- Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Art
Taking advantage of an open-ended title, Aaron Ridley delivers a work that is both engaging and provocative. From the outset Ridley chooses to prioritize the aesthetic nature of Nietzsche's philosophy rather than to address Nietzsche's views about the plastic arts in general. He is quite upfront about the complexity of this task, since Nietzsche is a special case for whom doing philosophy was often a work of art in itself. His examination includes Nietzsche's portrayal of the origins of aesthetic production, exemplified by the concept of the Dionysian, as well as Nietzsche's philosophy as art, via the production of philosophical themes such as the Eternal Recurrence, which he locates in Nietzsche's philosophy qua artistic literature. Ridley is articulate, witty, and acute in his critique of Nietzsche's ostensibly contradictory perspectives and lack of systematic structure. In a surprise, for a guidebook, Ridley grapples with these surface-level contradictions of Nietzsche's philosophy in order to critically disassemble and refute much of his aesthetic production, framing it as intellectual confusion. Succinctly put, the text is not your average "guidebook" to a philosopher on art.
One does not usually anticipate the conclusions of a putatively introductory text about Nietzsche's conception of, or relationship to, art to describe Dionysian becoming as "a travesty of the intellectual conscience" (127) or to discover the Eternal Return of the Same deconstructed as a conflated and "hopelessly unsatisfactory" sham (108). Ridley challenges status quo and perfunctory readings of Nietzsche and demands that one pay careful attention to Nietzsche's overall consistency, or lack of it. Most of the text is a ferreting out of Nietzsche's positions by coming to terms with his perception of art as a philosophical tool. The text does not attempt to provide the genealogy of Nietzsche's thoughts or propositions toward art as a phenomenon. Instead, it historically examines his aesthetic countenances and perspectives as they develop throughout his career. In Ridley's words, his reconstruction of Nietzsche's philosophy of art is necessarily "developmental and contextual" (2), and except for placing Wagner at the end, he faithfully follows the trajectory of Nietzsche's productive career.
Ridley is at his best in his pedagogical presentations of Nietzsche's publications. He adeptly manages their running internal commentaries, which require an artistic interpretation of the philosophical process. He consistently draws from various sources in Nietzsche's body of work in order to expose the shortcomings of Nietzsche's themes, especially where they are insufficiently consistent or clear. Clarity of explanation, on the other hand, is Ridley's primary strength, especially where he produces digestible descriptions of Nietzsche's philosophical themes. This ease of exposition will certainly be a help to those looking to this text for an explication of Nietzsche and the importance he placed on art as part of his philosophy. Unfortunately, the term guidebook is somewhat misleading here. Usually, the term appeals to newcomers or nonspecialists as a source for a standardized analysis from where one might begin an appreciation of a particular topic. Ridley's pitch, however, while providing a clear historical reading (in the Nietzschean sense), spends much time discrediting Nietzsche's themes and, thus, requires a certain amount of prerequisite familiarity in order to judge the conclusions.
In fact, the author admits, the text reads like a critical companion to Julian Young's Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, 1992). As such, it succeeds admirably in providing consequential [End Page 85] alternatives to Young's text on a variety of issues, though perhaps not always sufficiently potable for a more interrogative audience. As previously stated, Ridley follows a "developmental and contextual" approach, though, more important, he does so via a historical methodology, which may be dubious when it comes to interrogating Nietzsche's existentialist themes. Though critical of Young, Ridley acknowledges that Young provides "the other side of a (sometimes implicit) dialogue" (7) and encourages his readers to examine Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art in order...