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

continues, “the essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy” (Ibid). Intoxication can reverse the state of nothingness associated with nihilism because it has the power to cause the self to believe that it can master both itself and the world. Nietzsche writes, “it is impossible for the Dionysian man not to understand any suggestion of whatever kind, he ignores no signal from the emotions, he possesses to the highest degree the instinct for understanding and divining, just as he possesses the art of communication to the highest degree. He enters into every skin, into every emotion; he is continually transforming himself“ (Ibid, 10). A rapturous experience then emphasizes feeling as central to our awakening to becoming; as Heidegger remarks, in his discussion of rapture, “feeling achieves from the outset the inherent internalizing tendency of the body in our Dasein [the mode of existence of human beings].” # Through feeling, the cohesive powers of the body are extended into the world as our mode of existence. Nietzsche strongly feels that “from out of this feeling one gives to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them-one calls this procedure idealizing” (Ibid, 8). So the self’s emotive powers constitute an opportunity to reawaken the self.

But it is not enough to arouse the self; the body must also affirm itself within becoming. Nietzsche writes, “let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealization does not consist, as is commonly believed, in subtracting or deducting of the petty and secondary. A tremendous expulsion of the principal features rather is the decisive thing, so that thereupon the others too disappear” (Ibid). The goal is not to change the structures of

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