147 beautiful object pleases apart from any concept of what it is or should be (fourth

moment). Both of these latter claims, together with the notion of disinterestedness serve to dissociate the aesthetic object from considerations of means and ends, in other words, distinguish the aesthetic experience of the object from the experience of it as something to be utilised. As a symbol of morality, the beautiful does engage our interest on one level, yet this ‘intellectual’ interest is to be distinguished from the interest in the object as a means to self-preservation or advancement. It is a dis­ tinction which allows us to understand why we can allow fictional events or objects to affect us while we know they do not actually exist, without having to resort to

contemporary theories of make-believe, such as in Kendall Walton’s book. Mime­

sis as Make-believe , which proposes the curious notion that fiction is a game of

make-believe into which the spectator knowingly enters, and that emotional re­ sponses to what are known to be fictional events are in fact ‘pretend’ responses.

By drawing a distinction, however, between the aesthetic object (and this is increasingly equated with the work of art in writers after Kant) on the one hand and the realm of the practical (i.e. of desire) on the other, Kant is laying himself open to the kind of appropriation which Schopenhauer makes of his work, once the latter has transformed desire, or the Will, into a metaphysical principle. The subtle dis­ tinction between intellectual interest and desire is ignored in favour of a more simple opposition in Schopenhauer between willing and non-willing. The aesthetic experience is one devoid of all volition or interest in Schopenhauer, and hence an experience which is given a metaphysical significance in Schopenhauer’s system it did not possess in Kant. Likewise the beautiful object, by virtue of its belonging to a sphere independent of the realm of utility, appeals to the Romantics as a site of re­ sistance to the encroachment of the (conceptually bound) kingdom of means and ends, and from here we can follow the path leading to Modernism and the Avant- Garde where art, as a site of resistance to modern culture, becomes increasingly self-absorbed and purely self-critical, a characteristic feature to which Peter Burger, amongst others, has drawn attention.^^

If we restrict our analysis of this development to the nineteenth century, i.e. to that which would have been known to Nietzsche, we find the idea of the auton­ omy of art pursued to its most extreme conclusion in formalist writings of the Ger­ man musicologist Eduard Hanslick, and more prominently, the poets of I’art pour Tart such as Gautier and symbolists such as Mallarmé in France, who empty art of the moral content which even the Romantics had accorded it, instead transforming it into an enclosed sphere of self-reference^®. Attempting to free art from morality, such writers have, for Nietzsche, trivialised art, and it is Kant he criticises for es­

sentially proposing the idea of aesthetic experience without interest. In On the Ge­

;'r 148 estedness asserting that Tf our aestheticians never tire of claiming, in Kant’s

favour, that spellbound by beauty one can even view of undraped female statues “without interest”, then one can laugh a little at their expense . . . in any case Pygmalion was not an “anaesthetic human” ‘ (KSA 5 p. 347). Further in the same section he notes Schopenhauer’s indebtedness to this same idea, challenging the notion of willless aesthetic experience with the observation that far from displaying no interest in the aesthetic experience, Schopenhauer was greatly interested in it, in­ deed positively craved it as a release from the blind mechanism of the Will. In Niet­ zsche’s eyes Schopenhauer’s subscription to the idea of a willless aesthetic experi­ ence is self-defeating, since the aesthetic is invested with a particular function or use value which enmeshes it within the system of means and ends, in short, the economy of desire, and thus brings it close to Stendhal’s idea of an art that contains ‘une promesse de bonheur.’ It is this weakness in the entire notion of willless aesthetic experience in Schopenhauer’s philosophy which leads Nietzsche to

demand, in Beyond Good and Evil that ‘the aesthetics of “contemplation devoid of

all interest” which is used today as a seductive guise for the emasculation of art’, an aesthetics which he equates with the Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, ‘be questioned mercilessly and put on trial’ (KSA 5 p. 52).

In Twilight of the Idols he devotes a substantial passage to a critique of the

Modernism of I’art pour I’art, countering the desire of those to free art from moral­ ity and hence render it ‘purposeless, goalless, senseless’ with the following series of rhetorical questions: ‘what does all art do ? does it not praise ? does it not glorify ? does it not select out ? does it not bring to prominence ? With all this it strengthens or weakens certain judgements of value . . . is this incidental ? a coincidence ?’ (KSA 6 p. 127).

Far from occupying a completely autonomous sphere of self-reference, art, in Nietzsche’s thought, refers beyond itself to the world, in as much as it consti­ tutes the material expression of a certain relation towards the world. As Nietzsche says, ‘Art is the great stimulant to life: how could one conceive of it as without pur­ pose, as goalless, as I’art pour Tart ?’ (ibid.). Yet although the specific opposition to Tart pour Tart is a product of Nietzsche’s mature thought, brought about by his

linking of art and will to power, the development of his theory after The Birth of

Tragedy can be traced without difficulty. Already in the first volume of Human

All-too Human the notion of art as a means of coming to terms with the world, of

rendering it bearable, is being transformed into that of art as an affirmation of the world. In the section entitled ‘From the Soul of the Artists and Writers’ he writes that art has ‘taught us for thousands of years to look upon life in every shape with interest and desire and to bring our feelings to the point where we finally shout:

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Science Nietzsche offers a lengthy discussion of the origin of poetic metre and

rhythm, which stands in clear opposition to the view of, say, Mallarmé, who pro­ claims that ‘language speaks itself (la langue se parle). Nietzsche claims that the use of rhythm in poetry originates in the ancient conviction that its use could enable humans to exercise some power over the gods. For it had long been recognised that music has ‘the power to unload the affects, to purify the soul, to mollify the ferocia animi - and especially through the rhythmical in music’ (KSA 3 pp. 440-1), and it was assumed that it would effect the gods in the same fashion. Hence poetry finds its origin in invocations to the gods, attempting ‘to compel them through rhythm and exercise a power over them* (ibid.).

Now the significance of this interpretation does not lie in Nietzsche’s obser­ vation that rhythm has a certain power over the human affects, for he freely admits that Pythagoras (not to mention Plato) had already understood this, and he would not be saying anything very interesting. Instead, what deserves our attention is his claim, no matter how incorrect from an anthropological and historical point of

view, that early humans used this awareness in order to try to control the gods, and %

hence by implication the natural environment. In other words, rhythm was utilised as a means of controlling the world, getting a purchase on it, and hence is intimately bound up to questions of means and ends, utility and desire.

As Pütz puts it,2i art finds its ground in life, and although will to power has not yet been articulated in Nietzsche’s work at this stage, art in the form of poetic rhythm is clearly motivated by will to power. It is a claim supported in the aphorism following the discussion of poetry, which discusses the beautiful. In this aphorism he asserts that ‘Artists are always elevating - they do not do anything else

- and moreover all those situations and things which are reputed to make a person ^

feel good or great or drunk or merry or well and wise. These select things . . .

are the objects of the artist’ (ibid. pp. 442-3). The states of being which the artist promotes are precisely those states which are engendered by will to power, and the emphasis which Nietzsche lays on the selectivity of the artist will have important consequences for articulating the relation between will to power and Nietzsche’s later aesthetic norm of Dionysian Classicism.

The notion of I’art pour Part, stemming in Nietzsche’s view from the Kan­ tian idea of disinterestedness, functions as the corollary to ‘that dangerous old con­ ceptual fable, which has posited a “pure willless, painless, atemporal subject of cognition” ’ (KSA 5 p. 365). Here we see Nietzsche confirming the genealogy of I’art pour Tart I sketched above, seeing it as a descendant of the Kantian conception of the disinterested aesthetic subject. Naturally, Nietzsche’s understanding of self­ hood rules out accepting either the Kantian aesthetic subject or the derivative notion of artistic autonomy. His grounding of all acts of cognition or interpretation in will

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