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

of epistemology, ethics, and politics. With Platonism a dualism was introduced into our horizon, whereby we have come accept the notion that truth and what justifies our conduct here on earth resides in a transcendent, idealistic, metaphysical “real world,” while our material realities are merely transient, inadequate, and needing of transcendence if we are to commune with that “real world.” Since Plato rationality, the dialectic, ascetic contemplation, and the will to give a spiritual interpretation to the unstable forces of becoming have become cultural hallmarks of modernity: what is valuable is one’s resolve to behave in such a way so as to tap into a transcendent logos of truth and absolute dignity.# The rise of Christianity, Nietzsche continues, only reinforced human beings’ conviction that a “life worth living” should be deeply marked by its metaphysical orientation: “The real world [the ideal world of the Forms], attainable for the moment, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man (‘to the sinner who repents’)” (Ibid). Christianity eventually inherited the dualistic tradition of Platonism, so that most of us continue to locate the source of value-making in an ideal realm that remains detached from everyday life but that has the power to pass judgments and impose norms on it.# What confers dignity to one’s life is one’s ability to behave, here on earth, in ways that prepare one for a promised millenarian communion with a deity in charge of history.

I.

A defining feature of the highest values then is the project to impose on life rational or ethical perspectives that console us: through the intellectual and moral traditions of the Western consciousness we

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