This post picks up on this post that commented on this part of Rick Visser's interview with Stephen David Ross over at Artrift called the Gift as Art.
If progress, profit and utility are the ethos of the market, then there is an ethical and aesthetic value to the ritual significance of exchange as gift. This aesthetic can be seen as destabilizing the market ethos that has triumphed in the Australia of the 21st century.The aesthetic expresses an alternative form of civilization that welds together an inclination towards non calculating enjoyment, an ethics of expenditure of material goods and sensations that stands in opposition to the useful.
In the 11th part of the interview Stephen David Ross says:
"We may read Nietzsche as opening the possibility, foreclosed from the beginning in the quarrel between art and philosophy, that art is the highest way. Or we may read him to open the possibility, present for us from the beginning, that the diaphora is not an opposition, undermining the idea of the highest way. Poetry, art, do not order being from high to low, do not order representation or experience, but cherish every nuance, every detail, every loss and every gain, perhaps as a mother cherishes every gesture of her child, perhaps in a more masculine way. Perhaps. Art and poetry show us, perhaps, that cherishment is possible for those who are not mothers, that maternal care extends beyond the child and mother, that nature everywhere, and humanity everywhere, may cherish and may be cherished, together with loss, with sacrifice, aware as Hegel may not be of its contamination (pp.163-164).”
I had read him as highlighting the difference between art and science and as suggesting we look at the world through the eyes of art, and not those of a positivist science. Art was also the countermovement to nihilism and the ascetic ideal and it preserves the political and ethical thrust of a radical critique of values, thanks to the transvaluation of values.
Nietzsche's aestheticism highlights the Dionysian affirmation of life against a Socratic rationality" that is against our bodily instincts and a Christian religion (a reactive religion of ressentiment and bad conscience) that is hostile to life.
The Dionysian affirmation of life counterbalances the interpretation of the will to power as a Hobbesian-like play of forces that bring about domination and mastery (over nature, persons, and things) with one that recognizes and affirms forms of otherness through an aesthetic model of subjectivity of giving style to one's character.
Stephen's conception 'cherish' is a long way from Nietzsche's Stoic harshess and tragic view of life. Nietzsche's mater morality would oppose cherish as a virtue as being part of a slave morality.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 19, 2004 11:42 PM | TrackBack