov-

ering them up and concealing their origin, and its reception of this one is a case

in point. Plato formulates his thesis in The Republic, books 3 and 10. The part

of it most often adduced and discussed is the metaphysical argument about the

distance that separates the image produced by the artist from the idea created by

God (Rep. 10.597b), which downgrades the work of art to the status of a copy of

a copy, with the pedagogical corollary that to know and enjoy a copy of a copy

is to move further away from the world of ideas. But Plato’s main emphasis is

always on the opposition between the true Being (or being true) of the ideas

Art and Identity: On the Relevance of Nietzsche’s Aesthetics

and the character of the artistic image as appearance (as phantasm, specter,

eidolon, semblance, simulacrum, Schein …). This entails the hierarchical sub-

ordination of sensible knowledge and the emotions to intellectual knowledge.

In the dialogue Io, Plato adds another line of argument to the aesthetic position

taken in The Republic: the rhapsodist and the poet are not “technicians,” they

do not speak with well-grounded knowledge, and the only possible source of

their utterance is a mysterious force that inspires them, a divine madness. This

is generally read as a statement that simply parallels The Republic: imitation is

condemned in the Io not on the basis that it makes copies of copies but because

it is an activity that cannot be fitted into a rational framework. The third book

of The Republic takes yet another tack: dramatic imitation is deprecated because

it entails the identification of the imitator with base and unworthy persons or

attitudes (Rep. 3.395d ff). But apart from this “moral” line of argument, taken

up again in book 10 with the one about a copy of a copy, there is a more radical

and global thread of argument that links the discourse of the Republic to that

of the Io in a more coherent fashion. The impossibility of defining poetry as a

techne, which is the conclusion of the Io and may be considered as a prelude to

the “condemnation” in the Republic, counts heavily against art primarily be-

cause it flouts the division of social roles.

But perhaps, I said, you would affirm it [the imitative, that is, the dramatic,

type of poetry] to be ill-suited to our polity, because there is no twofold or

manifold man among us, since every man does one thing… . If a man then, it

seems, who was capable by his cunning of assuming every kind of shape and

imitating all things should arrive in our city, bringing with himself the poems

which he wished to exhibit, we should fall down and worship him as a holy

man and wondrous and delightful creature, but should say to him that there

is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such a man to

arise among us, and we should send him away to another city, after pouring

myrrh down over his head and crowning him with fillets of wool.3

It is true that right after this Plato appears to limit his condemnation once

again to imitations that lead to identification with what is most low and vile.4

But these lines allude to a more general and fundamental reason for condemn-

ing imitative art, a reason already adduced earlier in very explicit terms:

And to still smaller coinage than this, in my opinion, Adimantus, proceeds

the fractioning of human faculty [a moment before it had been agreed that


not even the poets themselves are able to produce good imitations, either

tragic or comic], so as to be incapable of imitating many things or of doing

the things themselves of which the imitations are likenesses.5

In the Platonic vision of the state, “there is no man of that kind … nor is

it lawful for such a man to arise”—a man, that is, who evades the logic of the

division of labor. The division of labor corresponds to an essential character of

human nature. There is no man capable of stepping outside himself and sinking

into other roles, other individualities; if it appears that there is, it happens only

in the realm of imitation and poetic fiction. But this weds the condemnation

of imitation as fiction and as a copy of a copy to the “technical” argument of

the Io by establishing a nexus between the true reality of human nature and the

division of labor. For that matter, in the Io itself this nexus is clearly articulated:

the reason it is impossible to define poetry in technical terms is the fact that the

appearance it produces causes the poet and the rhapsodist themselves, prior

even to the listener, to be transported outside themselves, so that it is no longer

they who are disposing words and images according to rules, but words and

images that are disposing of them. Thus poetry presents itself, in our experience

of it, as a sort of autonomous power of appearance, or—we might say—of the

signifier, a power that manifests itself precisely by transporting us beyond the

bounds of our “real” condition.6 This is why it cannot be theorized and reduced

to rules as a techne can.

The irreducibility of poetry to the model of the division of labor7 in this last

sense is thus rooted in the fact that poetry, as we experience it, is per se, consti-

tutively, a negation of the division of roles, a violation of the essential segmenta-

tion of human nature. Even when he does narrow his condemnation of poetic

imitation by sparing the narrative and mixed genres (on which, however, he

sets moral restrictions concerning the kinds of persons and states of mind they

may represent), Plato’s essential model of poetry is always dramatic representa-

tion, the kind that transports individuals outside themselves. It is only because

narrative and mixed poetry also ultimately imply transport outside oneself (the

rhapsodist referred to in the Io sings and narrates but does not actually do tragic

or comic theater), that it is necessary to set moral restrictions on the type of

events and personages they can represent.8 Even the “natural propensity” of the

poet for the sphere of the emotions rather than for the intelligent and composed

character9 has more to do with what we might call the ecstatic or disidentifying

essence of poetry than it does with his desire to please the audience. The intelli-

gent and composed character, “always similar to himself,” is not easy to imitate


or readily graspable. Poetry, which is above all an experience of disidentification

on the part of both poet and audience, prefers to seek its objects of imitation

not in the world of the ever-the-same but in the realm of the changeable and the

various: not in the zone of the intelligible but in that of the sensible.

It is not possible here to present a complete reconstruction of Plato’s aesthet-

ics with reference to this “theatrical” concept of imitation as disidentification,

nor to discuss, as one ought, the problematic relationship between madness

and the transport produced by poetry and artistic appearance, and the forms

of ecstasy and mania that Plato includes with a positive valence in his descrip-

tion of the voyage of the soul toward the ideas (as in the famous passage from

Phaedrus, 265b, where the poetic inspiration of the muses is one of the four

forms of divine delirium, the others being the prophetic, the mystical, and the

amorous). My aim is solely to emphasize that a decisive component of the all

too well known Platonic condemnation of poetry and art is the connection, first

clearly theorized by Plato, between poetic and artistic appearance on the one

hand, and disidentification, transport outside oneself, and the breakdown of

the ordered division of social roles on the other. The subsequent tradition has

mostly obscured this connection (though this affirmation too would require

separate documentation): isolated from its disidentifying power, the appear-

ance produced by poetic or artistic imitation could be justified as an auxiliary

instrument of knowledge or moral education (this starts with Aristotle); while

ecstasy, cut off from appearance, or related exclusively to an appearance already

depotentiated and made subservient to truth, was developed in its “positive”

valence only, as a mode of access to the deep structures of the metaphysical

order that also sanctions and guarantees the division of social roles and the

identity and self-continuity of individuals above all else. Before Nietzsche, per-

haps only Kierkegaard had revived the spirit of Plato’s argumentation, in his

theory of aestheticity as a stage of existential discontinuity; and Kierkegaard

fully endorsed the Platonic condemnation,

The concealment of the link between aesthetic appearance and disidentifica-

tion, a concealment that culminates in Hegel, may properly be regarded as one

aspect of the forgetting (of Being?) that, according to Heidegger, constitutes

metaphysics. Naturally to characterize metaphysics primarily through its con-

cealment of the art-disidentification nexus, as Nietzsche does, is a far cry indeed

from the spirit of Heidegger’s theses. Perhaps it even sheds light (with “Being”

placed in parentheses and followed by a question mark) on their permanent

metaphysical nostalgia. To recall the forgotten Platonic nexus between aesthetic


appearance and the negation of identity and social roles is what the Nietzschean

aesthetics is all about. I am far from claiming that we may speak of “the aes-

thetics of Nietzsche” as a coherent, unitary, and easily discernible whole. But

even the questions that such an expression immediately provokes form part, or

characterize the content of the problematic “Nietzschean aesthetics.” The main

reason for this is that the outline of the aesthetic problem grows progressively

more blurred as Nietzsche’s thought moves from The Birth of Tragedy, which is

still a book “on aesthetics,” to the reflections on art and artists in Human, All

Too Human, and on to the notes in the Nachlass and “the will to power as art.”

There is only one satisfactory way to account for this: my hypothesis is that

Nietzsche’s original model of aesthetic experience was narrowly based on the

problem of tragedy and the word-music relationship and that it evolved as his

critique of Platonic-Christian metaphysics and the civilization grounded on it

grew more radical. When he was a young man, his belief in “the art of our works

of art”10 had gone hand in hand with his faith that tragedy was being reborn

in the Wagnerian musical revolution. But as his critique expands, it draws art

into the same field of force as metaphysics, morality, and religion: art too is an

aspect of nihilism, one of those phenomena to which by now we have severed

our ties. Yet if it is clear in Human, All Too Human and his subsequent writ-

ing that the art of our works of art cannot be the model, or even the point of

departure, for a new tragic civilization, it is no less clear that art as it has been

determined in the European tradition has an ambiguous character and that not

everything in it is destined to perish with the devaluation of the highest values.

That is why art still features so prominently in the works of Nietzsche’s matu-

rity, from Zarathustra to the late notes for The Will to Power. The fact is that a

Dionysian ember still glows in art, despite all the mystifications and moralizing

misinterpretations that Nietzsche lays bare in his analysis, and the renewal of

tragic civilization depends on fanning it back to life. “Incipit tragoedia” is the

heading of the last aphorism of the fourth book of The Gay Science, in which

Zarathustra is first proclaimed.

Yet everything said to this point still concerns the “philological” problem of

defining a Nietzschean aesthetics—the problem of isolating a nucleus of propo-

sitions regarding art in Nietzsche’s thought and establishing their relationship

with his other doctrines and their development. From the perspective that in-

terests me here, it is less important to achieve such a reconstruction than it is to

sharpen our focus on the characteristic connection, explicitly theorized in full

as early as The Birth of Tragedy, between aesthetic appearance and the negation

of identity.


There is a strong analogy, at the level of description, between the phenom-

enon of the tragic as defined in The Birth of Tragedy and poetry as characterized

by Plato in the Io and The Republic. In Plato poetic imitation is interpreted

primarily in terms of its production of appearances (imitations, copies of cop-

ies), and then, more profoundly, in terms of its producing escape from iden-

tity. The decisive intermediate link between these two poles is the point that

the poet’s occupation cannot be made to fit into a strict model of the division

of labor. Likewise, in Nietzsche’s book on tragedy the production of aesthetic

appearance (the world of the beautiful Apollonian forms) is traced back to the

Dionysian impulse, which can only be defined as the impulse to negate identity.

The devotee of Dionysus is consumed by the horror and ecstatic rapture that

result when the principium individuationis (the principle that each individual

is himself alone and stands permanently apart from all the others) is violated.

For him

not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature, which

has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated celebrates once more her rec-

onciliation with her lost son, man… . Now the slave is a free man; now

all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity, caprice, or “impudent conven-

tion” have fixed between man and man are broken. Now, with the gospel of

universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and

fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been

torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious

primordial unity.11

The heart of the festivals of Dionysus consisted almost everywhere “in ex-

travagant sexual licentiousness, whose waves overwhelmed all family life and

its venerable traditions.”12 Nietzsche distinguishes between the “barbaric Dio-

nysian” of the original Thracian founders of the cult and the “Hellenic Diony-

sian,” and although the remark quoted refers exclusively to the former, within

a few lines he asserts that at a certain point similar instincts penetrated to the

core of Greekness as well. The Dionysian is actualized when man is reconciled

with nature and with the rest of mankind in primal unity. This can only come

about through a violent break with the “venerable traditions” on which society

is built, above all the principium individuationis and all it entails.

Everything said about the Dionysian applies to the tragic as well—for the

tragic is not the balanced synthesis of the Dionysian and the Apollonian that

a number of explicit statements by Nietzsche appear to suggest. In The Birth


of Tragedy, the Dionysian element is privileged with respect to the Apollonian,

and tragedy is the final triumph of the Dionysian spirit. This view could be

backed up with numerous citations from The Birth of Tragedy itself and oth-

ers from across the entire span of Nietzsche’s career. The latter would show

that tragedy and Dionysus continue to play a major part until Nietzsche ceased

to write altogether, whereas the figure of Apollo disappears. And even in The

Birth of Tragedy, notwithstanding Nietzsche’s explicit intention to maintain

the idea of synthesis (the combination of Apollo and Dionysus generates trag-

edy, just as the duality of the sexes leads to reproduction)13 and thus his bond

with Schopenhauer, the Dionysian is clearly preeminent, more radically origi-

nary. Similarly, in the conclusion to chapter 21, in which he analyzes Wagner’s

Tristan, Nietzsche leaves no doubt as to how the overall effect of tragedy is to

be understood:

Should our analysis have established that the Apollinian element in tragedy

has by means of its illusion gained a complete victory over the primordial

Dionysian element of music, making music subservient to its aims, namely,

to make the drama as vivid as possible—it would certainly be necessary to

add a very important qualification: at the most essential point this Apollinian

illusion is broken and annihilated. The drama that, with the aid of music, un-

folds itself before us with such inwardly illumined distinctness in all its move-

ments and figures, as if we saw the texture coming into being on the loom

as the shuttle flies to and fro—attains as a whole an effect that transcends all

Apollinian artistic effects. In the total effect of tragedy, the Dionysian predom-

inates once again. Tragedy closes with a sound which could never come from

the realm of Apollinian art. And thus the Apollinian illusion reveals itself as

what it really is—the veiling during the performance of the tragedy of the

real Dionysian effect; but the latter is so powerful that it ends by forcing the

Apollinian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian

wisdom and even denies itself and its Apollinian visibility. Thus the intricate

relation of the Apollinian and the Dionysian in tragedy may really be symbol-

ized by a fraternal union of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of

Apollo and Apollo, finally, the language of Dionysus, and so the highest goal

of tragedy and of all art is attained.14

The two principles, which were compared in chapter 1 to the male and female

elements in procreation, have become brothers here. But their brotherhood

is not in the least one of equals: Dionysus may indeed speak the language of

Documents

Art and Identity - Nietzsche