Daily Dialectic

In the Twilight of Idols Nietzsche gives us the famous thesis that the “Art is the great stimulus to life” (TI, Skirmishes of an untimely man, §24). Art and Life are enormous topics in his philosophy and we can find them along his entire work, from Truth and Lie in an extra-moral Sense to the late Notebooks. Art and Life have a very stratified relationship and they both touch different philosophical fields: not only aesthetics, but also ethics, ontology and sociology. How many meanings can we associate with the word Art? Why a lot of critics can talk about a synonymy between Art and Life? Why, following Nietzsche’s opinion, humans need art in order to live?

When Nietzsche talks about Life, he means the original and undisputed patency of Greek and Western culture, namely the one of Becoming of everything, which Nietzsche tries to describe as Will to Power. Anyway, this patency has been forgotten by the West, due to a couple of thousands of years dominated by platonic philosophies (metaphysics) and religions. These kind of faiths gained power and success because of the difficulty humans have, when they try to bear the knowledge of the becoming of everything, and nihilism is an ever-present risk.

For Nietzsche, the greater counter-movement is Art, which becomes a stimulus, so not a further Faith or Meaning, but a sort of corporal imput, a physiological need. Actually, art does not refer to a unique thing in Nietzsche: there are at least a strict meaning and a broadly one. The former is the conception of the art as an artwork, and we can discuss with Nietzsche about tragedy, music, literature and so on. Probably, we would find that they endorse the idea of the world as Will to Power to varying degrees. On the other hand, we would find also that these art forms have a fundamental role for the education of the free spirit and his liberation from the Truth-chains.

Nevertheless, in Nietzsche these education and liberation are an education-to-ourself and a liberation from the degeneration of our drives. Indeed, in a broadly meaning, everything humans do is art: all the metaphysical structures are an artistic product, all the faiths are a creation of the human creativity. Indeed, Nietzsche calls Art the Will to Power expressed through Man. Thanks to his creativity and inventiveness, the Man find himself as a part of the entire becoming nature.

Our mental structure and our thinking habits produce angst in front of the lack of sense and value. Nietzsche’s answer is a sort of art-therapy: we recognize we could be only artist, and we follow our creativity, producing ever new values, Weltanschauungen or faiths, without being stuck on them or believe in their truth. It is, for Nietzsche, the only way we have to reach both satisfaction and freedom.

In this context, is it possible to characterize still better the concept of art? Where is the bottom of the relationship between art and life? How can we look at the other important concepts of Nietzsche’s philosophy, such as the Eternal Recurrence and the Overman?