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

will cannot be “explained mechanistically” (Ibid). For Nietzsche the forces of the will do not rationally structure themselves in a way that allows the mind to intuitively intent and represent the world, independent of the influence of the body because the will configures itself as will only as a result of forces spontaneously clashing. Consciousness cannot function as an interpretive force detached from the bodily realities of the self. Nietzsche believes that the Cogito functions as a conscious, mediating expression of a body structured as an unconscious self with its own hermeneutic powers.# Rational concepts can help interpret the modalities of the self, as an agent immersed in the practical events of life, but only after subterranean, bodily dynamics of willing give coherence to these rational concepts. Thus Zarathustra notes, “You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this-although you will not believe in it-is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’” (Z, I, “Of the Despisers of the Body“). The modern subject is conscious of its own categories, but it fails to realize how much more significant is their real origin. A disembodied mind cannot grasp the real nature of the world it wants to interpret because emotions, personal temperament, behavioral habits, and our brute interactions with the material processes of the everyday life contribute to the ability of mind to accurately grasp what it wants to interpret. Our representations of the world take place as a continual matrix of rational and personality processes. In practical everyday life, Nietzsche is telling us, part of the reason why our interpretations of the world satisfy us is that they emotionally and

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