Comparative Literature Studies

Comparative Literature Studies 37.3 (2000) 321-343

A. Owen Aldridge Essay Contest Winner

Nietzsche: Utility, Aesthetics, History

Robert Doran

The nineteenth century was the century of historical sensibility par excellence: Hegel, Marx, Michelet, Ranke, Burckhardt--to name only the most prominent historians and philosophers of history of the era. It is not surprising that the young Nietzsche, professor of philology, was particularly concerned with questions of historical theory and methodology. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), featured a new kind of cultural history, and one which was not uncontroversial in the staid circles of classical philology. ¹ Following soon after, an essay entitled "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life" (1874) theorized the specificity of the historical in the wake of the aesthetic horizons opened by The Birth of Tragedy. These horizons being more extensive than any previous philosophy had put forth, The Birth of Tragedy comes to us not merely as a scholarly dissertation on Greek tragedy: it is a book about life and art seen from the vantage point of a historically charged moment, a redemptive moment of pith and vital intensity whose recurrence Nietzsche saw at hand in the operas of Wagner.

Though rhetorically speaking these two early works appear well removed from each other--one is based on poetic figures as proxy concepts while the other is organized around notions of utility--there is nevertheless a common project (and one which Nietzsche would never completely abandon): that of an existentialist historiography under the aegis of art. Seen in its context, this project represents the culmination of the aesthetic tradition inaugurated by Kant's third Critique and continuing through Schiller, the Idealists, and Schopenhauer. Through a comparative [End Page 321] analysis of Nietzsche's two early works, coupled with an examination of the aesthetic categories Nietzsche inherited and reinvigorated, I will seek to resituate Nietzsche in this tradition, particularly with regard to what Nietzsche terms his "aesthetic metaphysics" ² --its logic and relevance--while drawing out the theoretical implications of such a stance for historical practice.

I

Writing against the grain, Nietzsche takes his contemporaries to task for reifying history, for allowing a scientific appropriation of what heretofore had been an artistic activity. With the disciplinization of historical studies and concomitant legitimization as science, myth (art) was opposed to history (object of scientific inquiry). In Nietzsche's view this "opposition" was merely a contest between two mythologies: one affirmed its aesthetic nature, while the other's vaunted anti-aestheticism (Christian or scientific) blinded it to its own essential poiesis. Nietzsche saw in Schopenhauer's metaphysics of art a way to reverse the intellectual tide. By raising the status of art to such heights that it could no longer be opposed to truth, the young Nietzsche's aim was not, as is often assumed, to eradicate metaphysics, but to radically change its nature. Metaphysics is not undercut in the aesthetic turn, but sublimated: "art--and not morality--is the true metaphysical activity of man" (8, Nietzsche's emphasis). The revaluation of all values in the aesthetic is effected by a secularized metaphysics ("an artiste's metaphysics" [5], as Nietzsche writes in his 1886 introduction to The Birth of Tragedy). By making metaphysics into an aesthetic affair, Nietzsche not only transforms the nature of metaphysics, but also that of the aesthetic. Henceforth the aesthetic is not ontic but "ontological," that is, not a region of being but its replacement.

Yet, given Nietzsche's aesthetic turn, how to square the utilitarian rhetoric of "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life" with the effusively poetic bent of The Birth of Tragedy? To think of history in terms of its utility is to invert assumptions about the role of historiography. Nietzsche's historian does not strive to do history justice or discover its hidden workings; it is not a matter of the accurate reflection of "historical reality" (the goal of historicism), the a priori necessity of a philosophical system (Hegel, Marx), or the pronouncement of moral judgments (which produce a sentiment of either superior rectitude or fatalistic providence). The role...