I don’t agree with this aphorism. We are artists in order to heighten our reality, increase awareness and remain alert to the world.
Lulusays
What does “heighten” reality mean if not to change our perspective in some way? Art is illusion, which Nietzsche thought was necessary in order to make reality palatable. Even the act of narrating our own story, or becoming the “poets of our lives,” is art in Nietzsche’s sense. This is how we reconcile everything that happens to us in life, both good and bad. We tell our story. It does not mean we become less “alert to the world” but rather that we actively shape our own perspective as artists do.
Perhaps this passage from The Gay Science illuminates the aphorism more:
“What one should Learn from Artists. What means have we for making things beautiful, attractive, and desirable, when they are not so? And I suppose they are never so in themselves! We have here something to learn from physicians, when, for example, they dilute what is bitter, or put wine and sugar into their mixing bowl; but we have still more to learn from artists, who in fact, are continually concerned in devising such inventions and artifices. To withdraw from things until one no longer sees much of them, until one has even to see things into them, in order to see them at all or to view them from the side, and as in a frame or to place them so that they partly disguise themselves and only permit of perspective views or to look at them through coloured glasses, or in the light of the sunset or to furnish them with a surface or skin which is not fully transparent: we should learn all this from artists, and moreover be wiser than they. For this fine power of theirs usually ceases with them where art ceases and life begins; we, however, want to be the poets of our lives, and first of all in the smallest and most commonplace matters.”
Nietzsche nailed it once again.
He certainly did!
I don’t agree with this aphorism. We are artists in order to heighten our reality, increase awareness and remain alert to the world.
What does “heighten” reality mean if not to change our perspective in some way? Art is illusion, which Nietzsche thought was necessary in order to make reality palatable. Even the act of narrating our own story, or becoming the “poets of our lives,” is art in Nietzsche’s sense. This is how we reconcile everything that happens to us in life, both good and bad. We tell our story. It does not mean we become less “alert to the world” but rather that we actively shape our own perspective as artists do.
Perhaps this passage from The Gay Science illuminates the aphorism more:
“What one should Learn from Artists. What means have we for making things beautiful, attractive, and desirable, when they are not so? And I suppose they are never so in themselves! We have here something to learn from physicians, when, for example, they dilute what is bitter, or put wine and sugar into their mixing bowl; but we have still more to learn from artists, who in fact, are continually concerned in devising such inventions and artifices. To withdraw from things until one no longer sees much of them, until one has even to see things into them, in order to see them at all or to view them from the side, and as in a frame or to place them so that they partly disguise themselves and only permit of perspective views or to look at them through coloured glasses, or in the light of the sunset or to furnish them with a surface or skin which is not fully transparent: we should learn all this from artists, and moreover be wiser than they. For this fine power of theirs usually ceases with them where art ceases and life begins; we, however, want to be the poets of our lives, and first of all in the smallest and most commonplace matters.”