I will begin with a quotation from Nietzsche:
Kant’s victory over the dogmatic concepts of theology (“God,” “soul,” “freedom,” “immortality”) (did not damage that ideal)...since Kant, transcendentalists of every kind have once more won the day - they have been emancipated from the theologians: what joy! - Kant showed them a secret path by which they may, on their own initiative and with all scientific respectability, from now on follow their “heart’s desire.”’)1
My argument in this paper will be that the ‘secret path’ which Nietzsche bestowed underlay creative respectability...
When we begin to study a text, we place our craft on a flow of words and are borne away. Are we won by their fluency? Or convinced by their force - by the impulse from their origin? Might we know them by the friends they keep, and by the deeds they commit upon us? Or do we engage with them and seek the contradictions - where the eddies, the cross movements, and the undertow - where the richer signs of life?...And to what are we blind, and why?...
We have understood Nietzsche, a man who wrote so much on the relation between form and content, largely according to his will. His writing on and against philosophical idealism sustains his work - he boasted that he had risen above that current running from Plato, through Christianity (‘Platonism for the people’, for which he felt the most bitter antipathy) to Hegel, Kant and Schopenhauer.
the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error - namely, Plato’s invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself...this nightmare...amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the perspective - the fundamental condition - of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as Plato spoke of them...Christianity is Platonism for the “people”.’2
Nietzsche told us that Dionysus and Apollo overthrew this sickly orientation, that perspective should replace universals, that binary oppositions are false, and that the best art is synonymous with creativity, life and truth. And we welcomed his perspective.
Evocative of both Diogenes the dog and Lady Macbeth - in search in turn for an honest human and a cleansed conscience - Nietzsche’s madman entered the market place, lantern in hand, and cried words which have echoed through a much larger marketplace - ‘God is dead’. If not a shout of victory, these words convey the stamp of finality, emphatic in their simplicity. But why have they been ripped from their context, why has their meaning been torn from them, and both context and meaning discarded?
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives - who will wipe this blood off us?...Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?3
This quotation indicates how Nietzsche ‘solved’ his primary concern, the problem of God(’s death). Having willed His death in eternity...Nietzsche resurrected (created) Him in the temporal flesh. He brought back to earth and maintained in ‘life’ that which he attacked Plato and Christianity for having sent beyond. But it was to an earth beyond time - the life of Mind, in which occurs the ‘...rare ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time, and the individual.’4 And Nietzsche proselytised God in the name of another faith - his own creation, Dionysus.
‘As a philologist and man of words (?!) I baptised it, not without taking some liberty - for who could claim to know the rightful name of the Antichrist? - in the name of a Greek god: I called it Dionysian.’5
In the same piece of writing Nietzsche made a leap not of reason but of faith
Whoever approaches these Olympians with another religion in his heart, searching among them for moral elevation even for sanctity, for disincarnate spirituality...will soon be forced to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed. For there is nothing here that suggests asceticism, spirituality, or duty. We hear nothing but the accents of an exuberant, triumphant life in which all things, whether good or evil, are deified.’6
Christianity has long had a central place for the passage of Spirit into flesh in its own mythology, under the rubric ‘et incarnatus est’. And this arose from a complex and rich heritage which Nietzsche correctly traced to the immeasurable influence of Plato - obviously Plato was not the only source. Nietzsche wrote ‘(Dionysus is) a deification of life...the religious affirmation of life’,7 and ‘I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even a satyr than a saint.’ Thus two gods have their ministers.8
Nietzsche’s Dionysus and Apollo arose from a chain of inspiration originated by Plato, which has continued across generations, with inevitable developments and variations in emphasis. The Timaeus, a dialogue from Plato’s ‘middle’ or ‘late’ period, and generally and mistakenly regarded as a minor work, is his attempt to give a scientific explanation for the divine creation of this world - for that reason alone positioning it as a major work by him. In it is written an encapsulation of a process and purpose which is of the greatest importance to Western philosophy, Christian theology and Western art theory and practice.
And (the Demiurge) gave each divine being two motions, one uniform in the same place, as each always thinks the same thoughts about the same things, the other forward, as each is subject to the movement of the Same and uniform; but he kept them unaffected by the other five kinds of motion, that each might be as perfect as possible.9
This little group of words summarises the dual yet undifferentiated pathway Plato established between perfection, its divine medium, and creation; it asserts that creation and ‘thought’ in its motion are equivalent; it defines the nature of that process. The motions of his divine beings differ from those of the sensory world, they are effects of the soul in its activity.
Lee wrote of the Timaeus that
as the first Greek account of a divine creation, containing a rational explanation of many natural processes, it remained influential throughout the period of the Ancient World, not least towards its end when it influenced the Neo-platonists and when its creator-god was easily assimilated by Christian thought to the God of Genesis.10
Plotinus’ mystical and emotive development on this (on the Soul’s contemplation of and desire for its source, his development of the realm of Forms into that of Intellect, and differentiation between its lower and higher aspects as the ascending Soul’s activity quickens, culminating in its unity with its source, his hypostasis of the One - which he defined as the greatest activity in the greatest stillness) was absorbed into Christian theology and Western philosophy as the methods of contemplation of form and (the movement through) desire, passion and the emotions, toward union with that which was desired - God.
These methods underlie Kant’s notions of the beautiful and the sublime
the feeling of the sublime involves as its characteristic feature a mental movement combined with the estimate of the object, whereas taste in respect of the beautiful presupposes that the mind is in restful contemplation and preserves it in this state.11
They echo in Schopenhauer’s writing - consider his distinction between the methods of science and experience
the rational method which is alone of use in practical life and in science (the method of Aristotle) - and ‘the method of genius’ - which is valid and of use only in art (the method of Plato). ‘The first is like the mighty storm that rushes along without beginning and without end, bending, agitating, and carrying away everything before it; the second is like the ray of sun that calmly pierces the storm and is not deflected by it. The first is like the innumerable, violently agitated drops of the waterfall, constantly changing, never for an instant at rest; the second is like the rainbow, silently resting on this raging torrent.12
And they recur in Schopenhauer’s aesthetics which were overtly Platonic - simply, he believed the object of art is the Platonic Idea.
Raised by the power of the mind, a person relinquishes the usual way of looking at things...He does not allow abstract thought...to take possession of his consciousness, but, instead, gives the whole power of his mind to perception, immerses himself entirely in this, and lets his whole consciousness be filled with the quiet contemplation of the natural object...he can no longer separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one...then what is known is no longer the individual thing as such, but the Idea, the eternal form...The person rapt in this perception is thereby no longer individual...but he is a pure, willess, painless, timeless subject of knowledge.13
Also
(Art) repeats or reproduces the eternal Ideas grasped through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding element in all the phenomena of the world...it plucks the object of its contemplation out of the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it. And this particular thing, which in that stream was a minute part, becomes for art a representative of the whole, an equivalent of the endless multitude in space and time. So art pauses at this particular thing; it stops the wheel of time, for art the relations vanish; only the essential, the Idea, is its object.’14
Again, in Nietzsche’s Apollinian and Dionysian. He wrote of ‘that splendid mixture which resembles a noble wine in making one feel fiery and contemplative at the same time.’15
As Plato’s Demiurge created the world and gave it form, as Plotinus’ Soul brought form from the far more ‘real’ universe of Intellect to Intellect’s eternal creation in matter, as the God of Christianity created the world to which He sent His Son as the embodiment of the Holy Spirit, so Dionysus eternally creates the world and gives of himself through the beauty of Apollinian form (which Nietzsche applied to appearance). Demiurge, Soul, Jesus and Dionysus are the media, Mind the medium.
Nietzsche was very aware of the heritage on which he drew - he creatively blended its elements in his writing
the whole divine comedy of life, including the inferno, also pass before him, not like mere shadows on a wall - for he lives and suffers with these scenes - and yet not without that fleeting sensation of illusion.16
Here Nietzsche refers to the Enneads through Dante’s great Christian allegory of the Way to God - ‘to that union of our wills with the Universal Will in which every creature finds its true self and its true being’,17 in which Dante is guided by the shade of the poet Virgil and then led by the beautiful revelation of God through philosophy, Beatrice, to Paradise, and directly to the simile of the cave in the Republic. In the Introduction to her translation, Sayers referred to the ‘cold passion’ of Dante’s style - it might have been better described as repressed.18
For Nietzsche, the ‘tragic’ artist attains the Dionysian state through Apollinian apotheosis, the perfecting of man’s self. He wrote ‘If we conceive of it at all as imperative and mandatory, this apotheosis of individuation knows but one law - the individual...’19 Obsessive self-love has its justification.
Likewise, Plotinus’ philosophy is concerned with the creation and perfection of self
If there had been a moment from which He began to be, it would be possible to assert his self-making in the literal sense; but since what He is He is from before eternity, his self-making is to be understood as simultaneous with Himself; the being is one and the same with the making, the eternal ‘bringing into existence’.20
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote
Sense and spirit are instruments and toys: behind them still lies the Self...Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage - he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body.21
and ‘Your Self can no longer perform that act which it most desires to perform: to create beyond itself. That is what it most wishes to do, that is its whole ardour.’22
Nietzsche emphasised the fecundity of Dionysus, destroying as he eternally creates - in so doing he drew from the work of Plotinus, who had an immense impact on Nietzsche’s own thought and of whom it was written that because of his mysticism, he has been a greater inspiration for Western philosophy than even Plato.23
the tragic artist...creates his figures like a fecund divinity of individuation...and as his vast Dionysian impulse then devours his entire world of phenomena, in order to let us sense beyond it, and through its destruction, the highest artistic primal joy, in the bosom of the primordially One.24
Plotinus wrote
Is that enough? Can we end the discussion by saying this? No, my soul is still in even stronger labour. Perhaps she is now at the point when she must bring forth, having reached the fullness of her birth-pangs in her eager longing for the One.25
Plotinus believed that through loving oneself in God, one becomes God, one becomes the Creator. The same religious belief in creativity was held by another extremely influential voluntarist and vitalist contemporary of Nietzsche’s - Bergson, whose best known work is Creative Evolution. (1907)
The notions of will, vitality and creativity are fundamental to Plotinus’ philosophy. Not only are Intellect and particularly its source, the One, overflowing with activity, there is in Intellect an “...endlessness for ever welling up in it, the unwearying and unwearing nature which in no way falls short in it, boiling over with life...”26
The language Plotinus used to describe this excess of life resonates in Nietzsche’s description of Dionysian creativity. Compare the words of Plotinus
in order that being may exist, the One is not being, but the generator of being. This, we may say, is the first act of generation: the One, perfect because it seeks nothing, has nothing, and needs nothing, overflows, as it were, and its superabundance makes something other than itself...Resembling the One...Intellect produces in the same way, pouring forth a multiple power - this is a likeness of it - just as that which was before it poured it forth. This activity springing from the substance of Intellect is Soul...(which) does not abide unchanged when it produces: it is moved and so brings forth an image. It looks to its source and is filled, and going forth to another opposed movement generates its own image, which is sensation and the principle of growth in plants...So it goes on from the beginning to the last and lowest, each [generator] remaining behind in its own place, and that which is generated taking another, lower, rank27
with those of Nietzsche
(The aesthetic state) appears only in natures capable of that bestowing and overflowing fullness of bodily vigour: it is this that is always the primum mobile...“Perfection”: in these states (in the case of sexual love especially) there is naively revealed what the deepest instinct recognises as higher, more desirable, more valuable in general, the upward movement of its type; also toward what status it really aspires. Perfection: that is the extraordinary expansion of its feeling of power, riches, necessary overflowing of all limits.’28
Creation is not for its own sake, but to produce objects of ‘vision’, to enable knowledge and ultimately the unity of seer, seeing and seen. The points of focus Nietzsche created to enable his longed for ascent to Truth are the Dionysian reveller, the satyr and Dionysus
Such magic transformation is the presupposition of all dramatic art. In this magic transformation the Dionysian reveller sees himself as a satyr, and as a satyr, in turn, he sees the god, which means that in his metamorphosis he beholds another vision outside himself...With this new vision the drama is complete.29
Compare the dictum of Plotinus with Nietzsche’s words, for which they both drew on the chain of inspiration in the Ion and Plato’s use of the metaphor of sight in the Republic’s simile of the cave, in which the philosopher attains the supreme ‘vision’ - that of the absolute form of the Good - ‘the brightest of all realities’.30
Only insofar as the genius in the act of artistic creation coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he know anything of the eternal essence of art; for in this state he is, in a marvellous manner, like the weird image of the fairy tale which can turn its eyes at will and behold itself; he is at once subject and object, at once poet, actor, and spectator.31
Even Nietzsche’s description of man’s perfecting of himself
(In a Dionysian state, man) is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist rings out the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries...Do you sense your Maker, world?32
is shaped not by Kant’s hand of nature, but by that of Plotinus, who commanded, in reply to the question ‘But how are you to see into a virtuous Soul and know its loveliness?’
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine...the Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and, thus, always, Beauty’s seat is There.33
Nietzsche responded powerfully to the same ‘intoxicated’ drive to ‘shape’ and control the self in Plato in whom ‘as a man of overexcitable sensuality and enthusiasm, the charm of the concept had grown so strong that he involuntarily honoured and deified the concept as an ideal Form. Intoxication by dialectic: as the consciousness of exercising mastery over oneself by means of it - as as tool of the will to power.’34
Consistently, this current in philosophy is not driven by a will to life in this world but to one, as the hero in Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities said as he mounted the scaffold, in ‘a far better place’. What connects Plato, Plotinus and Nietzsche in this is their artistry, their immense sensitivity to the creative process and therefore their intense spirituality.
But they theorised about spirituality not as a fundamental quality of community but only of the self and its Soul. They were unable to reconcile the elements of their mental functioning (from their emotions and non-discursive capacity, to cognition) both internally and to the world in which they lived. I quote Nietzsche
Thrown into a noisy and plebeian age with which he has no wish to eat out of the same dish, he (‘who has the desires of an elevated, fastidious soul’) can easily perish of hunger and thirst, or, if he does eventually “set to” - of a sudden nausea. - We have all no doubt eaten at tables where we did not belong; and precisely the most spiritual of us who are most difficult to feed know that dangerous dyspepsia which comes from a sudden insight and disappointment about our food and table-companions - the after-dinner nausea.35
Nietzsche’s writing details over and again the gulf he felt between himself and others: ‘I don’t want to be lonely any more; I want to learn to be human again. Alas, in this field I have almost everything still to learn!’36 The philosophies of Plato, Plotinus and Nietzsche, ostensibly developed as a guide to life, grew in reaction to it. They direct away from life. Plotinus concluded his Enneads
This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, the passing of solitary to solitary.37
The metaphor of flight illustrates this desire to break free from the gravity of objective reality - the flight of the poet in the Ion, the flight of the Soul in the Enneads, the flight of angels in Christianity, the flight of man in The Birth of Tragedy - ‘(man) has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing...he feels himself a god...’38 This flight was aided by the non-discursive tools of intuition - ‘(Dionysian) music incites to the symbolic intuition of Dionysian universality’39 and, as Nietzsche was the first to acknowledge, the self-deceptive art of lying.
...there is only one world, and this is false, cruel, contradictory, seductive, without meaning - A world thus constituted is the real world. We have need of lies in order to conquer this reality, this “truth,” that is, in order to live...To solve it, man must be liar by nature, he must be above all an artist...This ability itself, thanks to which he violates reality by means of lies, this artistic ability of man par excellence - he has it in common with everything that is. He himself is after all a piece of reality, truth, nature: how should he not also be a piece of genius in lying!...In those moments in which man was deceived, in which he duped himself, in which he believes in life: oh how enraptured he feels! What delight! What a feeling of power! How much artists’ triumph in the feeling of power! - Man has once again become master of “material” - master of truth! - ...(man) enjoys the lie as his form of power.40
Nietzsche wrote
An artist cannot endure reality, he looks away from it, back: he seriously believes that the value of a thing resides in that shadowy residue one derives from colours, form, sound, ideas; he believes that the more subtilised, attenuated, transient a thing or a man is, the more valuable he becomes; the less real, the more valuable. This is Platonism, which, however, involved yet another bold reversal: Plato measured the degree of reality by the degree of value and said: The more “Idea,” the more being. He reversed the concept “reality” and said: “What you take for real is an error, and the nearer we approach the ‘Idea,’ the nearer we approach ‘truth.’” - Is this understood? It was the greatest of rebaptisms; and because it has been adopted by Christianity we do not recognise how astonishing it is. Fundamentally, Plato, as the artist he was, preferred appearance to being! lie and invention to truth! the unreal to the actual! But he was so convinced of the value of appearance that he gave it the attributes “being,” “causality” and ‘goodness,” and “truth,” in short everything men value.
The concept of value itself considered as a cause: first insight.
The ideal granted all honorific attributes: second insight.41
In the above, Nietzsche stated his belief that the artist cannot ‘suffer’ reality and that there is a profound connection between the artist, Plato and the Christian. He wrote that this connection, developed by Plato, opposes the equivalents of Idea or form (as Apollinian appearance), lie and the unreal, to being, and the actual. He tied their retreat from reality to the creation of and faith in a higher one in mind. For Nietzsche, Apollo and Dionysus were the gods bringing form and content to his new and lonely faith - a faith in which he was torn, as Plato revealed of himself in his writing of the Timaeus.
Nietzsche’s philosophy has much to offer, not least because it details the tension in his thought between life and Life eternal, between perspective and vision. That he was a man of god, no less than his father and both grandfathers, who were all ministers in the Lutheran faith, he surely could not have argued against. That his faith was strongly flavoured by the Christianity he despised he would have rejected, but this underpins his mask of the myth of Oedipus,
Sophocles understood the most sorrowful figure of the Greek stage, the unfortunate Oedipus, as the noble human being who, in spite of his wisdom, is destined to error and misery but who eventually, through his tremendous suffering, spreads a magical power of blessing that remains effective even beyond his decease.42
and it is the fabric of his greatest mask, his ‘counterdoctrine’ of Dionysus
One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. ..The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.43
Not only does Christianity teach that Christ on the cross is the symbolic promise of eternal ‘life’, as Dionysus was for Nietzsche a signpost to seek redemption from the life of objective reality, both the god on the cross (who was also ‘cut to pieces’) and Nietzsche’s creative interpretation of his own god can equally be traced (as Nietzsche realised) to Plato’s fundamental influence.
Nietzsche never lost the ‘intense piety’ of his youth - he adapted it.44 Hollingdale wrote ‘What the Christian says of God, Nietzsche says in very nearly the same words of the Superman, namely: “Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever.”’45 Nietzsche was a major figure in the development of twentieth-century Modernism, and as we contemplate the works in galleries, produced this century, we might think critically of Nietzsche’s words
Art raises its head where creeds relax. It takes over many feelings and moods engendered by religion, lays them to its heart, and itself becomes deeper, more full of soul, so that it is capable of transmitting exultation and enthusiasm, which it previously was not able to do46
The epistemological flow which this paper addresses - this pathway to perfection, this stairway to heaven - is intimately bound to patriarchal power. Plato was born into a prominent Athenian family with many political connections - his mother’s second husband was a close friend and supporter of Pericles. Porphyry wrote that Plotinus was ‘greatly honoured and venerated’ by the emperor Gallienus.
It is a current suffused with exclusions - the exclusion of this world from a ‘higher’ one, the exclusion of discursive reason from contemplative ‘reason’, the exclusion of the feminine from the masculine, the exclusion of women from power, the exclusion from true power of the majority by the minority. It is the content of this current which constitutes the backbone of the visual ideology of the capitalist class.
The art Marx thought to be the best is that which aims to stimulate the viewer’s mind to awareness of and desire to act upon the one absolute truth - that of change in a material universe. Such a view is diametrically opposed to the art informed by this philosophical current which aims to stimulate the viewer’s mind to the denial of change by a body of desired, absolute truths, the highest of which is God the Father, God the Self.
Notes
1. In extracts from On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) Third Essay, Section 25, Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1969, 156
2. From the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. (1886) In G. Clive. Ed., The Philosophy of Nietzsche. New York: Mentor, 1965, 123
3. From the madman’s speech in The Gay Science. (1882), 125. In the Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (1883-1885). Trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, 14
4. The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Section 2I, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967, 124
5. In ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ (1886), Section 5, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner op. cit., 24
6. Ibid., Section 3, 41
7. The Will to Power (1901), Bk 1V, 1052, Trans. W. Kaufmann. and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968. 542
8. From the Preface to Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is? (1888), Section 2, in G. Clive. Ed., The Philosophy of Nietzsche. op. cit., 134
9. Timaeus, 8, 40
10. In his Introduction to Plato Timaeus and Critias, Trans. D. Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, 7
11. Kant I. Critique of Judgement. Bk II, Analytic of the Sublime, 24, Trans. J. Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952, 94
12. Schopenhauer A. The World As Will And Idea. Book III, 36. (Abridged in One Volume) 1819, Trans. J. Berman. London: Everyman, 1995, 109
13. Ibid., Book III, 34 (102)
14. Ibid., Book III, 36 (108)
15. The Birth of Tragedy, Section 21, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit., 125
16. The Birth of Tragedy, Section I, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit., 35
17. From the Introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers, in Dante. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri The Florentine. Cantica 1: Hell, Trans. D. L. Sayers. London: Penguin, 1988, 19
18. Ibid., 42
19. The Birth of Tragedy, Section 4, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit., 46
20. Enneads VI,8,20
21. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. op. cit., 62
22. Ibid., 63
23. Henry, P. ‘The Place of Plotinus in the History of Thought’, The Enneads, Third ed., Abridged, Trans. S. MacKenna. London: Penguin, 1991, xlii - lxxxiii
24. The Birth of Tragedy, Section 22, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit.,132
25. Enneads V,3,17
26. Enneads VI, 5,12
27. Enneads V,2, 1-2
28. The Will to Power op. cit., Bk 3, 801, 422
29. The Birth of Tragedy, Section 8, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit., 64
30. Republic Bk VII, 514-521
31. The Birth of Tragedy, Section 5, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit., 52
32. The Birth of Tragedy, Section 1, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit., 37
33. Enneads I,6,9
34. The Will to Power. op. cit., Book 2, 431, 236
35. Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. (1886) 282, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1990, 213
36. From a letter to Lou Salomé, 2 July, 1882. From the Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. op. cit., 21
37. Enneads VI,9,11
38. The Birth of Tragedy, Section 1, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit., 37
39. The Birth of Tragedy, Section 16, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit.,103
40. The Will to Power. op. cit., Book 3, 853, 451-452
41. Ibid., Book 3, 572, 308
42. The Birth of Tragedy, Section 9, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, op. cit., 67
43. The Will to Power. op. cit., Book 4, 1052, 543
44. I use Hollingdale’s expression, in his Introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. op. cit., 12
45. Ibid., 29
46. From Human, All-Too-Human, A Book for Free Spirits. (1878) vol. I, 150, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche. op cit., 516
* * *
I will complete my presentation with a brief discussion of the content of four images:
1) ‘Head of the Virgin’ - artist and date unknown
2) Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea (1890) which is based on the myth of Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, who, disappointed by mortal women, carved an ivory statue of his ideal and then fell in love with it. In answer to his prayer, Aphrodite brought the sculpture to life and Pygmalion married her. They had a daughter, Paphos, named in honour of Aphrodite. The name Galatea is a postclassical addition. It is worth noting that when he died, Gérôme was found at the foot of his painting Truth Coming out of her Well to shame Mankind (1896).
3) Picasso’s Head of a Woman - Fernande (1909)
4) Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. (1907)
* * *
This paper was to have been given at a post-graduate seminar at the College of Fine Arts, the University of New South Wales, on 03.04.98. I was to have given the last presentation in the programme (4pm-4.45pm), but the speaker before me (who had been allocated the time of 3.15pm-4pm) was still giving his presentation when the seminar was due to conclude. Having delivered their brilliant papers, the other students had left with their friends. A friend of mine who had travelled 100 kilometres to hear my presentation could wait no longer and had to leave to go home so I excused myself and left with her. We were followed out by the course co-ordinator, who then abused me.
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