Nietzsche on art as the good will to appearance
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Nietzsche makes a number of remarks that suggest that he thinks that art and truth are antithetical – indeed that he thinks that the value of art lies in its falsification of aspects of the world that would otherwise prove unbearable. ‘Truth is ugly,’ he says: ‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ But the argument of the present paper is that the falsification reading is unsustainable, and that if we attend to the notion of ‘appearance’ rather more attentively than Nietzsche himself always did, we can (a) read him as defending a plausible account of the relation between art and truth, rather than an unsustainable one, (b) recast the passages that have encouraged the falsification reading so that they lend support to the reading suggested here, and (c) show how the resultant account squares with, and indeed reinforces, Nietzsche's perspectivism.
DOI: 10.1111/phpr.70004
Author: Aaron Ridley
Institution: University of Southampton
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,900
OpenAlex ID: W4408564635