When Joseph Beuys declared, in the 1970s, that everyone is an artist, he effectively meant that anything can be art—a proposition made possible though the particular history of art to which Beuys himself contributed, but which would have been unthinkable a century earlier, when, in his 1873 opuscule On Truth and Lie from an Extra-Moral Point of View, Nietzsche declared that we are all artists. Obviously, Nietzsche did not and could not have meant that we are all artists in the received sense of that term, but that certain activities, which define us as a species, are, abstractly considered, best understood as artistic. We are poets through the mere fact that language as such is metaphorical. This thesis required as radical a reconsideration of language as Beuys’s did of art, with the difference that whereas Beuys’s thought fit into a widespread pattern of artistic revolution, Nietzsche’s was more or less original with him. His thesis was that the initial impulse of language is to make metaphors, which means that in its initial phase language is poetry. Metaphor gives rise to language, rather than being something language is merely capable of—an embellishment of speech, or speech used ornamentally.
Nietzsche was of his time in thinking of language from the perspective of vocabulary rather than grammar, and his formulations were initially paradoxical: “All expressions are metaphors” flies in the face of the fact that “metaphorical” presupposes “literal,” hence if everything is metaphorical, nothing is literal, and so nothing is metaphorical either. His genius was to have introduced implied temporal indices: what we call literal was once metaphorical but its poetical origins have been forgotten and it has become stale and used. Nietzsche even felt this way about his own “written and painted” thoughts. In Beyond Good and Evil, he wrote:
Not long ago you were so variegated, young and malicious, so full of thorns and secret spices, that you made me sneeze and laugh—and now? You have already doffed your novelty, and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths, so immortal do they look, so pathetically honest, so tedious. (296)
The antonym of “true” for him is not “false” but “fresh,” and the criteria are aesthetic—“young and malicious” against “honest and tedious.” There is no semantical difference, and both the true and new are simply “lies”—Nietzsche’s rather incendiary assessment of metaphor, fresh or stale. There is no effort to explain how things become true—no “genealogy” of truth of the sort Bernard Williams attempted to write before his recent death, according to which telling the truth is part of what holds society together.
Why lies? The answer is that Nietzsche thinks we don’t know what really happens in the body when we have an “idea”—he uses the classical term of modern epistemology, according to which ideas are mental representations. There is a “nervous impulse” that gets translated into an “idea”—he says “picture” or “image,” which he counts as itself a metaphor for the nervous impulse. Perhaps the idea is thought of as a metaphor because the relationship between it and the subjacent nervous impulse is thought of by him as translational, but it is a reckless step in his case, since nobody knew then, as nobody knows now, what the relationship is between psychology and physiology. It seems a strange basis for calling us “artists,” but that is his basis; quoting from his 1873 text: “A nerve stimulus is first translated into a picture. First metaphor. The picture is transformed once again into a sound! Second metaphor.” It is this that makes Nietzsche at once so seductive and infuriating as a writer, giving us handsome philosophical compliments—“You are all artists!”—that turn out to be high-flown redescriptions of quite ordinary processes: in the present case certain hard-wired neurological processes that take place when we undergo perceptual experiences that in no obvious way resemble the neurological processes that underlie them. In part, it is this in which our being artists consists. He is interested in the stream of experience in which the “dream” of conscious life consists and in the fact that it is an epiphenomenon, something that merely accompanies the underlying shuttle of ionic interchange at the neurophysiological level. It relates to reality the way fiction does.
What are the consequence for ethics of this aestheticized picture of human existence? My sense is that the answer must be that there can be no consequences. Ethics is part of life, or part of the dream, since Nietzsche leaves us no internal basis for discriminating one part from another in point of truth or reality. Though he may say that the only values he recognize are aesthetic, in truth we have already, however it has happened, woven all other sorts of values into the fabric of life, and we have allowed ourselves no standpoint for their removal. There are philosophies in which values are noncognitive, but Nietzsche has a noncognitivist account of cognition, hence no way of segregating any part of the fabric from any other. If everything is a lie, it is no criticism of morality that it is a lie. True, if we accept the picture that life is a work of art of which we are the creators, then full recognition of this yields the option of becoming better and better artists. But that is not the same thing as becoming better and better people. And it is difficult to see how to put this into action, since everything takes place beneath the threshold of consciousness—it does so for just the reason that the sources of consciousness are outside consciousness—and there are no entry points for us as conscious beings below the threshold of what makes us conscious. Whatever we are capable of doing must be within consciousness—within the dream—and presumably we are doing that already. So we cannot really get better at what we do. The kind of artist we have to be for Nietzsche’s aesthetic metaphysics to function leaves no real room for improvement. But that is the price of his inflationist definition of being artists. It is the metaphorical use that Locke appealed to when he asked, rhetorically, “Whence comes [the mind] by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety?” Nietzsche speaks of “forgetting that [we ourselves are] artistically creating subjects.” This is not something any of us have forgotten. We would never have known it had Nietzsche not told it to us. It could never have been something we would have known without him.
In the final paragraph of his text, however, Nietzsche somewhat withdraws the compliment in favor of singling out the artist as a type—the Intuitive Man—who stands “side by side with another type—The Rational Man.” The former counts as real “only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty.” Again, this would not be something known to the person of whom it is true. It is a drive of which the person who possesses it is essentially unaware. Nietzsche projects a theory to the effect that when, under rare and favorable conditions, the Intuitive Man prevails, then “a culture can take shape and art’s mastery over life be established.” He thinks this may have happened in ancient Greece. And he conjectures, “Neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothes, nor the clay jugs give evidence of having been invented because of a pressing need.” This is a fascinating idea, that there is an aesthetic supplement superimposed on the practical solutions in which a culture consists, when a certain human type prevails. All cultures need houses, garments, vessels, but these become art just when the conditions of life are mastered and something more, beauty, for example, is wanted. He might have added that all cultures need an ethics as well but that there is an artistic mode of moral life that takes the form, say, of a sort of courtesy in certain cultures. Nietzsche was a cultural critic, and my sense is that he felt that the rational, practical type of human held ascendancy rather than the artistic type: hence his shrillness in certain of his scarier texts. Here I think he himself forgot the difference between lies in the moral and in the extra-moral sense of his text. His famous moral passages are self-conscious lies, through and through.