Book Reviews : Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts. Edited by Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell and Daniel W. Conway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 351. £40.00
Abstract
Book ReviewsNietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts. Edited by Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell and Daniel W. Conway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 351. £40.00 SAGE Publications, Inc.1999DOI: 10.1177/004724419902900119 Paul Bishop Famously, Nietzsche remarked that the world is only justified - or bearable - as an aesthetic phenomenon (The Birth of Tragedy §5 and §24, 'Self-Criticism' §5; and The Gay Science, §107). Just what this tenet might mean provides the starting-point for Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts. According to the editors of this volume of thirteen essays, 'Nietzsche's contributions to aesthetics are unusually rich and complex', not just because he was a philosopher as well as a poet and composer, but also because '[h]is personal experiences of rebirth and transfiguration lead him to seek the meaning of existence itself in a quasi-religious mode of aesthetic attunement or appreciation' (p.2). In the first essay, Ernst Behler develops ideas pursued in earlier publications, comparing Schlegel's definition of irony with the Nietzschean notion of the mask. Martha Nussbaum's 'The Transfigurations of Intoxication' contrasts Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's approaches to the Dionysian. In the following essay, Adrian Del Caro examines the varying presentations of the Dionysian within Nietzsche's thought as a whole.