Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 47 x borrowed a metaphor, quite another to claim that it takes on the same significance in his very different system of ideas. The point is not that Weiner's book is uninteresting. Few readers could come away from his book without feeling that there is a definite Schopenhauerian influence on TLP. This is a useful corrective to the monolithic Fregean/Russellian interpretations. But Weiner does overstate his conclusions. For the existence of Schopenhauerian metaphors or terminology does not justify a sweeping Schopenhauerian interpretation of the text. That could even lead to a misunderstanding of the way in which Schopenhauer did influence TLP. The project cannot be to rewrite TLP in nineteenth-century terms. Whenever one finds allusions to Schopenhauerian ideas one must ask to what extent such ideas even could be carried over into Wittgenstein's "treatise on logical philosophy." RICHARD McDoNoUGH University of Tulsa Julian Young. Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xiii + 17o. $44.95. Someone just entering the seductive maze of Nietzsche's thought would do well to take Julian Young's lucid, sympathetic, yet critical Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art for a guide. Mindful of its focus on art, the book offers "a particular perspective on the development of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole," "a philosophical biography, a record of the twists and turns taken by Nietzsche's philosophy" (2). Young divides this development into four periods: 1. a872-1876. That The Birth of Tragedy shows Nietzsche still dominated by Schopenhauerian metaphysics is difficult to contest; more questionable is Young's wellsupported claim that Nietzche's proposed response to life's pain and absurdity remains profoundly Schopenhauerian: Nietzsche, too, offers two escape routes, the flight to Apollonian illusion and, to those in need of stronger medicine, "heady draughts of Dionysian intoxication" that " 'kill' the consciousness of what it is to be human" (54). 9. 1876-1889. In Human, All-Too-Human we meet with a very different, much more optimistic and life-affirming stance. Still developing a Schopenhauerian theme, what used to be "thing-in-itself" or "will" is now naturalized, biologized. With such naturalization goes a new confidence in our ability to understand and control nature. No longer the villain, science now promises real progress. At no point does Nietzsche seem so close to Hegel--a point not made by Young. That goes especially for many of his propositions on art. The suggestion that we live "in the 'evening twilight' of art," that "the artist will soon be regarded as a 'glorious relic' " (Human, All-Too-Human I, a33) of a more primitive culture, someone whom we honor for past services, but (like Plato and for Plato's reasons--art distracts us from "reality and truth") "show finally the door" (7 t), invites comparison with Hegel's theses on the death of art in its highest sense: the progress of reason has to leave art behind. 472 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:3 JULY 199 3 But already in AssortedOpiniom and Maxims, Nietzsche regains a sense of the indispensability of art as he recognizes that science lacks the power to create values. For that art is needed, which is now given the task of " 'signposting' the future" (73). In the tradition of Winckelmann Nietzsche tends to equate such art with classical art, at times with a "monomania that helps here to give Nietzsche's neo-Hellenism the face of aesthetic Stalinism" (79)- It is this vocation that Wagner, along with so many modern, decadent artists, is thought to have betrayed: "Artist as legislator of high values for the future has been replaced by artist as panderer to low tastes of the present" (91). 3. 188~--1887. In the period of The Gay Scienceand Zarathustra "Nietzsche's scientism evaporates" (148). Art and the possibility of living aesthetically regain much of their former importance, as a Schopenhauerian pessimism reasserts itself and with it the need for aesthetic illusion as the one thing that can make life bearable. As already in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche offers an evasive, superficial, Apollonian, and a more profound, ecstatic, Dionysian solution: the eternal recurrence. 4. 1888. In...