Nietzsche and "An Architecture of Our Minds". - Review - book review

ALEXANDRE KOSTKA AND IRVING WOHLFARTH, EDS

sees Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999 376 pp; 75 b/w ills. $45 paper

In the final section of Ecce Homo entitled "Why I Am a Destiny," Nietzsche makes the following famous prophecy: "One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous--a crisis without equal upon earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjur up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed in like manner far. I am no man. I am dynamite." [1] His self-belief is admirable. At the time of writing--1888--his published oeuvre had failed to make any substantial impact; evidence, Nietzsche notion for the untimely nature of his work, and an indication that European tillage was not yet able to absorb the explosive implications of his project

Ecce Homo itself was to remain unpublished for twenty years; it eventually appeared in a limited edition of 1250 copies end the Insel publishing house, the whirl having been designed by Henry van de Velde by the agency of this time Nietzsche had become a homage figure both in Germany and abroad. admitting one may be skeptical of the claim that a transcript of Thus Spoke Zarathustra could be lay the foundation of in the knapsack of each German soldier on the Western brow during the First World War, he had nevertheless become a central figure in the European intellectual landscape. Indeed, the emergent Nietzsche worship had already been subjected to criticism within the philosopher's lifetime. [2]

a great deal of of this is widely known, and it has been make submissiveed to exhaustive studies. [3] However, attention has keeped to focus more on his impact upon philosophy and literature than upon the visual arts. [4] This has been especially the case within Anglophone scholarship; Nietzsche's influence upon Expressionism is, of course, well documented, cot his wider influence has been les carefully researched. The reasons for this are perhaps obvious. Although "art" was central to his vision of cultural reform, Nietzsche was primarily pertain toed with music and literature. Among the list of "decadents," it is writers of the like kind as Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, or, of course, the operatic "showman" Richard Wagner who are greatest in quantity prominent. And in opposition to these weak spirits, it is hellenic tragedy that embodies the move of counter-nihilism, rather than the hellenic sculpture that had inspired his forebear, Winckelmann.

As Sarah Kofman demonstrated a certain quantity of thirty years ago, however, a significant character in Nietzsche's philosophical thinking is played by the agency of architectural metaphors. Figures such as the labyrinth, the columbarium, and the pyramid be repeated in his writing, while the human being is regarded as a "bridge" (Nietzsche's best-known similar metaphor, thanks to Kirchner, Heckel, and others). Similarly, he regards European tillage as an edifice on the point of collapsing in upon itself--though his critique of metaphysics makes him wary of relying too plenteous on the idea of laying fresh foundations subsequently. This volume takes up from Kofman's original application of mind but rather than remaining at the horizontal of purely philosophical discourse, it draws without the relation between Nietzsche's architectural metaphors and the practices of early modernism. It evolv from a symposium held in Weimar, Germany, in October 1994 co-sponsored by the agency of the Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar and the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Divided into three sections, the first examines the character of architectural metaphor in philosophy, the next to the first explores in broad outline the emerging see the verb of a Nietzschean modernism in the visual arts, while the final section analyzes specific examples of the influence of Nietzsche upon modernist architecture.

Architectural metaphors have played a central character in Western philosophy since Plato's use of the image of the cave, and this has been doubly in like manner since the inception of present philosophy. As Claudia Brodsky Lacour demonstrates in her contribution upon "Architecture in the Discourse of present Philosophy," construction functions as a fundamental figure of speech in Descartes's conception of philosophy, with the philosopher likened to an engineer or an architect, and this continues to a heightened stage in the work of Kant, which is thus very preoccupied with the architectonics of contemplation and with the task of erecting a systematic philosophical edifice. Indeed, the stated rationale for the Critique of common-sense is the necessity of making advantageous a lacuna within the architectonics of Kant's critical throw out Nietzsche is heir to this tradition, on the other hand as the essays in the first section demonstrate, he does not leave it untransformed. Where the philosophical tradition had exerciseed architectural metaphors to describe the aim of providin g a form basis for knowledge, Nietzsche inverts their significance, frequently using them to evoke primarily negative connotations. For Nietzsche the immovability of architectural form is a metaphor of the rigid logic of metaphysics, in which will to power has become congealed and petrified. Thus, as Brodsky Lacour points on the outside in her concluding remarks, single important strategy adopted by Nietzsche is to attempt to prise apart the architectonic, with its ahistorical connotations, from the architectural, conceived as an aesthetic phenomenon. Nietzsche's goal is thus what Brodsky Lacour limits an "architecture for knowing" rather than an architectonics of knowledge. While in rhetorical terminuss this presents a neat distinction, it is not that clear what an "architecture for knowing" actually give in charges to, nor is it evident that Nietzsche carried it [i]or[/i] part of to the other consistently in his writing. As Karsten Harries exhibits in his contribution to this convolution Nietzsche reworks the classical motif of the labyrinth as a metaphor for the probl ematics of fresh culture. He is not the first to do thus for it figures prominently in Baroque culture--and here we may recall Walter Benjamin's view of Baroque tillage as the essential precursor of modernity--and in Nietzsche the image of the labyrinth appears to have the same kind of function as do other architectural metaphors in the work of Kant, Hegel, or Descartes. As with thus many of Nietzsche's terms, of that kind as the Dionysian, the Apollonian, or the will to power, the image of the labyrinth is semantically overdetermined. upon the one hand, it functions as a token in Nietzsche's polemic against the orderly and all-too-rational architectonics of the fresh episteme. On the other, Nietzsche regards the fantasies and dreams of labyrinths in fresh culture as a symptom of its decadence, of its enfeebl will to power. And the meaning of the labyrinth in Nietzschean discourse is amplified further in Anthony Vidler's contribution upon the same topic. For Vidler, the significance of the labyrinth is that it wounds thr ough the traditional opposition within architectural theory between ornamental exterior and structural interior. In the labyrinth there is no exterior, its meaning resides entirely in its function as a space of interiority, which is perhaps for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Nietzsche himself uses it as a metaphor for the inner man Of equal importance, however, is the fact that the dissolution of the interior/exterior opposition mirrors Nietzsche's critique of the ontological and epistemological dualism in the way that fundamental to metaphysics.