The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy

George Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317287162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

In The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy, Smith argues that Western Metaphysics has indeed come to what Heidegger describes as "an end." That is hardly to say philosophy as such is over or soon to disappear; rather, its purpose as a medium of cultural change and as a generator of history has run its course. He thus calls for a New Philosophy, conceptualized by the artist-philosopher who "makes" or "poeticizes" New Philosophy, spanning literary and theoretical discourses and operating across art in all its forms and across culture in all its locations. To this end, Smith proposes the establishment of schools and social networks that advance the training and development of artist-philosophers, as well as global digital networks that are themselves designed toward this "ever-becoming community."

Part 1

The Artist-Philosopher

1 Nietzsche & Hegel

Section I: Nietzsche

It is easy to say that Nietzsche is an artist-philosopher; he says so himself. It is not so easy to explain what that means and why that is. Neither of these questions Nietzsche ever addresses directly. And except for Heidegger, nobody else ever asks what Nietzsche is getting at by making such an odd self-assertion. And yet it is only by answering these questions that we can fully understand what happens to Nietzsche when he goes through a near-total transvaluation of his own values. Only then can we begin to understand how the darling of German philology becomes the scandal of Western metaphysics. Indeed, absent these answers, major readers of Nietzsche, Walter Kaufman chief among them, have convinced much of the world that despite everything we read in Nietzsche, he lived and thought and wrote as a devout follower of Socrates and as a card-carrying champion of metaphysics. Little wonder, then, that Kaufman never says a word about the fact that Nietzsche is an artist-philosopher. After all, it is as an artist-philosopher that Nietzsche turns against Socrates, turns, more specifically, against Plato, and more generally and monumentally, against the whole of Western metaphysics.

Nietzsche’s turn against Plato and Socrates—against his own tribe, as it were—begins, I want to suggest, with the mysterious disappearance of Dionysius. This event marks the onslaught of the war between metaphysics and myth—which is to say that the disappearance of Dionysius from the Greek cultural consciousness is not at all a vague cultural forgetting but rather an actual and deliberately staged maneuver that marks a turning point in the history of Greek philosophy. As such, it explains why Nietzsche decides to write The Birth of Tragedy and why that experience turns him into an artist-philosopher whose project is to revivify and reincorporate Dionysius into contemporary philosophical thought and German cultural consciousness—thereby to turn the tide in the war against myth.

Waged by an undeclared Apollonian/Socratic/Platonic alliance, we can see how this war plays out in The Symposium as a purging of the Dionysian element from Socratic philosophy. Though the war against pre-Socratic thinking is not a secret war, it is unspoken, and it is waged discreetly and discursively. Be that as it may, if we are patient and painstaking in our analysis of the text (a text all too familiar to the history of philosophy and therefore very hard to see), Plato’s discursive moves against Dionysius will come to the fore for us. This in turn will show The Symposium as depicting pre-Socratic philosophy as the murky, myth-infested thinking of the past and proclaiming the advent of metaphysics as the pure science of the future. Though not so obvious to us, these discursive maneuvers were no doubt apparent to the Greek world and all the more so to Plato’s inner circle. Our own grasp of Plato’s narrative in this light will make Nietzsche’s thinking as an artist-philosopher that much easier to fathom. Already, in acknowledging Nietzsche as an artist-philosopher, we have recognized him for a hybridized thinker; a thinker, that is, whose thinking is opposed to metaphysics, still the pure science of the future.

As regards The Symposium, we can elaborate these points as follows. To begin with, from Diotima, the wise old teacher of the young and still impressionable Socrates, we learn about the love of wisdom. Insofar as the Dionysian spirit will later be characterized as that which is lewd, lascivious, and even incestuous, we take it as no accident that Diotima begins her lesson by telling us that love “may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good.”¹ In which case, “the object which [lovers] have in mind is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul.”² But as Diotima says to her young charge, procreation is not always a beautiful thing. Yes, “procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing; for conception and generation are an immortal principle of the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they can never be. But the deformed is always inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious,” which is to say that beauty is never deformed but always of pure form.

Beauty then is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at the birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception.³

In these aesthetic pronouncements we can plainly discern Kant’s judgment of taste: one feels pleasure at the sight of pure form, which is beautiful, and one feels un-pleasure or pain at the sight of deformity or a lack of form, which fails to achieve beauty and causes the senses to flinch and close down.

And when it comes to procreation, for human beings, “generation is a sort of eternity and immortality.” That is because all living beings, including birds and bees and beasts, “are in agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union,” and this can only be explained as “mortal nature […] seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal; and this is only to be obtained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in place of the old.” Hence, we should “[m]arvel not then at the love which all men have of their offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of immortality.”⁴ While sexual procreation seeks a kind of immortality, likewise, so does the creation of beauty. “All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making, and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of the arts are poets or makers.”⁵ One might think the laurels go, therefore, to the artist, especially since:

souls which are pregnant—for certainly there are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies—conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or contain. And what are these conceptions? —wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are deserving of the name inventor.⁶

We should not, however, take this as the highest accolade one can bestow upon the maker, for “the greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states and families,”⁷ and that is the wisdom of the philosopher, who in this case is none other than Plato, author of The Republic. On this key distinction between the artist and the philosopher, Kant stakes the same claim that the philosopher stands above the artist, for the knowledge of philosophy is teachable, whereas the creation of art is not. And besides, the artist who conceives “wisdom and virtue in general” is not, as we learn in Book X, just any artist, but the one who makes art or poetry in accordance with Socratic principles, the one, that is, who does not malign the gods or cast aspersions against the makers of the laws, but who tells stories that will teach the young to be wise and virtuous by showing them what is wise and virtuous.

Along these same pedagogical lines, Diotima outlines for the young Socrates what ought to be a youth’s progression from the appreciation of the outward beauty of form to the inward beauty of the individual who recognizes form as a reflection of mind:

For he who would proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he is guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only—out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty of every form is one and the same! And when he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form.⁸

Here in Diotima’s glorification of mind, of human reason, we see Kant’s notion of pure reason in and of itself but also as the height of beauty. And here we arrive at Kant’s pure form as it applies to the aesthetic: Diotima seeks “beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting […] without diminution and without increase, or any change.”⁹ Which brings us to the fruition of pure form:

[W]hat if man had eyes to see the true beauty—the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life—thither looking and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities of beauty (for he has hold not of an image but of reality), and bring forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?¹⁰

The answer is no, of course, and Kant could not agree more. Eternal truth is to be found, according to Kant, in the formal aesthetic idea as absolute beauty, given outward representation in the artist’s rendering of the beautiful as form. The beautiful image, the art work’s content, which represents a beautiful thing, is subject to the unpredictable flux and pollutions of everyday life, whereas the form of the art work is, on the other hand, beautiful, eternal. As such, aesthetic form is real in Plato’s sense of the Ideal and in Kant’s notion of pure reason. Such, in other words, is the love of wisdom. It must be pure, not mixed. It must come from love, and love of wisdom is always pure, as Diotima teaches. This pure love of wisdom is the thinking of Socrates, a thinking that is never mixed with poetry, never diluted by emotion, never inspirited with Dionysian wine. It is the Apollonian thinking of pure logic, and as such, it is the anti-thesis of pre-Socratic philosophy, which is by definition poetic, and it is the antidote to the creative and destructive Dionysian spirit. The function of beauty is to valorize harmony, stability, and order. Beauty is invented, therefore, in the service of the State, to support and strengthen the security and stability of the State, to whom the artist is subservient.

But let us return to the narrative thread. No sooner does the noble Socrates conclude his rendition of Diotima’s myth and his own encomium on love as a thing of pure beauty, when who shows up the symposium but the fair and glamorous Alcibiades. Barging in on the evening’s refined and sober gathering of high-minded Athenians, announcing himself with yelps and whoops and followed by his noisy train of attendants and his flute-girl (the maenad), this party-crasher cannot be mistaken for anyone other than Dionysius: “He was in a great state of intoxication, and kept roaring and shouting.” Plato’s contrast between the howling drunken sensualist and the sober and clearheaded Socrates could not be more pointed. It is especially marked if we remember that Socrates arrives as the last of the guests, having been struck by an idea the contemplation of which stopped him in his tracks.

But lest we somehow fail to recognize this unruly interloper for the god that he is, Plato adorns Alcibiades in traditional Dionysian garb: “‘Hail, friends’, he said, appearing at the door crowned with a massive garland of ivy and violets, his head flowing with ribbons.”¹¹ Thusly costumed, our Dionysian Alcibiades gives to the noble gathering an impromptu but nonetheless stirring account of Socrates. We hear of his wisdom, his kindness and patience, his magnificence as a teacher and abiding and gentle guidance as a mentor. And we learn that no matter what wiles and cunning Alcibiades brings to his relentless seduction of Socrates, nothing will tempt his master into foregoing the eternal pleasure of the universal good in exchange for the momentary pleasure of the earthly profane, for Socrates has not forgotten the lessons of his old teacher, Diotima. After many failed stratagems over many days, Alcibiades tells his fellow guests, he is brought to desperate straits. Finally, one day he persuades Socrates to dine with him at his home. By way of posing endless questions, each of which Socrates answers in earnest and at length, Alcibiades draws the dinner conversation far into the evening. As the two grow weary with the passing hours, at last Alicibiades coaxes Socrates into spending the night with him rather than journey home in the dark and cold. Thinking he had finally gained his glory, the fair young boy offers Socrates all the favors sensual pleasure could want, all to no avail, until finally the young man awakens to the light of day, only to discover that “nothing more happened, but in the morning when I awoke (let all the gods and goddesses be my witness), I arose from the couch of a father or an elder brother.”¹² As every Athenian would know, Alcibiades in his guise as Dionysius is right to call Socrates/Apollo an elder brother, for Apollo, son of Zeus and Leto, is in fact the elder half-brother of Dionysius, son of Zeus and Semele. Thus we add incest to Alcibiades’s account of love and desire, an account in diametrical contrast to Diotima’s.

Alcibiades’ song of Socrates continues with his own capitulation:

What do you suppose must have been my feelings, after this rejection, at the thought of my own dishonour? And yet I could not help wondering at his natural temperance and self-restraint and manliness. I never imagined that I could have met with a man such as he is in wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 The Artist-Philosopher
• Part 2 New Philosophy
• Afterword
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index