Throughout his writing career Nietzsche seems to have admired both the sciences and arts yet to have regarded them as opposed. In The Birth of Tragedy he proclaimed the superiority of the great dramatists over the “scientific” Socrates. Later, after separating from Wagner, he reversed himself, and in Human, All Too Human applauded the sciences while patronizing artists as naive and immature. Yet as he grew older, Nietzsche came increasingly to emphasize the limits of “truth,” seeing its pursuit as ascetic and life denying. The arts, by contrast, were almost always portrayed as beguiling, deceptive, and seductive, but seductive to life itself, and therefore friends of life, as the pursuit of truth was not.

This was an opposition which Nietzsche first confronted during adolescence. In my presentation I will concentrate on his years at Schulpforta and examine his devotion to music and poetry on the one hand and his fascination with scholarship on the other. A number of factors (the example of Manfred, his disenchantment with Christianity, his admiration for his professors, and a withering evaluation of his own talents and drive) all led him to decide on the pursuit of truth, not the arts, as his primary task. In his graduation speech he promised to dedicate himself exclusively to knowledge, a path he would pursue over much of his life.

This presentation will feature Schumann’s and Nietzsche’s piano music as well as excerpts from the first act of Tristan.

Mark as favourite