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

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

In his essay “Richard Wagner at Bayreuth” Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “there is only one hope and one guarantee for the future of humanity: it consists in his retention of the sense for the tragic.” # Nietzsche sees tragic art as a reliable means of effecting a transfiguration of nihilism, a nauseating absence of cultural vitality that originates from our strong cultural propensity to absolutize metaphysical values. Nietzsche’s belief that our “retention of the sense of tragic” constitutes one of our surest means to overcoming such a cultural “sickness” includes the project of reaffirming the instinctual, bodily, and practical over metaphysics, for through the aesthetics of the tragic, Nietzsche believes, we can construct a value system that considers and satisfies our individual practical needs.# This paper therefore argues that Nietzsche’s conception of the role of the body in the tragic, as an aesthetic experience, provides a useful model for combating some of the nihilistic aspects of contemporary modern culture. That is, the body itself constitutes an “ontology of practice” # that can actually ground our effort to successfully confront nihilism.
Nietzsche writes, “what does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves” (WP 2). Nietzsche then sees ‘nihilism’ as the reality of the disappearance from our world of “highest values” that claim to be universal and objective. Nietzsche writes, “the real world, attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man- he dwells in it, he is it” (TI, “How the ‘Real World’ at Last became a Myth”). For more than two thousand years now metaphysical rationalism has defined how we relate to the world in terms

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