Nietzsche and Aestheticism

Notes and Discussions Nietzsche and Aestheticism 1o Alexander Nehamas's Nietzsche: L~feas Literature' has enjoyed an enthusiastic reception since its publication in 1985 . Reviewed in a wide array of scholarlyjournals and even in the popular press, the book has won praise nearly everywhere and has already earned for Nehamas--at least in the intellectual community at large--the reputation as the preeminent American Nietzsche scholar. At least two features of the book may help explain this phenomenon. First, Nehamas's Nietzsche is an imaginative synthesis of several important currents in recent Nietzsche commentary, reflecting the influence of writers like Jacques Derrida , Sarah Kofman, Paul De Man, and Richard Rorty. These authors figure, often by name, throughout Nehamas's book; and it is perhaps Nehamas's most important achievement to have offered a reading of Nietzsche that incorporates the insights of these writers while surpassing them all in the philosophical ingenuity with which this style of interpreting Nietzsche is developed. The high profile that many of these thinkers now enjoy on the intellectual landscape accounts in part for the reception accorded the "Nietzsche" they so deeply influenced. Second, Nehamas has effected this synthesis primarily through the introduction of a novel interpretive rubric: what Nehamas calls "aestheticism."' According to aestheticism , "Nietzsche... looks at [the world] as if it were a literary text. And he arrives at many of his views of human beings by generalizing to them ideas and principles that apply almost intuitively to the literary situation, to the creation and interpretation of ' (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ,985); all further references will be included in the body of the text. I willcite Nietzsche's texts (by section number) using the standard Englishlanguage acronyms: The Birth of Tragedy (BT); Human, AU-Too-Human(HAH); Daybreak (D); The GayScience(GS); Thu~SpokeZarathustra (Z); BeyondGoodand Ev//(BGE); On theGenealogyofMorals (GM); TwilightoftheIdols (TI); TheAntichrist (A); EcceHomo (EH); Nietzschecontra Wagner (NCW); The Case of Wagner (CW); The Will to Power (WP). Translations are by Kaufmann or Kaufmanrd Hollingdale, except for HAH (trans. Faber & Lehmann) and D (trans. Hollingdale). 9 Allan MegiUalso uses the term "aestheticism" in a related way in his Prophets ofExtremity: Nietzsche,Heidegger,Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, ,985); e.g., p. 2:"1 am using ["aestheticism"] to refer.., to an attempt to expand the aesthetic to embrace the whole of reality. To put it another way, I am using it to refer to a tendency to see 'art' or 'language' or 'discourse' or 'text' as constituting the primary realm of human experience." MegiU, it should be noted, pursues this theme in Nietzsche less relentlesslyand also less artfully than Nehamas. [275] 276 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:2 APRIL 1992 literary texts and characters" (3). For Nehamas, then, the literary text is Nietzsche's "overarching metaphor" (164), the "model" he "always depended on" (194) in pursuing his philosophical inquiries, "the single thread running through" his work.s And according to at least one commentator, it is through Nehamas's "ingenious employment of an aesthetic model" that he "has dramatically raised the standards of Nietzsche scholarship."4 While there is clearly much to admire in Nehamas's book, I should like to raise here a skeptical question about Nehamas's extensive use of this aestheticist model: for aestheticism , I suggest, is actually not Nietzsche's view. In the next two sections, I will concentrate on one way in which this problem surfaces: namely, in Nehamas's failure to adduce a single passage from Nietzsche in which he actually embraces aestheticism. But the problem is also apparent in Nehamas's attempt to show that aestheticism informs Nietzsche's treatment of different issues: perspectivism, the nature of the self, the will to power, the critique of morality, his positive ethics. In section 4, I shall explore just the last of these, and suggest how aestheticism leads Nehamas to an idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche's positive views. 9. Nehamas, as we have seen, claims that "aestheticism" informs all of Nietzsche's philosophical work. He even attempts to show that there is "explicit" textual support for aestheticism: text, that is, where Nietzsche claims this putatively "overarching" device-understanding the world as it if...