Saturday, April 11, 2009

Readings: The Art of Being

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This, from Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche, Volume I: The Will to Power as Art:

[T]he being of an artist is the most perspicuous mode of life. Life is for us the most familiar form of Being. The innermost essence of Being is will to power. In the being of the artist we encounter the most perspicuous and most familiar mode of will to power. Since it is a matter of illuminating the Being of beings, meditation on art has in this regard decisive priority.

And then:

[A] guiding principle of Nietzsche's teaching on art: art must be grasped in terms of creators and producers, not recipients. Nietzsche expresses it unequivocally in the following words: "Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman's aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experience of 'what is beautiful.' In all philosophy to date the artist is missing...." ...The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard.

Not to be a mere critic, then, or a passive, effeminate recipient, one must produce art; having done so, one has enhanced one's essential Being. This is why Jesus was also a tekton. So, get off your ass and make something.
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