Make Your Life Your Art

A refreshing thought, courtesy of Friedrich Nietzsche:

“ … I am convinced that art is the highest task and the real metaphysical activity of this life …”

 - from the 1872 Introduction to The Birth of Tragedy

“ … art – and not morality – is established as the real metaphysical activity of man; in the book itself the suggestive proposition that the existence of the world is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon recurs several times.”

- from section 5 of the “new” 1886 Introduction to The Birth of Tragedy

“For this above all must be clear to us, as a cause of both humiliation and exultation, that the whole comedy of art is not in any way performed for our benefit, for our improvement and edification, and that we are to an even lesser extent the real creators of that world of art: but we may assume that we are already images and artistic projections for the true creator of that world and have our greatest dignity in our meaning as works of art – for only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified to eternity.”

- from chapter 5 of The Birth of Tragedy

Now, I’m not a Nietzschean scholar by any stretch of the imagination. But I am sensing a thread in this work, his first published book, written as a philologist and not a philosopher. Several of them, actually. The seeds of his philosophy seem to be here, especially in this thought: we have our greatest dignity in our meaning as works of art.

I like that. It coincides nicely with the direction I have been heading these past couple of weeks.