Nietzsche, Artistic Intoxication, and the Overcoming of Nihilism: the Body as an Ontology of Practice

absurdity and suffering, the Dionysian will subsists at this level of its terrible discovery as an end-in-itself. Nietzsche writes, “the highest art in saying Yes to life, tragedy, will be reborn when humanity has weathered the consciousness of the hardest but most necessary wars without suffering from it” (EH, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 4). The aim of the Dionysian experience is not to stagnate in a meaningless existence but to go beyond and transforming the absurd suffering that plagues life; the tragic constitutes a truly affirmative perspective on life because suffering is the ground for asserting a joyful mode of existence.

IV.

Nietzsche believes that “the intoxication of the will” has the power to turn the will from its inward direction, where nihilism has imprisoned it, and thrust it outward into becoming; “intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens” (TI, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” 8). The mechanism of intoxication consists in its ability to cause a condition of arousal in the will. If one believes that it is one’s duty to better human existence by creating progressive conditions, whereby the inspired individual authentically fashions a world meaningful to her because it reflects her creative possibilities (in the fifth section of the Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche tells us that “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”), and if one believes that human beings should be able to so relate to life as the meaning of their humanity, then one would welcome “a certain physiological precondition” that revives our sense of power and purpose. Nietzsche

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