Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Truth, Interpretation and the Dialectic of Nihilism
- 2 Nietzsche's Subject: Retrieving the Repressed
- 3 Laughter and Sublimity: Reading The Birth of Tragedy
- 4 Wagner, Modernity and the Problem of Transcendence
- 5 Memory, History and Eternal Recurrence: The Aesthetics of Time
- 6 Towards a Physiological Aesthetic
- 7 Art, Truth and Woman: The Raging Discordance
- 8 Overcoming Nihilism: Art, Modernity and Beyond
- Notes
- References
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Truth, Interpretation and the Dialectic of Nihilism
- 2 Nietzsche's Subject: Retrieving the Repressed
- 3 Laughter and Sublimity: Reading The Birth of Tragedy
- 4 Wagner, Modernity and the Problem of Transcendence
- 5 Memory, History and Eternal Recurrence: The Aesthetics of Time
- 6 Towards a Physiological Aesthetic
- 7 Art, Truth and Woman: The Raging Discordance
- 8 Overcoming Nihilism: Art, Modernity and Beyond
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
“Beauty” is for the artist something outside all orders of rank, because in beauty opposites are tamed; the highest sign of power, namely power over opposites.
(WP§803)This book is concerned with the place of art in the thought of Nietzsche and with the place of Nietzsche's philosophy of art in the aesthetic tradition. It is not the first such study; as early as 1900 Julius Zeitler devoted a monograph entirely to Nietzsche's aesthetics, and there have been several other studies since. However, it differs from those studies in that it discusses Nietzsche's writing on art within the context of the problem of modern culture. It therefore draws out the relation between Nietzsche's own interpretation of art and modernity, and the aesthetic inflection of the debate concerning the meaning of modernity both in Nietzsche's predecessors such as Hegel, the Schlegel brothers or August Schelling and in his successors, in particular, Theodor Adorno. There is a tension in the work of Nietzsche, one with which he is constantly occupied and that, it might be argued, is a lasting legacy of his work. It emerges from his general critique of metaphysics and could be characterised as the problem of reconciling radical epistemological scepticism with continued belief in the possibility of normative discourse. In short, Nietzsche is concerned with the question of how the radical sceptic can avoid becoming a nihilist, and how the radical sceptic might combine acknowledgement of the contingency of all values with a continuing commitment to their necessity.
- Type
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- Information
- Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity , pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999