The Poetic Process as Aesthetic Experience in Nietzsche’s Birth of

Tragedy

ADM

16 November 1992

“There are times when we look at something, whether new or familiar — it

can be anything from a panoramic vista to a small, mundane object such as
an apple or a doorknob — and realize we are seeing it in a singular way.
We seem to be taken out of ourselves.” So observes Bryan Magee in his
discussion of transfiguration. This epiphantic process — the removal of
an object from its spatial and temporal environment — grants the object a
universality it did not previously have, but the feelings such an
experience summons are singular and perhaps inexpressible. An epiphany
likely will surprise the observer, so much so that he often will be
unable to remember, unable to maintain the glory of having united, if
only for a moment, with the sublime. The unification is what
Schopenhauer calls the aesthetic experience, and what Nietzsche calls a
substantial part of what makes life bearable. But in order to
communicate the sublime and to preserve it, a medium is needed. This
medium, according to both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is art. Plastic,
written, or musical, it is art that captures and expresses the aesthetic,
so that the experience can be shared, understood, or duplicated. With a
single aesthetic experience as inspiration, an artist can participate in
the transfiguration of an object, go through a period of awe, and then
feel a deep need to preserve the occasion. From the moment the artist
decides to make permanent the Schopenhauerian aesthetic experience, she
decides to engage in the poetic process.
Just as the aesthetic transfiguration changes the singular to the
universal, so does the poetic process transform the singular, personal
aesthetic experience into a universal one that will not change, one that
may even provide the artist’s audience a glimpse of the aesthetic. The
poetic process begins with a longing to make the moment last, continues
with a choice of artistic medium, and ends with a finished artistic
representation which can be passed on to an audience. In the earliest
stages, the artist expresses himself in rudimentary terms. He tries to
connect ideas, to apply traditional thought processes to his new outlook,
to determine what the pure aesthetic means to him. Words spoken or
written in prosaic form fail to capture the essence of the occasion. The
spectator, if he is an artist, must instead exercise the force of his
will to transform the transfiguration from the singular experience of the
universal to the universal experience of the universal. One method of
artistically accomplishing this is poetry. In translating the aesthetic
occurrence into poetic form, the artist can undergo a second epiphany — a
moment or series of moments in which he not only relives the first, but
also understands how the first experience applies to his day-to-day life.
The discovery of application is crucial to granting value to the
artist’s life and purpose. For, as Nietzsche famously argues in The
Birth of Tragedy “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence
and the world are eternally justified.” The artist must understand his
experience as a justification of his misery-filled life and environment,
lest he despair and fail to continue the aesthetic and poetic processes.
Failure of the poet means failure of the justification. Nietzsche
defines the task of the poet as aesthetically justifying the world. If
the world is as disproportionately filled with suffering as Nietzsche
claims, some justification — some lasting justification — is needed to
prevent a Hamlet nausea consuming enough to cripple the artistic impulse.
Although the poetic process does not originate in the pure will-
less contemplation of which Nietzsche is so fond, it is born in what
Schopenhauer names the “lyrical state” and in Schiller what terms his
“musical mood.” Schopenhauer seems far more willing to accept the role
of the will in the entire process than doe s Nietzsche. These states
combine the willing with the will-less, a merging that makes possible
(for Schopenhauer, at least) the translation of the raw epiphany into
communicable form, and the transformation of spectator to creator. This
process differs from other artistic ones in that its inspiration comes
directly from transfiguration. Ordinarily, an artist will see an object
and decide to pain or describe it, without ever seeing it objectively.
The aim of all art, Schopenhauer concludes, is the expression of the
Ideas, primarily the “objectification of man.” But before the artist
can fully objectify the man, she must deal with her own subjectiveness,
both before her epiphany and while in the lyrical state. Careful
investigation of the transfiguration itself, the artist’s initial and
ultimate reaction to it, and the response of artist’s audience will offer
substantial insight into the poetic process and the aesthetic experience.
The investigation begins with determining why transfiguration is a
necessary element of human existence. To be sure, there are those who
argue against the need of art, let alone the need for an experience that
pulls relativity away from an object. The poetic process ignores the
suffering of the world, it apparently forgets the need for general
happiness; it exchanges the fight against the pain of many in favor of
the individual’s rapturous glorification. And although the spectator may
feel those around him are experiencing what he is, they in fact may not
be, and it becomes his task to make the transfiguration communal. One
might argue that rather than be concerned with lyric quality or the best
blend of poetry and music, people (especially artists) should pay proper
attention to the issues that matter, e.g. disease, hunger, religious
strife, and war. These problems, after all, affect and end the lives of
masses of people, people who do not have opportunity to care about verse,
melody, or the value of opera. What is the reason for artistic pursuits
when so many physical elements are in disarray? To be content with life,
one needs not only aesthetic justification, but justification of the
aesthetic; i.e. both an moral and utilitarian justification of the world.
The value of the aesthetic experience, of the poetic process, must be
great enough to outweigh the simultaneous misery so many people feel. And
the experience must be accessible enough to bring large numbers of people
out of their misery. Furthermore, and most importantly, it must be
powerful enough in the individual’s mind to outweigh the effect of the
pain he feels in and sees around himself. When this is accomplished, he
will have the courage necessary to communicate the once inexpressible.
In takes courageous will to describe what must be experienced
without will: the first moment of transfiguration. As Magee describes
above, this is the moment when the artist sees an object as he has never
before seen it. From that, an artist can gain inspiration for a work of
art that aims at the universal. It is necessary, however, that the
artist does not “will” a new outlook. He must be as open-minded and as
objective as possible, so he can be, as Nietzsche’s plastic artist,
“never tired of contemplating [an image’s] minutest traits.” When the
artist is not seeking a specific inspiration or aesthetic object, he is
prepared for the sudden, unexpected aesthetic experience. Will-less and
unprejudiced, anything he happens across could strike him as beautiful,
and if he is successful in casting away his prejudices, anything he sees
can seem to him new. For the first time, he sees the object without
relation to his or its environment. Whatever it is near, whatever it
affects, whatever its accidents, no longer matter. What does matter is
the intrinsic value of that object — it beauty, its proportion, the
object per se. The artist sees essence in this transfiguration. Because
all mundane attachments disappear, he “seems to be taken out of
[himself]” and takes the object itself from its context of ugliness and
suffering, so that he can deal with it on a purely aesthetic level. The
pain that the artist might associate with the object, the pain that
ordinarily would stifle his artistic vision, disappears, so that for
better or worse, even the horrific can move the artist to unforeseen,
spell-binding aesthetic heights.
This is true on a large scale in war. “Millions of men in our day
— like millions before us — have learned to live in war’s strange element
and have discovered in it a powerful fascination...It has drawn most men
under its spell,” writes John Gray in his philosophic reaction to battle,
The Warriors. It is of note that Gray recognizes not all soldiers are
drawn by “the enduring appeals of battle,” just as not all people are
open to the possibility of transfiguration of the commonplace. But
enough are aware, and personally know, that gruesome and shocking as it
is, the spectacle of war commands the awed attention of its participants
— participants who find themselves in such a rapture, they lose their
ability to act. They are removed from themselves, removed from the fear
and viciousness commonly associated with battle. In spectacular war,
fear is replaced by a will-less tendency to aesthetically absorb the
event, whatever the physical cost, and blood lust is replaced by Biblical
“lust of the eye.” That lust drives the soldier into pure objectivity.
Just as Magee’s observer removes the observed from its context, she no
longer cares about the death and pain involved in battle, or even the
risk to herself. The satisfaction of her eye is all that is important,
but it is something over which she has no control. War has pulled her
out of her mundane civilian life, and dropped her into the magnificent,
grandiose environment of battle, where she is free from ordinary
behavioral constrictions. The rules change in war: the ugly becomes
beautiful (or at least aesthetically compelling); the grotesque, sublime.
She experiences and observes events from a will-less perspective that
could not have been possible in a more conventional environment. From
this, a writer, painter, or sculptor, gain inspiration, much as Gray
himself did.
This becomes more apparent when one compares Gray’s language with
Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s. Gray writes of “the disinterested
contemplation of beauty” , precisely the approach Nietzsche looks for in
his consideration of the artist, who “has already surrendered his
subjectivity in the Dionysian process. And echoing Schopenhauer’s
discussion of the “lyrical state”, the sublime, and will-lessness, Gray
quotes Dixon Wecter while describing war as “the one great lyric passage
in their lives — lyric because “the chief aesthetic appeal of war surely
lies in this feeling of the sublime, to which we, children of nature, are
directed whether we desire it or not.” [italics mine]. Subjectivity
does not adulterate the astonishment and wonder that accompany the
primordial connection with the spectacular. Whether he wishes it or not,
the aesthetic experience, the transfiguration of war from horror to
glory, will happen, and it will steal its observers ability to act. Gray
suggests this is a result “not so much a separation of the self from the
world as a subordination of the self to it.” Both Gray and Nietzsche
seem to maintain that an awe-struck observer can fully ignore his pain
and needs, though Schopenhauer suggests “willing (the personal interest
of the aims) and pure perception...are wonderfully blended with each
other” Because the experience can place the soldier/artist in s
Schopenhauerian lyrical state, where “willing tears us anew from peaceful
contemplation,” he is able to remember the experience, but only as a
vague and nebulous one. One of the needs of the will is to know, to
understand, the nebulous. Though this contemplation is not as will-less
as Nietzsche would prefer, as in a dream for example, the will involved
in the lyrical state allows him to begin the poetic process without
detracting from its magnificence.
Because it is will-less, contemplative, and beautiful, the dream can
serve as a Nietzschean inspiration for the poetic process. Nietzsche
infers in his discussion of the dream state that the dreamer “must have
completely lost sight of the waking reality and its ominous
obtrusiveness.” This inference is similar to the phenomenon of
transfiguration, in which the observer surrenders his will and sees
something without its ominous and obtrusive connections to the world
around it. The dream state may prompt the dreamer to proclaim, as
Nietzsche suggests, “It is dream, I will dream on,” just as someone
involved in a transfiguration will long to hold onto that moment for as
long as possible, whether she has any control over herself and the
situation or not. The transfiguration and the aesthetic experience
justify the phenomenal world, but Nietzsche goes further than that in his
praise of the dream state: “I feel myself impelled to the metaphysical
assumption that the truly existent primal unity, eternally suffering and
contradictory, also needs the rapturous vision, the pleasurable illusion,
for its continuous redemption.” Nietzsche not only sees the
“pleasurable illusion,” i.e. the dream, as redemptive, but also as
preferable, to waking reality. Empirical reality, a representation of
the primal unity, is a “mere appearance,” and a dream likewise is a “mere
appearance of a mere appearance. This leads Nietzsche to the conclusion
that Schiller’s “naïve” art is a mere appearance of a mere appearance.
But if the artist uses the dream experience as inspiration, her work is
once more removed from the primal unity that is at the heart of empirical
and dream reality. The resulting art, then, is an appearance of an
appearance of an appearance.
After the epiphantic moment or series of moments series passes, the
observer is left with an uncertain emptiness because he must return to
the reality everyone else experiences, and he must reattach all the
associations of pain and suffering to himself, the object he
decontextualized, and his environment. He is left with a nameless,
disconcerting insight into the nature of the world, a knowledge that
reveals to him the base, the vile, the gruesome, with a clarity he has
never witnessed. But just as he may have stood awe-struck while watching
the horrors of war, he may be incapable of action due to his new
knowledge. Nietzsche describes this sensation as the Hamlet nausea, a
sickness in which understanding hobbles the will to act. A conflict
emerges now between the will to continue the poetic process and the
nausea of inaction. In considering methods of curing himself of the
sickness, he may look for further aesthetic experiences, further
transfigurations, through which he will remove himself from phenomenal
reality and be free from the Weltschmerz. Or, he may hope to recover by
directly confronting the source of his inaction, the pain of those who
surround him. Knowing that he touched the sublime through his aesthetic
experience, he can hope to give others that same feeling if he is able to
use his artistic talents to communicate to them the beautiful. Argument
and dissertation cannot accomplish this with any elevating or lasting
effect; the only method of sharing the aesthetic experience, if there
truly is one, is through art.
Lyric poetry, situated somewhere between prose and music, best
facilitates the immediate desire of the poet to preserve and communicate
the essence of her transfiguring experience. It is not as epic as a
tragedy or as enchantingly communal as an opera, but poetry’s value is
that it can contain the fresh immediacy of the artist’s needs, can be
widely distributed, and it gives the artist opportunity to look back on
her aesthetic experience with both an objective and a subjective eye.
The simultaneous willing and will-lessness create Schopenhauer’s lyrical
mood, and in this mood the poet sees the purpose of her aesthetic
experience, which in itself can be described as a second transfiguration.
Once the author gets over her Hamlet nausea and decides to cement the
experience, she is open to a creative subjectivity (by choosing her
medium and her words) and an objectivity (by enshrining the moment in an
artistic expression, which once refined and submitted, is immutable).
“Genuine song,” writes Schopenhauer, “is the expression of the whole of
this mingled and divided state of mind.” Genuine song provides the
composer with an understanding of herself and her world.
The initial objectivity of the aesthetic experience is followed during
artistic creation by the Schopenhauerian blend of the objective and
subjective will, and this process concludes with the subjective
refinement of the artistic expression. In the refinement period, the
author re-reads his work (a work written in a state of recovery from the
awe) and makes it more cohesive, more understandable. He may change it
from a stream of words to a stream of consciousness, a form a narrative
that both conveys the fluid nature of the experience and can be readily
understood by its audience. The receivers of the work — if the poet has
successfully translated the experience from phenomenon to poem — may in
turn undergo an understanding, an epiphany, an aesthetic experience of
their own. In this case, the poetic process ends with the audience’s
epiphantic reaction to the work of the poet.

2718 wds.