Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art [Paperback]

Young is clearly prepared to write on Nietzsche's philosophy of art. He has already authored a book on Schopenhauer, called "Willing and Unwilling," and has a demonstrable sensitivity to and experience with artworks and art theory. Young begins his book with a treatment of Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer's philosophy of art -- both in terms of how Nietzsche understood them. Nietzsche's famous philosophical relationship to Schopenhauer is well explained. The brilliant and enthusiastic young Nietzsche devoured Schopenhauer and as Young writes,

"Except for the Greeks, there is no other philosopher he knew with anything like the same intimacy. His writings, all of them, are full not just of quotations and paraphrases from Schopenhauer, but of phrases, allusions, and rhythms both conscious and unconscious. Nietzsche breathed Schopenhauer and cannot be understood without him."

Nietzsche always acknowledged a debt to Schopenhauer, even in his later writings, but it is essential to an understanding of the force of Nietzsche's philosophy (and particularly his central notion of "independence of the soul") to see that after Birth of Tragedy (and somewhat within Birth of Tragedy) Nietzsche sets himself adamantly and effectively against Schopenhauer's and Wagner's romanticism, and against the "cry baby optimism" of his age in general.

Young understands correctly, I think, that Nietzsche turned against Schopenhauer early and Wagner too. But after a series of slight misinterpretations, particularly of Nietzsche's treatment of science, his metaphysics or understanding of the natural world, and his ideas of art in "Human, All to Human," Young's over-arching claim is that Nietzsche fails in his anti-Romantic endeavor to live without metaphysics and redemption, and in the end returns to a Schopenhauerian pessimistic philosophy.

For those who see Nietzsche as accomplishing a systematic rebuttal to Romanticism and transcendental philosophies, Young's conclusion that Nietzsche's philosophy is circular or returns to the foil against which it first defined itself, will be unsatisfactory.

Young is clearly prepared to write on Nietzsche's philosophy of art. He has already authored a book on Schopenhauer, called "Willing and Unwilling," and has a demonstrable sensitivity to and experience with artworks and art theory. Young begins his book with a treatment of Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer's philosophy of art -- both in terms of how Nietzsche understood them. Nietzsche's famous philosophical relationship to Schopenhauer is well explained. The brilliant and enthusiastic young Nietzsche devoured Schopenhauer and as Young writes,

"Except for the Greeks, there is no other philosopher he knew with anything like the same intimacy. His writings, all of them, are full not just of quotations and paraphrases from Schopenhauer, but of phrases, allusions, and rhythms both conscious and unconscious. Nietzsche breathed Schopenhauer and cannot be understood without him."

Nietzsche always acknowledged a debt to Schopenhauer, even in his later writings, but it is essential to an understanding of the force of Nietzsche's philosophy (and particularly his central notion of "independence of the soul") to see that after Birth of Tragedy (and somewhat within Birth of Tragedy) Nietzsche sets himself adamantly and effectively against Schopenhauer's and Wagner's romanticism, and against the "cry baby optimism" of his age in general.

Young understands correctly, I think, that Nietzsche turned against Schopenhauer early and Wagner too. But after a series of slight misinterpretations, particularly of Nietzsche's treatment of science, his metaphysics or understanding of the natural world, and his ideas of art in "Human, All to Human," Young's over-arching claim is that Nietzsche fails in his anti-Romantic endeavor to live without metaphysics and redemption, and in the end returns to a Schopenhauerian pessimistic philosophy.

For those who see Nietzsche as accomplishing a systematic rebuttal to Romanticism and transcendental philosophies, Young's conclusion that Nietzsche's philosophy is circular or returns to the foil against which it first defined itself, will be unsatisfactory.

Young admits that his book, despite its title, "constitutes a kind of biography: not a biography in the usual sense but rather a philosophical biography, a record of the twists and turns taken by Nietzsche's philosophy viewed through the prism of his philosophy of art" (2). This biography has "four main periods," according to Young, and runs roughly thus: pessimistic, not-so-pessimistic, almost-optimistic, once-more-pessimistic (1). The "main purpose" of the chapter on "The Birth of Tragedy" is, for example, to answer "this question: whether [Nietzsche] also endorsed Schopenhauer's pessimism; whether, that is, he endorsed Schopenhauer's inference from the pain and purposelessness of human existence to its worthlessness" (26). In case you were wondering, Young has published previously on Schopenhauer, and the argument here goes further to cast a Schopenhauerian shadow over Nietzsche than to more generally (and perhaps fairly) probe Nietzsche's thoughts on art.

This insistence on diachrony in Young's approach to Nietzsche's thought forces some unfortunate groupings made to serve the argument's ultimate end, which is more heavily invested in the question of when and whether Nietzsche's philosophy is pessimistic or optimistic than in the question of what Nietzsche felt art was, what it could do, and how it could do it. (I think that the alternative to this evolution-of-a-writer's-thought approach is often equally unhelpful, though, as in Tracy Strong's book on Nietzsche's politics, which considers his thought as one organic totality and tends to see later statements as part and parcel of earlier ones, even when blatantly contradictory. Perhaps the real answer is to look at each of Nietzsche's works one by one. I don't know.)

Then there's the lack of real engagement with extant scholarship on the topic of Nietzsche's aesthetics (a lack probably due to the lack of real engagement with Nietzsche's aesthetics, except perhaps in the discussion of his views on naturalism). Silk and Stern's opus on Nietzsche's conception of tragedy is not given the attention it deserves, nor is Strong's work on Nietzsche's broader imagining of drama and its potential, and Sloterdijk's essay on Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy" isn't even mentioned.

All of which makes for a slightly deceptive book-buying experience. If you're interested in Nietzsche's relationship to Schopenhauer or in whether Nietzsche was a pessimist, you might have a better time reading Young's essay than I had. But if you, like me, are looking for a book on "Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art," look further.