KIRIN WACHTER-GRENE: Thank you
all for coming to this lecture.
Thank you for joining
us this afternoon.
My name is Kirin Wachter-Grene.
I'm Assistant Professor
of Liberal Arts,
and it's my pleasure to
introduce you to this lecture,
"From Science to Perspectivism--
Nietzsche on Art,"
presented by Dr.
Guy Elgat, who is standing
right to my right.
This is the second liberal arts
lecture in the recently revived
Liberal Arts Lecture Series.
The first lecture
was last spring.
The Liberal Arts
Department offers
one or two lectures a semester
presented by our faculty
to the entire SAIC community.
So save the date for
Tuesday, November 12,
for a lecture
titled "Microcosm--
the Hidden Universe
in the Ocean,"
presented by adjunct
assistant professor
Michele Hoffman Trotter, so more
information on that to come.
I want to offer a special
thanks to my colleagues, Raja El
Halwani, Adam Mack, Teena
McClelland, Annette Lepique,
and Kelly Christian for
helping to organize and host
this event.
And it's now my pleasure
to introduce you
to this afternoon's speaker.
Dr. Guy Elgat is a lecturer
in liberal arts, teaching
philosophy and critical
theory-themed first-year
seminars.
Dr. Elgat's research
focuses on German philosophy
with an emphasis on the
thought of Friedrich Nietzsche.
His book, Nietzsche's
Psychology of Ressentiment,
was published in
2017 with Rutledge.
In his lecture this
afternoon, Dr. Elgat
will examine Nietzsche's view
on art, specifically music,
in two separate periods
of Nietzsche's thought--
1878, when he
published his Human,
All Too Human, and
1886, when he published
the fifth book of
The Gay Science,
as well as Beyond Good and Evil.
Dr. Elgat will examine
Nietzsche's early view of art
in relation to
contemporary scientism
and explain how,
in his later work,
Nietzsche transcended this
earlier a more limited view
by appealing to his
doctrine of perspectivism.
There will be time
after the lecture
for questions and discussion.
Please welcome Dr. Guy Elgat.
[APPLAUSE]
GUY ELGAT: Thank you very much.
Glad to see
everybody here today.
So there you have it.
You know what it's
about, more or less.
And I usually talk about
Nietzsche and moral philosophy,
so I haven't really done any
serious research with respect
to Nietzsche and art.
But I've been interested
in those questions,
so this is a great
opportunity to finally
articulate explicitly
some of the ideas
that I've played
around with in my head.
And of course, I'm looking
forward to the discussion.
Probably you guys know more
a lot about art than I do,
so it would be very interesting
to see what you have
to say in response to this.
So let me start.
I don't have any
PowerPoint presentations,
so this is all very low tech.
So I apologize for that.
It's just a technology
of words and ideas,
good old-fashioned technology.
OK, so let's get started.
So I would like to talk today
about Nietzsche's philosophy
of art, specifically the very
critical ideas he developed
in his 1878 work,
Human, All Too Human,
and see whether and in what
way Nietzsche ultimately
came to revise at least some
of his views in his later work
from 1886, when he
started to formulate ideas
about perspectivism.
Now, perhaps you know
Nietzsche as a philosopher who
in general is very sympathetic
to the arts, and this, I think,
is roughly very much true.
But what is less known
about Nietzsche's engagement
with art is that during
an important period
of his thinking, the
so-called Middle Period,
Nietzsche entertained very
critical ideas regarding
art, artists, aesthetics,
and formulated these ideas
in sometimes extremely
aggressive language,
as his is wont in
general, you could say.
So while I hope you will not
find these ideas too offensive
and get too angry with
Nietzsche, or with me
as his spokesperson
here today, I
hope that nevertheless
you will find
them intellectually stimulating
and thought provoking.
So first of all, to
motivates my talk,
at least partially,
I would like to begin
by quoting a few sentences from
an interview recently given--
and you can find it online
if you are interested.
It's very interesting--
by another philosopher,
the contemporary American
philosopher Alex--
Alexander Rosenberg.
And Rosenberg, he's currently
a professor of philosophy
at Duke University.
He's a card carrying
adherent of the view
that is called scientism.
And what is scientism?
Scientism is a
term that is often
used in a pejorative way,
that is, in a negative way,
to refer to the
approach that sees
in the sciences, especially
the natural sciences--
that is, biology,
chemistry, physics,
neurology, neuropsychology--
sees in those sciences
as the end all
and be all of all
rational inquiry.
According to this
approach, science
enjoys exclusivity with respect
to human beings' attempt
to know anything at all.
If there is a meaningful
question there to be asked,
it is the sciences
and the sciences alone
that have the
legitimacy and authority
to try to answer the question.
And it is their answer
and their answer
alone that we can ever
be rationally warranted
in believing.
So what is the nature
of material existence?
Did the universe
have a beginning?
What is the function of the
brain, et cetera, et cetera.
With respect to any question
that we can pose whatsoever,
if there is some determinate
answer to that question,
if there is a truth to be
found with respect to it,
it is the sciences alone
that can deliver it.
And anyone else, layman--
that is, mere mortals--
should bow down before
science and accept its results
unquestionably.
While extremely--
Sorry, as I already mentioned,
the term scientism usually
has strong negative
connotations for its users
since it is believed by
those who oppose scientism
that its overweening
scientific imperialism is just
wrong-headed or flat out false.
While extremely
valuable, the sciences--
so the detractors of scientism
hold the sciences cannot
possibly hope to answer
every legitimate question.
And the scientistic
approach, in contrast
to the scientific approach--
the scientistic
approach that seeks
to delegitimize any question or
suggestion that might threaten
the exclusive
hegemony of science
by dismissing the
question as meaningless
is nothing but
intellectual terrorism.
Rosenberg, while aware of
the resistance to scientism,
is not fazed by it at all.
And I want to quote
from the interview.
And he says this.
"So scientism, as the
word is normally used,
is a term of abuse.
And what it means is the
unreasonable and unwarranted
crediting of science
with powers to explain
that is, by many
people, not so credited
in the exaggerated respect for
science's methods and science's
findings.
Now take that definition and
remove the word exaggerated,
and you've got my
definition of scientism.
Scientism is the view
that science is our best
guide to the nature of reality.
Its methods and its
findings our best
account of the
nature of reality."
End quote.
Now, in Rosenberg's
view, when it
comes to the fundamental
philosophical questions
we might be perturbed with
and which philosophers
have dedicated themselves
to for centuries,
science has supplied us with the
best available answers, which
he powerfully lists
in the following.
So this is another quote.
"So is there a god?
Of course not.
What is the meaning
of the universe?
Doesn't have any.
What is the purpose of life?
Ditto.
Is there a difference between
right and wrong, good and bad?
There's not a moral
difference between them.
What is the nature
of the relationship
between mind and the brain?
They are identical.
The mind is the brain.
Is there free will?
Not a chance."
So that's a nice list.
Now, it is not my intention
here to develop or challenge
Rosenberg's ideas in any
detail, though I will
raise a challenge to scientism.
So you might ask, why have
I been talking about him
and his problematic views?
And what has that to do
with Nietzsche and art?
Well, what caught my
attention in this interview
with Rosenberg was the
following exchange between him
and his interviewer
regarding the nature
and value of artworks
and aesthetic experience.
So this is Rosenberg again.
He says, "I mean,
the arts are fun.
They are entertaining,
they're enjoyable.
It's like when you listen
to Beethoven's Ninth
and you hear the "Ode To Joy."
It makes you cry, OK?
Nobody can deny that
it makes you cry.
Scientism doesn't
deny it makes you cry.
But to think there's some
world historical meaning
beyond the emotional impact
of great works of art on us,
that's what I think is the
mistake, and the mistake
that science reveals to us."
And the interviewer
goes on to ask,
"And science tells us that when
we're moved by Beethoven's "Ode
To Joy," that's nothing more
than an emotional response?"
And he answers, "It's the
acoustical disturbance
produced by the condensation
and verification of oxygen
and nitrogen molecules
in the atmosphere pushing
on our eardrums."
"And when you say value,"
the interviewer asks,
"the value that it has is,
for example, its ability
to emotionally give us
pleasant experiences?"
"Yes, right."
"But nothing beyond that?"
"No."
Let me repeat the
central claims here.
Great art, Beethoven's Ninth
for example, makes you cry.
It has an emotional impact,
but there is no world
historical meaning in it.
It reveals no great secrets
about the mysteries of life,
the universe, and everything.
Moreover, the effect
of the work on us
can be explained in
purely scientific terms--
molecules, atmosphere, pressure.
Now compare this
to the following
aphorism by Nietzsche--
so here I'm finally
starting with Nietzsche--
entitled "Art Weighs Down
the Thinker's Heart."
It's taken from the
section "From the Soul
of Artists and Writers" in
Nietzsche's 1878 Human, All Too
Human.
So Nietzsche writes
the following.
"We can understand how
strong the metaphysical need
is from the way the
highest effects of art
can easily produce
a reverberation
of a long silenced or even
broken metaphysical string.
Even in a free spirit who
has rid himself of everything
metaphysical, at a certain place
in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony,
for example, he
might feel that he's
floating above the
Earth in a starry dome
with the dream of
immortality in his heart.
All the stars seem
to glimmer around him
and the earth seems to
sink ever deeper downwards.
In such moments his intellectual
character is being tested."
End quote.
You can now see, I hope,
why reading the Rosenberg
interview I became
instantaneously intellectually
sizzled and quickly reached
to my copy of Nietzsche's
text, for here, in essence,
we have very similar ideas.
Art, great art, Nietzsche
tells us, can give rise in us
to a great emotional
response, the highest effects,
as Nietzsche says, and
might generate in us,
as a result, the illusion
that arts can communicate
great metaphysical truths or
alternatively reawaken in us
metaphysical or religious
notions that, as free spirits,
we should have left
behind as relics
of an immature pre-scientific,
unenlightened age.
Was, then, Nietzsche
at the time of Human,
All Too Human an adherent
of scientism of sorts?
Well, he certainly would
agree, I think, with Rosenberg,
at the time of Human, All
Too Human and all the way
to the end of his career, that
indeed life is meaningless,
the universe is meaningless.
There is no moral
difference between what
we call right and wrong, and
that there is no god because,
well, as Nietzsche famously
put it, god is dead.
But what about
Nietzsche's view of art?
And did it remain
unchanged all the way
until Nietzsche's final works?
In the section I
quoted above, Nietzsche
mentions the free spirits
or the free thinker.
The free spirit was a
new ideal that Nietzsche
began to articulate in
Human, All Too Human
and in the immediately
following works.
The term free spirit
of free thinker
represents for Nietzsche not
what it has come sometimes
to represent in our current
topsy-turvy culture,
namely the anti-science,
anti-authority of every kind,
who mocks those who trust
the sciences for not being
able to think for
themselves and takes pride
in being an independent
free thinker?
No.
For Nietzsche, it represents the
philosopher or the thinker who
has managed, by means of the
lessons of science as well
as by means of his scalpel-sharp
reason, to free himself--
and Nietzsche mostly
had men in mind,
but we should also add herself--
from the shackles of
irrational or erroneous belief.
Every idea that
smacks of something
unnatural, supernatural,
transcendent, that
smells, as Nietzsche puts it,
of the beyond, the hereafter,
of another world beyond this
world, every idea that whispers
in our ear that the
human being is more,
is special, unique, divine,
that there glows in him
some magical spark,
every such idea
is to be put by the free spirit
on ice, as Nietzsche puts it.
Namely, on the basis of
piercing psychological analysis,
of which Nietzsche was a master,
every idea, such as the ones
that I mentioned,
is to be flated--
is to be deflated, sorry,
of its seeming grandiosity
and of the humanistic
enthusiasm that
was breathed into it, and
in a cold dispassionate
fashion shown to be nothing but
as a result of certain errors
of thinking passed down to
us through the generations,
nothing but the
consequence of the working
of certain natural,
psychological mechanisms
now exposed for what
they really are,
namely the mechanisms of a
finite, feeble, arrogant,
credulous, and mendacious
mind, a mind that
is human, all too human.
For example, while we
may think that there
is something supernatural
or divine about morality,
that the laws of morality are
of pure or pristine origin
and are therefore
unconditional, Nietzsche
avers in an aphorism entitled
The Super Animal, he says,
"The beast in us
wants to be lied to.
Morality is a white lie to
keep it from tearing us apart.
Without the errors inherent
in the postulates of morality,
man would have
remained an animal.
But as it is, he has taken
himself to be something higher
and has imposed stricter
laws upon himself."
Morality, Nietzsche thus claims,
is a lie, a lie, moreover,
we tell ourselves.
It is based on errors, errors
with the help of which we fancy
ourselves to be
more than a beast,
and thus, on the basis
of this self-deception,
keep ourselves in check.
While it is true that
by means of morality,
by means of this self-deception,
we've become a super-animal,
we remain animals nonetheless,
not beings of a higher divine
order.
Besides morality, in the course
of the free spirit book series,
Nietzsche subjects a whole
variety of different beliefs
to this cold analysis--
religious beliefs, metaphysical,
political beliefs, as well as--
and this is the focus
of my talk today--
beliefs that concern art and
aesthetics, for these two
must in frosty scientific
spirit be debunked and shown
to be the result of mythical,
pre-scientific, religious
metaphysical thinking.
And here Nietzsche radically
breaks from the ideas
that he developed in
the first philosophy
book that is ever published,
the earlier The Birth of Tragedy
from 1872.
There, under the
strong influence
of the metaphysical ideas of
the German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche held
that art, especially music
and Greek tragedy, can pierce
into the abysmal and horrifying
nature of reality
and reveal to us
the terrible pessimistic truth
about the all-encompassing and
eternal will that lies
beneath all appearances.
From the standpoint of the later
text, Human, All Too Human,
this is all just juvenile,
overly enthusiastic twaddle.
And indeed, Human,
All Too Human can
be seen, as it was
seen by Nietzsche,
as a radical act of about face,
an act of self overcoming,
where the older
self, intoxicated,
as it was with romantic ideas
about the metaphysical power
and significance of art, is
criticized and cast aside,
shed like snakeskin to
make room for the new self,
the free spirit.
It is in this spirit
that Nietzsche severely
criticizes received and
inflated notions of the artist,
of aesthetic experience,
of artworks themselves,
of the significance of art,
and of the effects of art
on the public and on the artist.
Indeed, I think the force
of Nietzsche's criticism
is so vehement at
times that I dare
to say that ever since Plato's
notorious attack on art,
no stronger words have
been directed against it,
by a philosopher at least.
The reason being that,
according to Nietzsche,
art in its various aspects
can only sustain itself,
can only appear to retain
a measure of legitimacy
by feeding on religious and
metaphysical ideas that cannot
be rationally
maintained anymore,
that have fallen into
intellectual disrepute.
We saw this idea at work in
the section on Beethoven.
The magic that a great
composition can work on us,
Nietzsche claims, draws
its power from the illusion
that that gives rise
to, the illusion
that something divine,
supernatural, and otherworldly
is being revealed to
us, communicated to us,
channeled to us in
aesthetic experience.
Nietzsche, of
course, does not deny
the blinding and extraordinary
effect of great art,
but he thinks that from the fact
that aesthetic experience has
this enchanting,
quasi-magical character often
captured with the aid of terms
such as beauty and the sublime
and aura, to use
Benjamin's term,
from that it doesn't
follow that art indeed
has a capacity to open us to any
hidden dimensions of reality.
First, Nietzsche holds, a cold
scientific mind cannot allow
itself to buy into such
outlandish ideas that have no
empirical grounding whatsoever
and can only appear to be true
for a mind steeped in religious
and metaphysical ideas
and minds not sufficiently
schooled in the cold
and objective method of analysis
of the Nietzschean free spirit.
Second, Nietzsche
thinks, there are
natural, historical
explanations of how
religious meanings entered art.
Thus with respect
to music, he writes
in a section entitled "Religious
Origin of Modern Music,"
that music of feeling comes
into being within the restored
Catholicism that followed the
Council of Trent, that spawned
the Counter-Reformation,
through Palestrina, who
was an Italian Renaissance
religious composer, who
assisted the newly awakened
spirit to find utterance,
later with Bach.
It extended to
Protestantism, too.
This is how profoundly indebted
we are to the religious life.
In other words, what
Nietzsche is saying
is that modern music--
and as a consequence,
great classical music--
has become infused
with certain feelings
of a specific religious
coloring and has
been accordingly interpreted.
But, as he says, no music
is in itself deep and full
of meaning.
And he adds, the
intellect itself
has projected this
meaning into the sound
as it has also read into
the relationship of lines
and masses in architecture
a meaning that is, however,
actually quite foreign
to mechanical laws.
The implication seems to
be that, in truth, there's
nothing there in
the artistic object
but what the sciences
can tell us--
lines and masses and
the mechanical laws
that govern them, all
meaning everything
that goes beyond the scientific
truth is just a projection.
Art, Nietzsche says
in the section,
"Infusion of Soul
into Art," art takes
over a number of feelings and
moods produced by religion,
clasps them to its
heart, and then
becomes itself
deeper, more soulful,
so that it is able
to communicate
exultation and enthusiasm which
it could not yet do before.
Thus the claim, it
seems, is general.
He's not just
talking about music.
It's not just music
that benefited
from this intertwining with
the effective and ideational
palette of religion,
but all art.
As Nietzsche writes
in the section,
"Transcendence in Art,"
artists glorify mankind's
religious and
philosophical errors,
and they could not have
done so without believing
in their absolute truth.
Now, if belief in such
truth declines at all,
if the rainbow colors around the
outer edges of human knowledge
and imagination fade, then
art, like the Divine Comedy,
Rafael's paintings,
Michelangelo's frescoes,
Gothic cathedrals,
art that presumes
not only a cosmic but also
metaphysical meaning in the art
object, can never blossom again.
There will someday
be a moving legend
that such an art, such an
artistic faith once existed.
But Nietzsche's
critique of the artist
goes far deeper than this.
Not only is it true, Nietzsche
thinks, that artists,
perhaps some of the
greatest artists,
believed in certain religious
or metaphysical ideas and that
their art cannot be imagined
without such presuppositions,
but artists actively,
Nietzsche says,
actively resist any attempt
to discredit such religious
metaphysical notions, for
they have a vested interest
in preserving them,
for their art,
their success as
artists depends on it.
As Nietzsche puts
it, "On no account
does the artist want
his brilliant, profound
interpretations of life
to be taken from him,
and he defends himself
against sober plain methods
and results.
Ostensibly, he is fighting
for the higher dignity
and meaning of man.
In truth, he does
not want to give up
the most effective
presuppositions for his art,
that is, the fantastic, the
mythic, uncertain extreme.
Thus he thinks the continuation
of his manner of creating
is more important than
a scientific dedication
to truth in every form,
however plain it may appear."
End quote.
One central idea,
according to Nietzsche,
that artists
tremendously benefit
from is the idea of
genius and inspiration.
Criticizing the romantic
idea of the genius artists,
in whose ears the Muses
whisper and through his mind
there consequently flow
brilliant images, visions,
entire works that then stream
almost effortlessly out
through the hands to the page,
the canvas, the music sheet,
Nietzsche claims, as you
might expect by now, that this
is all mythology, and a
pernicious and self-serving one
at that.
The artist's illusion that their
art fell from the sky in one
fell swoop might strengthen the
erroneous belief that indeed
they are channeling something of
divine origin, which would only
add to their glory and
prestige and further solidify
the metaphysical
significance of art
as well as certain
metaphysical ideas.
To debunk this
mythology, Nietzsche
offers, as in so
many other places,
a psychological, naturalistic
explanation of the phenomena
at issue, that of genius.
He writes, "When productive
energy has been dammed up
for a while and has been
hindered in its outflow
by an obstacle, there is finally
a sudden outpouring, as if
a direct inspiration with no
previous inner working out,
as if a miracle
were taking place.
This constitutes the
well-known illusion
which all artists have
somewhat too great an interest
in preserving."
End quote.
Thus what seems to be miraculous
is revealed as natural.
What appears higher and
full of mysterious meaning
is disenchanted.
A little bit of psychology
and the belief in inspiration
dissipates like morning dew.
But not only is the idea
in sudden inspiration
psychologically explainable
and thus demystified,
Nietzsche thinks it is also
possible to examine closely
the actual process of creation
and see what is actually
going on in the atelier or
study of the great artist.
Thus he claims, in truth the
good artist's or thinker's
imagination is continually
producing things
good, mediocre, and bad.
But the artist's
power of judgment,
highly sharpened and
practiced, rejects, selects,
joins together.
Nietzsche adduces the
example of Beethoven.
If we look at
Beethoven's notebooks,
we can see that he
gradually assembled the most
glorious melodies
and, to a degree,
selected them out of
disparate beginnings.
Hard, continuous, dirty
work, then, rather than
an instantaneous and
immaculate conception.
What, then, causes us
to believe in genius?
As we saw, artists,
Nietzsche thinks,
are prone to promote
this idea, given
that it magnifies their glory.
But another suggestion Nietzsche
makes is the following.
He says, "Everything that
is complete and perfect
is admired.
Everything still becoming
is underestimated.
Now, no one can see
in an artist's work
how it has become.
That is its advantage,
for wherever
we can see the act of becoming
we grow somewhat colder.
The finished and perfect
art of representation
repulses all thinking
as to how it has become.
It tyrannizes as present
completeness and perfection.
This is why the masters of
the art of representation
count above all as
gifted with genius."
End quote.
In other words, it is
precisely because we are not
privy to the gradual,
messy process of creation
that we tend to think, when
confronted with a finished
work, that it
descended from the sky.
And as a side note,
think in this connection
about a parallel case--
intelligent divine creation
on the one hand and evolution
by natural selection
on the other.
Since the very slow and
gradual process of evolution
is something we don't
actually observe,
we are tempted to
believe in a god who
created all forms of life in
instantaneous acts of creation.
But when we think like
this, Nietzsche says,
we are probably still
under the influence
of an ancient mythological
sentiment, that
is, we are thinking
unscientifically.
Consequently, Nietzsche adds,
he says, as is self-evident,
the science of art must oppose
the illusion most firmly
and point out the false
conclusions and self
indulgences of the
intellect that drive it
into the artist's trap.
Now, in general, the
treatment the artist receives
in Nietzsche's discussion
is unflattering
to the extreme, and this,
again, in sharp contrast
to his earlier veneration of the
artist at the time of The Birth
of Tragedy, his earlier book.
In Human, All Too Human,
the later work, Nietzsche
excoriates the
artist and paints him
in the most
unflattering of colors.
We already saw that
Nietzsche thinks
that the artist encourages
belief in illusion
and miracles out of egoistic
interest in self-preservation.
But the harshest
words, I think, are
to be found in the
following section, entitled
"Art, Dangerous for the
Artist," which I will now
quote to you at some length.
Nietzsche writes,
"When art seizes
an individual powerfully,
it draws him back
to the views of those times when
art flowered most vigorously.
And then it effects a
retrogression in him.
The artist comes more and more
to revere southern excitements,
believes in gods and demons,
imbues nature with the soul,
hates science, and desires the
overthrow of all conditions
that are not favorable to art.
And this is with the
vehemence and unreasonableness
of a child.
"Now," Nietzsche continues,
"the artist, in and of himself,
is already a laggard creature--"
in another translation I have,
"a retarded being--
because he still
plays a game that
belongs to youth and childhood.
To this there is now added
his gradual retrogression
to earlier times."
End quote.
So not only is the artist
interested in deceiving
his audience and tarnishing
their clarity of thinking,
he is himself a victim of his
own artistic craft insofar
as it has the effect of causing
the kind of retrogression
in the artist to
a stage of culture
where belief in mythical
beings and powers was the norm
and where science was not yet
available as a way of making
sense of the world.
But the second idea that
Nietzsche introduces here
is that, this pernicious
effect of art aside,
the artist is already a
kind of laggard creature,
as Nietzsche says,
which, we might add,
is perhaps another explanation
for why the artist is attracted
to such unscientific notions
and why he exhibits resistance
to scientific ideas
in the first place.
Now, this is not to say that the
illusions that art traffics in
have no value whatsoever.
Here Nietzsche retains
an important idea
from his earlier work and
claims that art renders
the site of life bearable
by laying over it
the gauze of impure thinking.
This is just great.
Let me read that again.
Art renders the site of life
bearable by laying over it
the gauze of impure thinking.
Art makes life bearable
by falsifying it,
whether by distracting us away
from the horrible everyday,
by making us believe in
certain comforting religious or
metaphysical ideas, or
even by tantalizing us
with the seductions of beauty.
Taking up the concept of
beauty, Nietzsche asks,
what do we long for
when we see beauty?
And he answers, to be beautiful.
We think much happiness
must be connected with it,
but that is an error.
So art as well as the artist and
as a consequence, the public,
are all sunk deep in outdated
magical and mythical thinking.
What is to be done?
What is the future that lies
ahead for art, for artists?
The assumptions under which
art operated and thrived,
according to
Nietzsche, assumptions
about the power of art reveal
a true world, assumptions
about the genius of the
artist, about meaning in art,
such assumptions are wrong,
Nietzsche says, and asks,
what place remains for art,
then, after this knowledge?
And he answers, we
could give art up.
Could give it up.
But, he adds, in
doing so, we would not
forfeit what it has
taught us to do.
And he says, "This teaching of
art, to have joy in existence,
has taken root in us.
It now comes to light again
as an all-powerful need
for knowledge.
As plastic art and
music are the standard
for the wealth of feeling
really earned and won
through religion, so the
intense and manifold joy
in life which art implants in us
would still demand satisfaction
were art to disappear.
The scientific man is
a further development
of the artistic man."
End quote.
This is, in essence, Nietzsche
thesis about the end of art.
Art, or at least
great art, grew out of
and was propped up by religious
or metaphysical ideas.
But now that these ideas
have lost all credence,
art is for us a
thing of the past,
as Hegel formulated his
idea about the end of art.
But for Nietzsche, art is
not to disappear completely,
rather it is to flow into and
nourish the scientific spirit.
Specifically, it has to
make possible the kind
of joyful attitude to
existence that within living
the existence and activities
of the scientific person
was now supposed to
supersede the artist
and take his or her place.
Art, as the title of
Nietzsche's 1882 book has it,
is supposed to make possible
a gay or joyful science,
a joyful wisdom.
It thus seems that in this
middle period of his thinking,
the period of the Free Spirit,
Nietzsche held views on art
very similar to those of
Alexander Rosenberg, with whose
views I began my talk.
Art can make you
feel various things,
and it has value as
entertainment of sorts.
But it in itself lacks any
world historical meaning,
and its effects
on the subject can
be understood scientifically.
What are we to make of
this criticism of art?
To what extent is it persuasive?
I think, but I'm not
so sure so correct me
if I'm wrong in my usage
of we in the following.
I think that no one
today would hold the view
that art manages to
provide us with access
to some supernatural
or spiritual realm,
or that there is something
magical or mystical
about inspiration,
though in parentheses I
want to add that I
can still hear artists
talk about the universe
signaling to them what to do.
Our concept of genius
has to a great degree
undergone
disenchantment as well.
We still believe
in innate talent,
but like Nietzsche at first, we
don't conceive of this talent
as equipping the artist with
the capacity to receive messages
from some beyond, nor
do we, second, think
that talent without
instruction and hard work
can really come to
anything worthwhile.
But what should we think
about Nietzsche's ideas
regarding meaning in art?
Is art itself
really meaningless?
Can it merely provide
us with some form
of sensory or
emotional stimulation
that can be understood,
theoretically explained
by the natural sciences?
Is art nothing but a form
of entertainment of sorts?
Doesn't it possess the
ability to reveal truths
with a lower case t?
But what truth is
left once we abandon
religious and
metaphysical truths
and surrender all discovery
and analysis of truth
to the sciences or to
common sense understanding?
In order to offer a possible
answer to these questions,
I would like to
move forward in time
to a later period in
Nietzsche's thinking,
the last period of
his productive life,
which we can perhaps
claim started at 1886
with the publication
of the fifth book
of The Gay Science and of
Beyond Good And Evil, all
the way to the
final works of 1888,
such as Twilight of the
Idols and The Antichrist.
Now, on the one hand, in his
remarks on beauty and art,
Nietzsche in this later
period of his thought
retains the psychological,
physiological analysis,
and raises ideas similar to
those that we encountered
above, where the
power of art is seen
to lie in its ability to
generate a life affirming
attitude.
For example, apropos of his
rejection of the idea of art
for art's sake,
Nietzsche asks, art
is the great stimulus to life.
How could art be understood
as purposeless, pointless,
[NON-ENGLISH]?
These suggestions, however,
true or false or they might be,
are still caught up in the
reductive scientistic attitude
to art, I want to say,
where it is merely
conceived as a kind of drug
that works to excite and enliven
the body and mind, an
existential Viagra of sorts,
if you will, one that can,
in principle, be replaced
by a chemical
substance developed
by the pharmaceutical industry.
I would like to suggest that a
more promising line of thinking
could be found in
Nietzsche's later reflections
on art, when we
take into account
his ideas about perspectivism.
So what is perspectivism?
So Nietzsche does
not really clarify--
he never does, actually.
He never really
clarifies anything
in a direct, straightforward,
explicit way.
But I think it's possible
to approach perspectivism
through another famous
idea of Nietzsche's, namely
the death of God.
The death of God, announced
in The Gay Science,
means, in a
nutshell-- and this is
of very, very small nutshell.
It means that, as
Nietzsche puts it,
the belief in the Christian
god has become unbelievable.
The belief in the Christian
god has become unbelievable.
In other words, the
death of God does not
involve the annihilation
or disappearance
of a previously
existing being, God,
but rather it involves
a change in our beliefs.
We-- and we can, of course,
raise questions about this we--
have stopped believing
in God because we
take such believed
to be unbelievable,
that is incredible.
What are the
implications of this?
For Nietzsche, the tremendous
implications of this event
can hardly be exaggerated.
But while huge but
while usually focus
is put on the moral implications
of the death of God,
I want to focus my attention
on the epistemological
implications, that is,
on the consequences
that the death of God has
for how we should think
about knowledge and truth.
So in the philosophical
tradition,
on top of being
all-powerful and all-good,
God is, in addition, conceived
as an all-knowing being.
Roughly, what this is meant,
again, for philosophers
is that God knows all reality.
Nothing escapes God's sight.
And he knows reality as it
is, not as it appears to be,
and where all the
different parts
of this reality like
in a jigsaw puzzle
are held together in a
synaptic, internally coherent,
all-encompassing view.
Since this is how
God knows the world,
this is for us human beings
the ideal to strive to
in our scientific endeavors.
We want our knowledge
of the world
to coincide with
God's, for then we
will have perfect and
absolute knowledge.
Now, Nietzsche's
idea is that when
we reject the belief in God, we
are at the same time, committed
to rejecting the divine
conception of knowledge
that I just outlined, for the
force of this picture of what
knowledge is derived
from any authority
that the conception of
God might have over us.
Thus the death of God spells a
revision in our understanding
of knowledge.
Our cognitive
access to the world,
Nietzsche holds, should
not be conceived merely
as an inherently limited
attempt to know reality
from God's point of view since
this divine point of view
does not exist.
Rather than think
about knowledge
as total, all-encompassing,
pure, impersonal, and
internally coherent, rather than
think of it, in other words,
as providing us with a
complete view from nowhere,
to use philosopher
Thomas Nagel's phrase,
we should appreciate that
cognitive access to the world
is always local, always
piecemeal, always
personal, that is, always
mediated through our cognitive
capacities, our concepts
and our theories,
always couched in
our vocabulary,
and always reflective of our
interests, needs, and affective
dispositions.
It is always plural.
In other words,
cognition for Nietzsche
is always perspectival,
from a specific perspective,
and it generates
different interpretations.
Moreover, what is
revealed in these various
perspective-dependent
interpretations cannot
necessarily be joined
together to form a complete
and wrinkle-free picture.
Some perspectival
interpretations or views
do not.
Unlike jigsaw
puzzle pieces, they
do not fit together
neatly to form a whole.
They might, in other
words, be incommensurable.
It thus follows-- and I'm
circling back to where I
began--
that a corollary of the death
of God, something which I think
is perhaps not appreciated
enough or too often,
is the death of scientism.
Nietzsche could be seen to
draw this conclusion himself
in a section from the 1886
edition of The Gay Science
that is entitled
"Science As a Prejudice."
Thus-- and I quote
Nietzsche at some length--
Nietzsche speaks of,
quote, "the faith
with which so many materialistic
natural scientists rest content
nowadays, the faith
in a world that
is supposed to
have its equivalent
and its measure in human thought
and human valuations, a world
of truth that can be mastered
completely and forever
with the aid of our
square little reason.
What?
Do we really want
to permit existence
to be degraded for
us like this, reduced
to a mirror exercise
for a calculator
and an indoor diversion
for mathematicians?
"Above all, one should not
wish to divest existence
of its rich ambiguity.
That the only justifiable
interpretation of the world
should be one that permits
counting, calculating,
weighing, seeing,
touching, and nothing more,
that is a crudity and a
naivete, assuming that it is not
a mental illness, an idiocy.
A scientific interpretation of
the world as you understand it,
dear scientists,"
Nietzsche says,
"might therefore still
be one of the most stupid
of all possible
interpretations of the world,
meaning that it would be one
of the poorest in meaning.
An essentially
mechanical world would
be an essentially
meaningless world."
End quote.
In other words, Nietzsche's
here explicitly claiming
that the scientific attitude
characteristic of scientism
that wishes to reduce the entire
world to what can be measured
and quantified might
be the most superficial
since it would vacuum all
meaning out of the world.
Sometimes to discover
the truth about things,
one indeed has to be cold.
But at other times,
if one is too cold,
one might freeze
things to death.
And this applies directly to the
question of meaning and truth
in art.
Thus Nietzsche writes
in the same section
that I just quoted,
he says, "Assuming
that one estimated the
value of a piece of music
according to how much
of it could be counted,
calculated, and
expressed in formulas,
how absurd would such a
scientific estimation of music
be?
What one would have
comprehended, understood,
grasped of it?
Nothing, really nothing,
of what is music in it."
End quote.
In other words, a
scientific analysis of music
that reduces pieces of music to
sound waves, frequencies, air
modulations, maybe even
synapses in the brain,
would completely
failed to capture
at first the very
qualitative nature
of the acoustic
experience, namely the what
it's like character of sound
and harmony and melody.
Secondly, it would
fail to capture
the meaning of the work,
what is music in it,
as Nietzsche puts it.
And third, it would fail to
capture the value of the work,
whether it's good or bad.
Thus in contrast to Alex
Rosenberg's reductive view,
music cannot be properly
understood as, as he puts it,
the acoustical disturbance
produced by the condensation
and rarification of oxygen
and nitrogen, et cetera.
Furthermore, to the
extent that Nietzsche
found this scientistic
view of music or art
in general appealing in
his Free Spirit phase,
then it follows that in
his later perspectivism,
he overcame this way of
thinking and he perhaps
makes room for a different way
to approach the work of art.
Now, this is not to assert that
what science tells us is false
or that the scientific
perspective is worthless,
but that it is just
one perspective, one
interpretation,
out of potentially
infinite perspectives
and interpretations.
The world, Nietzsche
says, is richly ambiguous,
meaning that it
could be approached
from a myriad of
different perspectives
that may be enlightening
in their own way.
Importantly, however,
this does not
mean that all possible
interpretations are
equally good or equally valid.
Nietzsche, in my
view, never subscribed
to this relativistic
or postmodern outlook.
In fact, he quite often
describes certain perspectives
as foolish or, as we
just saw, plain stupid.
But what meaning or what
truth can art make accessible
if it is not the empirical
truths that science, or even
our everyday understanding
can discover and access?
While Nietzsche, I think,
does not give a direct answer
to this question, I believe an
implicit beginning of an answer
could be found in his
description of a piece of music
composed by his erstwhile mentor
and father figure, Richard
Wagner.
In a section from his
1886 Beyond Good And Evil,
Nietzsche writes the following.
And again, I quote
him at some length.
This is a difficult passage.
So he writes this.
"I have heard once again
for the first time--"
that itself is a very
weird formulation,
once again for the first time.
"I have heard once again for
the first time Richard Wagner's
overture to Die
Meistersinger," which
is an opera that Wagner
were composed in 1867.
"It is a magnificent,
overladen, heavy,
and late art which has
the pride to presuppose
for its understanding that
two centuries of music
are still living.
"What forces and juices, what
seasons and zones are not mixed
together here?
Now it seems archaic, now
strange, acid and too young.
It is as arbitrary as it
is pompous traditional.
It has fire and spirit,
and at the same time
the loose, yellow skin of fruits
which ripen too late, something
German in the best and worst
sense of the word, something
manifold, a certain German
powerfulness and over fullness
of soul, which is not
afraid to hide itself
among the refinements of
decay, a true, genuine token
of the German soul which
is at once young and aged,
over mellow, and still
too rich in future.
This kind of music
best expresses what
I consider true of the Germans.
They are of the day
before yesterday
and the day after tomorrow.
They have, as yet, no today."
End quote.
Now, though it is
difficult to do so,
I want to put aside the entire
complex and problematic context
of 20th century horrors on the
background of which we might
want to read this
difficult passage,
as well as questions
regarding Nietzsche's
vexed and ambivalent relation
to Wagner and his music,
and the Germans
in general, and I
want to make the
suggestion that here we
have an example of
the kind of insights
that art, in this case, music
can make available to us.
For here, Nietzsche is
basically articulating
to us what is music in this
piece of music, in Wagner's
overture because here
in this piece of music,
in Nietzsche's eyes,
the overture opens
a window to the German soul
in the late 19th century.
It is by means of
this piece of music
that we can catch a
glimpse of the spirit
of the German nation,
Nietzsche thinks,
caught as it is between its
rich and overburdening past
and its great
future of potential,
which it is, at present,
perhaps groping its way towards.
To generalize my
claim here, we can
say that art, the
perspective of art,
makes accessible truths
regarding society, culture,
the spirit of a certain people,
or even of certain individuals,
truths that are inaccessible
from the perspective
of science.
Indeed, how could
the natural sciences
ever discover what Nietzsche
sees in the overture?
So truths, then,
are inaccessible
from the perspective of
science, or it could also
make truths that are otherwise
known, or potentially knowable,
accessible to us
in a different way.
I leave many questions
open and unattended,
but I hope to have shown
that despite Nietzsche'
earlier science-inspired,
tough-minded approach to art,
in the later and last
period of his life,
due to his doctrine
of perspectivism,
he came to see such an
approach as overly reductive.
Importantly, perspectivism does
not deny the immense cognitive
contributions of the
various sciences,
nor should it be seen as
opening the door to some kind
of rampant relativism.
Rather, it emphasizes
the richness of reality
and how different
approaches to reality
could be illuminating
and informative.
Indeed, specifically
with respect to art,
I think it's possible
to make the stronger
claim that only perspectivism,
insofar as it rejects
reductive materialism and
scientism in its various forms,
can make room for the
cognitively independent
contribution of the arts.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
KIRIN WACHTER-GRENE: Questions?
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Kirin.
I don't need a mic.
Thank you, Guy,
so much for this.
I have a quick
question to ask you,
and it connects to something
you said at the last sentence
that you said in
your lecture, which
is quite strong, actually.
So was Nietzsche motivated to--
what was Nietzsche's
intellectual motivations
for adopting perspectivism?
And I ask this question because
in order to defeat scientism,
you don't need to go all
the way to perspectivism.
And you can say
scientism on its own
is not sufficient, so it
needs to be complemented
by other ways of
knowing, and that's
a different position
than perspectivism, which
allows for multiple, oftentimes
incompatible, perspectives
on the world.
So that seems to be
a case of overkill
if you are just out to
defeat scientism, basically,
if that makes sense.
So I'm guessing that
Nietzsche's motives for adopting
perspectivism were not just
simply to defeat scientism,
but there is something
else behind them.
Am I correct?
GUY ELGAT: Yes, I think it's
fair to say that he did not
have merely scientism--
well, of course,
the term did not exist
in Nietzsche's time.
So it's scientism
[NON-ENGLISH] so to speak.
So I think he sees that as
following from the death of God
thesis, as I tried to explain.
So in my interpretation,
he's just
trying to tease out the
various consequences--
and there are many different
kinds of consequences--
from this insight
that God is dead.
So in light of this
insight, I think
he realized that the trust
that he put into sciences
was immature in a way.
AUDIENCE: Just a
quick follow up.
Did Nietzsche suggest
any ways by which
to adjudicate the different
perspectives because he
doesn't want them to collapse
into rabid relativism,
basically?
GUY ELGAT: Yeah, so
that's a good question.
Unfortunately, I don't
think that he provides us
with any substantive or
even half-substantive answer
to this question,
and that's a shame.
But what I do think can
be found in his works
is the view that in order
to be cognitively just
to the phenomenon, you
have to at least give
other perspectives
a chance, and that
is examine the various
perspectives that
are available with respect to
any given question, problem,
or phenomenon, and then
be in a position to judge
and be just to the phenomenon.
But he does not provide
us any algorithm or even
any more substantial
answer to this question.
KIRIN WACHTER-GRENE:
[INAUDIBLE] back here.
AUDIENCE: Yes, thank you very
much for this interesting talk.
I wanted to follow up on
this previous exchange
and ask you more
about perspectivism.
The previous
questioner suggested
that perspectivism allows
for potentially incompatible
perspectives.
And from what you said--
and I don't know that
much about it, but
from what you said,
it didn't seem to
me that that is
part, necessarily,
of Nietzsche's view
because it seemed to me that he
might well allow that science
is right about what they say
about the compression of air
molecules when they
talk about music,
but just that this is
completely besides the point,
that perspective is not
incompatible with or wrong.
It's just it's the
wrong perspective
to take when we want to
know anything about music.
But it's not incompatible.
This is true about
the air molecules,
but when we ask about
music, we are not
asking about the air molecules.
We're asking about
the musical in it,
as you explained very well.
So does Nietzsche's perspective
function in that way
that I try to
suggest, that there
are all these perspectives,
they are all compatible.
But in some cases,
some perspectives
provide interesting insights
and others don't, and we
should just look
at each perspective
when it's appropriate, perhaps,
or can tell us something?
GUY ELGAT: Yes.
That's a good question.
Of course, a lot
depends on what exactly
we mean by incompatible.
There could be weak and stronger
versions of incompatible.
And I tried to adopt
a softer approach,
and so I used the
term incommensurable.
Now, we can also discuss
that that term in itself.
This is open to various
interpretations.
But I think it's close
to what you had in mind,
namely that it's not
necessarily the case
that we have a strict,
logical conflict
between different perspectives,
but that they just talk
about totally different things.
So that's what I try to capture
with the term incommensurable.
Having said that, I
think-- and now I'm going,
I think, beyond Nietzsche.
I think it's nevertheless
possible to say
that in some cases
different perspectives could
be incompatible in
the strong sense.
For example, we can say
that from the perspective
of materialistic science,
there is no free will.
But from the
perspective of morality,
we can say, at least
for some people,
there must be free will.
So here we have a
very strong clash.
So I think it varies.
AUDIENCE: Thank you
for the talk tonight.
Appreciated that a lot.
My question kind of
follows up in some ways
on Roger's question earlier.
Having to do with adjudicating
among perspectives,
it seems like, at least
in the later Nietzsche,
there's a lot of stuff
about how power might
be an answer to that question.
I'm wondering if you could
offer some reflections on that.
So with regarding
the matter, I guess,
of what makes one perspective
maybe better than another,
for Nietzsche, doesn't that have
something to do with the sense
the feeling of overcoming and
the power that comes with that?
GUY ELGAT: Yes, so that's
an excellent question.
I want to be very sympathetic
to this suggestion,
but since I have my
own interpretation
of what is going on
in Nietzsche's texts,
I will say the following.
The way that I think about
the relation between power
and adjudicating amongst
varying perspectives is,
going back to the answer that
I gave, is that, on my reading,
Nietzsche thinks
that in order to be
just cognitively, cognitively
just, to the phenomenon,
you have to consider the
various perspectives that
are available.
But in order to do that, in
order to be open intellectually
to other points
of view, you have
to have some kind of
power over yourself.
Maybe you have to restrain your
one-sidedness, your biased way
of thinking, et cetera.
So it's a kind of
ascetic practice
that the intellectual practices
with respect to him or herself.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
KIRIN WACHTER-GRENE:
Other questions?
AUDIENCE: Thanks a lot, Guy.
That was really,
really enjoyable
seeing that magical moment,
like the dealing with truth
regards to if any of
this kind of matters
situation regarding creations.
And I think what's really
exciting from the perspective
of the person who
makes, if I'm going
to call myself an artist--
a lot of us sit in this room
and pay money to be in this room
call themselves artists.
It's a great dispellment,
and I think it goes to power.
It's like we are
here working as hard
as we can to make
this existence great,
and I like that part that
we're putting a gauze over
to make this world livable.
I don't know if I
even have a question,
but for sure it's hitting
hard, in a good way.
And I just think
the best part of us
is we all believe in making
the place a little bit better
somehow, and then so
we're questioning better.
And yeah, thank you for
putting that on the perspective
direction.
And maybe you could
find somewhere
to spit something
back at me about--
GUY ELGAT: Yeah, so
say thank you for that.
I just want to say
that I think it's
very important to emphasize
what you just emphasized,
namely that Nietzsche
thinks that there
is great value to art, even
in this earlier period.
And he never abandons this
idea that it's important.
It makes life livable.
That's very important.
So that should not be
underestimated in any way,
so you're right to bring it up.
Having said that, and maybe
these are just my own issues,
I keep asking myself--
so maybe these are just
philosophers' anxieties
about art.
I keep asking myself,
is it just that?
I can binge watch on Netflix
and watch Breaking Bad, which
I consider to be an
art form of sorts,
and it makes my life
livable for those hours
which I spend in front of the
computer screen or whatever.
And that's great.
That's important.
But I'm wondering is
there something more
to watch than just this
drug effect of sorts?
You could get high
and get along.
That is, it depends.
But in principle, we can
find the right medication
and everything would
be peachy creamy.
I want to say that's art's--
I want to say I want
to believe that art
or offers more than that.
So that's where I'm coming from.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I just wanted to
ask, if there are
better or worse perspectives
or ways to approach something
like music for
Nietzsche, would that
suggest that there's kind of
essence to something like music
that is knowable?
GUY ELGAT: Right.
Yeah, so this connects
with the questions
that other people
have already asked,
about how to adjudicate between
perspectives, how to interpret.
And again, beyond what
I said, unfortunately,
Nietzsche does not really
give us a lot to work with.
Let me just say
that, that I don't
think that he would
say that music
has an essence of some kind.
That was his earlier view,
his earlier metaphysical view,
influenced heavily
by Schopenhauer.
In his later thinking,
I don't think
that he would say that music
has an essence in some kind
of strong metaphysical sense.
I think, again, the
best that he would--
one thing that he does say in
a later work, The Genealogy
of Morals, he says that if you
want to enjoy a work of art,
forget about the artist.
Put the artist aside.
And he talks about that.
He makes this claim precisely
in the context of music,
again talking about Wagner.
Forget about the
composer if you want
to really understand and
immerse yourself in the music.
But beyond that,
he does not want
to give us any help or
suggestions with respect
to how we should approach a
work of art in general, music
specifically.
AUDIENCE: I'm sorry.
I'm going to ask
one more, if I may.
GUY ELGAT: Sure, as
many as you like.
AUDIENCE: So in
part, at least, art
has the value of keeping
us going, keeping us alive,
for Nietzsche.
And it seems to protect us
against maybe nihilism, which
is a real concern for Nietzsche.
With someone like--
it's Rosenberg, right?
GUY ELGAT: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: As a scientist, as
a scientistic thinker, what
do you think keeps him going?
I mean, what protects a
person of that frame of mind
from nihilism?
GUY ELGAT: That's
a good question.
I don't know him personally,
so I cannot really say.
But one possibility--
and again, I
don't want to attribute anything
to the individual person.
But one possibility, I think,
is self-deception, in a way.
I think that's really
helpful for many people.
So maybe that's
the case with him.
I don't know.
Again, I don't want to
make any allegations.
AUDIENCE: Sorry.
If I may interject, I
don't want to dump too much
on Alexander Rosenberg.
I mean I think there
are different versions
of scientism.
You can be a--
I don't know how many people
hold onto a view of scientism
that is so strong as
to basically declare
things such as even certain
questions are meaningless.
I think some
versions of scientism
could be that a lot of questions
are important and interesting,
it's just that we will never be
able to have definite answers
to them because the
only types of questions
to which we can have
definite answers
are scientific questions.
But as long as you agree
that some questions are still
meaningful and interesting,
that that could keep you going,
basically.
So I might never know,
actually, whether there
are any moral
properties to the world
or not, but that can
keep me alive, no?
GUY ELGAT: Yes, I
think this is helpful.
Yeah.
I think this is a
helpful response.
It is the very scientific
quest for knowledge
could be meaningful enough to
sustain a human life, perhaps.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Yes,
more towards music,
maybe, I am really
kind of annoyed
by his descriptions of music,
Nietzsche's descriptions
of music.
And I wanted to ask,
the first question,
what is his training in music?
That's my first question.
And the second question is,
regarding this description
of an artist that you
read, that very unfair,
the one that talks about
the retarded artisan.
Its sounds almost like
he's very personal.
I almost feel like he's
talking about somebody.
GUY ELGAT: Right, yeah.
So let me first answer
the second question.
The answer is, I think, yes.
For Nietzsche, everything
is very personal.
And it is very hard at times
to separate the personal
from the impersonal, that
is, the merely subjective
and the philosophically
substantive and interesting.
So that's a problem with
Nietzsche interpretation.
So I think it would be
very plausible to say
that in those sections
he has Wagner in mind.
And this relates to
your first question.
What experience does he have
in musicology and music?
Well, he spent a lot
of time with Wagner.
So that's one answer.
But he was himself
an aspiring musician.
He composed a number of piano
pieces, considered to be
horrible by his contemporaries.
But he considered himself
to be a specialist
of sorts in matters musical.
AUDIENCE: Earlier
you were talking
about how art is most likely
more than just something
to give us a kind
of drug effect.
What, in your opinion,
is it for, then?
GUY ELGAT: What is it for?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
What does it bring us, if it
is indeed more than that drug
effect you're mentioning?
GUY ELGAT: Yeah, good.
So I wanted to
make the suggestion
that it can potentially
enable us to access truth,
that it can reveal
truths to us that
are either inaccessible
by physics or chemistry
or what have you, or
are accessible to us
in different ways, but
art can present them to us
under a different guise,
in a different way.
So that that was the
suggestion, and I
tried to make the
argument that Nietzsche
came to realize that towards
the end of his thinking,
maybe that there is
more to art than just
this intoxicating effect.
Does that make sense?
KIRIN WACHTER-GRENE: Are
there are other questions?
Yeah.
Speak into the mic
so we can all hear.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
This conversation
is fascinating.
Does Nietzsche define art?
And do you have a
definition of art?
GUY ELGAT: Wow.
Well, I think Nietzsche
would resist the question
because, again, in his On
the Genealogy of Morals,
he makes this very
thought-provoking claim where
he says that anything that has
a history cannot be defined.
Anything that has a
history cannot be defined.
Music has history, ergo it
cannot be defined by him.
It's just layers upon layers
of various related practices
and meanings that have
evolved throughout history.
That's the best that we can say.
And if you want to know
better what music is,
we can look at some examples.
So in this respect,
he's very close,
I think, to Lichtenstein
and his resistance
to the very idea of
defining of definition.
The second question is hardest
do I have a definition of art?
No.
First of all, because I'm
sympathetic to the Nietzschean
approach, so that's
my getaway card.
I can always say,
that's Nietzsche.
But nevertheless, I am
attracted to the view--
and it's not it's not an
original view of mine--
that thinks of art as
presenting goes something
by means of presenting
itself, and presenting itself
by presenting us with something.
I think that any kind--
and maybe I'm going
out on a limb here--
that any kind of representation,
for example a painting,
that by showing itself aims
to show something else,
and that when it shows
this something else,
it can only show that
thing by showing itself,
there you have an
artistic representation.
AUDIENCE: So how is that
different from [INAUDIBLE]??
So how might that--
and it's hard because
we're using words.
How might your conceptualization
of an artistic practice
be different or
similar to, let's say,
a cultural signifier or
symbolism or some sort
of symbolic action?
And why am I using those words?
How are they different?
Words matter for different
ideas that we want to express.
So when you juxtapose
artistic expression
and cultural expression,
signifier, symbolism,
what do with each
of those words do?
And why do we use them?
GUY ELGAT: Right.
Yeah, so there's a
lot in that question.
So I would want to say that
in any cultural practice that
fits my definition is
to that extent artistic.
And I want to distinguish
such products, such phenomena,
from mere signs in
so far as mere signs
like words, the
words that we use,
do not typically attract
attention to themselves.
They are invisible, in a way.
We talk and think through
them to what they refer to.
Art differs in that it
draws attention to itself.
By presenting itself it
shows something else,
and this something
else can only be seen
through the specific artwork.
It's not accessible
in any other way.
KIRIN WACHTER-GRENE: We have
time for one more question.
OK.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Guy.
So you ended by trying to
or wanting to kind of claim
for Nietzsche a view
at the end, coming
through the scientistic phase
toward this other position
where art can in some way
provide us some kind of access
to truth.
And I maybe wanted to push
a little against that.
So you got there through the
kind of critique of scientism
as a form of faith
in The Gay Science.
If I'm remembering
correctly, there's
another aphorism
in The Gay Science
kind of going after scientism
again as a form of faith.
But in that one,
Nietzsche kind of
goes after scientism through
this theme of the relationship
between truth and falsity.
You'll correct me if
I'm getting him wrong,
but I'm pretty sure there is
an aphorism in there where
he says, look, science
is a form of faith
because if we look at the world
or the scientistic impulse,
the scientistic
interpretation of the world
as a form of faith, because if
we really look at the world,
we see that falsity, falsehood
is a value in the world as much
as truth is.
And he doesn't say exactly
what he has in mind,
but I gather what he has in
mind is something like animals
camouflage themselves.
Animals stalk one another.
They hide from one another.
There is mimicry in the world.
There's all these different
forms of disguise and falsity.
And so the scientistic
view, which
says truth is an absolute value,
is tantamount to a turning
away from the values
that we actually
find in the world,
the value of falsity
that we find there in the world.
And so thinking
about that aphorism,
it seems like the turn
away from scientism
is at least in
part, as much as it
is a turn toward perspectivism,
is at the same time
a turn toward a potential
value of falsity
in the world or falsehood, or
at least disguise or something.
And so I wonder if
there aren't resources ,
maybe very meager resources,
but some kind of resources there
to think that maybe in
Nietzsche's rejection of his
kind of mid-period scientistic
deflation of art there's some
kind of turn back toward the
early Birth of Tragedy view
of art where illusion is somehow
crucial to the value of art,
that it's not just some kind
of access to truth but maybe
something like some kind of like
dialectic or something of truth
and falsity in the work of art.
GUY ELGAT: Right.
Yeah, so thank you for that.
So I think that
to a great degree
I'm in agreement with
what you just said.
I would add that
perspectivism swallows
the truth-falsity distinction.
Perspectivism just-- another
implication of perspectivism,
which you're right--
I did not say anything about,
is that it basically says,
from some perspectives,
being deluded
could be actually quite useful.
So perspectivism allows I
think for the value of falsity
as well.
That's a short answer, but
hopefully it does something.
KIRIN WACHTER-GRENE:
Let's give Dr. Elgat
another round of applause.
[APPLAUSE]
GUY ELGAT: Thank you.
