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

“ugly” mode of life, and we see in the ugliest man a desire to escape the hold of metaphysics accompanied by a will to impose on the world secular values whose skeleton is the old metaphysical faith in the will to truth. He reacts against the old metaphysical values’ tendency to ignore and distort our practical needs, motives, and reasons to be effective cultural actors, yet the secular values that he re-imposes on the world often refuse others the right to pursue their own practical needs, motives, and reasons. “The effect of the ugly is depressing: it is the expression of a depression. It takes away strength, it impoverishes, it weighs down” (WP 809). An individual experiences moral stagnation and lack of creativity when, for example, she models her outlook on life, her values, or her lifestyle on the moral discourses and norms offered by the managers of mass culture (modern figures of the “ugliest man“), for the latter excel in the administration of the masses’ desires, needs, and values. Nietzsche notes that “the ugly limps, the ugly stumbles: antithesis to the divine frivolity of the dancer” (Ibid). Contradiction in the impulses of the ugliest man, as shared by the late modern subject, promotes an aesthetically and ethically objectionable mode of existence because a self that cannot act and create abandons life to its challenges, imperfections, chaos, and difficulties, when it should act to remedy them.

By ‘nihilism,’ therefore, Nietzsche means the process whereby we lose faith in the notion that there exists objective sets of values that should always provide models for our lives because of the nauseating, pitiful and ugly character of the will (of the reactive modern subject) that upholds these

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