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

idealistic systems of values. He proclaims his power to fashion his own ideals. Like the modern compassionate individual whose pity toward the other leads her to affirm her will to power, pity then has a similar effect on the ugliest man. Though he reacts against God’s great pity, the ugliest man perceives such pity as a mirror, for his appreciation of God’s pity causes him to experience a moral disgust against his own life since, like many of us, he was trained by the “religion of pity” to deeply trust in God’s judgment. So the pity of the modern individual and the pity of the ugliest man are similar because in both individuals pity causes a deep reaction against the traditional perspectives on practical life. The ugliest man develops a hatred of values based on the pity of God (or of the ascetic ideologue, for that matter) because pity constantly reminds him of his own impotence, that is, his need to judge himself on the basis of values that subsist outside the scope of his will and that reflect back on his illusory life.

What is ugly about God’s murderer, the ugliest man, is his will to embrace the collapse of old idols as a reason to introduce a reactive set of values that further depreciates life and that demands our own creative intervention: “the ugly is the form things assume when we view them with the will to implant a meaning, a new meaning, into what has become meaningless: the accumulated force which compels the creator to consider all that has been created hitherto as unacceptable, ill-constituted, worthy of being denied, ugly!-“ (WP 416). God’s murderer is ugly because he deepens the meaninglessness of our world, so that if we are to defeat nihilism, we will have to transfigure his ugliness and introduce

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