NIETZSCHE'S AESTHETICS OF TRANSFIGURATION (FICTIONALISM, HERMENEUTICS, TRANSCENDENTALISM; GERMANY

An understanding of Nietzsche's late, "mature" writings presupposes a thorough familiarity with his early writings on aesthetics, including both The Birth of Tragedy and the posthumously published essay "On Trust and Falsity.".;This dissertation thematizes Nietzsche's aesthetics of experience based on the imagination or the mythological consciousness. Issues like the social functions of myth as a Weltbild, Apollinian imagery as the structure of language and thought, and the cultivation of the "intuitive" (versus "rational") attitude in everday life illuminate the nature of the mythological consciousness as an ecstatic mode of experience, epitomized by the artist's inspiration. The mythological imagination establishes the conceptual framework for a revolutionary role for art (narrowly defined): the artist, though not divinely inspired, creates novel, "forbidden" metaphors of experience.;Aesthetics generalizes this activity to all areas of life. The philosopher, above all others, becomes the artist who helps define the world horizon through the artistic power of idealization. This principle manifests the dynamic of the will to power. When used for the purposes of Daseins-Verklarung or glorifying finite existence, idealization gives rise to a transfiguring "art of apotheoses" which represents the earth as "a humanly-good thing." Idealizations of experience underlie both cultural ideals like asceticism and philosophical constructions like Nietzsche's "ideals" of "life," the (')Ubermensch, the will to power, and the eternal recurrence.;These conceptions fit within the dual context of Nietzsche's rejection of the concept of transcendence in traditional methaphysics, and of his increasing interest in transcendental issues. Aesthetics provides a structural model of reflective thought which can be used for the subversive role of philosophical critique of experience. Such critique can be applied, in particular, to the dimension of values left untouched by Kant's Copernican revolution. Resuming this revolution, Nietzsche radicalizes the critique of human finitude, thereby focusing attention on new possibilities of ecstatic experience. Nietzsche's perspectivism and phenomenalism disallow the reification of Nietzsche's own ideals into metaphysical absolutes. Still, art functions to transform experience. For example, as an Apollinian-Dionysian hero, Zarathustra transforms life into art, suffering into joy; thus, he demonstrates that art is suffering made creative.