1. In Nietzsche's
philosophy of Art, the concept of ‘Beauty’ really does lie in the eye of the
beholder. For Nietzsche, man is the sole
source or origin of meaning in the world; that is, the world alone, or what we
would call ‘Nature’ is void of any meaning other than how man perceives and
comes to understand it. ‘Nature’ then is
a vast collection of chaos represented as stimuli that man encounters and
attempts to organize, thus creating meaning[1] . The concept of ‘Art’ then is, as Neitzsche
puts it, “not merely
an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement
to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.” The latter part of the quote notes an
interesting point: that Art is a tool invented by man as a means to understand
and thus conquer the natural world.
‘Art’ creates a second or symbolic world that allows for the discovery
of entirely new meaning for the same object or concept. Beauty, understood this way, is another one
of these concepts that man has invented to better organize and categorize the
world around him. Beauty, by these terms
is not an object in the world waiting to be stumbled upon, nor is Beauty a naturally occurring phenomenon[2] ; Beauty is
created in the mind, in the consciousness that is subjective perception,
through a process of creating meaning and understanding, thus further
conquering the world and its objects.
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