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

categories of bodily expectations and behavioral conventions are displaced.# Not surprisingly, Zarathustra reminds the “higher men,” who suffer from cultural impotence and who desire to recover their power of willing, “although there are swamps and thick afflictions on earth, he who has light feet runs across mud and dances as upon swept ice” (Z, IV, “Of the Higher Man,“ 17). Zarathustra confronts the ponderous weight of cultural decline and nihilism through affirmation, but a precondition for the success of that confrontation is the elimination of decadence and resignation as weighty afflictions that plague the body.

Zarathustra wants a subject prepared and predisposed to change, and, as we noted above, intoxication achieves this through an emotive experience that has the power to orient the self beyond the absurd, though here we see the same process articulated in a body that upsets its normal categories. Zarathustra advises the “higher men“, “lift up your hearts, my brothers, high! higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up your legs, too, you fine dancers: and better still, stand on your heads! “ (Ibid). Through the activity of dancing the body symbolically affirms its liberation from nihilistic normality; that is, Zarathustra sees a possibility to uplift the subject above the conditions that have so far acted as a hinder to her life, for through dance the whole person is involved with the rhythmic pulses of music in a way that turns his or her life into a work of art, an achievement Dionysus envisions for anyone aspiring for a meaningful life. Zarathustra’s celebration of dance symbolizes the ability of some of us to transfigure the reality around them by transfiguring their own selfhoods.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21