Spiros Doikas - Metaphysics of Art

METAPHYSICS OF ART

© Spiros Doikas

http://www.translatum.gr/etexts/moart.htm

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment ofthe requirements for the degree of BA (Hons)English Studies, in the Department of English

and History, Manchester Metropolitan University.

March 1995

© Spiros Doikas, Metaphysics of Art - http://www.translatum.gr/cv.htm(1995)

http://www.translatum.gr/cv.htm

http://www.translatum.gr/etexts/moart.htm


CONTENTS

Abstract

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . .

. . . . . 4

Introduction . . . . . . . .

. . . . . 6

Chapter 1: Schopenhauer . . . . . . . .

. . . . . 12

Chapter 2: The Birth of Tragedy

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Chapter 3: Music versus Language

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Chapter 4: Art as Philosophy . . . . . . . .

. . . . 27

Chapter 5: Ethics . . . . . . . .

. . . . . 31

Chapter 6: Art versus Truth

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 34



Chapter 7: Science and Metaphysics

. . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Chapter 8: The Psychology of Art

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Chapter 9: Art as Applied Physiology

. . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Chapter 10: Erotics of Art

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Conclusion . . . . . . . .

. . . . . 50

Post Scriptum

. . . . . . . . . . . 53

Addendum I: Nietzsche and Keats

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Addendum II: Cassette contents

. . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Bibliography . . . . . . . .

. . . . . 59



ABSTRACT

This study is an examination of Schopenhauer’s and

Nietzsche's theories of art (with greater emphasis on

the latter) and especially the part whereof that it is

intricately woven with the assumption of a copula

between aesthetics and metaphysics. This assumption

will be discussed within a wider philosophical context

that will demonstrate its relatedness, as a reaction

to, or an enhancement of, other areas of philosophical

interest that inevitably impinge upon the

aesthetics/metaphysics binary. These areas are

epistemology, ethics, psychology, psychobiology,

science and erotics.

© Spiros Doikas, Metaphysics of Art -http://www.translatum.gr/cv.htm (1995)


Acknowledgments

I am grateful towards all those that have preceded me

in their critical appreciation of Nietzsche for the

obvious reasons. I feel inclined to bestow individual

praise upon the following works: Silk & Stern’s,

Nietzsche on Tragedy, for the exhaustiveness and

meticulousness with which they tackled every single

aspect in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy; Julian Young’s

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, for its succinctness, clarity,

and observations that relate Nietzsche's relevance

today; JR Hollingdale’s, Nietzsche, for a wide range of

observations; Erich Heller’s, The Importance of Nietzsche,

for a series of extremely useful comparative

approaches; Gillespie & Strong’s (ed), Nietzsche's New

Seas, for an excellent selection of

deconstructionalist and hermeneutic essays on

Nietzsche; and, most importantly, Ellen Dissanayke’s

opus mirabilis, Homo Aestheticus, which has been an

epiphany with an effect comparable only to Nietzsche's

Birth of Tragedy. Finally, I would like to express my

gratitude for my dissertation tutor, Laurence Coupe,

for his humorous and inspiring (albeit post-modern)

lecturing on the domain of literary theory.



To say it once again: today I find it animpossible book - badly written, clumsy andembarrassing, its images frenzied andconfused, sentimental, in some placessaccharine-sweet to the point of effeminacy,uneven in pace, lacking in any desire forlogical purity, so sure of its convictionsthat it is above any need for proof, and evensuspicious of the propriety of proof, a bookfor initiates, ‘music’ for those who have beenbaptized in the name of music and who arerelated from the first by their rare andcommon experiences in art, a shibboleth forfirst cousins in artibus - an arrogant andfanatical book that wished from the start toexclude the profanum vulgus of the ‘educated’even more than the ‘people’; but a book whichhas a strange knack of seeking out its fellowrevelers and enticing them on to new secretpaths and dancing places. What foundexpression here was a strange voice ofsomething like a mystical and maenadic soul,stammering laboriously and at random in aforeign tongue, almost unsure whether itwished to communicate or conceal. It shouldhave been singing this ‘new soul’, notspeaking!



INTRODUCTION

I was in love with art, passionately in love, and in thewhole of existence saw

nothing else than art - and this at an age when,reasonably enough, quite

different passions possess the soul.

Nietzsche contra Wagner

1

‘To be human is to go beyond physics’1- thus spoke

Diderot. But, perhaps, one has to have something

Übermenschlich (superhuman) in order to indulge to such

degree in the intellectual debauchery of metaphysics.

Superhuman, or, simply, an artist: the case with Nietzsche,

the advocate of non-theological metaphysics, the advocate of

the metaphysics of art.

In the metaphysics of art nothing is more positively

true than the negation of the affective fallacy, or, to wax

rhetorical, the affirmation of the affective infallibility.

Thus the metaphysics of art have swung far from notions of

‘objective criticism’ perhaps because the subject of the

1The Sunday Times, 15 May 1994



metaphysical condition has transcended criticism in his

tremendous sensibility of appreciation.

On the other hand, there is a certain amount of

audacity in the term metaphysics of art as there is a

certain amount of audacity in the term metaphysics. For Lord

Bowen (1835-1894) a metaphysician is a ‘blind man in a dark

room - looking for a black hat - which isn’t there2’. The

metaphysician of art -or should I say the metaphysical

artist- might, indeed, partake of the same predicament,

only that his search is accompanied by the sound of his

voice humming a favourite tune, and that when he fails to

find the hat he can only murmur in indifference: je m’en fou !

- and go on humming his favourite tune for as long as he

has a breath to breathe and a voice to sing.

2

Each of the two words that comprise the title of this

dissertation carries an enormous load of connotative

meaning, which is the result of aeons of human civilization.

Two of the biggest branches of philosophy -metaphysics and

aesthetics- are merged into one. Indeed, their combination

equals an overload of interrelations, contradictions and

juxtapositions that could inadvertently end up in a semantic

explosion, or, even, a pyrotechnical display where

2The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, p.45



signifiers and signifieds rave in the tunes of nominal

aphasia3. In order to further justify my choice of title, I

shall invoke the sheer perlocutionary force of this utterance. I

explain myself: It duly has an exaggerated ring to it as I

find this is the only one that sufficiently encapsulates the

awe of the artistic psyche at work. Moreover, this

particular choice is neither irrelevant, nor arbitrary. The

concept of the metaphysics of art occupies a significant

place in the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Even though the emphasis will be on Nietzsche,

Schopenhauer will occupy a significant part as he has been

extremely influential to the development of the Nietzschean

philosophy of art. My approach will be multidisciplinary

combining philosophical analysis, literary and music

criticism, psychology, science and psychobiology. Apart

from strictly academic material, I shall refer to articles

of the daily press that bear a relevance to the subject and,

at the same time, embody in the shape of specific

individuals the concepts I shall be trying to investigate.

Psychological analysis will also be crucial in my text as I

believe that the idiosyncraticity of the author and the

texts under scrutiny fully justify this approach.

3Aphasia in which the primary symptom is an inability to recognize wordsand to speak the right word (CollinsDictionary p.1019)



3

I justify scholars like Julian Young who advocated that

a holistic approach is necessary when one talks about

Nietzsche’s philosophy of art. For, indeed, art is the

central axis on which Nietzsche’s philosophy revolves as it

relates directly to his metaphysics which has been,

according to Schopenhauer, the branch of philosophy that has

traditionally recruited philosophers. Furthermore, as

hermeneutics has taught us, we cannot really comprehend the

meaning of a part until we have grasped its place in the

whole to which it belongs. Similarly, the comprehension of

the work will be enhanced if we comprehend the author. The

author is not altogether dead. Non omnis moriar4 is

undoubtedly the most appropriate utterance that should

accompany a writer of metaphysics in the grave.

So, what sort of philosopher Nietzsche was? What drove

him into this profession which during his lifetime gave him

little, if not none, worldly benefits? This is indeed a

burning question for students of any philosophy and

particularly relevant to students of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

It goes deep into the motivation that lead somebody into

philosophizing. Thus, if we know why someone is doing

something then it is easier for us to understand what he is

doing.

4Horace, Odes, 6



4

There are two kinds of philosophers. The most common is

the ones that encountered philosophical problems as

students, through the work of others, and being intelligent,

they may be good at coming to grips with. If they excel, the

academia offers them the possibility of making it a career.

Thus, they acquire the material means of surviving and

supporting their family and at the same time enjoying the

respect that such a post entails. It becomes another way of

making one’s living in this world by adapting to the laws of

offer and demand that regulate the employment market. The

above, however, is a response to extrinsic rather than

intrinsic needs. It does not necessarily entail

spirituality. As Nietzsche says: ‘one can be even a great

scholar without possessing any spirit at all’5.

On the other hand, for Nietzsche philosophy was an

imperative need, the unique conceivable mode of existence.

It derived from the very depths of the abysses he was trying

to gauge and his attempts to tame them so that they will

meekly transform themselves into words and tones. The sheer

passion of his scripture has very few parallels; indeed, it

seems as if for him writing is a very literal means of

extending his life to the length of another daybreak. I find

fully justified the statement that Nietzsche's scripture has

the passion of a religious document; perhaps, by means of a5Twilight of the Idols (1986) p.61



theological style, he gives an alternative direction to his

deeply religious and unbelieving at the same time nature.

For him, a leap of faith, was a leap of faith in art. A salto

salvante, in a concrete reality which could be empirically

experienced, as opposed to a salto mortale to Christianity’s

‘hangman’s metaphysics6’.

5

Ever since I started reading Nietzsche I had this

peculiar feeling that his writing style, as well as the

essence of the ideas he was trying to convey, had something

intensely musical. And, in specific, after the reading of

his work I found myself in a similar mood as in the mood

that followed my listening to music. Later on, as I delved

deeper and deeper into Nietzsche and Nietzsche-related

literature the clues proliferated and it seemed that I was

not the only one who has experienced such strange intuitive

aperçus7. Indeed, it dawned on me that for Nietzsche writing

(‘speaking’) was some sort of sublimation for his poor

compositional talent, “it should have been singing this ‘new

soul’, not speaking!8”, and again his prose appears to be

‘music to those who have been baptized in the name of

6Allusion to the Twilight of the Idols (1968), p.537 An example of this can be found in the Introduction to BT by MichaelTanner, p.xxvi ‘and to ask them {readers of the BT} how they have beenaffected by it is like asking how one has been affected by anoverpowering piece of music’8 The Birth of Tragedy (1993) p.6



music9’. Nietzsche even refers to Schiller implying that the

genesis of creative writing is due to a pre-existing musical

mood: ‘in the state prior to the act of writing, he does not

claim to have had within him an ordered causality of ideas,

but rather a musical mood10’. And he goes on to add: ‘For

me...a certain musical atmosphere of moods precedes it

{writing} and the poetic idea only comes afterwards11’.

Thus, the wheel has come full circle - a musical mood being

the raw material for creative writing, and creative writing

once read producing a musical mood.

To my knowledge I am the only one to make such vast an

assertion given Nietzsche's status as an adroit manipulator

of words and concepts but, mutatis mutandis, I strongly

believe in its validity. And of course, this is more obvious

in The Birth of Tragedy, which seems to be a seminal text, a

manifesto in the metaphysics of art and the metaphysics of

music in particular. Thus, BT, shall be the text to be

scrutinized in this study, though not to the detriment of

Nietzsche's prolific references in art and music in other

volumes of his work.

6

What transpires after the study of Nietzsche is his

conception of the function of art as something inherently

9The Birth of Tragedy, 1993, p.610The Birth of Tragedy (1993) p.2911The Birth of Tragedy (1993) p.29



life-affirming even at moments when the horror and terror

of existence is most intensely felt. It is this unique

possibility of the artist to transmute his pain into art

that ultimately gives a life-affirming value in suffering as

big as the aesthetic exaltation that will be derived from

the ensuing contact with the work of art itself. And music

is considered to be the highest of the arts; it is not by

chance that the full title of Nietzsche’s aesthetico-

metaphysical manifesto is The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of

Music. Thus, he unites art (music) and tragedy in another

interpenetrating duality.

7

Indeed, it is my profound love and empathy for

Nietzsche, music and tragedy (in the wider sense) that has

made me write this. Or should I say that my love for

Nietzsche, music and tragedy is my love for one and the same

thing?

8

What will ensue is not a hermeneutics of art but an

erotics of art - if ‘ethics and aesthetics are one and the

same’12erotics of art and metaphysics of art are one and the

same as well.

12Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logicophilosophicus 6.421



CHAPTER 1

SCHOPENHAUER

1

Undoubtedly, one would commit a grave error if he were

to talk extensively about Nietzsche without referring to

Schopenhauer. Nietzsche, having encountered the former’s

magnum opus The World as Will and Representation (or Idea as it is

sometimes translated) at a young age had had a unique

epiphany. His works, BT to a major extent, abound in

prolific and longwinded references to Schopenhauer. Indeed,

he assimilated Schopenhauer to the extend of ventriloquism.

Therefore, I shall briefly discuss the major concepts

relating to Schopenhauer’s philosophy in general and then,

to a greater extend, his own philosophy of art.

The key tenet in Schopenhauer’s philosophy is the Will:

(Idea being a direct adoption from Plato) the inaccessible

metaphysical substratum of all natural phenomena. He bestows

this name upon more or less everything, from the power of

gravity to the fatal attraction that brings two human beings

together - a kind of conceptual panacea for every

conceivable disease of our interpretative apparatus.

Everybody is primarily a subject of the ‘will’, viewing the

external world, the animate and inanimate objects, either as

threats to one’s existence or as potential satisfiers of

one’s desires. The implicit atomism of the above leads us



into another of Schopenhauer’s favourite concepts, the heavy

artillery so to speak, of his pessimistic Weltanschauung: it

is the principium individuationis, according to which ‘we mortal

millions live alone’ without any possibility of fellow

feeling. The world of the principium individuationis is the

Darwinian world of terror and suffering, of the survival of

the fittest, in which nature arbitrarily bestows and

withdraws life. In existentialist terminology this would be

described as the human condition.

And here comes more evidence Schopenhauer’s rampant

pessimism, as, for him, life is essentially an oscillation

between pain, anxiety and boredom; and even things that

satisfy our will are essentially negative as they bring

about satiation. In other words an elaboration on the good

old Latin theme of post coitum omne animal triste est13. Thus, we are

trapped in a sisyphean nightmare wherein desire is doomed to

be followed by either satiation or frustration, experiencing

our life as the inescapable prisonhouse of the will. One

here could exclaim: ‘thank Will!’ (instead of ‘thank God!’),

man is an animal alright; but an animal metaphysicum. And I

would like to minimally modify Schopenhauer’s dictum by

means of a monolexical addition: animal aestheticum

metaphysicum.

2

13Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, p.7



So, lo and behold, here comes the winged chariot of art

with the delightful load of 14, the revival of the deus

ex machina that purges us from the tragic tyranny of the will

and transports us to the cathartic world of

disinterestedness, the world of pure aesthetic contemplation. Yes,

it is from Kant that Schopenhauer inherited the concept of

disinterested aesthetic contemplation, but it is much to his

credit that he has taken it a step further.

I explain myself: humans plagued by the insistent

torment of the will long for a release from its insidious

bondage. And the only alternative to death (for this is the

release par excellence), according to Schopenhauer, can be

found in art. But how, exactly, art acquires this attribute?

I shall answer this question by relating Schopenhauer’s

definition of the beautiful and his theory on, what I call,

aesthetic cosmology.

Schopenhauer defines The Beautiful as ‘the essential and

original forms of animate and inanimate nature - in Platonic

language, the Ideas; and these can be apprehended only by

their essential correlate, a knowing subject free from will; in

other words, a pure intelligence without purpose or ends in

view15’. As a result of this the will is absent at the time

when a subject operates in the aesthetic mode, and as the

will is the cause of all suffering we automatically dispense14I am referring to the nine ancient Greek deities each one representinga particular art.15Schopenhauer (1951) The Metaphysics of Fine Art (essay), p.83



with suffering altogether. And he goes on to add what I

consider a contradiction, or, at its best, a fallacious

misuse of language: ‘This is what explains the feeling of

pleasure {my italics} which accompanies the perception of the

Beautiful16’. This statement is contradictory with what he

claims a few lines below, namely that happiness and

satisfaction are negative in nature and that by taking away

the possibility of suffering one takes away also the

possibility of enjoyment. And my aporetic remark to Mr

Schopenhauer is: how is it possible if, having bypassed the

will (and therefore the possibility of experiencing

suffering or enjoyment) one is able to feel pleasure as a

result of the aesthetic mode of perception? In a further

refinement of his theory Schopenhauer explains this pleasure

as a form of oblivious absorption in the object of

contemplation whereby one is freed from oneself by becoming

a pure intelligence. But still, this does not explain his

ambiguous semantics.

I shall have to abort further treatment of the above

point of controversy in order to relate Schopenhauer’s

aesthetic cosmology. And, inevitably, it has to do with the

omnipresent concept of the will. The will then, can be

perceivable to us through, what Schopenhauer calls, its self-

objectification. The will’s self-objectification in the world

is roughly divided in four categories: inorganic matter,

16ibid, p.83



plant life, animal life and human life. This constituting a

developmental chain in more complex forms of being. And here

comes the crux: as every object in the world of phenomena

has to belong in one of these categories then its aesthetic

value is analogous to the complexity of the category to

which it bears a stronger affiliation. A corollary of this

being the diversification of the abstraction ‘art’ into the

‘more concrete’ abstractions of individual arts. For example

the art most closely related with inorganic matter is

architecture.

At the pinnacle of will’s self-objectification, as an

analogy to intelligent human life, stands language, and,

more specifically, the verbal arts. Of them, poetic drama

being the non plus ultra of the linguistic medium’s possible

refinement. This because it combines the esoteric, the

elegant expression of psychological states, and the

exoteric, the unfolding of action, characterization, fate.

And, in its turn, tragedy being the non plus ultra of poetic

drama. But why tragedy?

3

First, what is tragedy? Tragedy is ‘ the description of

the terrible side of life17’ everything sinister and

deflating, everything that turns awry, everything that adds

suffering to those that deserve exaltation and bestows

17Schopenhauer (1966 Vol. I) p.252



honours to those that deserve suffering. Tragedy is being in

a position where you have to utter unanswerable and

harrowing aporias like: ‘Why should a dog, a rat, a horse,

have life/ and thou no breath at all18?’ And why? Because it

hints at a possible reconciliation with the prospect of our

personal ceasing of existence, it liberates us from the

oppression of the will by intimating a world in which living

can be seen as no longer desirable - and these heightened by

the aesthetic effect of tragedy. Furthermore, precisely by

means of the aesthetic effect, it hints on a different world

that we can only intuitively apprehend, which annihilates

the will-to-live. And it is this moment that constitutes the

most metaphysical instantiation of a tragedy.

In the light of the above we have to see instances like

the time when Gloucester, blinded and painfully aware of his

unjust treatment of his lawful son Elgar, is being attacked

by Oswald, and not only makes no effort to save himself but

says: ‘Now let thy friendly hand/ Put strength enough

to’t19’. It is an unconditional acceptance and embracing of

what Schopenhauer calls ‘complete knowledge of the real

nature of the world’ that has been acquired by ‘ the noblest

man, after a long conflict and suffering, finally renounce

for ever all the pleasures of life and...cheerfully and

willingly give up life itself20’. In every great tragedy we

18King Lear Act V sc.iii 308-1019King Lear Act IV Sc. VI 25520Schopenhauer (1966 Vol. I) p.253



have such moments when the will-to-live is totally and

wholeheartedly denied. But perhaps the most characteristic

example is found in ancient Greek tragedy, and in specific,

in Sophocles’, Oedipus Coloneus: ‘not to be born is, past all

prizing, best, and, failing that, to die soon’.

4

But, having talked about verbal arts, there appears to

be one art which deservedly leads a solo career in

Schopenhauer’s account of the objectification of the will in

the world and, following this, the representation of the

world in art’s mimetic attempt of the Platonic Ideas.

All arts portray what already exists in the world by

means of imitating Ideas. That is to say, they have nothing

to do with the will itself, but draw on the second level of

reality which is the Platonic Ideas. Hence all of them

objectify the will only indirectly. There is one art in

which we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any

Idea of the inner nature of the world. Therefore, it could

still exist even if there were no world at all. At this

point one might have already guessed that I am talking about

music. Music is different from other arts insofar as it is

not a copy of the Ideas but a copy of the will itself. And that is

how Schopenhauer explains the dramatic emotional effect of

music for ‘other arts speak only of the shadow, but music of



the essence21’. He expands on his justification of the

emotional effects of music in more detail by saying:

‘it never expresses the phenomenon , but only the innernature, the in-itself of every phenomenon, the will itself.Therefore music does not express this or that particular anddefinite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow,horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind, but joy, pain,sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mindthemselves...’22

And since music is directly a copy of will itself it

therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical

in this world. But Schopenhauer goes even further than that

claiming that another implication of music being a direct

copy of the will is that we could call the world embodied

music! He supports his argument by considering this the

reason why every scene from everyday life seems to acquire a

higher significance if it be accompanied with the analogous

melody: ‘to the man that gives himself up entirely to the

impression of a symphony, it is as if he saw all the

possible events of life and of the world passing by within

himself...23’

What I consider, though, to be Schopenhauer’s most

metaphysical statements about music are firstly, the one

relating music in the more concrete terms of human,

intelligent existence: ‘Music is an unconscious exercize in

21Schopenhauer (1966 Vol.1) p.25722ibid, p.26123Schopenhauer 1966, p.262-3



metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is

philosophizing’24 and secondly, one that goes even further

than that, maintaining what could be characterized as the

hagiography of the musical creator:

‘Since music is the only language with the contradictoryattributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable,the musical creator is a being comparable to the Gods, andmusic itself the supreme mystery of the science of man’25.

If one were to use Saussurian terminology then he would

summarize the Schopenhauerian metaphysics of music thus: ‘if

the analogy with language holds for it, music seems to be a

mode of the signifier without the signified’26. Concepts are

abstract cerebrations, which are somewhat lifeless, whereas

music exists as a thing in itself.

5

But how did Schopenhauer’s philosophy affect art? And

especially music? Well, remember the part in my introduction

(5) in which I speak about the ‘musical mood’ that pre-

exists creative writing and, more importantly, vice versa?

That is precisely what Wagner claims to have been the

impetus and the inspiration behind one of the controversial

24ibid, p.26425Claude Lévi Strauss (1970) p.1826Easthope Antony (1988) p.124



works in classical music, and certainly the most

experimental in his time, the opera, Tristan and Isolde27.

Wagner immediately became an apostle of the

Schopenhauerian Evangel and declared himself unable to

finish work in progress in order to incorporate

Schopenhauerian principles in the name of music. The result

was the aforementioned opera which will be discussed in more

detail.

The musical device that has been utilized by Wagner was

already a commonplace in music. But it is the sheer length

during which this device remains operative that has made

Wagner famous. What I am talking about is the use of

dissonance in the form of suspension, the holding over of a

tone from one chord to the next so that it will make the

chord dissonant and delay the resolution. Music is based on

this fundamental binary opposition and interplay of

dissonance/consonance. What is so idiosyncratic with

Wagner’s masterpiece is the fact that every chord contains

two dissonances, one of them is resolved and the other not,

the same happens without exception until the and of the

opera when we have the final -and also the first-

resolution.

We could say that Wagner has achieved a translation in

musical terms of Schopenhauer’s major doctrine of the

27Please refer to the accompanying musical material.



inherent fluctuation of the human will from desire to

temporary satisfaction and then to desire again - from which

the only resolution is the cessation of physical existence.

And, indeed, browsing through Schopenhauer one could find,

to reverse the terms, the verbal analogy of Wagner:

‘Now the constant discord and reconciliation of its {thewill’s} two elements which occurs here {the melody} is,metaphysically considered, the copy of the origination of newdesires and then of their satisfaction...’

But the similarities do not end here. In the plot we

see reflected the principium individuationis from which one can

only escape through the loss of oneself in sexual love

temporarily/imperfectly, and eternally/perfectly through the

loss of self by means of offering oneself to ‘breastless

creatures under ground28’. In specific, it is a love story

(I should mention here that Schopenhauer apart from the

metaphysics of art has written extensively on the

metaphysics of sexual love) about two youths that share an

undeclared love which they assume impossible to satisfy,

finally resorting in a suicide pact. The attendant, however,

who is meant to bring the lethal liquid brings a love potion

instead. This results in an outburst of their love which

they will satisfy to the uttermost extent - only to realize

that their desire for unity is unfulfilable in this world of

‘phenomena’. Naturally, their only alternative is to have a

28Allusion to Eliot’s Whispers of Immortality



shot at the noumenal world thereby achieving not only

release from their unfulfillable longing but a complete

merging with the other. I consider this instance whereby

love and death exist simultaneously, what has been named by

Wagner Liebestod (literally a conflation of the two German

words for love and death), the non plus ultra of the romantic

stock-in-trade. Liebestod is a concept many a romantic what

enthuse about, had it been known by Keats especially it

would have been a revelation. In a letter to his sweetheart

Fanny (1819) he says: ‘I have two luxuries to brood over in

my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I

could have possession of them both in the same minute.’

6

Herewith, I regretfully abandon Keats, Wagner, and

ultimately Schopenhauer, only to return with the aim of

implicitly and explicitly comparing and juxtaposing

Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art with Nietzsche's, in the

chapters that will analyze in more detail the various

aspects of the latter’s aesthetics.



CHAPTER 2

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

“Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and

the

world eternally justified”

The Birth of Tragedy

1

A natural procession from Schopenhauer would be

Nietzsche's book that bears the highest marks of

Schopenhauerian influence as well as having the highest

focus in my study: The Birth of Tragedy. The argument of this

book is extremely complicated, allusive and elusive. The

breadth of scope reflects Nietzsche's aversion towards a

monomaniac academic style - what Silk & Stern call

‘philistine compartmentalism29’. From a plan30 of the period

we learn that the book was going to cover four large areas:

ethics, aesthetics, religion and mythology.

I shall commence my voyage in the rough sea of BT by

first clarifying the key duality of Dionysian/Apollonian,

and then moving from the fatherland of lyric poetry to the

island of tragedy, so as to reach the final destination of29Silk & Stern (1981) p.6130Silk & Stern (1981) p.43



this voyage which is the harbour of music. Then I shall move

into the conceptual neighbourhoods of the metaphysics of art

in a more abstract form, so as to compare and contrast them

with notions of morality, science, truth, psychology,

biology and ultimately erotics.

2

The binary opposition of the interdependent concepts

Dionysian/Apollonian is perhaps the trickiest one in the

history of philosophy. It is a conceptual ambush that I

would wish to avoid by deviating but, alas, one has to fight

the monster. And I say these things because Nietzsche

himself has been extremely controversial, vague and

ambiguous in his handling of the above opposition, resulting

in endless logomachy of interpretative activity. A good

starting point is tracing their etymological origins and

their connotative breadth in ancient Greece.

They both belong to the Greek polytheistic system of

the Olympian dodekatheon31. Apollo is the deity of light

personifying order, measure, number and the subjugation of

undisciplined instinct. He is the ruler of the inner world

of phantasy and dream. Dionysus, on the other hand, is the

complete opposite, exhibiting liberation, drunkenness,

unbridled license, intoxication and orgiastic celebration.

31Literally: twelve gods.



In BT Dionysus stands for the emotional element in art - the

Dionysian art par excellence being music, whereas Apollo for the

form creating force representing the representational arts

and especially sculpture. In other words, the rational

versus the irrational, form versus content.

The best metaphorical explanation of this duality is

given by Nietzsche, and it is obvious that for him it is an

archetypal duality, something that sounds remarkably close

to the oriental yin/yang. The artistically creative

intercourse of these elements is likened to the duality of

the sexes with their constant conflicts and occasional

reconciliations32. In other words a work of art must needs

have a mixture of both in order to come into existence with

the Dionysian, however, always predominating.

Why should the Dionysian predominate? For a number of

reasons, the most important of which being the fact that

the term ‘Dionysian’ (in the way it is used in BT and as it

will be made apparent as my argument unfolds) is nothing but

a synonym for the term ‘metaphysical’; therefore, Dionysian

art is metaphysical art. I believe this to be a key statement

that will lead to an improved comprehension of the Dionysian

within the sphere of the metaphysics of art.

So, the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy will be further

examined by means of relating it to specific arts and their

32The Birth of Tragedy (1993) p.14



metaphysical anatomy. The fundamental binary here is

language (in the form of lyric poetry and tragedy) and

music, although its boundaries being quite unclear as both

of these language-based arts share a strong affinity with

music. The next chapter will investigate this affinity.



CHAPTER 3

MUSIC VERSUS LANGUAGE

I wondered whether music might not be the unique

example of what might

have been - if the invention of language had not

intervened - the means of communication

between souls.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

1

During the first year of life, one cannot distinguish

tones from approximations to words: the precursors of music

and language cannot be separated. Lyric poetry reflects this

primary unity of the two media. However, it is considered to

be a Dionysian art as the lyric poet is first and foremost a

composer and musician. By etymology (lyre - musical

instrument), a lyric poet could only perform his verse by

the accompaniment of lyre - the words themselves being of

secondary importance. At this point I would like to remind

the reader of the concept of the ‘musical mood’ which has

been already discussed. And I do this in order to relate the

verbal idea as following the musical idea: music precedes



language. But lyrical poetry, as it was developed by

Archilochus, does its ‘utmost to imitate music’33. Thus, for

Nietzsche, there were two currents in ancient Greece: one of

them in which language imitated the world of phenomena and

the other in which imitated the world of music.

But language, as it can only imitate the world of

phenomena, it can never match the cosmic importance of

music, which, in Schopenhauerian nomenclature, is an

immediate reflection of the will. This, of course, being a

rehashing of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music. The only

difference being that Nietzsche uses a convoluted

periphrasis, which bears more affinity to poetry than

philosophy. Instead of saying ‘will’ he says: ‘{music}

refers to the primal contradiction and the primal suffering

within the primal Oneness, and thus symbolizes a sphere

beyond and prior to all phenomena34’.

2

If lyric poetry is a Dionysian art of moderate

proportions then tragedy is the utmost possible Dionysian

development of a language-based medium. What constitutes the

copula linking tragedy with music is the origin and

function of the chorus. Its origin is a moot point but

Nietzsche's thesis is that in a more primitive form tragedy

33The Birth of Tragedy (1993) p.3334ibid p.35



consisted only of a chorus. Its function is clearly

Dionysian but the term used is ‘metaphysical consolation’

which I believe seconds my thesis of the synonemic relation

between metaphysical and Dionysian:

‘The metaphysical consolation (with which, as I wish topoint out, every true tragedy leaves us), that whateversuperficial changes may occur, life is at bottomindestructibly powerful and joyful, is given concrete form inthe satyr chorus...’35

What is even more astonishing, and what will enable me

to support my contention a fortiori, is that the above

quotation is engulfed between two pieces of text that

discuss the central idea of the Dionysian in tragedy; and,

specifically, the word ‘Dionysian’ occurs seven times within

a single page with the complementary epithets of ‘chorist’,

‘wisdom’, ‘music’, ‘tragedy’, ‘state’, ‘reality’, ‘man’!

A corollary of the Dionysian condition induced by

tragedy is the overcoming of the curse of individuation,

whereby the spectator experiences the dissolution of the

fixed boundaries between men, and between man and nature,

becoming oblivious of his personal afflictions and achieving

a reunification with the primitive forces of nature. Thus,

the ancient Greek theatre is transformed into a temple,

sharing an equal social status with the proto-christianic

35ibid p.39



church, which provides metaphysical consolation for the

‘horrors and terrors’ of existence.

3

The issue becomes more opaque if we consider

Nietzsche’s equation of the metaphysical music with the

Dionysian music; since, having purely Dionysian music would

have been impossible as Dionysian implies a lack of formal

structure. On the one hand, he rages against formal

austerity of the baroque era which cannot function without

the ‘arithmetical abacus of the fugue and contrapuntal

dialectics36’, and, on the other, he includes Bach in the

conceptual vicinity of Dionysian music37! Musicologically

speaking, Bach’s compositions are of extreme formal

elaboration and discipline but with a unique power of

intimating the highest forms of emotion. Especially the way

the tragic emotion is exhibited in, inter alias, his two great

Passions - St John and St Matthew38 - is almost

unparalleled. Music critics generally consent on the fact

that Bach in these works was a precursor of Wagnerian music

dramas - a century before their appearance. Hence, the

empathy Nietzsche feels towards Bach. And we know by now

36ibid p.9537ibid p.9438Please refer to the accompanying musical material.



that, if Nietzsche feels empathy for you, he will call you

‘Dionysian’. Perhaps, as an attempt to explain this apparent

contradiction, what Nietzsche meant is a Dionysian effect by

means of Apollonian structure. But he failed to make this clear

to us.

Another issue of discontent is the fact that Nietzsche

limits his conception of music to very few names, and even

then, hardly ever discussing the formal aspect of their work.

This is especially annoying with Wagner, about whom he raves

without cessation. At the BT he only hints at the Wagnerian

device of chromaticism39 when he discusses the lyric poet who:

‘sings us through the full chromatic scale {my italics} of his

passions and desires40’. Thus, he excludes from his

discussion the figures of such imminent and original

composers as Mozart and Chopin41, the former known for his

lightness of expression and the latter for his extreme

sensitivity of spirit.

But why does music is considered a sine qua non in

Nietzsche's philosophy of art? Is there any personal

39The chromatic scale is twelve note scale which includes both the whiteand black keys of the piano. Wagner used such notes extensively inchords and harmonic progressions in order to achieve the effect of adesire striving after its fulfilment. The use of this device isunorthodox for the musical establishment of Wagner’s time, insofar as itdisrupts the predictable hierarchy of tones that was essential totraditional tonality. A further development of this system will takeplace in the beginnings of the 21st century with the atonal music ofSchönberg expanded in his book ‘Harmonielehre’.40Ibid p.2841Please refer to the accompanying musical material.



motivation apart from the theoretical concoctions that have

already been mentioned? Is it perhaps, that Nietzsche sees

art as a substitute for philosophy? Art as the way of practicing

philosophy par excellence?



CHAPTER 4

ART AS PHILOSOPHY

This is an artist as an artist should be, modest in

his requirements: there are only two things he

really wants, his bread and his art - panem et

Circen...

Twilight of the Idols I. 17

1

The most apparent reason, which has to do with

extrinsic rather than intrinsic factors, is that two of

Nietzsche's ‘idols’ practiced religiously the metaphysics of

music. Music was the pinnacle in Schopenhauer’s philosophy

and the most important thing in Wagner’s life. On addition

to that it was in ancient Greece where the art of music was

an integral part of formal education.

But the above would not suffice if Nietzsche himself

was not an aficionado of music. In fact, music has been his

first creative activity, and, improvising on the piano was

his last, a long time after he had lost the will or the

ability to express himself by means of language. His

statements about music are numerous and categorical. Some of

them indicate a polemical mood towards language, a supreme

irony here as he was one of the few great masters of the



German language. And if he hasn’t got the right to criticize

language who does? It is only fear that his criticisms of

language should be listened to with due attention.

2

So why against language? Why against words? It is quite

simple, because philosophy as such, is mediated through, and

owes its existence to, language. And how can such a feeble

medium serve the purpose of such a high discipline? (let us

remember the etymology of philosophy: ‘love of wisdom’) It

simply can’t; something which numerous philosophers,

including Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, have pointed out. For

Wittgenstein, ‘philosophy is a battle against the

bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language42’. But

that is what he thinks philosophy should be not what philosophy

is or has been for centuries. Similarly, for Nietzsche the

predominance of language is experienced as a form of

superimposed claustrophobia:

We read contradictions and problems into everything becausewe think only within the forms of language ...We have tocease to think if we refuse to do it in the prisonhouse oflanguage; for we cannot reach further that the doubt whichasks whether the limit we see is really a limit...Allrational thought is interpretation in accordance with ascheme which we cannot throw off43.

3

42Philosophical Investigations No. 10943Will to Power No.522



Seen from a different point of view language is flawed

as it is a theistic legacy. Let us remember the Bible ‘in

the beginning was the word’ a statement which could no

longer be valid as God for Nietzsche is dead. And this is

what brought philosophy to its death throes. If God is dead

there is nobody to impose and order values. Theological

transcendence is no longer possible since theological

metaphysics have been declared defunct. Therefore, one is

threatened by nihilism unless he is ready to abandon

philosophy and adopt a different discipline that has not

bumped against an intellectual impasse. And this can be

discovered in the ancient Greek culture that preceded the

development of philosophy. However, one needs to believe

passionately in whatever discipline might be adopted as the

way out of the nihilistic abyss:

The essential thing...seems...to be a protracted obedience inone direction: from out of that there always emerges and hasalways emerged in the long run something for the sake ofwhich it is worthwhile to live on earth, for example virtue,art, music, dance, reason, spirituality - somethingtransfiguring, refined, mad and divine44.

4

The true answer is not the systematization of

philosophy ‘I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The

will to a system is a lack of integrity45’ but the creative

44Beyond Good and Evil (1990) p.11145Twilight of the Idols (1968) p.25



liberty of artistic expression which knows no conceptual

boundaries and can suffer no bruises against language. The

main thesis is that, in fact music is philosophy in the sense

that it can intimate us a higher form of knowledge, a

wisdom, a gnosis46. Quoting again from Nietzsche:

Has any one ever observed that music emancipates the spirit?gives wings to thought? and that the more one becomes a musician themore one becomes a philosopher {my italics}? The gray sky ofabstraction seems thrilled by flashes of lightning... andthe world is surveyed as if from a mountain top. - With thisI have defined pathos...47.

And, indeed, at this point Nietzsche follows

Schopenhauer’s footsteps, as, for Schopenhauer, ‘music is an

unconscious exercize in metaphysics in which the mind does

not know it is philosophizing48’. Music critics second the

idea that music can be conceived is a form of philosophizing

along the lines of primum vivere deindre philosophari49 (music

perceived as a means of enhancing life), Malcolm Boyd50, in

specific, refers to Bach’s oeuvre (and especially the Art Of

Fugue51 )as existing ‘in a world far removed from the musica46Supposedly revealed knowledge of various spiritual truths, especiallythat said to have been possesed by the the ancient Gnostics. Itsetymology is from the Greek word for knowledge. I find it very apt inthis case as we could draw a parallel with Dionysian knowledge. 47The Case of Wagner (1974) p.2-348Schopenhauer (1966) p. 26449Live first and philosophize afterwards50Bach (1983) p.20851It is Bach’s last opus. He wrote at the time when he was blind anddying. It is a series of highly contrapuntal pieces for strings thathave set the standard for contrapuntal composition. Their achievementlies in that up to five different voices can sustain five different



humana of our own, where music, mathematics and philosophy are one

{my italics}’.

5

Nietzsche goes as far as maintaining that the only

touchstone his intellectual faculty possesses in order to

distinguish what is good, is artistic creativity (the

following quotation being the continuation of Nietzsche's

above quotation on music): ‘everything that is good makes me

productive. I have gratitude for nothing else, nor have I

any other touchstone for testing what is good’52. This,

though, leads us to the discussion of ethics as a discipline

which Nietzsche treated at its best with paradigmatic

indifference, and, at its worst, with a voice more polemical

that a serpent’s tongue.

melodies without any sense of them jarring with each other. Theintricate mathematics applied there match in intensity the depth offeeling.52The Case of Wagner (1974) p.2-3



CHAPTER 5

ETHICS

‘Art and not morality is represented as the actual

metaphysical activity of mankind’

The Birth of Tragedy

1

Nietzsche's philosophy arouse out of a reaction against

centuries of pseudo-moral justifications of existence. And

I say ‘pseudo’ because there is nothing in the universe

justifying a moral interpretation. In specific, on our

planet there seems to reign a state of bellum omnium contra

omnes, life is extremely precarious, and to use an

anthropomorphism, life is really cheap. Nietzsche turned

away from all this ‘routine moralistic clapltrap about

virtue, happiness and knowledge53’ and devoted himself to

art and the thought of art; this involving an attempt to

perceive the world from an aesthetic viewpoint, to find a

way of life that would ‘raise nobility, glory and tragic

53The Birth of Tragedy (1992) p. xxi



beauty to the place that had been occupied by moral goodness

and by faith54’.

And here lies one of Nietzsche's points of fundamental

divergence from Schopenhauerian cogitations: Nietzsche is

indifferent towards the amorality of the universe, for him

it is sufficient that the universe can be interpreted in an

aesthetic way; whereas, for Schopenhauer, the universe,

conceived as will, is not simply amoral - it is immoral.

Hence, Schopenhauer is more of a humanist, and one can see

his pessimism ultimately springing from specifically this

sort of humanism.

2

If one wants to object further to Nietzsche's aesthetic

interpretation then it has to be said that his

interpretation is still an interpretation, the same way the moral

interpretation of the world is an interpretation. And, as

we, poor mortals, do not posses ‘knowledge’ of ‘the truth’,

all interpretations -all propositions as Wittgenstein55

would have it- are of equal value. Thus, I retort to

Nietzsche's dictum that ‘morality is only an interpretation

of phenomena, more precisely a misinterpretation56’.

On the other hand, we can understand Nietzsche's

polemics with the aid of the historical knowledge that

54Roger Scruton (1989) p.2755Wittgenstein Tractatus Logicophilosophicus 6.456Twilight of the Idols (1968) p.55



religion has been repressing art for centuries. In our

times, though, there are certain individuals that,

notwithstanding their participation in a theistic tradition

they dare transcend the old boundaries of religion. What

will follow is an example that seems to belie Adorno when he

says that ‘a metaphysics of art demands that art be strictly

separated from religion’:

‘My vocation is to try and make art accessible because Ibelieve that this is the way of coming in touch with the well-spring ofyour own being, where God is... all experience of art is an indirectexperience of God.57’{my italics)

What I find so amazing in this statement is the

similarity it bears to the atheistic doctrines about art

that I have been discussing so far. What sister Wendy says

about art, namely being ‘an indirect experience of God’ is

similar to Schopenhauer’s doctrine of music as being an

‘immediate copy of the will’ (however she restricts herself

to ‘indirect’ rather than ‘immediate’, as, if she had done

otherwise, it would constitute, in religious terms, a

blasphemy), only that, in Schopenhauer’s terms, the

equivalent of ‘God’ is the ‘Will’. Furthermore, ‘coming in

touch with the spring of your own being’ could be conceived

as the analogy of the Nietzschean primal unity that can be

found in the Dionysian experience of art.

57The Observer, 8 May 1994 (My italics). In an interview of Sister Wendy,the popularizer of art in her famous television series.



3

But the main aporia still remains: is a moral

interpretation of the world more justified than an aesthetic

interpretation? Is it, above all, more true? And if it is

true, it is true to what? Who can guarantee the

alethiological validity of the concept of truth? And how do

we know whether truth is true to life?



CHAPTER 6

ART VERSUS TRUTH

Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

Will To Power No. 916

1

In the times of neoclassicism when nothing was in a

state of flux there were an abundance of truths easily

prescribed and economically dispensed by the Ideological

State Apparatuses of the time. General ignorance,

dogmaticism and obscurantism made sure that there rose no

dissenting voices. And these ‘truths’ covered the whole

range, from metaphysical to religious, from moral to

rational. There was a belief in the absoluteness of truths

until Hegel and Darwin reminded humans of the Heraclitean

and Aristotelean doctrines of and 58 who

accustomed modern man to the idea of becoming. And if

everything evolves, then truth cannot remain a frigid

fossil. But, even so, how can we speak about truth in an age

when the ultimate prescriber of truth(s), according to

Nietzsche, has perished?

Nonetheless, even if the idols themselves have

perished, the images of the idols have survived - as it

appears to be more difficult to dispense with the simulacra

of ghosts than with ghosts themselves:58’Everything is in a state of flux’ and ‘becoming’ respectively.



Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms andanthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations, whichhave been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poeticallyand rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm,canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusionsabout which one has forgotten that this is what they are.59

What becomes increasingly more problematic is a redefinition

of truth, nay, I should have said the impossibility of defining

truth, truthfully, in any sense whatsoever. Thereby, I declare

truth the most arid philosophical concept ever concocted as

it is, and will probably remain for ever, inaccessible to

the limited capacities of our mental apparatus. But how art

relates to this context?

2

According to Keats, as he says in his Ode on a Grecian

Urn: ‘Beauty is truth, Truth beauty - that is all/ ye know

on earth, and all ye need to know.’ But signifiers of

abstract concepts are often very tricky in their semantic

variation in synchronic, idiolectical terms, let alone in

diachronic, intercultural terms. The point I am trying to

make with the above is that what Keats meant by ‘truth’ is

positively not the kind of Darwinian, horror-and-terror-of-

existence truth that Nietzsche implied in the statement that

has been used as an epigraph for this chapter. And that is

why I think that Hollingdale,60 when he juxtaposes the two

59Nietzsche (1954) p.46-760In his article : The ugly truth about Nietzsche, Guardian, 19 March 1992



statements, taking that truth in each of them means exactly

the same thing, is making an oversimplification for reasons

of literary effect.

It becomes apparent that for Nietzsche the ‘sublime

metaphysical illusion’ (a bombastic periphrasis for

‘artistic illusion’ I believe) is not just the only means to

counteract the sheer gravitas of truth, but it can contribute

to truth itself. If we accept the relativity and flexibility

of truths then an aesthetic way of knowing could open new

vistas: ‘This sublime metaphysical illusion {my italics} is an

instinctual accompaniment to science, and repeatedly takes

it to its limits, where it must become art: which is the true

purpose of this mechanism.’61What is intimidated here is an

incredulity towards the so-called empirically verifiable

truths, in other words the impossibility of knowing without feeling.

And, perhaps, I will have to go a bit out of the way here,

but I will not regret quoting this: ‘{a man} by virtue of

his suffering knows more than the shrewdest and wisest can

ever know...62’; but not far at all if I quote this: ‘The

most abstract the truth you want to teach the more you must

seduce the senses to it63’.

3

61The Birth of Tragedy (1993) p.7362The Case of Wagner (1974) p.77-7863Beyond Good and Evil (1990), p.99



In an attempt to escape from this rampant aestheticism

and recapture the binary illusion/truth, I would like to

return to BT. Despite the plethora of ambiguities one trend

is discernible therein: that art is an illusion but an

illusion that has redeeming power and requires a highly

spiritual nature in order to function as redeeming. It is,

perhaps, exactly this redemptive power of art that makes

people like John Arras maintain that in BT ‘art functions as

a medium of truth’64. And we should pay close attention to

this as it might be easily misconstrued as art being

identified with truth. Adorno cryptically elaborates on this

by saying that ‘art is true to the degree to which it is an

illusion of the non-illusory’65. How do I comprehend this?

Unfortunately, Adorno doesn’t really clarify this

obfuscating remark but I shall attempt an interpretation

using as little imagination as possible.

Art, is what now sustains the metaphysical condition

which has become viable only by means of art: this being the

only non-illusory alternative after the advent of nihilism,

that is to say, the impossibility of theological

metaphysics. Thereby, the non-illusory (art as viable

reality) becomes tautologous with the illusion (of

metaphysics) par excellence. I think Nietzsche makes it clearer

when he almost identifies the metaphysics of art with truth:

‘The will to illusion... counts as more profound..,64British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol.30, No.4, October 1990, p.35065Aesthetic Theory (1976) p.192



‘metaphysical’ than the will to truth ... art is worth more

than truth.’66 An attempt to rationalize the above statement

is by claiming that the metaphysical in art rests in its

ability to create new forms, thereby signaling the possibility of the

non-existent.

But what claims to base its foundations solely on

grounds of objective truth? What else, the biggest deception

of them all: science.

66Hollingdale (1973) p.155 (from an unused draft for a preface for a newedition of the BT)



CHAPTER 7

SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS

There is speculation. There is pure speculation. And there

is metaphysics.

1

The inclusion of a scientific section in a humanities

study might seem dissonant with the spirit of the faculty,

but even if it does, it certainly wouldn’t be to the mature

Nietzsche. (I say that because at the time of BT he

maintained a strong metaphysical position which he later

dispensed with). Having developed a profound respect for

science in his later years he ends up castigating non-

scientific methods that claim knowledge dismissing them as:

‘abortion and not yet science: which is to say metaphysics,

theology, psychology, epistemology.67’ But even in the case

of Nietzsche not seconding my approach one would be

monolithically absurd not supporting a synectic approach in

a world of such diversification. Philosophy and science

sometimes converge to the extent of total amalgamation, and

it has been argued that the only people that should be

allowed to philosophize in our age should be scientists.

67Twilight of the Idols (1968) p.36



Philosophers and scientists attempting to explain soul

in a scientific way is certainly not a phenomenon of our

times. Descartes, for example, hypothesized that the precise

interface between body and soul was to be found in a cone-

shaped organ in the mid-brain, known as the pineal gland.

Nowadays, scientists dismiss this idea as unfounded.

The latest theory relating to the above has been

advocated by Francis Crick which, in its turn, has been the

receiver of much adverse criticism and scorn. Crick’s

argument, not much different from Descartes’, is that the soul

is physically based on the head. He posits that human consciousness

is nothing but the rich result emerging from the interaction

of billions nerve cells (neurons) in the brain. He attempts

to explain the human ability for self-reflexivity by

hypothesizing the existence of ‘awareness neurons’ and that

by discovering what is special about them we could reveal

the physical basis of consciousness.

In the concluding part of his book he claims that: ‘The

aim of science is to explain all aspects of the behaviour of

our brains, including those of musicians {my italics}, mystics, and

mathematicians’68 and he feels confident that there will be

a day when this will constitute a concrete reality. But no

matter how ambitious science is, it can never replace the

western mythology of metaphysics because of a tragic flaw:

science, with the aid of the fundamental law of causality,68Crick Francis (1994) p.259



can only help us understand the phenomena of the world, not

the world in itself. And Nietzsche, at the metaphysical times

of BT seems to have grasped this idea: ‘This sublime

metaphysical illusion {my italics} is an instinctual

accompaniment to science, and repeatedly takes it to its

limits, where it must become art: which is the true purpose of this

mechanism.’69What is remarkable here is that the seeds of

self-incredulity and epistemological becoming have already

been sown: the metaphysical state has lost much of its

conceptual rigidity by becoming metaphysical illusion, but

notably it is a sublime illusion, this relating to the

alethiological validity of art which has been discussed in

the chapter ‘Truth versus Art’.

2

A different approach to a scientific explanation of the

soul has been taken by Frank Tipler in his book, The Physics of

Immortality, in which he puts forth the metaphor of the soul

as a computer program run on the computer of the brain.

According to his theory the totality of the human body could

be directly translated into bits of information - three

followed by 45 zeros worth to be exact70. He envisages a

time when resurrection could take place simply by

downloading every bit of information of the dead person in

the computers of the future.

69The Birth of Tragedy (1993) p.7370The Sunday Telegraph, 22 January 1995



The most interesting finding in Tipler’s book, is the

unbelievably Nietzsche-sounding statement that: ‘The

universe must be capable of sustaining life indefinitely

because we physicists now that a beautiful postulate is more

likely to be correct than an ugly one.’71 I find in this

statement the same deep structure that applies to

Nietzsche’s fundamental ‘aestheticosmological’ tenet: ‘only

as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally

justified’72. Even a surface analysis can render amazing

similarities. Tipler uses the following verbal structures

juxtaposed with Nietzsche's analogies in parenthesis: ‘the

universe’ (existence and the world), ‘must be capable’

(only) ‘sustaining life indefinitely’ (eternally), ‘a

beautiful postulate’ (aesthetic phenomenon), ‘is more likely

to be correct’ (justified). The connotative difference being

that there is a more pronounced aesthetic Darwinism in

Tipler’s statement. But, even so, we must not forget the

other Nietzschean dictum: ‘aesthetics is nothing but

applied physiology’73 which reduces beauty to an unequivocal

biologism.

Nothing, perhaps, would be more appropriate to conclude

this section, than Nietzsche's own topographical placement

of the soul: ‘I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and

71The Sunday Telegraph, 22 January 199572The Birth of Tragedy (1993) p.3273Nietzsche Contra Wagner, II



soul is only a word for something in the body74’. Indeed,

this statement being as anti-metaphysical as anything could

be, expressed in the monistic terms that must have seriously

disconcerted his dualist contemporaries.

74Zarathustra, I.4



CHAPTER 8

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ART

‘Psychologist’s casuistry’

Twilight of the Idols X 15

1

Part of Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s fame is due to

the fact that they had been the precursors of psychology in

its modern form firstly systematized by Freud. Moreover,

they were both renowned for their insightful psychological

remarks in a mummer of areas apart from the psychology of

art. One could interpret the metaphysics of art is a

misinterpretation of the psychology of art. But this is one

concept that will be further discussed in a different

chapter.

So, let me first survey the Freudian ideas on the theme

of art and artists as I believe in their usefulness despite

their limitations - perhaps acting as a foil to my

judgments. It should be noted from the beginning that Freud

apart from his of love of literature and sculpture had

little if anything to do with music. And in order to

dispense with the above euphemism I shall say that he was

deeply unmusical75.75Funnily enough this is an attribute that Freud shares with anothermajor psychologist and antagonist - Jung. The only reference of Jung tomusic is in his autobiography where he describes the singing of kettle.This, he wrote, ‘was like polyphonic music, which in reality I cannot



2

Freud, then, links play, dreams and creative fantasy as

regressive, wish-fulfilling procedures that functions as

sublimations for an unsatisfying, and apparently

unsatisfiable, reality. An artist will turn away from

reality because he76 cannot come to terms with the

instinctual renunciation that society demands. The most

celebrated single quotation that includes many aspects of

the Freudian art theory is the following:

An artist is once more in rudiments an introvert, not farremoved from neurosis. He is oppressed by excessivelypowerful instinctual needs. He desires to win honour, power,wealth, fame and the love of women; but he lacks the meansfor achieving these satisfactions. Consequently, like anyother unsatisfied man, he turns away from reality andtransfers all his interest, and his libido too, to thewishful constructions of his life of phantasy, whence thepath might lead to neurosis77.

Consequently, for Freud, if one managed to fully

satisfy one’s instincts there wouldn’t be any place for

‘finer and higher satisfactions78’ as their intensity is low

and they cannot be compared with the primal instincts whose

abide’ (source: A. Storr: Music and the Mind p.155)76Excuse my exclusive use of the masculine personal pronoun. I find itstylistically the lesser of many evils as politically correctalternatives tend to sound unidiomatic as well as interruptive to thenatural flow of the text. That, however, does not mean that, had therebeen a linguistically sound alternative, I wouldn’t have used it.77Freud: Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis SE, Vol XVI, HogarthPress,1963, p.37678Freud: Civilisation and its Discontents p.79-80



satisfaction convulses our physical being. Therefore the

arts, including music, would become otiose. With only two

drives, Eros and Thanatos, he rated creativity as a

secondary phenomenon. It has been a great misfortune for

music that Freud was deeply unmusical; it is even a greater

misfortune that his views on art were so narrow. Instead of

art, he predicated his philosophy of life in science. The

only mitigation that I can conceive is, firstly, his hinting

at a reality which does not encompass psychological insights

based strictly on our animal nature - what he calls

‘metapsychology79’; and secondly, his acceptance that art

can induce the so-called ‘oceanic feeling’ which bears

remarkable similarities with Nietzsche's Dionysian state of

rapture.

The oceanic feeling is usually compared with the states

of mind described by the mystics in which the subject feels

at one with the world and with him or her self. It is almost

invariably a solitary experience. Freud describes the

oceanic feeling as ‘a feeling of indissoluble bond of being

one with the external world as a whole’. He compares this

with the height of being in love, a state in which ‘the

boundary between ego and object threatens to melt

away’....it represents a regression...a return to a total

merger with the mother’80.

79This concept acquires a rather imminent place towards the end of hispessimistic book: Civilisation and its Discontents80Antony Storr (1992) p.95



But, at this point we are in danger of intruding into

the conceptual domain of the erotics of art which will be

fully developed in my eponymous chapter. Now, I shall move

on to the mature part of Nietzsche's life, in which his

metaphysics of art become ‘applied physiology’; a discipline

that has one foot in psychology and the other in biology.



CHAPTER 9

ART AS APPLIED PHYSIOLOGY?

1

In the course of my exposition I have been largely

occupied with the notion of the metaphysics of art.

However, as the end draws nigh, I feel inclined to repudiate

the alethiological validity of many of my (ultimately

Nietzsche's) arguments. And, indeed, that would be most

decorous as the grand master himself has done the same thing

dismissing his youthful paens to metaphysical art with the

earthly compromise (?) of physiology - ultimately a necessary

sacrifice to the omnipotent principle of Ananke. He even

replaced in his earlier works the word ‘psychological’ (in

the sense of relating to the psyche - ultimately ‘soul’)

with the word ‘physiological’81.

Traditionally, the reasons for the existence of art

have been sought in metaphysics, theology, history,

sociology - but never in biology. It was never thought of as

inherent in human nature, as something sine qua non of the

human psychobiological constitution. Modern approaches have

81Twilight of the Idols (1986) p.193 (Appendix D)



shed more feeling, more ‘body’, in the detachedness of

traditional aesthetics. The postmodern view, for example,

that art represents meaning deferred and desire unsatisfied

is evidence of a subversive undercurrent attesting to the

idea that at least some of the intense pleasures of

aesthetic experience are insistently bodily, and that

therefore, physicality cannot be totally discounted as

irrelevant. Inevitably, the critical vocabulary has been

extended by terms like jouissance and desire.

2

And the physicality of art is indisputable; Herbert von

Karajan -an accomplished pilot of full-size aircrafts-

participating in an experiment, made this amply obvious. The

experiment consisted of him flying an airplane and then

directing Moussorgsky’s Night on the Bald Mountain. The outcome

was that when he was directing the musical piece his

heartbeat was much faster that when he was landing the

plane. And, indeed, great art should have extreme physical

effects, not as a matter of exceptional circumstances, but

as a matter of course:

The experience of great art disturbs one like a deep anxietyfor another, like a near escape from death, like a longanaesthesia for surgery: it is a massive blow from which onerecovers slowly and which leaves one changed in ways thatonly gradually come to light.82

82Ellen Dissanayke (1992) p. 25 (herself quoting it from Jacques Barzan:The Use and Ubuse of Art)



Perhaps one may consider the above descriptions

simplistically naive. Perhaps, call it ‘affective fallacy’,

but one may committing a fallacy oneself if we take into

account that their judgment is predicated upon the

traditional approach that held the aesthetic experience to

be something ‘mental’ or ‘spiritual’, with no bodily

referents whatsoever.

3

Ellen Dissanayke, in her book, Homo Aestheticus, argues

that ‘artistic proclivities are inherent in human

psychobiology83’ and she polemically supports the idea of

the arts’ usefulness in life:

To say that religion or art or music are useful seems to menot in the least to devalue them but on the contrary itimproves our estimation of their value. I believe that these‘spiritual’ and creative activities are even more important,in the literal, practical sense, than the more mundane onesthat are the concern of politics, business, and industry.84

And, indeed, wouldn’t that encapsulate the ideas and

feelings of Nietzsche about art? Wouldn’t the concept ‘Homo

Aestheticus’ come as a welcome addition to Nietzsche's

vocabulary? Wasn’t he the one that in the whole of existence

saw nothing else but art? (See the epigraph in my

83ibid p. xix84ibid p.xi (quoted from J.Z. Young , Programs of the Brain, 1978)



introduction). And isn’t his re-evaluation of art as applied

physiology most germane with the practical utility of art in

the physical world by means of physical effects?

This is an extremely remarkable re-evaluation and

indeed most apposite to the master’s suspiciousness towards

his own suspicion of suspecting. Julian Young, in his

discussion of BT, concludes that what Nietzsche is

attempting there is simply an exaggeration on a purely

psychological state - psychological in the modern sense of

describing a mental state. He concurs on the fact that the

metaphysical and the Dionysian are used as synonyms and he

insists on taking ‘metaphysics’ as a metaphor.85 It makes

sense, if one thinks that access to one’s own inner

psychological depths is difficult enough without postulating

another form of reality outside the human psyche. I strongly

endorse the position advocated by Young, only to add that,

had not there been the exaggeration of metaphysics, we

wouldn’t have had the Nietzschean insight into the artistic

‘psyche’.

85Joung Julian (1992) p.52



CHAPTER 10

EROTICS OF ART

‘All beauty excites to procreation’

Plato

1

Perhaps, before I develop any other arguments, I should

divulge one of my hidden agendas. The fact that this

dissertation is structured on musical terms.86The key

signature in my text is set by the epigraph in the

introduction and it symbolizes emotion, pathos, erotics.

Thus, this chapter is the one of the return to the tonic,

the tonal centre of the piece which sounds perfectly

consonant - the resolution after a long voyage through the

dissonances (thematic irregularities) of all the other keys

(chapters).

2

I shall begin by talking about Plato. He says, with an

innocence for which one must be Greek and not ‘Christian’,

that there would be no Platonic philosophy at all if Athens

had not possessed such beautiful youths: ‘it was the sight86The same thing has been done by Nietzsche in his Twilight of the Idols. Ananalysis of Nietzsche's musical politics can be found in Michael AllenGillespie’s essay: Nietzsche's Musical Politics in Gillespie & Strong: Nietzsche'sNew Seas (1991) p.120



of them which first plunged the philosopher’s soul into an

erotic whirl and allowed it no rest until it had implanted

the seed of all high things into so beautiful a soil87’. The

entire higher culture of classical France also grew up on the

soil of sexual interest.

In my chapter on psychology I talked about the oceanic

feeling and its concomitant effect of feeling merged with

the surroundings, in unity with something one really can’t

tell what. I quoted Freud saying that the boundaries between

ego and object melt away. Similarly, when the aesthetic

experience is taking place, the spectator projects his

personality into the object of contemplation, and, if

possible, vice versa. The result of this is a feeling of

happiness of an equal intensity with the feeling of being in

love. What else could Eros be but the promise of happiness?

And art? Beauty in art implies the imitation of all that is

happy. Art is according to Stendal, a promesse de bonheur. ‘A

promise that is constantly being broken’88.

For mature Nietzsche a promise that cannot be kept

along the lines of a heavy liebestod orientated romanticism

that has flourished in Germany. The culture of the South is

the only one that can eroticize art without eroticizing

death at the same time:

87Twilight of the Idols (1986) p.8088Adorno (1976) p.196



‘Here another kind of sensuality, another kind ofsensitiveness and another kind of cheerfulness make theirappeal. This music is gay, but not in the French or theGerman way having this ‘southern, tawny, sunburntsensitiveness’ that ‘has found no means of expression inEurope89’.

From the heavy/dark/cerebral romantic to the

light/lightdrenched/sensual romantic. What Nietzsche meant

when he said il faut mediterraniser la musique90 is il faut mediteranniser

le monde. And ultimately, sensibiliser-érotiser le monde.

3

Frequently, in Nietzsche’s works occurs the word

femina. It seems that for Nietzsche everything is a woman;

music is a woman, life is a woman, truth is a woman. The

first thought is that he could just as well have called

himself Sigmund Freud. His, hitherto, ‘untainted’

aestheticization of the universe thereby acquires a less

genteel facade: the one of sexual interest. Even if we take

woman as a metaphor then the relationship between art and

artist is still erotic: ‘Art which perpetually creates new

objects of attraction and desire. Art is the arch-seducer to

life91.’

If it is by means of the physical, the erotic, that one

can experience the metaphysical illusion then the

89The Case of Wagner (1974) p.3-490ibid p.591Orage (1912) p.59



metaphysical artist par excellence is the dancer. (Nietzsche

has numerous references to dance/dancers/dancing). It

involves not only the supreme aesthetic beauty of dance qua

dance, not only the strongly pronounced erotic that is an

inevitable concomitant of an art that exists on the body, but

also the feeling of omnipotence derived from the very

truthful illusion of overcoming gravity. Besides that, dance

could be declared the art that bears the higher affinity to

music. In one of the most celebrated Dionysian festivities

in ancient Greece, the Eleusynian mysteries, dance had a key

role. And I believe that it is this giving a metaphysical

sense in life by means of the physical that is implied in

Mukhamedov’s statement: ‘You see, if I was dismissed {from

the ballet}, I would not know what to do. It would feel like

having no arms, legs or head.’92

4

In the question (because that is now the question): Is

a non metaphysical transcendence possible? I would answer:

It is, in the form of aesthetically induced transcendence...

In the form of an ultra-refined erotics of art...

92The Sunday Times, 24 December 1994



CONCLUSION

Oh my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but

exhaust the limits of the possible.

Pindar, Pythian iii

1

As Nietzsche himself says, BT has been a book in which

he tried to express new ideas by means of Schopenhauerian

and Kantian formulas. And what he means by that is

Schopenhauer’s conception of music as a direct copy of the

will (a conceptual monstrosity according to Heckman93) and

Kant’s commitment to a noumenal reality and disinterested

aesthetic contemplation. On the other hand, it constitutes

a breach of these formulas insofar as it proclaims the

necessity to evaluate, and when I say evaluate I don’t mean

evaluate only in the academic sense of evaluating

philosophy, or music, but evaluate people, and most importantly

life itself . The philosophic discourse of aesthetics is

only his excuse to do this. In specific, what constitutes a

shift from Kantian formulas is the doing away with the

concept of disinterested contemplation. Moreover, whereas

for Schopenhauer art was a means of escape from life, for93British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol.30, No.4, October 1990, p.351



Nietzsche it was a means of affirming life. When Nietzsche

interrogates the nature of tragedy, he interrogates the

utility of tragedy with relation to life. It is better to

feel that life is tragic than to be indifferent to it.

Ultimately, in order to understand Nietzsche, one has to be

a ‘victim of the same passion!’ 94

However, if we consider this book a failure because of

its extensive traits of ambiguity, contradiction, conceptual

plagiarism, incoherence, and youthful impetuousness, then it

is failure that is worth a thousand petty ‘successes’. It

might be a source of inspirational criticism of ancient

Greek tragedy, but that is not the main locus of its historic

significance. What it all boils down to, as I pointed out in

my introduction when I talked about tragedy ‘in the wider

sense’ (part 7), is not tragedy but man’s tragic condition

- the human condition. I can do nothing else but fully condone

Silk & Stern when they place Nietzsche's book in its

philosophico-historical context: ‘If Kierkegaard is the

first existentialist and Schopenhauer the first to present

aesthetics as an alternative to existence, Nietzsche's book,

by identifying aesthetics with the existential, is the first

essay in post-Christian existentialism.’95

2

94The Guardian, 19 March 199295Nietzsche on Tragedy (1993) p.296



Nietzsche, having experienced in depth the nihilism

that his cogitations imply, felt the impetus of overcoming

the abyss, as an imperative moral obligation96 for a man of

his stature, so, he became -and this is my favourite

metaphor- an architect of the abyss. As another major

existentiaslist put it, in his seminal work, one does not

discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual for happiness97;

Nietzsche's manual for happiness is the experience of

feeling through art. He must give the void its colours98 so that we

shall be kept entertained during our chute99. However, the

struggle against such conceptual incubi is enough to fill a

man’s heart. One must imagine Nietzsche happy100.

3

Now, the time is ripe to explain the puzzling

introductory statement that appears to synthesize

metaphysics aesthetics and ethics into a single entity. But

first I shall discuss the Wittgensteinein dictum. In what

way, then, is ethics and aesthetics one and the same? It is

more simple than one could imagine, in the sense that a

society that functions well aesthetically also functions well ethically. In other

words, a healthy society will produce healthy art and vice

96’Moral obligation’ might sound rather falacious after my examinationof Nietzsche's putative amorality, but it makes sense, if we considerthat he felt moral obligation only towards beauty. Again aestheticsidentyfying itself with ethics. 97Albert Camus The myth of Sisyphus (1975) p.11098ibid p.10399Allusion to a book by Camus, literally ‘fall’ 100Allusion to The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy’.



versa - art seen as the moral fulcrum. This is a morality whose

only criterion is the optimization of existence: ‘Art is

moral. But the morality is not of any creed..., but of life

itself’101. {my italics}. And now let me add the third thread

of this tri-partite entity. One could verbalize the

quintessence of Nietzsche's philosophy of art (or

Nietzsche's philosophies of art as Young has it102) quite

minimally: a youthful infatuation with metaphysics with a

concomitant repudiation of ethics that lead to the human

all-too-human affirmation of erotics. Thus, the wheel has

come full circle and the cryptic part 8 of my introduction

has (hopefully!) been divested of its veil of mystery.

4

If one is to consider this dissertation as something

creative then there are strong personal undercurrents that

lead me to it: having had first hand experience of the

transcendental feeling affecting the creator of music at the

moment of composition I longed to describe it and provide a

theoretical background for it. The philosophy of Nietzsche

came to me naturally and spontaneously to affirm

discursively my extra-discursive thoughts and feelings.

There is no disinterestedness here, no cold intellectual

detachment, but a blind will to ‘go beyond the phraseology

101Orage (1912) p. 66102Julian Young (1992) p.1



of aesthetics103’, to metamorphose the mathematically

analytic, and oftentimes anaesthetic, science of aesthetics

into something overbrimming with the force and urgency of

life: a form of linguistic acrobatics on the extra-

linguistic silk thread of joie de vivre. Ultimately, my ambition

is the comprehension of myself; and it is by means of this

effort, I hope, that I might assist some people into

achieving a greater self-knowledge of their active or latent

artistic passions.

POST SCRIPTUM

At this point I believe the reader should be made aware

of the origins of the text in this particular font

which has be chosen to introduce my dissertation. It

has its origins in -where else!- Nietzsche's Birth of

Tragedy (part I-3) and it belongs to the introductory

chapter entitled ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’. The

reasons that drove me to this decision are two.

Firstly, I consider its effect extremely musical - thus

introducing the reader into what Nietzsche described as

‘musical mood’. The second reason is that, as an

attempt at a self-criticism, it is also true for my

103Nietzsche on Tragedy (1993) p.77



text, except where it talks of a voice stammering in a

‘foreign tongue’ - that is twice true.

I would also like to say a few words in order to

justify my audio attachment. I found its inclusion an

imperative gesture as, had I obviated this necessity, I

would have either been hypocritical to the whole

ideology underlying my argument, or, at the least,

negligent. Thus, I hope that my abstract cerebrations

have become more substantiated, by the support of

concrete, sensory evidence.

Now, as there is nothing more to be said, the reader is

strongly advised to willfully transform into a

listener, and try to comprehend with the ear what my

words have failed to convey through the mind.

The rest is music.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle...



ADDENDUM I

NIETZSCHE AND KEATS

I have already referred to Keats twice. Firstly, as

a writer of love letters in my chapter about

Schopenhauer; and, secondly, as a speculative

epistemologist speaking about the nature of truth in his

poem Ode on a Grecian Urn in my chapter that bears the

heading Art versus Truth. But what I consider Keats’s most

paradigmatic aesthetico-metaphysical statement, and

perhaps the most stunning in English poetry, is the one

that can be found in Endymion. The opening lines of this

poem could have been -rather than Pater Nosters or Ave

Marias- Nietzsche's bedtime prayer. What is even more

remarkable is that these lines could very well lend

themselves for a ‘prayer’ as their rhythmical patterns

are quite similar to the ones of prayers. And I believe

that the whole idea of making a religion out of art

would not sound the least strange to Nietzsche himself!

And, indeed, if everybody that had been

regurgitating Pater Nosters and Ave Marias, within the

iconolatric Christian tradition, had been reciting

Endymion instead, then we might have been living in a

happier -and certainly more beautiful- world. What I

will venture is a comparative analysis between Keatsian



verse and Nietzschean prose and ideas. I hope that the

similarities will become easily discernible. As the

reader will probably notice part of the poem has been

italicized. It is these words that I shall try to relate

to Nietzsche. Intrinsically, they can apply not only to

Nietzsche, but any creator of the his stature and

sensibility. At this point I find it hard to resist the

temptation of reiterating these oft-quoted lines, and,

indeed, I shall do it without the slightest vestige of

guilt:

ENDYMION

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: ‘eternally justified’

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep ‘infinity of art’

A bower quite for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quietbreathing. art as health - affirmation of life



Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth, tragedy as life-affirming

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, thesolitude of the genius ‘to live alone one

must be an animal or a God -says Aristotle. There is

yet a third case: one mustbe both - a philosopher’104.

Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, the abysses of the philosopher in his

quest for truth ‘and when yougaze long into an abyss the abyss also

gazes intoyou105’

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits. Art as theonly answer to the human condition

104Twilight of the Idols (1968) p.23105Beyond Good and Evil (1990) p.146



ADDENDUM II

CASSETTE CONTENTS

-Cassette 1-

SIDE A SIDE B

1. Wagner Tristan & Isolde 1. BachSt Matthew’s Passion

Prelude & Liebestod Chorus: Wir setzen uns mitTränen nieder

Berliner Philarmoniker ConcertusMusicus Wien, Nicolaus Harnoncourt

Karajan 2. Bach St Matthew’sPassion

2. Mahler Symphony No. 5 Chorus: Kommt ihr Töchter

Adagietto, Berliner PhilarmonikerConcertus Musicus Wien, Nicolaus Harnoncourt

Claudio Abaddo3. Bach St John’s Passion

opening chorus

English Chamber Orchestra

Benjamin Britten

4.Bach St Matthew’s Passion

Aria: Erbarme mich, mein Gott

Concertus Musicus Wien,Nicolaus Harnoncourt



-Cassette 2-

SIDE A SIDE B

1. Chopin Nocturne No.1 in B flat minor 1. Vivaldi Cello Concerto

No.1 in C minor

2. Chopin Nocturne No.2 in E flat 1st mvt. Hungarian

State Opera Chamber

pianist: Artur Rubinstein Orchestra. Cellist:

György Kertész

3. Satie gymnopedie No. 1 2. Mozart Requiem:

Lacrymosa

pianist: Daniel Varsano Berliner

Philarmoniker, Karajan

4. Part of the Soundtrack of 3. Nick Drake: Cello song

Kieslowski’s movie 4. Nick Drake: Fruit Tree

‘The Double Life of Veronica’ 5. Doors: The End



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Spiros Doikas - Metaphysics of Art

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