On Nietzsche. The philosopher as artist By Miguel Morey

The purpose of these sessions is to draw a diagonal through the work of Nietzsche, taking into consideration the importance he attached to art and to the relationship between art and thought. For our starting point we take the issues that occupy him in his early work, The Birth of Tragedy – his youthful Wagnerianism, the contrast between Apollo and Dionysus, plastic arts and music, his claim for an artistic metaphysics, etc. – and others related to the same period (On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, The Book of the Philosopher, especially the passages in which art is seen as a form of knowledge and the figure of the philosopher-artist as someone for whom ‘inventing is to know and knowing to invent’, etc.).

The second session will be devoted to the way these issues are formulated in his late works, which could be considered to culminate in the experimentalism and perspectivism embodied in The Gay Science, whose programmatic point of departure is to be found in aphorism 54.