Monday, February 2, 2009

An Addendum

Perhaps it is art that is preferred as a source of self-deception precisely because it is knowingly so engaged. Or, at least such a view would be tenable if Nietzsche were more warm towards the plastic arts. Still, there is an important sense in which art does not deceive in the same way that rigid value systems do; there can be knowledge of the artificiality of the process which is understood in the same instant as there is deception and self-loss. Indeed, it is the anti-realist urge which seems to be present in Nietzsche's condemnation of Euripides and other artists. In the Birth of Tragedy, he unknowingly (or knowingly) tends towards a somewhat Romantic conception of the arts, especially inasmuch as he focuses on transcendence through the aesthetic.

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