Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a misunderstood thinker, we can safely say. He coined the term 'Superman', was a friend of Wagner, and was German. This was enough to attract a bad fan base in Germany in the 1930s, especially one particularly vocal fan named Adolf, who had started his own political party.
Fortunately Nietzsche's thought goes much beyond mere hamfisted political interpretation and can be seen as a major body of work, which is in some ways still ahead of its time in the twenty first century.
Nietzsche thought that art was really important in life and civilisation and much more than decorative. He thought, like many of us, that art could nourish the soul.
Nietzsche thought that there were two forces which were important in the creation of art: the Dionysian and the Appolonian. Dionysian represents chaotic, emotional, instinctive whereas Appolonian represents order, reason and form. These forces are to some extent present in all people including artists, though arguably the Dionysian is more prominent in the artistic mind.
'once we perceive not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian and Dionysian duality: just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations.'
Friedrich Neitzsche, Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsche thought that art was a means by which we represent and triumph over the travails of life. Artists can present us with stories of the triumph over adversity which inspire us. Nietzsche seemed to think that drama and heater were the highest forms of art, though we use remember that he lived before the age of cinema, recorded music, television and so forth. Art can be uplifting, Nietzsche claimed. The global entertainment industry would surely agree with him. Would Nietzsche approve of modern day escapism? Possibly.
Nietzsche seemed to criticise the rational approach to aesthetics, which might seem to be a criticism of philosophy itself. He thought that the emotional aspects of art represented more primal human nature, and that aesthetics should be a balance of rational and emotional reactions to art.
As an intellectual outsider Nietzsche valued the individuality of art and artists against conformity and conventionality. He thought that each artist had his or her own individual life experience and mode of expression; every artist has their own story to tell. This type of individuality was unusual for the time but has since become the norm in art and arguably in much of society.
What did Nietzsche have to say about beauty, that elusive and deceptive quality of art?
'Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty—he forgets that it is he who has created it.' 'He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world— alas! Only a very human, all too human beauty…'
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the idols
What did Nietzsche mean by this? I thought that at first he meant that the only beauty in the world was put there by man, i.e. architecture and art. That would be a very arrogant point of view. A sunset or a snow leopard are both very beautiful and predate the existence of man. On further reflection I think that Nietzsche means that we as humans have a concept of beauty which we assign to sunsets and snow leopards. So beauty only exists because we see it. The things we consider beautiful, such as waterfalls and mountains, have always existed, but it took us to decide that they are 'beautiful'. Here Nietzsche is refuting the idea, favoured by some philosophers, that beauty is an objective quality which exists regardless of human perception. It is certainly a refutation of Plato's idea of objective and perfectly beautiful forms.
'we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art - for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.'
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy:
Again we initially struggle to digest this statement. Nietzsche means here that life is a struggle or all of us. As intelligent beings we need to justify the struggle and art enables us to do so. It is all worthwhile for art.
'Only artists, and especially those of the theatre, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each man is himself; only they have taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everyday characters; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves…'
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Here Nietzsche is telling us that art can help us to understand ourselves better. Art gives us a perspective on ourselves.
"Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man — and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed. Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually deprives him of strength. One can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something 'ugly.' His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride — all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful. In both cases we draw an inference: the premises for it are piled up in the greatest abundance in instinct. The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgment of 'ugly.' Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition — even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol — all evoke the same reaction, the value judgment, 'ugly.' A hatred is aroused — but whom does man hate then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness — it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Gods
Nietzsche here suggests that ugliness reminds us of the decay of ourselves or our type, by which he may mean mankind or a particular culture. This is a very interesting angle on the definition of beauty. Previously philosophers had tried to define beauty as being perfect form, or form mixed with the good, or as something appreciated by those in a special state of aesthetic detachment and many more definitions. Here Nietzsche simply says that beauty is what we associate with the growth of ourselves and our brethren? Or as possessing admirable qualities which are not reminiscent of decay or decline?
Nietzsche also says in this quote that beauty is subjective and does not exist outside of human experience. He associates ugliness with the degeneration of man.
'the voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls'
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche here says that sensationalist and brash art does not communicate anything of lasting value. Also he echoes what many philosophers have said, which is that in order to fully appreciate great art, the consumer of the art must be at a certain intellectual and cultural level. For example an uneducated person might miss the nuances of Shakespeare's plays.
'We possess art lest we perish of the truth'
Friedrich Nietzsche,
This is a much quoted aphorism from Nietzsche where he makes the case for escapism. Again talking about the struggles of life he thinks that art enables us to escape momentarily from those struggles. Art can create a world into which we can escape.
Nietzsche made much of the importance of truth, as any philosopher must. But perhaps like Plato he thought that art sometimes was the opposite of truth. The difference is that Nietzsche thought that sometimes it was beneficial that art was different to truth.
'If we had not welcomed the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science—the realization that delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation—would be utterly unbearable. Honesty would lead to nausea and suicide. But now there is a counterforce against our honesty that helps us to avoid such consequences: art as the good will to appearance.'
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Nietzsche here says that the rationalism and logic of science can lead us to undervalue our senses and emotions and trap us into thinking only rationally, thus diminishing our existence. He is saying that we should nurture the fruits of art which may create things beyond rationality. If we think only rationally there may be no room for art and its pleasures.
A major part of Nietzsche's thinking is that truth and artistry conflict with each other and that this conflict maintains a balance.
Nietzsche's thought cannot be reduced down to a single set of principles as he accept that contrasting forces are a part of us and aesthetics.
So there we have a summary tour of Nietzsches's aesthetics. A very large amount of his thinking was concerned with matters which run parallel to aesthetics, such as the tension between logic and emotion,, art and science, truth and artistic license. It is altogether a huge body of work of which we have only scratched the surface.