Artist as Metaphysician

The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.

In reading Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I am reminded, time and time again, of John Keats and Samual Taylor Coleridge, two Romantic poets who, unlike the assuredness found in Wordsworth and Byron, wrestled with themselves of what is meant to be an artist in light of suffering and mortality (for Keats) and deepening Christian despair (for Coleridge). As seen in the above quotations, both poets see the artistic endeavor as rooted in epistemology (for Keats) and ontology (for Coleridge). In other words, an artist creates in order to know and in order to be. But what does the artist strive to know? What does the artist strive to be? What kind of art is produced in such a pursuit, and what does that art mean to those who would see the art, i.e., the audience?

The root of these questions is, ultimately, metaphysical: what is reality? For it is the “stuff” of reality with which the artist works with and tries to grasp with his imagination and repeat in a finite form, the work of art, as Coleridge rightly states. Also, aesthetics and metaphysics conjoin in the artist, whose vision of this reality is art; the art is beautiful if it is true to the reality of which the artist only has a vision, as Keats declares, albeit briefly. Keeping these underlying philosophical questions in mind, one realizes that an artist is also a metaphysician, exploring and expressing what reality is to the common man, who, more than likely, has no idea of what is Really Real.

Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies describe two contrasting realities that produce, not surprisingly, two different views of the artist and what art is supposed to convey to the common man. What is surprising (or perhaps not, if the need to create is universal) is that both Hegel and Nietzsche agree that the artist, in creating art, is striving to reform man, to reunify modern fragmented man, such that the artist is not only metaphysician but also meta-physician to ailing, common man. In other words, the role of the artist is to recreate or reunify reality – fragmented in fragmented man – in art for the reunification of man. In doing so, he gives voice of the invisible reality in the visible.

Hegel clearly states in his “Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind” what reality is: All of Reality is called the Idea.[3] The Mind, also called the Spirit, is the Idea, in and for itself, meaning that the Mind is active Idea, which is not fixed Idea (like Logical Idea). In formulating Mind as active Idea while Idea proper is potential Idea, Hegel is beholden to Aristotle, who stresses potentiality and actuality, which is part of Being and is Being. The Mind (which Hegel means to be the human mind) is a manifestation of Idea (all of reality) in humans. The Mind’s Notion (or actuality) is to realize that it is Idea. Mind is already Idea ontologically, but the Mind does not realize this. Only in the knowing does the Mind actualize its Notion as being Idea. Until then, Mind is disunited with its Notion. However, because Mind is already Idea beforehand, Mind is both unified and disunited with Idea, which Mind must also realize in order to be unified with Idea, i.e. realize its Notion. Thus, all of reality strives for the unity of Mind and Idea. With the advent of Christianity, the exemplar of this unity is the God-Man, i.e., Christ, in his Incarnation, the unity of the finite (Man) and infinite (God). Says Hegel,

It was Christianity, by its doctrine of the Incarnation and of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the community of believers, that first gave to human consciousness a perfectly free relationship to the infinite and thereby made possible the comprehensive knowledge of mind in its absolute infinitude. [4]

Thus, art becomes the process by which the artist, as believer, gains knowledge of his relationship with the infinite, with the Idea as Absolute, with the Absolute that is God. Says scholar William Desmond,

...a genuine sense of the Absolute for Hegel, is not attained by a leap beyond experience but by an emergence and unfolding from within experience itself of its own ultimate dimension. ....Art only achieves its highest task when, as he puts it, ‘it has placed itself in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and when it is simply one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deeper interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit.[5]

In other words, art, in expressing the metaphysics of the Absolute, necessarily becomes religious in nature. Says scholar Gary Shapiro, “That the art in question is religious should not appear strange when we recall that for Hegel religion is a figurative way of attaining self-knowledge.”[6] Also, if art is “the sensuous expression, manifestation, or ‘show’ of the Absolute Idea,”[7] what this expression ends up being is dependent on the artist’s knowledge of what the Absolute Idea is in relation to himself, what his God is like in relation to him, as believer.

Hegel outlines in history three stages in which man expresses his knowledge of his relationship with the Absolute. These three stages are the Symbolic, the Classical, and the Romantic.[8] In the first stage, the Symbolic, man and the Absolute are totally disunited. Man is a small finite being and the Absolute is a large, sublime infinity in which man cannot know except in “reverence before mystery, of awe before the infinite.”[9] Examples of Symbolic art articulate this mystery and awe: huge Egyptian Pyramids and Sphinxes, pantheistic Hindu idols, and “the sublime poetry of the Israelites in the Old Testament.[10] In the second stage, the Classical, man and the Absolute are totally united. Man creates God in his image, and this image, “reveal an immediate sensuous unity between the human and the divine in which all disproportion and discord between the two is banished.”[11] The obvious examples of such art are in the statues of the classic Greek gods, in all of their physical perfection. But such an art limits the expression of the Absolute since it is an Absolute created in man’s image, and even the physically perfect statues limit the expression of man’s own image of himself, which is not solely external, not solely body, and never is he perfect.

The third stage, the Romantic, resolves the seeming contradiction of Symbolic art and Classical art. In Symbolic art, man’s relationship with the Absolute is one-sided: man in awe of the Absolute Spirit. In Classical art, the man’s relationship with the Absolute is also one-sided: man’s image is the Absolute Spirit’s image. Romantic art restores the infinitude of the Absolute, found in Symbolic art, but also introduces what is missing in both Symbolic and Classical arts: man’s own infinite spirit. Says Desmond,

In Romantic art we come across what can be called an inwardizing in man himself of the sense of the infinite. Hegel explicitly calls our attention to this in his Aesthetics. The infinite is not just “out-there,” as it tends to be in Symbolical art. Nor is it completely proportioned to the human figure as physical, as it tends to be in the aesthetic perfection of Classical art. ....Romantic art only becomes possible after the human spirit has been percolated historically through the Christian religion. For in this religion, man himself, particularly in the depths of his inward subjectivity, becomes the most rich disclosure of the meaning of divinity, namely of God as spirit or Geist. It is this disclosure of Geist in its true form that Romantic art struggles to effect; and we must add, with the increasing realization that the sensuous embodiment essential to the aesthetic side of art may not always be completely adequate to this task.[12]

Man’s own spirit is infinite because the exemplar of man, Christ himself, shows that a man’s spirit is infinite. But unlike Classical art, in which God and man is a seamless identity, Romantic art, to be true to Christ himself, expresses the tension and suffering that occur when the infinite (free spirit) and the finite (limited body) are united. As scholar Albert Hofstadter clearly explains, “Romantic art is not an art of harmony but of disharmony; it is an art, not of the realization in external shape of norms of balance, measure, and proportion, but of the exhibition of imbalance, unmeasure, disproportion. It is... an art of Zerrissenheit – tornness, disruption, inner strife and confusion.”[13] Romantic art is not only about the Christ of Bethlehem and of the Galilee but also about the Christ of Gethsemane and of Golgotha. But out of that suffering and death of the body comes the release of the spirit, to become really free. For the believer “death of the body” does not mean a literal death but a figurative one, in which the believer comes to realize, in artistic self-knowledge, that his freedom, his actualization of the Absolute, lies not in his body but in his mind, his inward spirit, and the creations of his inward spirit, “the whole of cultural life.”[14]

But this creation of his inward spirit is not an easy task for the artist, especially when he is trying to be true to the true form of God as expressed in Romantic art. As Hegel declares,

People often imagine that the poet, like the artist in general, must go to work purely intuitively. This is absolutely not the case. On the contrary, a genuine poet, before and during the execution of his work, must meditate and reflect; only in this way can he hope to bring out the heart, or the soul, of the subject-matter, freeing it from all the externalities in which it is shrouded and by so doing, organically develop his intuition.[15]

The artist as metaphysician must be as vigorous in his creation as the philosopher is towards his philosophical thought because “Art is truth at work.”[16] Art is not just an image of truth but the actualization of truth in sensuous form, “a creative adventure in which the self brings into being its own self-knowledge.[17] One is reminded of Coleridge’s thought, in which the artist’s creation is a finite repetition of God’s eternal creation. As a result, what gets created has ontological meaning for the artist because his creation is part of himself. Says Desmond, “His material is not only external matter but also his own self .”[18] His creation, therefore, is the actualization of his own spirit and, in doing so, participates in the greater actualization of the Absolute.

The artist sees what reality is and strives for it in his creation; but sometimes what he creates falls short of his vision. This “falling short” is what Hegel calls “evil”: “Evil is nothing but the incompatibility between what is and what ought to be. ....in life, and still more in mind, we have this immanent distinction present: hence arises the Ought: and this negativity, subjectivity, ego, freedom are the principles of evil and pain...and as the fountain of nature and of the spirit.”[19] If one expands creation broadly into anything created in man’s image, like the State, then one can see the possibility for evil that is in the Ought. Another name for the Absolute is also the Rational, and, as seen in the above quotation regarding the meditative work of the artist, man’s reason also operates in his creation. Overall, man is guided by the Rational, and the State, a creation of man’s reason, is also guided by the Rational of the man that creates it. Therefore, the State is created in man’s image, and thus if that man’s reason is does not fully actualize the Rational, which guides the totality of everything, including everything Good, i.e., fully realize the notion of his Mind, which is Liberty, then the State that is created from such a man’s reason will also not realize Liberty and appear Irrational. Hence, the historical existence of such regimes as Stalinism and Nazism, which are examples of Hegelian evil, the incompatibility between what is, an irrational State enslaving its citizens, and what ought to be, a rational State in which its citizens can fulfill their Mind’s notion of liberty. The irrational State is only one example of how a creation falls short of its creator’s vision. But even this Hegelian evil participates in the reality that is expressed in Romantic art, i.e., reality as suffering and pain. When a grand creation like the State no longer becomes the expression of the reality that is the Absolute, the citizen in such a state is given the opportunity to find the Absolute by looking within himself, “to the essential inwardness of the spirit of which Nature is merely an outward manifestation, the essential inwardness for which we have to stammer the name ‘intimacy,’ ‘die Innigkeit.’[20] In doing so, the artist, in his art, unifies himself with the Absolute, and participates in the metaphorical dynamic of the God-Man.

As seen in Hegel’s aesthetics, the metaphysical foundation is Christianity, specifically Protestant, in which nothing mediates the artist with reality qua Absolute Spirit. The Hegelian artist actualizes his Mind by actualizing Absolute Spirit, i.e., the believer actualizes God. But what happens to this dynamic of the artist towards the Absolute when one no longer believes in the Absolute as the Really Real, and what becomes the Really Real?

Nietzsche’s aesthetics explores these questions, and he does away with the Hegel’s metaphysics that account for the existence of God separate from man but, at the same time, united with man through Christianity. Without Christianity, Nietzsche speaks relatively plainly of what the Really Real is: Man himself. Yes, Man does create God as a way of giving himself limits in this wild and wide world of ours. Unfortunately, Man forgot that God is created in his own image, has worshipped God like a graven image, and has lost touch of why he created God in the first place. With the advent of democratic socialism, in which everybody is like everybody else with the proverbial chicken in every pot, two cars in the two car garage, and Social Security to ward off the wolf at the door, God as savior to a problematic world is no longer needed, and all the trappings to worship this God no longer have any real meaning. In this neglect, Man has killed God, and now he only gives tithes to a corpse. Since Man, or, to use Nietzsche’s terminology, the herd, has forgotten that he created God in the first place, then, of course, the herd will not be aware that God is dead and thus real meaning is gone from their lives, replaced with ease, comfort, and drugs. In seeing this culture of the herd and the culmination of the herd, the Last Man, I cannot help thinking about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which Man has fashioned a Utopia for himself with social conditioning, secure jobs, universal healthcare and entertainment, and plenty of drugs (without the side effects) if one starts to feels uneasy with one’s self. In such a world, drama cannot exist, poetry cannot exist, tragedy cannot exist, because the passions stirred up by such things will destroy this society. In such a world, there can never be Overmen – the best of Man as Ultimate Creator of meaning-- because all the Higher Men – the insightful but lesser creators -- have been conditioned out, exiled, or killed in utero.

In a world in obvious trouble as this, without an Absolute to provide meaning, art, the act of creation, is metaphysics, and the artist, the creator of meaning, is God. “Hence, art,” says Rosenstein, “is not only ‘the highest task and proper metaphysical activity of this life,’ but is the ‘consummation of existence.’”[21] Also, the artist (the Overman), not the philosopher nor the religious man, is the most important man in this world, especially as conceived in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and his force of creativity is the Will-to-Power. Says the scholar Joan Stambaugh, “art is the authentic task of life, the metaphysical activity of life. Art is what makes life possible; it is the greatest stimulus to life.”[22]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra flips Hegel on its head (or, more aptly, on its feet) and inverts Christianity by stressing the primacy of the body over spirit.[23] Nietzsche, in attacking Christianity, uses the same tactics as the Bible (especially in the Gospels), in which Zarathustra, the solitary harbinger of the Overman, uses parables to impart his “wild wisdom” to his disciples.[24] So instead of parables about the workers in the field, we get parables about the master over these workers. Instead of parables about a people joined together in a covenant with God, we get parables about he-who-would-create-god, the Overman. Much of this work is so strongly anti-Christian that I think that perhaps Nietzsche should have titled this work The Antibible, in keeping with his Antichrist. But since Nietzsche evidently depends on Christianity for his foil, depends on this greatly towards his doctrine against pity, against a Redeemer (with a capital R), and against the equalizing of men in God’s eyes, perhaps he is doing a service to Christianity qua reformer, much like Martin Luther was for the Roman Catholic Church, pointing out the corruption of the institution in which it no longer really served the purpose for which it was formed, i.e., the salvation of man. Zarathustra damns men for their hypocrisy more than anything else: e.g., pity is really ressentiment, religious belief is really an activity (like watching tight-rope walkers).[25] The reason why the Last Man is so abhorrent to Zarathustra and nauseates him is because the Last Man accepts the institutions set forth in accepted values but only does so out of custom and tradition; the Last Man does not live deliberately, does not question why he does the things he does, and does not even believe that most of the customary religious tenets that he supposedly adheres to is relevant in his shallow life towards ease and happiness.[26] Last Man does not live nor think deeply, which is what Zarathustra tries to teach. In repudiating the Last Man, in much the same way that Christ repudiates the Pharisees, Nietzsche (via Zarathustra) may actually be doing a service to Christianity, as a Devil’s Advocate, to which Christianity, if it is to be true to itself, must acknowledge the accusations put forth from this advocate and answer with solutions.

But the Christian God, and the horizon of meanings created in accordance with this Christian God, is dead.[27] Now the only creator of meaning is Man himself, and the ultimate creator, the Man-God, which Zarathustra advocates, is the Overman: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome.”[28] The Overman is the person who recognizes that he is the definer of his horizon of meaning, that there is no transcendent definer of the horizon of meaning. As seen in Zarathustra’s quotation, the Overman comes from Man, but not in a biologically evolutionary manner. The rope metaphor, in which Man is a rope stretched from ape to Overman,[29] is a metaphor for inner self-control of one’s actions and thoughts. An ape is pure bestiality, consumed with various appetites and desires which dictate his actions without any thought; the worst of the rabble would be here, with Ape, who can only live within the confines of his own petty thoughts and shallow, self-serving deeds. Man, as the rope that progresses from Ape, moves from the mud of Ape-ness, towards the various fragments of what it means to be Man, whom, by increasing levels of self-control, unifies the various fragments of Man. These levels of self-control come out of Man as levels of creativity, such that what is in Man other men can see and respond to this level of self-control.

Zarathustra says that in order for Man to command, he must obey; that is, in order for a man to command others, he must be able to command himself and obey his own commands.[30] Self-control is when a man retreats into solitude, stills the various appetites and desires that wrack his body and mind, and comes to that point in which he realizes who he really is and what he is meant to do. In other words, he recognizes a vocation in which he is competent, and he develops within himself a set of life principles to which he must adhere to in order to live his life as true to his vocation. Those set of principles become a horizon of meaning for that man.

When a principled man practices his vocation, other men respond to that vocation and feel impelled to follow that vocation. In this way, in obeying himself, Man commands others without force or even saying that he commands. This principled Man is Zarathustra’s Higher Man. There have been many Higher Men in history: Confucius, Christ, Shakespeare, to name just a few. They are Higher Men because they have created principles – horizons of meaning – which survive after they are gone and still influence various peoples today. But note the phrase, “various peoples.” Not everybody follows Confucius, not everybody follows Christ, and not everybody follows Shakespeare. They are Higher Men because their horizons of meaning cut across time but not necessarily across space, i.e., do not influence all peoples. Also, such Higher Men attribute their insights to something outside themselves: Ancestors, God, a Muse. The Overman overcomes these obstacles of time, space, and origin of creation: his creation of the ultimate horizon of meaning will influence all peoples in all times, and he will recognize that he is the sole creator of his horizon of meaning and no other. When a Higher Man overcomes these obstacles, then he becomes the Overman.

The creative force in the Overman is called Will-to-Power, and the Overman uses his Will-to-Power to create his own horizon of meaning, which overflows his self into an external creation. This external creation takes on a life on its own such that it overcomes the Overman himself and influences other Men without the Overman being there in person, like Zarathustra saying to his disciples at the Motley Cow that they lose him so that they can find themselves.[31] Thus, it is clear how the Overman and Will-to-Power are related. His Will-to-Power is not merely physical force, not a subjugation of the rabble, but a creative force which draws men to it as speaking to their soul, as a guide for their own search for what is competent in themselves. But it is a Will-to-Power which he also must obey, as mentioned earlier; says Stephen Donadio, For Nietzsche, the subordination of the “creature” element to the “creator” element in man represents a triumph of consciousness over actual (and often painful) experience, and it is therefore regarded as a form of liberation. Through consciousness the Nietzschean creator is able to free himself from subjection to blind impulse: he himself calls into being all that he is and he alone possess the power to command and give form to himself. Like Zarathustra, he has been struck by the knowledge that “whatever lives, obeys,” and that “he who cannot obey himself is commanded. That is the nature of living.”[32]

Of course, Nietzsche’s Overman can be grossly misunderstood such that people may think the Overman and his Will-to-Power is simply a strong man. This misunderstanding stems from Zarathustra’s contempt and nausea for the rabble and his stress of the future in his doctrine of the Overman and Will-to-Power. Break all the old tablets! But how can the Overman unite the fragments of man into a whole horizon of meaning if the Overman is contemptible of the past? What arises from such an unresolved contempt is the despot. Says Zarathustra, “A great despot might come along, a shrewd monster who, according to his pleasure and displeasure, might constrain and strain all that is past till it becomes a bridge to him, a harbinger and herald and cockcrow. This, however, is the other danger and what prompts my further pity: whoever is of the rabble, thinks back as far as the grandfather; with the grandfather, however, time ends.”[33] A contempt for the past is a contempt for time itself; doing so limits the Overman to only one direction, to the future simply. The doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same opens the Overman to the past as well as the future. The Overman’s Will-to-Power also wills horizons of meaning in the past because the past eternally recurs into the present and will recur into the future. But this self-same doctrine also orders the Overman’s Will-to-Power such that he does not fall into the trap of the despot: since his choices are eternally recurring, then his choices better be good ones, competent ones. The Eternal Recurrence of the Same thus becomes part of the song in which all of being and becoming arises into the living, becomes part of the command in which the Overman forms within himself, found in solitude. All of being resounds this song of the eternal recurrence; even Zarathustra’s animals resound this song, prompting Zarathustra, in the end of Part Three, to sing to Eternity, even loving it above his Wisdom.[34]

In the end of the Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra becomes the Overman, “glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains,”[35] which ends the development of Zarathustra from unheard hermit in the wilderness to teacher with disciples to Overman. In the beginning, Zarathustra tries to speak to the many and is ridiculed,[36] is only able to speak to a dead man,[37] then chooses to speak to a few at the Motley Cow,[38] then speaks to even more few at the blessed isles and on the ship traveling away from the blessed isles,[39] and finally hosts the higher men who seek him out in his domain, around his cave on top of the mountain.[40] Zarathustra would speak to each group of people and then would return to his cave to his solitude, in which his body would inform his soul. After a time he would return, or go under, back to people again to speak. In the final part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he gathers in his errand to find the source of the cry of distress the Higher Men into his cave, and he realizes that the cry of distress comes from the Higher Men.[41] The Higher Men, the best Men of the age, cannot overcome their melancholy, which is why they cry in distress for Zarathustra. Zarathustra, their teacher, unwittingly pities them, sending them to his cave. In pitying them, Zarathustra succumbs to the final sin with which the soothsayer says that he has come. In pitying them, the Higher Men do not realize that they need to lose Zarathustra in order to follow his teachings, and they begin to slip into the idolatrous mode of the Last Man, which they had mocked in the Ass Festival just the night before. In the morning, the Higher Men “had awakened and arranged themselves in a procession to meet Zarathustra and bid him good morning”[42] as if they were in procession to greet a king. They cannot overcome this all-too-human habit of idolatry, which the lion, who only greets him who overcomes himself, recognizes by roaring at the Higher Men, who disappear into the security of the cave. Zarathustra is higher than the Higher Men, and he finally overcomes his last obstacle to his final evolution to Overman: “Pity! Pity for the higher man! ...Well, then, that has had its time! My suffering and my pity for suffering – what does it matter? Am I concerned with happiness? I am concerned with my work.”[43] In overcoming his pity and the Last Man’s concern for happiness, Zarathustra is prepared to be a creator, without the secure trappings of mockery (like the Ugliest Man) or religion (like the Last Pope).

Beyond Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche refines the interplay of the artist as metaphysician and introduces the ideas of Dionysian and Apollonian. Says scholar Richard Schacht:

The word ‘Dionysian’ means: an urge to unity, a reaching out beyond personality, the everyday, society, reality, across the abyss of transitoriness: a passionate-painful overflowing into darker, fuller, more floating states....

The word ‘Apollinian’ means: the urge to perfect self-sufficiency, to the typical ‘individual,’ to all that simplifies, distinguishes, makes strong, clear, unambiguous, typical: freedom under the law.

The further development of art is as necessarily tied to these two natural artistic powers as the further development of man is to that between the sexes.[44]

The Dionysian power is the realization that reality is formless, vast, and meaningless, in which suffering, death, birth, and creation are one and the same. The Apollinian power is the need to create some horizon of meaning out of this vast, dark void in the form of the State, laws, and other creations of civilization. But the Dionysian acts upon the Apollinian when these creations seem to break down in suffering and death. But, like the Eastern concept of Ying and Yang, there can be no creation without suffering and death. Says the scholar Rose Pfeffer, “In order to experience the delight of creation, in order for the will to live to be eternally affirmed, there must also be the eternal pain of giving birth.”[45] Pain and life are inextricably linked, which Zarathustra declares in “The Drunken Song”:

In order for there to be joy, there must be woe; and the artist and art that can express this truth – for this is a truth, even in Nietzsche’s metaphysics that expresses meaninglessness – is the most powerful of artists.

As stated in the beginning of this paper, Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies describe two contrasting realities that produce, not surprisingly, two different views of the artist and what art is supposed to convey to the common man. For Hegel, the artist is believer who recognizes his relationship with the Absolute in art. For Nietzsche, the artist is creator who recognizes that there is no Absolute with which to have a relationship. But both Hegel and Nietzsche agree that the artist, in creating art, is striving to reform man, to reunify modern fragmented man, such that the artist is not only metaphysician but also meta-physician to ailing, common man by expressing why such metaphysical realities like suffering, finitude, mortality simply must be. For Hegel, suffering participates in Christ’s suffering; for Nietzsche, suffering is an intricate part of joy in living. Like Keat’s thought, “Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth,” suffering as a part of the human condition is a harsh truth; but it is a truth that contributes to the fragile beauty that is being human.

Abrams, M.H. et al, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5^th ed. Vol.2. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.

Desmond, William. Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics. New York: SUNY Press, 1986.

Donadio, Stephen. Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will. New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1978.

Hegel, G. W. F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Ed. J. N. Findlay. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971.

Hofstadter, Albert. “On Artistic Knowledge: A Study in Hegel’s Philosophy of Art.” Beyond Epistemology: New Studies in the Philosophy of Hegel. Ed. Frederick G. Weiss. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. 58-97.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Penguin, 1968.

Pfeffer, Rose. Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus. Cranbury, NJ: Associated Univ. Press, 1972.

Rosenstein, Leon. “Metaphysical Foundations of the Theories of Tragedy in Hegel and Nietzsche.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (Summer 1970): 521-33.

Shapiro, Gary. “Hegel’s Dialectic of Artistic Meaning.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35 (Fall 1976): 23-35.

Stambaugh, Joan. Nietzsche’s Thought of Eternal Return. Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972.

[1] William Coleridge, “Biographia Literaria,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5^th ed, 396.

[2] John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5^th ed, 823.

[3] G. W. F. Hegel, “Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind,” Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, 1-24.

[4] Ibid, 2.

[5] William Desmond, Art and the Absolute, xiii-xiv.

[6] Gary Shapiro, “Hegel’s Dialectic of Artistic Meaning,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35, 24.

[7] Leon Rosenstein, “Metaphysical Foundations of the Theories of Tragedy in Hegel and Nietzsche,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28, 522.

[8] Hegel, 295.

[9] Desmond, 42.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid, 43.

[13] Albert Hofstadter, “On Artistic Knowledge: A Study in Hegel’s Philosophy of Art,” Beyond Epistemology, 93.

[14] Ibid, 95.

[15] Hegel, 200.

[16] Rosenstein, 522.

[17] Desmond, 8.

[18] Ibid, 45.

[19] Hegel, 232.

[20] Hofstadter, 97.

[21] Rosenstein, 527.

[22] Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche’s Though of Eternal Return, 84.

[23] Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” The Portable Nietzsche, 146-147.

[24] Ibid, 198.

[25] Ibid, 211.

[26] Ibid, 129-130.

[27] Ibid, 124.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid, 126.

[30] Ibid, 311.

[31] Ibid, 190.

[32] Stephen Donadio, Nietzsche, Henry James, and the Artistic Will,188.

[33] Nietzsche, 314.

[34] Ibid, 343.

[35] Ibid, 439.

[36] Ibid, 128.

[37] Ibid, 132.

[38] Ibid, 140.

[39] Ibid, 264.

[40] Ibid, 354.

[41] Metaphorically, the Higher Men are fragments of the Overman, which Zarathustra collects in his cave. After the drunken song, in which Zarathustra calls for all the Higher Men to join him, and after night has passed, Zarathustra emerges from the cave like a newborn god, having united the fragments into a Whole Man, the Overman. In this way, the Fourth Part is an appropriate ending to Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

[42] Ibid, 438.

[43] Ibid, 439.

[44] Richard Schacht, Nietzsche, 509.

[45] Rose Pfeffer, Nietzsche, Disciple of Dionysus, 203.

[46] Hegel, 436.