Justifying the world as an aesthetic phenomenon
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Date
12/2018Author
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Abstract
This article scrutinises one of the most challenging theses of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, that only as an aesthetic phenomenon can existence and the world be (or appear to be) ‘justified’. Through a close examination of the work's frequently masked revaluation of a series of Greek sources of thinking, not least its ‘inversion’ of both the metaphysics and the aesthetics of Plato's Republic, the article shows how the thesis of aesthetic ‘justification’ is caught up in a tension between Apolline and Dionysian interpretations, the first entailing a quasi-Homeric sense that the Olympians justify human existence by living a transfigured form of it themselves, the second involving a tragic insight into reality as itself the creative work of a ‘world-artist’, the latter allusively associated by Nietzsche with the philosophy of Heraclitus.
Citation
Halliwell , S 2018 , ' Justifying the world as an aesthetic phenomenon ' , Cambridge Classical Journal , vol. 64 , pp. 91-112 . https://doi.org/10.1017/S1750270518000064
Publication
Cambridge Classical Journal
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1750-2705Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Cambridge University Press. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1750270518000064
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