Life As Aesthetics?

The Wisdom of Silenus, Nietzsche & art

“For the past fortnight my mind and fingers have been working away like two lost souls… I am spending four to five hours a day practicing exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolandos, repeated notes, cadenzas, etc.). Ah! provided I don’t go mad, you may yet find an artist in me! Yes, an artist such as you desire and such as is needed today!”

-letter from Franz Liszt to Pierre Wolff, 2 May 1832

Franz Liszt was the archetypal Romantic genius. He may be the best pianist who ever lived, who ever will live. An international phenomenon, playboy, virtuoso, a spell-binding performer who reinvented his instrument and pulled forth from its keys music of such technical and artistic brilliance it still terrifies piano players today. Like Mozart and many others, he seemed possessed by something unnatural and superhuman. Liszt’s contemporary, the violinist Paganini, was so distressingly excellent a musician he was rumoured to have made a pact with the devil, and to have killed his mistress to use her intestines as a violin string. Their devotion to and obsession with their craft and the generation of art make them the rarest of men - those who, in Nietzsche’s words, justify the continuation of existence itself.

The ‘Wisdom of Silenus’ comes from a preserved Aristotelian fragment, wherein the intoxicated Silenus snaps at the Phrygian King Midas that life is a punishment, a hell which should be escaped.

It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live; and this is confirmed even by divine testimony. Pertinently to this they say that Midas, after hunting, asked his captive Silenus somewhat urgently, what was the most desirable thing among humankind. At first he could offer no response, and was obstinately silent. At length, when Midas would not stop plaguing him, he erupted with these words, though very unwillingly: 'you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature's excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.' It is plain therefore, that he declared the condition of the dead to be better than that of the living.

Silenus’ torment, being an immortal, is to be aware of the horror of life, and to be trapped within it for eternity. He tutors Dionysus, he is granted insight into the nature of reality through wine and he watches as the great wheel turns and turns again without end. For Schopenhauer the wisdom of Silenus is the truth of the world, that life is suffering, and consciousness is the awareness of unfulfilled desires and thus pain. But Nietzsche sees in the formulation the clearest grounds for Greek optimism. Affirming life, and overcoming the dismay that nature has gifted us a poison chalice of misery, the ancient Greeks instead decided to say yes to the world.

“The Olympian magic mountain now opens up, it were, and shows us its roots. The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to live at all they had to place in front of these things the resplendent, dream-born figures of the Olympians”

Only as an aesthetic phenomenon can life be justified, art provides the metaphysical solace to justify existing at all. So goes Nietzsche’s encapsulation of the Greek mindset in The Birth of Tragedy. Layering the superficial over the abyss is not weakness nor escapism, it is the recognition that profundity can come from form, shape, tone, colour, speed, harmony - in short the surface of the world.

Nietzsche’s philosophy of anti-nihilism, of life-as-joy, seems correct to me, but we must think through the implications that only the rarest kind of man can actually midwife the type of art needed to make life worth living. Not art as conscious striving, but the product of minds that should better be called aliens. For in truth, Chopin was an alien, Bernini was an alien, Alexander was an alien. These were souls not of the ordinary, mundane world. You might say that warfare is not art, but I believe any craft raised to a sufficient height of mastery and genius is a type of art, philosophically in that it helps to justify life. In fact it can under the right circumstances enhance life, and raise it up further towards the heavens. Hence Burckhardt’s provocative description: The State as a work of art. Is your life a work of art?

The inborn instincts that guide such people towards their ends are impossible to study, and almost inadmissible today when confronting democratic artistic pedagogy. Yet they remain the inner lights for great artists - impulses, daemons, muses, inspiration, the Holy Spirit, communication with the gods. At the far end is the brush stroke of madness and genius, imbuing those gifted enough with the ability to create something immortal.

If you’ve ever been so unlucky as to witness contemporary pupil or student reactions to Romeo and Juliet you’ll be aware of how limited a range of emotions they are capable of feeling. The ecstasy of love, of youthful passion, is bound up with death. In our culture of ‘normality’, of ‘have a normal one bro’ or ‘it’s not normal’, where is the room for being gripped by obsession and love? The young erotic power of the two lovers remakes their entire universe around them, violently, and their fate is tragic but ultimately justified. If you were seized by such overwhelming emotion, one that instantaneously rewired your whole physiology to one single end, one single person, then death is preferable to the despair of being separated. We need more depictions like this.

Most emotions today are so mediated, and consequently drained of vitality, that it would be healthy to see more Romeo and Juliet stories, more Tristan and Isoldes, more Anthony and Cleopatras, more Perseus and Andromedas. Love should be violent, bordering on madness. But perhaps as Heraclitus alludes to, the soul is a mixture of fire and water, and those souls which become too damp, too soggy, will die and return to the mud. Only fire ascends.