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

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Nietzsche writes, “What does the tragic artist communicate of himself? Does he not display precisely the condition of fearlessness in the face of the fearsome and questionable? -This condition itself is a high desideratum: he who knows it bestows on it the highest honours…In the face of tragedy the warlike in our soul celebrates its Saturnalias…” (TI, “Expeditions of an Untimely man“, 24). A Dionysian-like affirmation includes the ability to create a clearing effect in the midst of a nihilistic, hostile world that reacts to our own authentic needs, and such a clearing effect must also be a physiological experience, and that is why it takes a Saturnalian quality. The tragic artist seeks to produce a symbolic, positive situation within overwhelming conditions of nihilism. Zarathustra’s use of dance to render weightless the “swamps and thick afflictions” of nihilism represents his call that we rely on the body to introduce a positive symbolic force into becoming. Nietzsche insists that the Dionysian experience “is explicable only as an excess of energy” (Ibid, 4). Through dance, as a means to disrupt a nauseating and pitiful normality, we recognize a fracturing of existence, owing to an oversupplied artistic will, as a precondition toward creating the body as a symbol of affirmation.

That Nietzsche asks us “to welcome every moment of universal existence with a sense of triumph” should lead us to assume that life will continue to be a challenge that invokes our powers to judge and act, so that existence reduces to an eternal need to impose meaning schemes on the world. This leads Zarathustra to ponder, “if ever I have played dice with the gods at their table, the earth, so that the earth

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