Introduction
In this paper I ask if Nietzsche’s accounts of art can give us any purchase on the nature and value of creativity.
I attempt at the outset to give an account of the connection Nietzsche makes between rapture, creativity and the roles these might play in “the countermovement to nihilism” (e.g. WP §794).
I identify a tension between early and late formulations of creativity (as given in The Birth of Tragedy and in notes from 1888 and The Twilight of the Idols respectively), particularly with regard to the nature of Dionysian and Apollonian “energies” and I take this as the locus of my investigation.
The early formulations emphasise ego-dissolution into the “primal oneness” (BT: §1) as the defining feature of Dionysian rapture. The later emphasise heightened feelings of power, abundance and life-affirmation and ego-loss is much less emphasised (e.g. WP §811, TI ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’, §4). It might seem that this change is made partly to distance Nietzsche from what he himself admitted in his 1886 preface was the embarrassingly Schopenhauerian flavour of his BT account. The case for discounting a role for ego-dissolution in creative rapture which is seemingly implicit in Nietzsche’s twisting free of Schopenhauer looks even stronger when Nietzsche (in ‘The Third Essay’ of On the Genealogy of Morals) identifies a certain type of ascetic unselfing as implicated in nihilism and speaks strongly against it.
Against this I place Nietzsche’s account of his own experience of inspiration as given in Ecce Homo (‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ §3). Clearly, something like ego-dissolution is involved here. I add further weight to this side of the scale with a consideration of Nietzsche’s late “deconstructions” of the subject/ego.
This tension might be taken to indicate that Nietzsche had not succeeded in completely casting off Schopenhauer and with him, asceticism, nihilism and life-negation. However, I argue, we should not be too quick to draw this conclusion. Instead the question ought to be investigated by clarifying Nietzsche’s taxonomy of raptures. This taxonomy of raptures includes ascetic raptures, hypnotic and narcotic raptures, raptures manufactured for purposes of dominance, as well as the will to form of the Apollonian and the affirmative and abundant Dionysian.
I suggest that all of these involve some lability of the boundary around the subject/ego, including the type of raptures which can function as the well-spring of an art (and philosophy) capable of countering nihilism.
The countermovement to nihilism
In Ecce Homo Nietzsche describes himself as engaging in the “great task” (EH, “Why I Am So Clever”: #10) of performing a “revaluation of values”, both existing values and “value” itself. His aim, and this for him is the truly philosophical task, is to “legislate” so as to create the conditions for a kind of cultural revolution which will in time replace the purportedly life-negating, Christian-Platonic, other-worldly values of Western culture with alternative ones which will allow, at least some people, to fully affirm life.
In all phases of his thought, Nietzsche places great hope in art and this is central to his self-appointed “great task”. As early as The Birth of Tragedy, Dionysiac art is seen to promise the possibility of life-affirmation in despite of “all our pity and terror” (BT §17). By 1888 Nietzsche is assigning to art the broader role of “the countermovement” to decadent philosophy, morality and religion (WP §794). Both of these may be seen as attempts to find some armament in the war on nihilism and some basis on which to rebuild culture after its defeat.
If this is right, Nietzsche’s deliberations on art are of the utmost importance to his project. So what is the character of those deliberations? As Heidegger points out, they focus most often on the artist (somewhat broadly conceived) rather than on the reception of art or on art as such (Vol. I: 70). In part, this emphasis arises in order to address the question of what the character of the “artist philosopher” who can think in new ways appropriate to the “great task” will be like (WP §795).This in turn becomes a concern with “physiology”, with the “states” experienced by the artist (WP §811).
In both early and late formulations we find that the creativity experienced by the artist is considered by Nietzsche to be essentially rapturous, where “rapture” is understood as a state of being strongly moved “out of oneself” or beyond the limits of ordinary consciousness. Within this very general characterisation of “rapture”, Nietzsche explores various more nuanced ways of understanding it, but always with one eye on deriving an understanding that will facilitate his great task. Let’s examine some of these.
Rapture in The Birth of Tragedy
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche introduces the notion that there are two fundamental and opposite modes of artistic creativity, the Apollonian mode of dream and the Dionysian mode of intoxication:
We have so far considered the Apolline, and its opposite, the Dionysiac, as artistic powers which spring from nature itself, without the mediation of the human artist, and in which nature’s artistic urges are immediately satisfied; on the one hand as the world of dream images, whose perfection is not at all dependent on the intellectual accomplishments or artistic culture of the individual; on the other hand as an ecstatic reality, which again pays no heed to the individual, but even seeks to destroy individuality and redeem it with a mystical sense of unity. Faced with these immediate artistic states in nature, every artist is an ‘imitator’ – either an Apolline dream artist or a Dionysiac ecstatic artist or else – as for example in Greek tragedy – a dream artist and an ecstatic artist at one and the same time (BT §2).
Here we should note that though “mystical self-negation” is most obviously a feature of this conception of the Dionysian, the ego (or “individuality”) is pushed to one side even in the Apollonian where the artist is overtaken by a force of nature as he submits to the dream state. The Greek tragic artist, the quintessentially affirmative artist, combines these two states and apprehends “his unity with the innermost core of the world” as a dream image and thus gives form to insights gained through an ecstatic experience of ego-loss in which the creation and destruction of the world process is affirmed.
Rapture in 1888
In a late formulation of the Apollonian-Dionysian antithesis found in WP §798, Nietzsche reiterates much of what he has said in BT. There is a difference, however. Though “art appears in man like a force of nature and disposes of him whether he will or no…” the Dionysian here is no longer described specifically in terms of ego-dissolution into the primal Oneness (WP §798). Also, we should note that by now the Apollonian and the Dionysian have become less antithetical: both are now unequivocally intoxications with a sexual and “voluptuous” character with the Apollonian being understood as a rapturous feeling of great power (WP §799). In yet another aphorism of this period the Apollonian and Dionysian seem to slide into each other more or less completely. Here Nietzsche does not mention them by name, but talks only of intoxication as essential to creativity. This intoxication has a strong sexual character like the Dionysian and an urge to simplify forms like the Apollonian. But what is essential to the artist’s intoxication in this formulation is that “The condition of pleasure called intoxication is precisely an exalted feeling of power” (WP §800).
In The Twilight of the Idols (‘What I Owe to the Ancients’ §4) it is the Dionysian itself (rather than the Apollonian) which is “explicable only in terms of an excess of force” and the term “Dionysian” now seems to be synonymous with (affirmative) creative rapture as such (ibid).
The shift in Nietzsche’s thinking
The rapture of creativity, then, clearly occupies a crucial place in the architectonic of Nietzsche’s thought. Hence we see Nietzsche attempting again and again to understand and characterise it. And always it is associated with the notion of life-affirmation which is continuously explored and clarified alongside it.
There is clearly a shift over time in Nietzsche’s thinking regarding the natures of both creative rapture and life-affirmation with early formulations emphasising ego-dissolution and later formulations emphasising great feelings of power and abundance.
Three reasons for this shift suggest themselves. Firstly, the emphasis on feelings of power which characterises the 1888 formulations is probably a corollary of Nietzsche’s renewed interest of the same period in the concept of the will to power and his thought that a great abundance of the will to power in an individual was a sign of supreme life-affirmation and greatness.
Secondly, his rejection of Schopenhauer, already germinating in BT, was by 1888 vehement and total. The ground for this rejection is that Schopenhauer is seen as having a life-negating attitude: for him “…the will to nothingness has the upper hand over the will to life…” to the extent that “it is better not to be than to be” (WP §685). His strategy for dealing with the painful character of life is to become will-less, that is, to be resigned to the point of sacrificing the ego. Because he adopts this strategy he misunderstands art: he takes “...art for a bridge to the denial of life” (WP §812). Clearly Nietzsche must reject Schopenhauer (as he reads him) if he is to champion life-affirmation and theorise art as the antidote to life-negation. Even though in BT Nietzsche chastises Schopenhauer for actually downplaying the will-lessness behind the inspiration of the lyric poet, for only seeing it as partially due to a mergence with the “only truly existent subject” (i.e. “the primal Oneness”), he must by 1888 drop this talk of ego-dissolution. It is too close for comfort to Schopenhauer’s advocacy of an ascetic unselfing and life-denial.
The shift in Nietzsche’s thinking is also clearly related to the far-reaching consideration he has given to the ascetic ideal in ‘The Third Essay’ of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Here Kant, deemed partly responsible for Schopenhauer’s mistake, is the whipping-boy. On this view, Kant and indeed all philosophers have made the mistakes of failing to consider “the aesthetic problem from the experience of the artist (the creator)” and of giving us “…definitions within which, as in each of Kant’s famous definitions of the beautiful, the lack of a more differentiated experience of the self sits like a fat worm of fundamental error” (‘Third Essay’ §6).
To summarise thus far: as Nietzsche developed his conceptions of life-affirmation and life-negation, especially as he did so through his considerations of the ascetic ideal, he became suspicious of projects of negating the ego, seeing into their ascetic, life-negating heart. Formulations of rapture emphasising ego-dissolution were not going to fare well in this climate, especially as rapture was still considered central to art and art was still full of possibility for the overcoming of life-negation in despite of its vulnerability to the ascetic corruption of a Wagner.
Nietzsche the artist
Thus far it seems that we have to examine the cogency of what appears to be a development in Nietzsche’s thought on aesthetics if we are to use it as a resource for our own deliberations on the nature of creativity. But the Nietzschean oeuvre offers us another resource. Nietzsche was himself an artist and it is inevitable that his aesthetic formulations are profoundly informed by his own experience of creativity. Fortunately, Nietzsche gives us some reports of his own experience and this is obviously a vital resource for this enquiry. Let’s consider, then, the remarkable account of his inspiration given in EH ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ §3 in the hope of getting some purchase on the conundrum of the nature of creativity.
When gripped by inspiration, Nietzsche tells us, one feels to be merely the “medium of overwhelming forces”; something is revealed to one which “shakes and overturns one to the depths”; there is a “a complete being outside of oneself”; and “everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity” (ibid).
How should we take this? Has Nietzsche at this late stage reverted to a Schopenhauerian understanding of rapture? Though perhaps we do not quite have a language of melting into the One here, and feelings of power are still emphasised, there is certainly a sense that ego-loss and will-lessness or something very near to them is essential to creative rapture. This autobiographical detail makes it much more difficult to understand the shift in Nietzsche’s thought as simply a matter of development or a change of mind.
The taxonomy of raptures
How then can this contradictory tangle of Nietzsche’s thought on creativity help us to clarify its nature? It seems to me that some clarity can be had if we realise that Nietzsche considered many types of rapture throughout his career and actually taxonomised them.
In GM ‘The Third Essay’, for instance, Nietzsche distinguishes the following raptures: there is the rapture in which the sick “intoxicate themselves with their own malicious poison” (§15); there is the self-hypnotic rapture of the ascetic who equates deep sleep with the unio mystica (§17); then there is “the lascivious outpourings and ecstasies” of saints who deny themselves everything (§17); there is “the pleasure of giving pleasure” which is really the indulgence in a small dose of the will to power by the giver (§18); there is the rapture of an excess of emotion (§19), and this is at its most powerful and dangerous when a sense of guilt is exploited (§20); and there is the rapture induced by demagoguery (§26). And of course, we should not overlook the Dionysian and Apollonian raptures. This list is not exhaustive, but enough has been said to indicate the highly nuanced nature of Nietzsche’s considerations of rapture.
But what is the basis of this taxonomising of raptures? Consider the contrast between the raptures essential to a fully affirmative art with those raptures delineated in detail in GM. Raptures which can serve art and in serving art serve the counter-movement to nihilism must of necessity be non-ascetic, at least if there is something exemplary in such art. The raptures delineated in GM, on the other hand, are mostly ascetic raptures and the concern there is to expose them and pour suspicion on them thereby loosening their grip on culture. There is then a crucial distinction between ascetic and non-ascetic raptures, i.e. between mostly life-affirmative raptures and mostly life-negating raptures.
What in turn does that distinction itself depend on? Firstly, the ascetic raptures are all means of dealing with pain which attempt to escape from it in some way or other, (even if this involves incurring it in order to learn to take some pleasure in it or become indifferent to it). They all in a sense are driven by pain. They clearly reach their apogee in the will to nothingness wherein that entity which suffers attempts to escape suffering by negating itself. All this is underpinned by an evaluation of life which takes it to be flawed or even worthless on account of the inevitability that it will inflict suffering upon us. By contrast, Nietzsche’s non-ascetic inspiration embraces suffering and is able to do so out of an abundance of energy. As Nietzsche tells us, this rapture is characterised by “… a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy things appear, not as an antithesis, but as conditioned, demanded, as a necessary colour within such a superfluity of light…” (EH ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ § 3). Here, life is far from worthless, in despite of its painful side.
Secondly, the ascetic raptures are the goal and reward of ascetic projects which are actively engaged in. But Nietzsche’s inspiration seems to be the product of something ironically akin to grace, and, indeed, Nietzsche tells us he would speak the language of grace without restraint were he not devoid of “superstition” (ibid). Creative rapture can be invited by an arrangement of the artist’s living conditions and a certain inner comportment to his life on the artists’ part: hence Nietzsche’s concern with diet, location and so forth as well as with the artist’s character. But on this formulation, there are no crudely ascetic manipulations of the organism or magical invocations as though rapture could be forced to bless the artist.
Thirdly, Nietzsche’s emphasis on the abundance of energy which characterises non-ascetic creative rapture contrasts sharply with the sedative effect of many ascetic raptures and the enervation which motivates their cultivation.
Concluding remarks and speculations
Nietzsche’s considerations of creativity, then, furnish us with a highly nuanced taxonomy of raptures which relates raptures to attitudes of life-affirmation and life-negation and to concrete practices.
It is not only non-ascetic raptures, however, which are creative. The account given in The Genealogy makes it abundantly clear that the ascetic ideal with its associated raptures has been the creative force par excellence for millennia. So Nietzsche’s taxonomy of raptures does not ask us to accept a persuasive definition of creativity. Instead, it asks us to evaluate raptures and their associated modes of creativity. It asks us to question them and weigh them in order to determine the degree with which they are embroiled with life-negation and the degree with which they arise from and serve life-affirmation. If we are philosophers or artists, or even artist-philosophers, we owe Nietzsche an immense debt for bringing the necessity to evaluate our raptures, both actual and desired, into the light of consciousness and for suggesting a way of doing so. (It forces us to ask ourselves, “What is the use of our art for life?”)
But what of the connection between ego-dissolution and rapture? I think we can safely say that its move back into the shadows in Nietzsche’s later considerations happened for rhetorical reasons – to distance Nietzsche from Schopenhauer, to expose asceticism which often attempts to unseat the ego by pathological acts of willed self-torture, to emphasise the role of abundance of energy in what Nietzsche took to be healthy raptures capable of being marshalled against nihilism, to contrast this latter with the enervation characteristic of much ascetic rapture, and to point out the need to be able to evaluate raptures and not take them all to be the same.
The autobiographical evidence suggests that ego-dissolution was not, after all, out of the picture at the end of Nietzsche’s thought-trajectory on rapture and creativity.
But the ego-dissolution that Nietzsche talks about is spontaneous and in no wise the result of self-torture. It is not the result of a violent manipulation of soma and psyche and there is unlikely to be attraction towards such manipulation from one who loves his fate. It is certainly connected with a certain comportment on Nietzsche’s part towards his own life and we might account for his frequent autobiographical disclosures as an attempt to show how crucial this is, rather than seeing them as a Nietzschean idiosyncrasy that we have to put up with.
A part of that comportment, I want to suggest, is to regard ego as not in need of dissolution but of seeing through.. For the late Nietzsche, ego never had any substance. It never existed in the first place and there is no need, therefore, of ascetic effort to unseat it in the service of rapture. This is at least part of the significance, it seems to me, of the late deconstructions of ego as found for example in WP §481, §485, and §488 where ego is regarded as an interpretation under the imperative of the will to power. To so regard ego as a useful fiction is to invite rapture but not to demand it. (And if we love our fate we will not need to demand it.)
Nevertheless, ego-loss of some type, at least some lability of the ego-boundary, seems to be involved in all rapture and we need therefore to think how this might be so.
At this point, I can only offer some sketchy speculations on how this line of enquiry might be followed. If we take it that rapture is in some measure a matter of physiological change, the prominence of impacts on the body in ascetic practices which aim to produce rapture is understandable. The intimate connection between the body and the ego means that such practices, in interfering with the sense of the body, will cause the ego-boundary to seem at the very least to be labile and it is this affect which is sought.
But if rapture is inherently physiological, a healthy, non-ascetic rapture must be as physiological as its ascetic counterpart. Nietzsche seems to suggest just this, and there is no doubt about the physiological character of Nietzsche’s inspiration which we have not long ago considered. If the connection I have made between seeing ego as illusion and inviting creative rapture is cogent, then clearly a non-ascetic rapture can occur in virtue of our seeing through the illusion of ego, i.e. through seeing the productive role of interpretation in our sense of self. But how is this likely to manifest physiologically? How can it be more than a rather coldly intellectual and abstract “insight” lacking all the thrills and shudders of real rapture? Here, like Nietzsche, we must speak a language of energy, perhaps a language of libido.
Maintaining the illusion of ego, indeed maintaining any illusion, consumes energy. If we take both Nietzschean and Freudian formulations seriously, if we consider that the modern ego is maintained against a sense of guilt, and against the demands of instinct, and against the claims of social reality, then the fatigue and depression that both authors remark on as a concomitant of such a libidinal economy makes sense. Then neither is it surprising that the collapse of this economy will release all the energy formerly bound up by it, and the abundance of energy reported by Nietzsche as a main feature of non-ascetic creative rapture is explicable as a corollary of seeing through the illusion of ego. We might, incidentally, find that Nietzsche’s immoralism and his strong stand against the denigration of sexuality become quite transparent if they are understood as aimed against the libidinal economy of the ascetic ideal.
By contrast, the ascetic project remains captured by the illusion of ego insofar as any attempt to wilfully unseat ego remains an egoic project. Rapture interpreted as a sign of success in such an endeavour will actually confirm the strength of the ego to itself and the energy required to maintain ego will quickly be recaptured. Hence the possibility of soporific raptures which do not boast the abundant energy of non-ascetic raptures.
So what is Nietzsche’s ideal life-affirmative, anti-nihilistic creativity like? It must visit physiologically, as excitation, as arousal, as energy. It is only slightly excessive to call it the grace of Dionysius. It is invited by an openeness of spirit and a love of one’s fate, and it is just such rapture which caused Nietzsche to rhapsodise thus in 1885:
This world is will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are will to power – and nothing besides (WP §1067).
So again we have feelings of mergence with the primal oneness only now the latter has a new and more apposite name: the will to power. The new name captures the dynamic face both the world and self now present as well as the abundance of creative energy that the life-affirmative artist will experience. This rapturous experience, I want to suggest, is the basis for and well-spring of Nietzsche’s artistic philosophising or philosophic art.
