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29 BABICH

subsumable under the literary genre of rhymed text; it can even be

understood as a mixture of tragedy and comedy. Thus, models have
fewer poetic properties than literary poetic works such as Romeo
and Juliet and The Divine Comedy.

I started this pilgrimage not being sure if it was worthwhile.

What if I was wrong about there being poetic moments in phenomena
outside the realm of imaginative literature? But slowly, my
confidence increased; I thought I had discovered strong indicators
of there being poetic moments in non-literary phenomena. If this
philosophical experiment concerning the poetic of models is
successful, then I have not been walking in vain. But reaching the
goal of the pilgrimage will be a strenuous task.

Who says it is attainable?

SEE: II. 8; III. 8

I. 29
Nietzsche’s “Aesthetic Science”
Babette Babich

In Nietzsche’s prolegomena to an “aesthetic science” [ästhetische

Wissenschaft] (BT §1) he makes a distinction between ‘masculine’
aesthetics (and the active artist), and ‘feminine’ aesthetics (the
reactive artist or, more typically: the spectator). The gendering
language is egregiously sexist, to be sure, but the terms of the
distinction are cosmological. The artistry includes the ‘world
artist’ as Nietzsche also speaks of this here (BT §1), with its
roots in Empedocles’ cosmology (DK B63), as in Friedrich
Hölderlin’s expression of the “strife between lovers.”71 In such

71
In addition to Empedocles, Nietzsche draws on Heraclitus to echo the
closing lines of Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion, where Hölderlin, in a
beautifully musical metaphor, compares lovers, including those separated
and lost, to “living tones” sounded together in nature’s indestructible
harmonies: “Wie der Zwist der Liebenden, sind die Dissonanzen der Welt.
Versöhnung ist mitten im Streit und alles getrennte findet sich wieder”.
Hölderlin, Hyperion; oder, Der Eremit in Griechenland (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer,
1920 [1799]), 204 [Like the quarrels of lovers, are the dissonances of the
world. Reconciliation is amidst strife, and all things parted find one
another again]. Of course, the sentence, continues: ““Es scheiden und kehren
im Herzen die Adern und einiges, ewiges, glühendes Leben ist Alles” (ibid.:
The arteries separate and return in the heart and one, eternal, glowing life

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a poetic contest, ‘reconciliation’ and the tension of opposition

are not overcome but endure. The exchange is between love and hate,
desire and alienation, harmony and conflict. Thus Nietzsche
distinguishes the active dynamic of abundance and the reactive
compensation of lack or deficiency. 72 The opposition is a critical
dyad rather than a dialectic and as the (masculine or feminine)
artist may be active or reactive, the (masculine or feminine)
spectator can be active or reactive.

Nietzsche argues that one may distinguish the active spectator —

indistinguishable from the spectacle itself, as in ancient Greek
rituals such as the Dionysia , where the spectator is
himself/herself a participant-celebrant in the sacred rite — by
contrast with the contemporary era with its focus on the reactive
spectator who is herself/himself distinct from the art event.
Ineliminably distinct, as we understand, and as Jean Baudrillard
describes “mass media” today as both “anti-mediatory and
intransitive”.73 By the same token, today’s reactive observer/
spectator is autonomous, ‘free’ to ignore the work of art
entirely as Nietzsche puts it pointedly: free to arrive late,
free to leave early.74 As Baudrillard and others have argued,
we know the scopic aspect of the spectacle built into the
sampling of modern media, changing channels, scrolling,
sauntering through a gallery, ‘surfing’ less the internet(s)
than just and only our personal Facebook or Twitter feed.

Arguing in his preface to his 1889 Twilight of the Idols that “only
excess of force is the proof of force” (TI Preface ),75 two years
earlier in On the Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche also argues that
deficiency or lack has been the most “interesting” source of human
inventiveness (GM I: 6), characteristic of the ‘ascetic ideal.’
Consequently, the ‘decadent’ — exemplifying both the moraline
pathos of the slave and the exhausted artist — can be creative.

Giorgio Agamben highlights Nietzsche’s reactive, aesthetic

judgement as foundational for aesthetic judgment, citing him at
length where Nietzsche writes:

is all), and Hyperion concludes his last epistle: “So dacht’ ich. Nächstens
mehr” [So thought I. More soon.]
72
Thus in 1887, in the fifth book added to the second edition of The Gay
Science, Nietzsche includes the key aphorism entitled “What is Romanticism?”
(GS §370) distinguishing between the creative inspiration of “hunger” by
contrast with “abundance [Überfluss].”
73
Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” in: For a Critique of the
Political Economy of the Sign (New York: Telos Press Publishing), 169.
74
For references see: Babich, The Hallelujah Effect: Music, Performance
Practice, Technology (London: Routledge, 2016), 231f.
75
[Das Zuviel von Kraft erst ist der Beweis der Kraft].

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Kant, like all philosophers, instead of

envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point
of view of the artist (the creator), considered
art and the beautiful purely from that of the
“spectator,” and unconsciously introduced the
“spectator” into the concept “beautiful.” It
would not have been so bad if this “spectator”
had at least been sufficiently familiar to the
philosophers of beauty—namely, as a great
personal fact and experience, as an abundance of
vivid authentic experiences, desires, surprises,
and delights in the realm of the beautiful! But
I fear that the reverse has always been the case;
and so they have offered us, from the beginning,
definitions in which, as in Kant’s famous
definition of the beautiful, a lack of any
refined first-hand experience reposes in the
shape of a fat worm of error. “That is beautiful,”
said Kant, “which gives us pleasure without
interest.” Without interest! Compare with this
definition one framed by a genuine “spectator”
and artist—Stendhal, who once called the
beautiful une promesse de Bonheur. At any rate
he rejected and repudiated the one point about
the aesthetic condition which Kant had stressed:
le désinteressement. Who is right, Kant or
Stendhal? (GM III.: 6)76

Is art a matter of disinterested interest? Is art a matter of

Dionysian ecstasy? By contrast with Kant, Nietzsche articulated
the dyadic aesthetic of the creative artist by invoking the active
or creative (masculine) aesthetic with which we began above. This
active aesthetic exemplifies Stendhal’s ‘promise of happiness.’77
By contrast, in The Hallelujah Effect, I offer a reading of male
and female desire in art in a chapter entitled “On Male Desire and
Music.”78

If Nietzsche’s concerns conspicuously deploy the language of

gendered aesthetics, they predate the sensibilities of today’s
mainstream feminist philosophical aesthetics. A radicalized
Kantian, Nietzsche explores the conditions for the possibility of

76
Cited in Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999), 1–2.
77
The perspective informs Nehamas’s reflections as reflected in his book
Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007).
78
Babich, The Hallelujah Effect, esp. 48–78.

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the artist by raising the critical question of subject as such.79

In this way, the masculine referentiality of presumptively
objective judgement is revealed as the neutral, disinterested
‘power of judgement,’ quite where the claim of objective, neutral,
disinterest remains to this day. Importantly, we subscribe to the
‘neutrality’ of this claim when it comes to questions of what David
Hume characterized as the problem of standardizing taste: the
‘claim’ of the beautiful.80

Nietzsche’s attention to the masculinist bias inspiring the

“interest” haunting ‘disinterested interest’ may be used to read
between today’s reflections on male and female desire.
Significantly, it is male desire (largely heterosexual but also
homosexual, imperatives of which are interiorized by women and men)
that dictates what is available to be seen in textbooks, artbooks,
museums, and in a digitally mediatized era: onscreen, whether in
film or YouTube music videos, including Tik Tok. This ‘standard’
dictates what appears in our fashion shows, magazines, online video
advertisements, just as (male) desire speaks in the pop music we
hear even when sung or composed by female artists. Yet only Simone
de Beauvoir among all theorists has reflected on what she calls
“complicity” by women with this arrangement in its totalization in
culture, as object of that desire or spectators of the same.81 De
Beauvoir echoes Nietzsche, emphasizing that if woman “did not exist,
men would have invented her.” 82 Writing well after de Beauvoir
(albeit without citing her), Theodor Adorno repeats de Beauvoir’s
citation, describing the shopgirl’s fantasies not as complicit but
as side-lined non-choice: a creature forming herself in accord
with this same male dictate.83

Recall the first line of The Birth of Tragedy:

We shall have gained much for aesthetic science

[die aesthetische Wissenschaft] when we have
come to realise, not just via logical insight
but also through the immediate certainty of

79
See further Babich, “Who is Nietzsche’s Archilochus? Rhythm and the
Problem of the Subject” in: Charles Bambach and Theodore George, eds.,
Philosophers and their Poets: Reflections on the Poetic Turn in Philosophy
since Kant (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), 85–114.
80
See Babich, ed., Reading David Hume’s »Of the Standard of Taste«
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019).
81
For the argument that “male and female, we all listen with men’s ears”,
see Babich, The Hallelujah Effect, 51, cf., 49–68.
82
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York:
Random House, 1989, 1953 [1949]), 186. Citing Nietzsche, Twilight of the
Idols, ‘Maxims’ §13.
83
Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 49–50.

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intuition [Anschauung], that the ongoing

evolution of art is bound up with the duality of
the Apollinian and the Dionysian: in similar
fashion, as reproduction depends on the duality
of the sexes, through continuing battles and
only periodic intervals of reconciliation.” (BT
§1)

That was 1872; fourteen years later, Nietzsche would epitomize his
project as attempting “for the first time: to look at science in
the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life.” (BT
§ii) A year later, in the preface to the 2nd edition of The Gay
Science, returning to the themes of his first book on tragedy,
Nietzsche foregrounds “an art for artists, only for artists!” (GS
§iv)

As Agamben likewise does not fail to note, both hunger and

abundance, both the negative and the positive can be sources of
inventive inspiration for the artist. For Agamben, distinguishing
between artist and spectator, Nietzsche filters out the αἴσθησις
that corresponds to the sensory involvement of the spectator. But
if this makes Nietzsche’s project in The Birth of Tragedy a
phenomenology, such a Nietzschean phenomenology is a Kantian affair,
as it is for Heidegger: dedicated to articulating — this is the
logos — what comes to appearance in the phenomenon. Thus Nietzsche
highlights the non-metaphysical element of phenomenology given the
physical genius of the ancient Greeks who were capable of remaining
at and delighting in the surface of things.84

The Nietzsche who foregrounded art as illusion and argued against

the cult of facts and claimed there is no truth — “all of life is
based on semblance, art, deception, points of view” (BT §v) — does
not fit today’s typically Hegelian aesthetic schematism. Hence
some describe Nietzsche as ‘anti-aesthetic.’ But Nietzsche enjoins
us “to learn the art of this-worldly comfort”, to learn “to laugh!”
(BT §vii), in the spirit of “the rose-wreath crown” thrown from
one brother to another.

Nietzsche advocated on behalf of active, creative aesthetics. A

physiological thinker of aesthetics, Nietzsche emphasized the
‘force of age’ denied by our transhumanist and decadent era.
Writing in The Wanderer and His Shadow, a book dedicated to the
transit of life on this earth, haunted by death (the shadow),
Nietzsche dismisses the convention that there are four ages of
life, highlighting three ages only: one’s twenties – thirties –
forties, decades of creative power (HH II.: WS §269). Nietzsche’s

84
Nietzsche, GS, Preface to the Second Edition, §iv.

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ideal of vitality is power in excess: ‘abundant’ force that must

give itself out.

In the context of a book attuned to the “life’ and ‘death’ of an

art form, Nietzsche writes on the ‘birth’ of tragedy, arguing that
over time, tragedy plays itself out. Thus, like Socrates the last
of Nietzsche’s “Preplatonic philosophers,” Euripides is a
‘decadent’ who resuscitates a dying artform (BT §10), “forcing it”
as Nietzsche writes, to “re-bleed” great gouts of blood from dried-
out flowers. And it is in this context that Nietzsche calls for
the rebirth of tragedy, writing a book for artists, and invoking
“art, and not morality as the truly metaphysical activity of
humanity.” (§v)

Expert on the lyric and tragic age of Greece, admirer of Beethoven,

friend of Wagner, Nietzsche understood that a form of art could
outlive its time just as an artist might fail to die at the ‘right’
time. The product of the decadent artist, Nietzsche claimed, would
be an opera like Parsifal. If Wagner fans are hardly likely to
agree, the point highlights Nietzsche’s organic conception of the
birth — and death — of an art for spectators, opposed to his vision
of an art for artists, Nietzsche’s art of the future.

SEE: II. 8; III. 8

I. 30
The Man of Taste or How To Lose Interest In Art
Iria Grammenou

In a text published in 1757 and titled “Of the Standard of Taste”,

David Hume investigates the criteria according to which people can
define an object as being beautiful. As is often the case in the
eighteenth century, he compares aesthetic judgments with statements
concerning food. Thus, he notices that although we have no problem
making utterances such as this is bitter or this is sweet, things
get complicated when we start asking questions concerning the real
bitterness or the real sweetness of the food tasted. And he tries
to prevent his readers from addressing such issues by writing that
“to seek in the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an
enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter”
(Hume, 1757, para. 7). Hume insists that beauty, exactly like
bitterness, is not a quality belonging to the object itself, but
rather an effect that a particular object has on our senses. In

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