The Journal of Nietzsche Studies

Nietzsche and Kant on Aesthetics and Anthropology is the third of a three-volume collection exploring Nietzsche’s relationship to the Kantian legacy in philosophy. This volume examines his relationship to Kant’s aesthetic and anthropological views, focusing on the traces of Kant’s third Critique and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View that can be found in Nietzsche’s published and unpublished works. In this review, I offer a summary of each of its chapters, with some brief commentary, and underscore its major themes, contributions, and omissions.

In their introduction, Maria Branco and Katia Hay signal that the scope of this volume goes well beyond a strict understanding of aesthetics as the evaluation of works of art. They highlight several of its broader themes, such as the nature and validity of reflective judgments, Nietzsche’s transformation of Kant’s notions of the beautiful and the sublime, the role of pleasure in aesthetic judgments, the paradox of genius, the relationship between reason and aesthetic experience, and the prospects of an improved human situation. A close reading brings other themes to light, such as the role that conflict or struggle plays in the moral and aesthetic life, the perspectives of artist and spectator, and the relationship between the human individual and the species, as well as more existential themes like the reconstruction of human subjecthood, dignity, and meaningful living in response to the loss of their traditional grounding in the wake of Kant’s critical project. [End Page 290]

Herman Siemens opens the book with an essay on Nietzsche’s comparison, in UM, of the problem of originality in cultural development with the problem of producing a genuinely original work of art given our inescapable openness to traditional values, norms, and practices. Siemens interprets Nietzsche as transforming Kant’s model of “creative succession,” where originality is inspired by an exemplar yet still rule governed (since succession entails imitation in Kant’s view), into a model of “agonal mimesis” wherein the exemplar provokes the would-be genius to surpass tradition, thereby creating a new rule for art.

However, Siemens defends this reconstruction of Nietzsche’s view using two passages from the Nachlass of the 1880s rather than UM itself. As such, it remains unclear whether Nietzsche’s treatment of the problem of originality in UM should be construed similarly. Given the large amount of subject matter covered over the course of this chapter, it is equally difficult to determine whether Nietzsche’s own relationship with Kant on the problem of originality was merely coincidental or its own case of agonal mimesis. Nevertheless, Siemens offers a novel and engaging account of agonal mimesis, its role in Nietzsche’s aesthetic views, and its mediation of his relationship to the Kantian legacy.

Ekaterina Poljakova’s essay turns on the question, raised by Kant and Nietzsche, of whether it is possible to live a meaningful life in a world of pervasive illusion. According to Poljakova, Kant sees artistic practice as evidence of our inability to attain the truth of the world as it really is. In contrast, Nietzsche sees artistic practice as pushing us beyond the category of truth altogether. She traces the evolution of Nietzsche’s thought from BT, where he sees art as a way of justifying the world, to GS, where he sees it as a way of making the world bearable (GS 107), perhaps even beautiful. Considering the last possibility, a discussion of Nietzsche’s notion of amor fati (GS 276) is conspicuously absent here.

Poljakova then moves quickly, and without much textual support, to defend the view that Nietzsche’s answer to the question of how it is possible to live in illusion can be found in his notion of tragic knowledge, a condition arising from the...