Nietzsche and Weimar Aesthetics

Nietzsche’s philosophy, always a site of heated interpretative contestation, owes much to the aesthetic theory of its predecessors, particularly Kant, Schelling, Scho‐penhauer, Wagner, but above all Schiller and Goethe. Yet whilst this debt is frequently acknowledged by critics, its implications are even more frequently ignored. Once this ‘perspective’ is restored, however, a fresh coherence and purposiveness may be detected in Nietzsche’s philosophical aesthetics. In Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872) Nietzsche makes constant allusion to Schiller’s concept of ‘aesthetic semblance’, and when he describes the world as being justified ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon’, he is thinking of Schiller’s concept of the aesthetic as a fusion of physical and intellectual experience. Similarly, Nietzsche’s immensely influential ‘polaristic thinking’, in which each term (such as the Apollonian and the Dionysian) is affirmative and exists in its own right, rather than as a negation of the other, is inherited from Goethe. So Nietzsche can be regarded as participating in a ‘perennial aesthetic’. Not only is that aesthetic placed at the heart of Zarathustra’s teaching, but the aesthetic style of Nietzsche’s epic responds to the demand in Die Geburt der Tragödie for an original kind of conceptual art.