The Bodily Origin Of Art

Nietzsche is a great modern thinker. The theme of his thinking has changed from reason to being which is "will to power", thus , from the point of his view, body should be the focus of attention in the revaluation of all values, since God has died and western metaphysics has come to the end. As far as his aesthetics is concerned, it can be called body aesthetics, because all aesthetic phenomenon have been explained according to the essentiality of body. The hinge for us to understand Nietzsche's aesthetics is art whose great task is to criticize nihilism and to act as the greatest stimulus of life. Nietzsche has tried to find out the origin of everything, including art, by means of his genealogy. Therefore, the thesis is centered upon the study of the origin of art. The bodily origin of art is what we can find out in Nietasche's aesthetics, which can be made out by following three statements. First, the definition of body in the view of Nietzsche is totally different from that of western traditional philosophy. Second, body has showed a way to the origin of art. Art must be grasped in terms of the artist, because the state in which artistic doing and observing occurs has revealed the corporeal-psychical nature of man's body. Third, will to power is the bodily origin of art, since art is the most perspicuous configuration of it. Will to power is the anthropologically vital impulse of man, the physiologically forceful libido of flesh and blood, and the psychological feeling of power.The study on Nietzsche's body aesthetics is helpful not only to grasp his aesthetics as a whole, but also to provide a clearer angle of view in the history of western aesthetics in that there is a transition from the tranditional aethetics to the modern and post-modern aesthetics.