Nietzsche and Heidegger on the Origins of Aesthetics

In Heidegger’s otherwise extensive commentaries on Nietzsche, the early work The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1872) receives surprisingly little attention. Previous research has shown that Heidegger largely overlooks Nietzsche’s early attempts to think art beyond the limits of metaphysics. This article argues that The Birth of Tragedy also presents a reading of the origin of aesthetics, which in many crucial aspects is strikingly similar to Heidegger’s own account presented in his lecture course Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art (Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, winter semester 1936/37).

Both thinkers situate the origin of the aesthetics in the Socratic-Platonic opening of Western metaphysics. Both argue that from the start aesthetic theorizing captures art within a metaphysically determined mimetic paradigm, which covers over an element of disclosiveness identified by pre-Socratic approaches to art. Furthermore, both claim that the Socratic-Platonic paradigm has reached its limits in the modern world, and the thinking of art has to be reconfigured by overcoming its metaphysical determination and rethinking the pre-Socratic element suppressed by it.

This article offers a comparison of the similarities and difference of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s accounts of the history of aesthetics and argues that Heidegger’s reading is heavily prefigured by Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. As such this article aims at contributing to the widening appreciation of Nietzsche’s early work in the context of post-metaphysical aesthetics.