Friedrich Nietzsche on Art for Art's Sake

20. Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man — and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed. Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually deprives him of strength. One can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something "ugly." His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride — all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful. In both cases we draw an inference: the premises for it are piled up in the greatest abundance in instinct. The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgment of "ugly." Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition — even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol — all evoke the same reaction, the value judgment, "ugly." A hatred is aroused — but whom does man hate then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness — it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep.

[...]

24. L'art pour l'art. — The fight against purpose in art is always a fight against the moralizing tendency in art, against its subordination to morality. L'art pour l'art means, "The devil take morality!" But even this hostility still betrays the overpowering force of the prejudice. When the purpose of moral preaching and of improving man has been excluded from art, it still does not follow by any means that art is altogether purposeless, aimless, senseless — in short, l'art pour l'art, a worm chewing its own tail. "Rather no purpose at all than a moral purpose!" — that is the talk of mere passion. A psychologist, on the other hand, asks: what does all art do? does it not praise? glorify? choose? prefer? With all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations. Is this merely a "moreover"? an accident? something in which the artist's instinct had no share? Or is it not the very presupposition of the artist's ability? Does his basic instinct aim at art, or rather at the sense of art, at life? at a desirability of life? Art is the great stimulus to life: how could one understand it as purposeless, as aimless, as l'art pour l'art? One question remains: art also makes apparent much that is ugly, hard, and questionable in life; does it not thereby spoil life for us? And indeed there have been philosophers who attributed this sense to it: "liberation from the will" was what Schopenhauer taught as the overall end of art; and with admiration he found the great utility of tragedy in its "evoking resignation." But this, as I have already suggested, is the pessimist's perspective and "evil eye." We must appeal to the artists themselves. What does the tragic artist communicate of himself? Is it not precisely the state without fear in the face of the fearful and questionable that he is showing? This state itself is a great desideratum, whoever knows it, honors it with the greatest honors. He communicates it — must communicate it, provided he is an artist, a genius of communication. Courage and freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy, before a sublime calamity, before a problem that arouses dread — this triumphant state is what the tragic artist chooses, what he glorifies. Before tragedy, what is warlike in our soul celebrates its Saturnalia; whoever is used to suffering, whoever seeks out suffering, the heroic man praises his own being through tragedy — to him alone the tragedian presents this drink of sweetest cruelty.

---

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, accessed March 20, 2017, http://www.inp.uw.edu.pl/mdsie/Political_Thought/twilight-of-the-idols-friedrich-neitzsche.pdf.

Repost: Nick Land: On Savage Atheism

A central and insistent tenet of Schopenhauer’s philosophy is that intellect, personality, and consciousness are extremely superficial and derivative characteristics of complex nervous-systems, and are thus radically untypical of the nature of the cosmos, which is driven by impersonal and unconscious forces.

– Nick Land, A Thirst For Annihilation (Routledge, 1992)

The point that Land makes in this small section on the battle between German Idealism and the Kantian cosmology which Schopenhauer detested is that Kant and his followers brought back religion by way of the back door. Kant himself destroyed the pre-critical proofs of God only to rebuild and construct a new theistic cosmology in which he installed “faith guided by moral necessity” at the center of the human project. Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the other hand would break free of this hidden monotheistic agenda and replace it with – as Land puts it: a “savage atheism”, that attacked the very foundations of the humanistic project and its anthropocentric cosmology and philosophical presumption of human exceptionalism. While Schopenhauer considered theism to be the “apotheosis of immorality: a wretched attachment to the principle of identity” his student, Nietzsche would go even further and develop a philosophy and cosmology that put life itself at the service of “unconscious trans-individual creative energy”.

For those of us who see the future connected to a disconnect or bifurcation from the human into the inhuman Land reminds us of Nietzsche’s original diagnosis:

The end of humanity does not lie within itself, but in a planetary artistic experiment about which nothing can be said in advance, and which can only be provisionally labelled ‘overman’. For overman (“Übermensch“) is not a superior model of man, but that which is beyond man; the creative surpassing of humanity. (pp. 15-16)

David Roden outlines in his book Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human the ‘disconnect thesis’ such a possibility of the posthuman future in which humans might just be a thing of the past: “I have characterized posthumans in very general terms as hypothetical wide “descendants” of current humans that are no longer human in consequence of some history of technological alteration” (Roden, David (2014-10-10). Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human [Kindle Locations 2411-2412]. Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition). What he argues for is that the difference between humans and these future beings “should be conceived as an emergent disconnection between individuals, not in terms of the presence or lack of essential properties. I also suggest that these individuals should not be conceived in narrow biological terms but in “wide” terms permitting biological, cultural and technological relations of descent between human and posthuman. (Roden, KL 2423-2426)

However else it is possible to divide Western thinking, one fissure can be teased-open separating the theo-humanists—croaking together in the cramped and malodorous pond of Anthropos—from the wild beasts of the impersonal. The former are characterized by their moral fervour, parochialism, earnestness, phenomenological disposition, and Aborting the human race sympathy for folk superstition, the latter by their fatalism, atheism, strangely reptilian exuberance, and extreme sensitivity for what is icy, savage, and alien to mankind.

– Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation

Antihumanism: A Savage Atheism

In a specifically pointed critique of Jaques Derrida’s post-structuralist project of ‘deconstruction’ Land will tell us that we should not confuse his anti-humanistic philosophy with Nietzsche’s antihumanism. Land will show that the threads of a libidinal or energetic materialism that runs from Kant, through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to Freud and Bataille among others should not be confused with the deconstructionist phenomenological approach of Derrida and his anti-realist kindred. The difference between Nietzsche’s “aggressive genealogies that wreck unity on zero, and Derrida’s pursuit of the interminable borderlands between presence and absence” are light years apart. Derrida falls in line with those of the German Idealist traditions and the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger in aligning themselves with Hegel’s superficial phenomenology of reason, identity, and negation as modes of presence. (ibid. 17) Derrida’s limpid repetitions of the oppositional matrix of signs, signifiers, and signified in an endless binary writing that as Land will suggest operates in a triangular mode of opposing both sides of the binary opposition using a “partially concealed pseudo-concept with incoherent predicates that typify his concept of “presencing” or “writing” which is consummated in a given deconstruction leads to an insipid reading of history and existence as a form of endless equivocation. This endless inability to decide on the undecidable leads to a rather limpid nihilism of the word rather than an aggressive mode of revolt against the Word.

As Land will suggest of another post-modern laborer in the field of undecidability and irony Jean-François Lyotard follows his master, Derrida, in a false and limpid “disinvestment of monotheism”, one of forgetting God rather than revolting against the religious stance in itself. What Land despises in Derrida and Lyotard is there [sic] supposition that atheism is an instance of negation, rather than a transmutation or transvaluation of its sense. (ibid. p. 18) Instead Nietzsche offers against the negation of a limpid antihumanistic display of negative theology a much more insidious critique of Christianity. As Land tells us:

Zero is fatally discovered beneath the scabrous crust of logical negativity. It is obscurantism of the most tediously familiar kind to suggest that the ‘nothing’ of nihilism is an indissoluble theological concept. The nihil is not a concept at all, but rather immensity and fate. Nietzsche describes atheism as an open horizon, as a loss of inhibition. The ‘a-‘ of atheism is privative only in the sense of a collapsing dam. (idid. p. 19)

---

Source: S.C. Hickman, "Nick Land: On Savage Atheism," Alien Ecologies blog, June 9, 2015, accessed July 18, 2015, http://darkecologies.com/2015/06/09/nick-land-on-savage-atheism/.

Nietzsche on Unconscious Influences of Philosophy

After such self-questioning, self-temptation, one acquires a subtler eye for all philosophizing to date; one is better than before at guessing the involuntary detours, alleyways, resting places, and sunning places of thought to which suffering thinkers are led and misled on account of their suffering; one now knows where the sick body and its needs unconsciously urge, push, and lure the mind – towards sun, stillness, mildness, patience, medicine, balm in some sense. Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, a final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not illness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes frighteningly far – and I have asked myself often enough whether, on a grand scale, philosophy has been no more than an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. Behind the highest value judgments that have hitherto guided the history of thought are concealed misunderstandings of the physical constitution – of individuals or classes or even whole races. All those bold lunacies of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as symptoms of certain bodies [....] I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of the term – someone who has set himself the task of pursuing the problem of the total health of a people, time, race or of humanity – to summon the courage at last to push my suspicion to its limit and risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all 'truth' but rather something else – let us say health, future, growth, power, life... [...]

A philosopher who has passed through many kinds of health, and keeps passing through them again and again, has passed through an equal number of philosophies; he simply cannot but translate his state every time into the most spiritual form and distance – this art of transfiguration just is philosophy. We philosophers are not free to separate soul from body as the common people do; we are even less free to separate soul from spirit. We are not thinking frogs, no objectifying and registering devices with frozen innards – we must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and maternally endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and disaster. Life – to us, that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame, and also all that wounds us; we simply can do no other.

---

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. by Bernard Williams, trans. by Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 5–6.

Nietzsche on Modern Marriage and Romance

This sounds like bigoted, misogynistic conservatism to modern ears:

---

The things that make an institution into an institution are despised, hated, rejected: people think that they are in danger of a new sort of slavery when the word 'authority' is so much as spoken out loud. The value-instincts of our politicians, our political parties, are so decadent that they instinctively prefer things that disintegrate, that accelerate the end ... Witness modern marriage. It is clear that modern marriage is completely irrational: but this is an objection to modernity, not to marriage. The rationality of marriage lay in the fact that the husband has sole juridical responsibility: this gave marriage a centre [sic] of balance, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage lay in its principled indissolubility, which gave it an accent that knew how to be heard above the accidents of feeling, passion, and the distractions of the moment. The rationality also lay in the family's responsibility for choosing the spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the whole basis of marriage has been eliminated, the very thing that made it an institution in the first place. You never, ever base an institution on an idiosyncrasy, and, as I have said, you do not base marriage on 'love',—you base it on the sex drive; on the drive for property (woman and child as property); on the drive to dominate that keeps organizing the family (the smallest unit of domination), that needs children and heirs in order to maintain (even physiologically) the measure of power, influence, and wealth that has been achieved, in order to prepare for long tasks, for a solidarity of instincts between the centuries. Marriage as an institution already affirms the greatest, most enduring form of organization: when society cannot work as a whole to extend an affirmation to the most distant generations, marriage has stopped making sense.—Modern marriage has lost its meaning,—consequently, it is being abolished.

---

Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-Christ, Ecee Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 215.

Paul Ricoeur on the Critique of Religion and the Masters of Suspicion

These masters of suspicion have nurtured the modern context to the point that religion and religious interpretation will [...] have to face the challenge they represent. We are hereafter, as modern religious subjects and believing communities that desire mature faith, required to do business with the iconoclastic panoply of interpretation generated in work of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Ricoeur writes:

What we have appropriated to ourselves is first, the critique of religion as a mask, a mask of fear, a mask of domination, a mask of hate. A Marxist critique of ideology, a Nietzschean critique of resentment and a Freudian critique of infantile distress, are hereafter the views through which any kind of mediation of faith must past.

---

Source: Paul Ricoeur, "Two Essays by Paul Ricoeur: The Critique of Religion and the Language of Faith," in Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 28, no. 3 (Spring 1973): 209, in Richard R. Topping, Revelation, Scripture and Church: Theological Hermeneutic Thought of James Barr, Paul Ricoeur and Hans Frei (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2007), 178.

"Becoming Truly Great" by Br. Patrick Mary Briscoe, OP

You should not beautify Christianity or try to dress it up: it has waged a war to the death against [the] higher type of person, it has banned all the basic instincts of this type, it has distilled ‘evil’ and ‘the Evil One’ out of these instincts—the strong human being as reprehensible, as ‘depraved’ Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, failed, it has made an ideal out of whatever contradicts the preservation instincts of a strong life . . .

So writes the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his controversial book, The Anti-Christ. Throughout much of his work, but particularly in The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche makes the now widespread accusation that Christianity demands of its adherents submission to a morality fundamentally opposed to the fullness of life. Nietzsche contends, Christianity—along with Platonism and Judaism—prevents one from being fully and truly alive for the sake of transcendental doctrines. For example, he claims that the notion of “sin” makes Christians ashamed of instinct and sexuality, while “faith” discourages believers’ natural curiosity and deadens their desire to know.

I think it negligent to simply dismiss Nietzsche’s claims. Some Christians’ bad habits and deformed understandings of their faith too often lend credence to Nietzsche’s troubling assertions. How many Christians brush off questions about the faith and swiftly end discussion by chalking an answer up to “mystery,” a quotation from Scripture pulled out-of-context, or the appeal to some other authority? How many Christians, when presenting the faith, choose to lead off with repulsively rigid articulations of morality? How many Christians, by the example of their lives, appear numbed to beauty or apparently lack joy and zest for life? Nietzsche’s criticism reflects many people’s experience that the Christian life seems narrow and constricting, repressing our natural desires and tendencies in unhealthy ways.

“We Christians weren’t chosen by the Lord to do little things,” said Pope Francis in a recent homily to confirmation candidates. Far from constricting human nature, a thorough examination of the Gospel reveals that Jesus Christ, the Word, “was life and the life was the light of all people” (John 1:4). The graces of the Gospel compel us to seek out the accomplishment of grand things.

Without the Gospel, the lives of many great saints easily conform to Nietzsche’s scathing indictment. Mother Teresa’s dedication to the poor [...] Maximillian Kolbe’s act of self-offering [...] Vincent de Paul’s care for the poor [...] Bonaventure’s years of theological reflection [....]

Authentic Christian teaching confronts this accusation head-on, proclaiming that the Gospel message properly interpreted builds man up rather than constrains man. In fact, St. Thomas is so bold as to say, “There is in man something great which he possesses through the gift of God; and something defective which accrues to him through the weakness of nature. Accordingly magnanimity makes a man deem himself worthy of great things in consideration of the gifts he holds from God.”

The Christian tradition takes hold of magnanimity—the greatness of soul—from ancient thinkers and transforms it in light of the Incarnation. Like all virtues magnanimity disposes us to readily perform good acts. Magnanimity, the virtue which arouses in us aspirations to achieve feats worthy of great honor, can be thought of as a confidence. In other words, true magnanimity inspires man to greatness. Since all the virtues act in conformity with our nature, raising us up, magnanimity perfects us. Understanding magnanimity’s role in the spiritual life helps us to see the place in the Christian life of seeking after greatness.

But are we left caught in an interminable struggle between magnanimity and humility? Hardly. Central to a correct understanding of humility and magnanimity is the idea that both virtues are grounded in seeing things as they really are. St. Teresa of Avila, for example, says humility is simply truth. [...]

Not just a promise for the future or a solace for the weak-minded, the joy and vigor of the Gospel are intended for all people in every time and place. The virtue of magnanimity orients believers to seek and strive after the loftiest of aspirations. Empowered by grace and aided by virtue, great-souled believers become who they were made to be.

---

Source: Patrick Mary Briscoe, "Becoming Truly Great," Dominicana Blog, November 5, 2013, accessed November 5, 2013, http://www.dominicanablog.com/2013/11/05/becoming-truly-great/