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September 14, 2003
Salomé identifies three stages in Nietzsche's philosophical development: a Schopenhauerian aesthetic approach, the free-spirited critical approach, and a return to aesthetics. On this basis, she distinguishes between Nietzsche's early and late aphorisms as changing from examples of idiosyncratic preference to a deliberate formlessness.
Let me say what I think is the difference between Nietzsche's early and late aesthetic periods. While he was under the influence of Schopenhauer, in Salomé's words, he believed that 'the highest and ultimate things find their answer not through reason but through inspiration and illuminations in the life of the will'. It was the development of a critical attitude to Schopenhauer's metaphysics that led to Nietzsche abandoning a philosophy of the will. When he rejected the metaphysics of reason -I hope I'm not being too crude - he didn't return to the idea of will but reached deeper, into the instincts, some would say, into the soul itself.
When I say some, I have particularly in mind Pierre Klossowski, whose book, Nietzsche And The Vicious Circle is one of the highlights of twentieth century Nietzsche scholarship. Daniel W. Smith's recent translation has brought this book to the attention of the English-speaking world and Keith Ansell Pearson's review in Pli 9 (2000), 248-56, provides a good introduction to Klossowski's text.
In a not dissimilar manner to Salomé, Klossowski sees Nietzsche's efforts as reaching or giving over to something within him that lay beyond reason and the will. He wasn't seeking a philosophical account of these feelings, even if that is what he produced, but to submit to these inner feelings. When Salomé says that his madness was the outcome of his endeavours, she did not mean that he was driven mad by his thoughts and his intellectual effort. She meant that he found a way of escaping from his thoughts, and this was his ultimate goal.
Klossowski talks in terms of phantasms and simulacra. Phantasms are not moods of the soul, the impenetrable depth, but obsessive dispositions. They give rise to expression, which is in the form of simulacra, expressions of the phantasms. They are not meaningful in themselves, and relate only to instinctual needs, although they can be detached from their sources of origin and take on intersubjective meaning. Artistic expression and communication can be seen in these terms.
Of course, you may argue, Nietzsche's books have an explicit intersubjective meaning. They're not just spurts of the soul. Klossowski explains this as a dual, and in a very real sense contradictory, drive within Nietzsche, on the one hand, to his dissolution as a self, on the other, to teach, a drive to dissolution and a drive to communication - at least, this is how I read him.
Let me know what you think.
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