Different Stories

David Hoy

  • Nietzsche: Life as Literature by Alexander Nehamas
    Harvard, 261 pp, £14.95, January 1986, ISBN 0 674 62435 1

In the Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche maintains that life and the world are justifiable only aesthetically. The world is to be understood the way an artwork is, and life can become an artwork. If life depends on art rather than art merely reflecting life, the claim is not merely that artists live the best life. The paradigm is the work of art and not the historical, biographical artist: Der Mensch, says Nietzsche in section one, ist nicht mehr Künstler, er ist Kunstwerk geworden. If Nietzsche later abandons the Schopenhauerian elements of his early view about the relation of art and life, he continues to think, according to Alexander Nehamas, that life can be fashioned into literature. The historical author is less important than the literary artwork, and the world is itself like a literary text. Texts demand interpretation, and we find out about anything, including ourselves and the world, the way we come to understand aesthetic texts: through interpretation. Interpretation is itself a form of literary self-fashioning.

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[*] In Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives on the Work of Monroe C. Beardsley, edited by John Fisher (Temple University Press, 1983).