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

have been trained to believe that there exists an objective set of values to which we can appeal for meaning. Not surprisingly Nietzsche includes among the highest values most of our secular value systems, for they embrace the Platonist-Christian spiritual notion that truth really exists as a presence in a higher spiritual order although such presence must be recovered from behind the empirical realities of becoming, life, or nature. Nietzsche writes, “no doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this ‘other world‘- look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?” (GS 344). Our scientific pursuits constitute another way in which we manifest the “will to truth” that drove both Platonism and Christianity. All three movements “negate” life because they affect some level of violence not only on nature but also on ourselves, since the search for objective, ultimate truths may cause us to turn life into a means (or a necessary ordeal) to securing these truths, as, for example, when scientists only show interest in the animal-mechanical aspects of life rather than its creative possibilities. Nietzsche sees the emergence of the so-called modern ideologies (classical liberalism, socialism, positivism, historicism, Darwinism, scientism, etc.) of late nineteenth century Europe as manifestations of the “metaphysical faith” that informs modern value making activities. # He warns against “the nihilistic consequences of the ways of thinking in politics and economics, where all ‘principles’ are practically histrionic: the air of

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