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ART(IFICIAL) PERCEPTION: NIETZSCHE AND CULTURE AFTER
NIHILISM
WOLFGANG SCHIRMACHER.
TORONTO, 1999.
Nietzsche is a philosopher full of surprises. Didn't we just make him the father of nihilism and give him an honored
place in the history of philosophy? But then we encounter this "gay scientist" in a future beyond postmodernity, alive
and active in a culture after nihilism. There can be no doubt, Nietzsche lives to the fullest the cyclical recurrence he
proposes, with no regard for linear time, be it progress or decadence. Nietzsche's philosophy of culture for a tragic-
Dionysian age refers to a "transvaluation of all values" as an "act of highest self-reflection of humankind."
1
Resisting
fears of catastrophe and doomsayers Nietzsche persists in the view that an "enormous quantum of humaneness"
2
has already been achieved. His post-nihilistic experimental philosophy relies upon the will to power, the capacity for
self-potentiation as dynamic style of the human individual. Active nihilism has so expanded and heightened our
hermeneutic potential that our point of view, once valid in its singularity, has been broken up into an infinite diversity
of perspectives. The unexpected constellations of these perspectives, their chance interplay which gives rise to
temporary ideas and images, require a new art of perception. Traditional intuition and orientative concepts prove
ineffective as soon as they become caught in the whirlpool of an open system whose powerful maelstrom engulfs
prevailing perceptions. "Once we have words for something, we have gone beyond it;" reads a maxim from the
Twilight of the Idols
3
, descriptive and self-assured. This having "gone beyond" sets the keynote of an artificial
perception.
1. Living Culture: Anthropomorphic World and Artificiality of Truth
Nietzsche envisions a culture which is lived artistically and reveals itself in "great works." A contrived culture, one
merely thought up and imposed upon life, described by Nietzsche as the "collaboration between state, merchants,
the instructed but needy of style, and the learned,"
4
is to be rejected as "unproductive."
5
"Culture is only a layer of
veneer, thin as the skin of an apple stretched across a raging chaos,"
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observes Nietzsche, and he affirms this
condition (unlike the critics of civilization who almost unanimously decry it). "Life must become more dangerous."
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The battle-cry of a lived culture, and its model, is Dionysus. This god has "interrupted thinking," as Levinas would
say. An artist of life, Dionysus lives life's extremes: in the sense of an ethics beyond the morality of good and evil,
respecting the Other in himself as well. The art of perception is vital to a lived culture, a culture oriented not
according to concepts, but which seeks, in an unbiased manner, to discern how the world exists as world and
whether life is lived as fulfillment.
Two of Nietzsche's subversive insights are fundamental to this attempt and are revealed to us through our bodies.
Firstly, all perception is as active as it is experiential and brings forth an anthropomorphic world. A key passage
reads: We created this whole world, our one real concern, in which our needs desires joys hopes colors lines
imagination prayers curses are rooted we humans created this entire world and then forgot we did, so that
afterwards we even invented a creator of it all, or anguished over the problem of its origins. Just as language is the
primordial poem of a people, so too is the entire world. We see and feel the primordial poetry of all humankind, and
even the animals had begun creating poetry. And we inherit that, all at once, as if it were reality itself. Autumn 1881
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Secondly, every truth is artificial, a "transformation of the world so we may be able to endure it," a transformation for
which the human individual assumes responsibility. Nietzsche emphasizes the "identity in the natures of the
conqueror, legislator, artis.t"
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The definition of truth as lie remains negatively dependent upon tradition: only as
artificial-artistic perception does truth become a "productive" lie and a genuine expression of our "will to power." We
read a quality into the world, our emotive powers create the mood of life: The farmer looks upon his fields with
emotions that bestow them with value, the same is true of the artist with his colors, primitive man brings his fear, we
bring our certainty to bear, it is a subtle symbolizing and comparing, continuous and unconscious. We see the
landscape with an eye versed in all our morality and culture and custom. And we look at other people in the same
manner: each person is something different for you and for me: relationships and visions, herein lies what makes us
different from one another. Autumn 1880
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F ACUL TY / WOL F GANG S CHI RMACHER / ARTI CL ES / ART( I F I CI AL )
PERCEPTI ON: NI ETZ S CHE AND CUL TURE AF TER NI HI L I S M
9/11/2014 Wolfgang Schirmacher - Art(ificial) Perception: Nietzsche and Culture after Nihilism
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In this passage, Nietzsche also touches upon the other side of artificial truth, the distortion and destruction of the
world through anthropocentrism, through the diehard self-delusion of the human species in considering itself the
goal of creation. The Christian god, with his long shadow, his morality so hostile to life, was a powerful and effective
mask of this anthropocentrism. But the mask has now been dropped and anthropocentrism shows itself active in our
age as modern technology and anti-ecological humanism.
For a culture after nihilism everything depends upon perceiving the difference between anthropocentric and
anthropomorphic in our dealings with all phenomena. Anthropocentrism bears the mark of decadence and in its
"human-all-too-human" character is a radical weakening of the will to power. But the right of the human individual on
the other hand to be 'human-uniquely-human' of one's own strength, and to take responsibility for one's own world
as "primordial poetry" corresponds to Nietzsche's vision of "self-potentiation". This exercise of power, fitting to the
human individual, culminates in an anthropomorphic "innocence of becoming" which proposes "without haste" for
which Nietzsche admired the ancient Greeks that "the human being is something which must be overcome."
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Uncritical self-perception is at the mercy of an anthropocentric impoverishment of the emotions and narrowing of our
vision: Not where the eye ceases to recognize does the eye no longer see, but where thy honesty has already
ceased.November 1882 February 1883
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2. Aesthetic Reason: Artistic Culture and Pleasures of Perception
The artist, in Nietzsche's ambivalent view a passionate creator of worlds and a vampire lacking great passion
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,
synthesizes aesthetic reason instead of analyzing it (Kant: vernnfteln). The artist is the "Useless One in the most
audacious sense"
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Nietzsche's defiant description and as such does not seek to contribute to the general
development of culture and learning, but rather embodies in his person the higher form of an artistic culture. Its
signature is the transformation of the life we reject into an affirmed existence, turning the world into which we are
born into a desired, venturous design. Aesthetic reason is in no sense the dubious attempt to allow truth, driven out
of history and practice, to winter in the reserve of art (a late modern pipe-dream), but is instead, from inception,
body-oriented, coping in and with the world. Truth exists for aesthetic reason only as long as there is pleasure; and
as enticement to a good life and an ethics of fulfillment, aesthetic reason actively comes into its own. The joy of
perception, a "suggestion for muscles and senses,"
15
is the impetus of aesthetic reason whose chief activity is
"appreciation" as an ethical sense of quality. Aesthetic reason exercises the anthropomorphic "right" of the will to
power "to assign values" which determine, in Nietzsche's words, "what things we accept and how we accept
them."
16
In Nietzsche's sense the pleasures of perception expressly include aversion as a shrewd challenge to
overcoming itself, and the joy beauty gives us is intensified by the "pleasure taken in the ugly."
17
The "common
basis of pleasure and aversion,"
18
forgotten in the everyday scheme of things, "re-emerges" in the artist. The "first
truth," which according to Nietzsche is based upon aesthetics in all "naivet," is blatantly anthropomorphic and
needs no excuse for itself: "Nothing is beautiful, only the human individual is beautiful."
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3. Ethics Derived from Aesthetics.
Perceiving One's Individual World An ethics which can lay claim to being more than a shaky framework of values
arises from aesthetics, from the intuition of a self-fulfilling life, realized authentically only in the pleasurable
perception of one's own world. The Greek philosophers of ethics, beginning with Socrates, were seekers of
happiness, explained Nietzsche, and he commented further: "It's bad enough that they had to look for it." The
perception of one's individual world designs this world and at the same time endows it with its value. For all
happiness is contained therein, all the individual needs for his or her enhancement of life. The much bemoaned
"dissolution of ethics in aesthetics" is undoubtedly a danger, yet even the virtue of ethical "disobedience" draws its
strength from an "aesthetics of resistance" (Peter Weiss), having experienced injustice in a very palpable manner.
Three essential elements characterize an ethics unfolding from aesthetics within the horizon of post-nihilism: the
surprising return of the monad, an aesthetic (not a cognitive) consciousness, and an expansion of our perceptive
capacities once thought impossible and which suggests a new quality of "hyperperception."
(1) Return of the Monad
Are we all invincible monads, beautifully simple substances without parts and with no need for "windows through
which anything could come or go?"
20
Reverting to the monad of Leibniz as the basic determination of existence
which understands world and self as a finite occurrence makes immediate sense to the children of the first world,
these cyberpunks and nomads of the virtual world. In The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze describes the
post-nihilistic turning from Heidegger's "Being-in-the-world" to the "being-for-the-world" of the monad.
The "openness," and consequent "perilousness" of existence proves to be an anthropocentric disadvantage. It is
incapable of matching the concealment of truth, with its implicit care and consideration for things. The infamous
"windowlessness" of the monad refers in finitude to the infinite and allows (in Deleuze's words) "the world the
possibility of beginning over and again in each monad." Deleuze expresses the abandonment of intentionality as a
principle of order thus: "The world must be placed in the subject in order that the subject can be for the world."
21
This tenet could easily be from Nietzsche: "to attain the innocence of becoming by excluding purpose."
22
As
Alexander Nehamas observed, eternal recurrence is not a theory about the world, but rather an understanding of
self.
23
(2) Aesthetic Consciousness "Consciousness exists as far as consciousness is useful,"
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decrees Nietzsche,
but this is not as unambiguous as it sounds.
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There is a great "usefulness" in the enigmatic for aesthetic consciousness; the irrepressible otherness of the world
and of the Other sensitizes aesthetic experience in which the creativity of the artist and his or her audience meet.
Wolfgang Welsch sees a "culture of the blind spot" being realized, specifically as "recognition of the overlooked, the
missed, the unheard."
25
Specialness, fragment, curiosity, freedom from prejudice, enthusiasm, resistance, justice, to
name only a few, are features of an aesthetic consciousness, qualities resulting in an unceasing re-valuation of the
world yet without having a cognitive consciousness of purpose and goal of such a change. "Social mimesis"
currently describes an activity of perception which neither reproduces nor creates ex nihilo, but rather makes a world
and "generates" in media what comes naturally to it.
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(3) Hyperperception Are there ten dimensions instead of the
four to which we have become accustomed? Six additional dimensions, so that as the Japanese author Micio
Kaku proposes in his work "Hyperspace" (1994) "everything fits in?" Art and media, in any case, have
considerably intensified our capacity to perceive the differences of the world, and there's no end in sight. Skepticism
and doubts of a culturally critical bent taking issue with the "loss of center" (Hans Sedlmayr) in art or concerned with
the "industrialization of seeing" sharpen our eye for this Dionysian process of perceptive excess. Paul Virilio has
definitely recognized a real danger when he sees a "dressage of the eye" at work in video and the digitalized image
and calls on our still existing faculty of "direct perception" for help; but his proposal of an "ethics of perception" is
unrealistic. Like Nietzsche's bermensch, hyperperception is an intensification of humankind and cannot be placed
on the list of proscribed powers. More perception, of greater differentiation, finer complexity and participation is the
best protection against the dressage of our gaze and emotions. Yet by the same token, forgetting is an intrinsic part
of perception, our guard against the exaggeration of the historical sense, which would lead to the poisoning of
memory. Nietzsche extols the good fortune of being able to forget and stresses that no action would be possible
without forgetting. As if he knew the video addicts and information junkies of our time, he writes:
There is a level of sleeplessness, of rumination, of historical sense, at which living entities suffer harm and perish in
the end, whether this be man, a nation, or a culture.
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A hyperperception which is equally bold in its granting and
forgetting of world and which makes differentiations is effective in practice. According to the traces of a self-fulfilling
life it is a hyperperception at once critical and creative.
4. Culture as Art of Fulfillment:
Autopoetics of Artificial Perception Culture serves the will to power, formed and articulated in artistic activity, and is
the expression of the art of life as well as of the capacity for the world. The artistic will to artificial life, analyzed by
Heidegger as the "will to will," has no aim, and is tautologic in structure. Consciously anthropomorphic, this
realization of willing seeks this fulfillment as fulfillment no other, only fulfillment of itself (albeit in the identity of
difference of self and otherness). Culture as art of self-fulfillment is autopoetics, its emergence and its feedback are
one and the same. Autopoetics must be distinguished from Niklas Luhmann's functional communication which shifts
reactions to a subjectless system and attributes it with being autopoetic. Luhmann agrees here with Humberto
Maturana who defines as autopoetic the systemic qualities of self-production and self-preservation (as discussed in
the physiology of sight); but neither self nor poetics retains its distinctive power in this abstract definition. In contrast,
autopoetics in an emphatic sense expresses the experience of irreducible individuality intrinsic to each phenomenon
and heightens the generative activity for which we ourselves are responsible, a generation concealed by emulation
and performance in the concept of mimesis.
Perceiving as the activity of this culture after nihilism is artificial and perceives in works only what we the artificial
beings by nature value. Nietzsche asks himself the question: "What does it mean 'to perceive'?", and answers:
"To take something to be true: is to say yes to something."
28
Self and world cannot be played against one another,
they belong together, inseparably, as reciprocal perceptive action, as Nietzsche knew: "The animal knows nothing of
itself, nor does it know anything of the world."
29
There can be no authoritative measure in autopoetics surpassing
that which created the authority to begin with. But this does not make us self-legislators in Kant's sense and in that
of the Enlightenment, this would only be the case if we had to yield to a (universal) law of consequence. Even the
self-imposed rule becomes obsolete for me at the same moment it has made its contribution to my art of living. As
Nietzsche tells us: "The creator must always be a destroyer, only the appreciation of value itself cannot destroy
itself."
30
But how can the individual possibly discover whether his or her life fulfills itself without criteria and
without assured methods? Together with Nietzsche we should respond to a postmodern cynicism which calls upon
us to vegetate, homeless in our own world, and to renounce identity once and for all with an affirmative: THIS life is
not for me! I WANT a different one! Whether life fulfills itself cannot be discovered with the aid of a eudaemonistic
ethics and its self-examination, nor even through general inquiry. The existential interest in the lie diagnosed by
Nietzsche concerns most intimately self-delusion. Everything which reaches our consciousness and is interpreted by
it is subject to this tendency to deceive oneself in the futile interest of survival, to blandish what is bad, to ruin what
was perfectly good. Happiness as well as suffering are noticeable and for this basic reason cannot be helpful in
allowing a self-fulfilling life to become evident.
HOW both happiness and suffering are realized in my life must be imperceptible, yet can perhaps be perceived. An
imperceptible perception alone can fulfill our artificiality, one related to silence, this most powerful motive of
language. Constant in its absence, imperceptibility could hold out as fulfillment and even lend the chaotic and
seemingly failed life a touch of lightness. Three non-characteristics of this autopoetics of an artificial perception can
be discerned from Nietzsche's perspective. Unobtrusive, they are more concealments than distinctions: the
movement toward uniqueness which need not be expressly justified; an openness toward the Other which results
unawares from an "ethics derived from aesthetics;" and finally, the imperceptibility of fulfillment itself which has
recovered from anthropocentrism.
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(1) Movement toward Uniqueness Nietzsche is an "Anti-Darwin,"
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and he thinks little of the idea of a "higher race."
The movement toward the bermensch is one of the possibilities of the human race, its self-potentiation in the
individual. As the richest and most complex form (as the most sublime and frailest machine), we realize the non-
definable in our self-definition for as long as the human has existed and will exist.
32
So no new race of
"overhumans" (bermenschen) is to be expected, instead, the bermensch will co-exist with pre-modern, modern,
and postmodern human beings, dominating no one, and being dominated by no one. "All knowledge is limitless as
creative activity. There should be an explanation of the world to correspond to each human being, one which
belongs to him completely, to him as to a first movement."
33
In writing this, Nietzsche could very well have said: this
is the case don't bother yourselves about it any further. Singularity is nothing special for our eternal recurrence.
Not even two pianos are identical, complained John Cage with a sly twinkle.
(2) Openness toward the Twofold Other Singularity is a matter of the body, emphasized Lyotard. Art and ethics are
subject to the Other in a twofold style. In ethics the individual responds to the summons of a voice to which you
owe sincerity in actions and justice in judgment. In aesthetics, in art and literature the unsignifiable matter itself
"commands." Not breaking up this twofold Other into discursive techniques, but rather perceiving it in a manner as
open as it is painful, allows us self- fulfillment in the other. "The matter ignores you, seeks nothing from you, not
even your will," says Lyotard, and it opens itself to the singular precisely in this indifference: The matter, the stuff our
inner nature is made of, "is like an animal in your body."
34
A non-verbal language of images, as Peter Greenaway
calls for and achieves,
35
listens to the animal.
(3) Imperceptibility of Fulfillment Missing a note, fading away, overcoming, blurring, letting be are imperceptible
perceptions in which the art as well as the artificiality of our culture work together at their most intense level and
generate an "innocence of becoming." With the eternal recurrence of the same, "justice," in principle impossible as
positive law, is released into pre-consciousness. First living, then building, and finally thinking the fulfilling cycle of
our dwelling on earth has a hidden beat, and its only trace, disappearing as soon as perceived, is an "imperceptible
smile."
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5. bermensch in the Post-Technological World:
A Preview The birth of the bermensch in the post-technological age is an occurrence which causes as little
sensation as the death of God. "The Madman" of Nietzsche's The Gay Science
37
is merely a braggart who hasn't
understood that everything revolutionary happens when our backs are turned and fortunately is no news to us. You
only better; you only worse: the manifold pleasures in the game of bermensch laugh at both optimism and
pessimism. A "levelling of humankind" is not Nietzsche's scheme; his "movement" is on the contrary the
intensification of all opposites and gaps, the elimination of sameness, "overpowering creativity."
38
Culture is what
can be lived to the full by an individual, self-evidently and easily in self-fulfillment. Nietzsche's "last reflection" is the
call to culture, still valid today: In a word, a very good word, after the old God has been done away with I am
prepared to rule the world
Early January 1889
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Notes
1
. Friedrich Nietzsche, Weisheit fr bermorgen Unterstreichungen aus dem Nachla (1869-1889). Ed.Heinz
Friedrich. Mnchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1994, p. 310 (All translations W.S.).
2
. op.cit., 302.
3
. F.Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize With a Hammer. Trans. Duncan Large. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998, chapter "Expeditions of an Untimely Man", section 26.
4
. Nietzsche, Weisheit fr bermorgen, p. 58.
5
. op.cit., 65.
6
. op.cit., 163.
7
. op.cit., 103.
8
. op.cit., 134.
9
. op.cit., 181.
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10
. op.cit., 119.
11
. Twilight of the Idols, section 26.
12
. Weisheit fr bermorgen, p.153.
13
. cf. op.cit., 262.
14
. op.cit., 37.
15
. op.cit., 290.
16
. op.cit., 206.
17
. op.cit., 288.
18
. op.cit., 207.
19
. Twilight of the Idols, section 20.
20
. G.W.Leibniz: The Monadology. Trans. Robert Latta. Electronically Enhanced Text: World Library, 1991, section
7.
21
. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993, p.26.
22
. Weisheit fr bermorgen, p.154.
23
. Cf. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
24
. Weisheit fr bermorgen, p.234.
25
. Wolfgang Welsch, sth/ethik. Ethik der sthetik. Ed.C.Wulf, D.Kamper, H.U.Gumbrecht. Berlin: Akademie-
Verlag, 1994, p.19 (Trans.W.S.)
26
. Cf. Wolfgang Schirmacher, Homo generator Media and Postmodern Technology. Culture on the Brink. Ed.
G.Bender / T.Druckreye. Seattle: Bay Press, 1993.
27
. F.Nietzsche, On The Use and Disadvantage of History. Untimely Meditations. Trans. D.Breazeale /
R.J.Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, section 1.
28
. Weisheit fr bermorgen, p.217.
29
. op.cit., 152.
30
. op.cit., 152.
31
. op.cit., 295.
32
. op.cit., 297.
33
. op.cit., 152.
34
. Jean-Franois Lyotard, Das zweifach Andere. Bildstrung Gedanken zu einer Ethik der Wahrnehmung.. Ed.
and trans. Jean-Pierre Dubust. Leipzig: Reclam, 1994, p.14-18.
35
. Cf. Peter Greenaway, The Stairs: Genova, the Location. London: 1994.
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36
. Weisheit fr bermorgen, p.168.
37
. F.Nietzsche, The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974, section 125.
38
. Weisheit fr bermorgen, p.153.
39
. op.cit., 312.
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