Dr. Christine Battersby
Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. For those thinking of / taking the option on Kierkegaard, or Aesthetics, this is one not to miss!
Abstract :
This short talk will not offer a critique of Nietzsche’s theory of art, but an attempt to explain why we should, like Nietzsche, make aesthetics central to philosophical enquiry. Thus, in both his early and late works Nietzsche indicates that it is art, and not morality, that is "the truly metaphysical activity of man".
I will consider how Nietzsche’s account of the value and ontology of art differs from more standard accounts of artistic meaning and value. We will also see how Nietzsche contributes to—but also radically changes—the philosophical tradition that links the transformative power of art to the sublime. Often opposed to the beautiful, the sublime was overwhelming; breath-taking; awe-inspiring; tremendous; terrifying; unrepresentable; involving an encounter between the self and something infinite, mysteriously great and ‘other’.
Hegel, and many other 19th- and 20th-century philosophers picked out as the most significant characteristic of sublimity the failure of the understanding and reason to conceptualise the sublime object. Burke, and other 18th-century philosophers, tended to emphasise the way that pleasure mixed with terror in the experience of the sublime. Between these two traditions we find Kant who described the sublime in terms of the encounter between an ‘I’ and that which has the capacity to annihilate it completely. For Kant and many of the Romantics, the pleasures of the sublime are linked to the self reasserting itself and regaining control. But, for Schopenhauer (important for Nietzsche, for Freud, and for many avant-garde artists), the delights of the sublime involve a more profound kind of surrender and the displacement of the ego.
For Nietzsche, as we will see, art also involves an encounter with that which is ‘other’ However, unlike Schopenhauer, he does not locate this ‘other’ in a supersensible realm. For Nietzsche, the metaphysics of art are tied to a renewed encounter with this space–time world: enabling us to register something that our conceptual framework had prevented us from registering in the past. Space and time and the ‘I’ are themselves changed in what I will call Nietzsche’s ‘encounter’ theory of art.
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