NIETZSCHE AND ART AFTER THE “ARTIST’S METAPHYSICS”: FROM HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN (1878) TO HIS LATER WRITINGS (1888)

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate the art in Nietzsche in the period between Human, all too human (1878) and his later writings (1888), that is, in the period after “artist’s metaphysics”. Considering the tripartite division of the author’s work, “artist metaphysics” corresponds to the period of his youth, while here we explore the intermediate and mature periods. While distancing from Schopenhauer and Wagner and thus from metaphysics and romantic pessimism, Nietzsche will accentuate the examination of art increasingly by the artist’s bias. He did not intend to conceive a theory of art, a science of the beautiful, nor to analyze art from the prism of the work of art, nor from the spectator. In fact, without the artist, without the creative body, the work of art would not be able to exist. Thus, “artist’s metaphysics” will be replaced by a “physiology of art”, and from the viewpoint of the “will to power” a “decadent life” will produce a “decadent art”. On the contrary, only the fullness of forces could create an “ascending art”, Dionysian, affirmative, which is capable to perform, along with other mechanisms, the “transvaluation of all values”.