For a long time, art is not only about what is beautiful and pleasing. Ancient Greek Tragedy deals with the emotions of pity and fear to achieve catharsis. The medieval age depicts Jesus’s suffering to tell about the divine love and humanity of Jesus. Judith beheading Holofernes, a baroque painting, portrays an episode from the Book of Judith in the Old Testament, and represents the assassination of the Assyrian general Holofernes by the Israelite heroine Judith. Many arts from our time also depict pain, grief, sorrow, suffering, bloody murder, cruelty, and misery.
So, how to appreciate this kind of tragic art? Let’s learn from Nietzsche on art, anaesthetic, and life.
For Nietzsche, art in his time is not aesthetic at all, but rather anaesthetic. Art has two functions both as a social anaesthetic and as a form of ‘intoxication of alienation’. (John Moore, 2004: 132).
Anaesthetic refers to humans’ capability to overcome their pains. In art, humans reinterpret their experience, ‘through awakening a pleasure in pain, which is the starting point for tragic art’. In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (BoT), the anaesthetic function of art is celebrated as a product of Greek Wisdom. (Matthew Rampley, 2000: 122).
For Nietzsche, both the ancient tragedy and modern musical drama have the Dionysiac capacity, which is the capability to reveal the ‘worst of all worlds’ (BoT, §25). Art, particularly musical tragedy, is the highest form of cultural activity because it completes man’s existence in symbolic form by reminding us of our multi-dimensioned human nature. Tragedy keeps alive the pain caused by the victory of man over nature. Art is the necessary realization of the human condition in history. (Douglas Burnham and Martin Jesinghausen, 2010: 153)
Nietzsche calls the condition of pleasure, “intoxication”. It is precisely an “exalted feeling of power-the sensations of space and time are altered: tremendous distances are surveyed… the extension of vision over greater masses and expanses; the refinement of the organs for the apprehension of much that is extremely small and fleeting”. (The Will to Power, WtP, § 800)
Nietzsche sees that the real world is false, cruel, contradictory, seductive, and without meaning. To live, we need lies to conquer this reality or this “truth”. Metaphysics, morality, religion, and science are various forms of lies that help someone to have faith in life. (WtP, § 853). Above all, humans are artists, who create science, religion, morality, and philosophy from their will to art, to overcome reality. Man always rejoices as an artist, he enjoys himself as power, the power to make “truth”. (WtP, § 853, I).
“Art is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life”. (WtP, § 853, II). Art is also the redemption of the man of action-of those who not only see the terrifying but live in it, and want to live in it. Nietzsche’s book, The Will to Power, teaches us something more than a pessimistic, even more “divine” than truth, that is art. “Art is worth more than truth. Art is the real task of life, art is the metaphysical activity of life”. (WtP, § 853, IV).