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Life as Art
 Life as Art

Aesthetics and the Creation ofSelf

Zachary Simpson

LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lallham • BOlilder • New York· Toronlo • Plymouth, UK
Published by Lexington Books
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com

10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

Copyright © 2012 by Lexington Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Simpson, Zachary, 1979–
Life as art : aesthetics and the creation of self / Zachary Simpson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-7391-6870-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-7391-7931-4 (electronic)
1. Life. 2. Aesthetics. I. Title.
BD435.S567 2012
111'.85—dc23 2012029434

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Part I Introducing Life as Art 1
1 The Path Ahead 3
2 Dandyism and Life is Art 15
3 Nietzsche’s Ideal Types 27

Part II Resistance 63
4 Theodor Adorno on Negative Thinking and Utopia 65
5 Herbert Marcuse and the Artful Individual 95

Part III Affirmation 125

6 Martin Heidegger and Poetic Thinking 127
7 Merleau-Ponty and Marion on the Thought of Being 159

Part IV Creation 205

8 Albert Camus on the Life Artist 207
9 Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence 237

10 Life as Art 283

Further Suggested Reading 291

Selected Bibliography 293
Index 299

v
 Acknowledgments
This project, owing both to its long gestation time and the amount of work
required for its completion, accumulated innumerable debts which will likely
never be fully repaid. Without my friends, mentors, and parents, and their
unending love, support, and humor, this project would not have been possible.
Though insufficient, I can only thank the following people for their
companionship and support in the years which preceded and surrounded my
work on life as art:
Tad Beckman, with whom the idea for life as art was born in countless
conversations and in the living example he has given. There is hardly a page in
what follows which Tad has not influenced in some way.
Philip Clayton, whose tutelage, mentorship, and friendship have been
invaluable. Philip has pushed me to become a better writer, scholar, and
professional, and, most importantly, has shown me on a daily basis how to be a
better person.
My mother, Pam Simpson, whose unending love and support have allowed
me to see that life itself could be artful.
My father, Gary Simpson, who showed me that the world was more
complicated than we allowed, and that truth is what matters.
My friends and family: Gary and Kelsie Grubitz, Shaun Spreacker, Ben
O’Donnell, Keith Basham, Paul Manning, Brent Voorhees, Richard Miller,
Abby Parish, my extended family, and many others, whose humor and love
made this project a joy and a privilege.
Many other conversation partners were called upon during this project.
Roland Faber gave valuable comments during all phases of the project. Jason
McMartin, as always, gave invaluable feedback on my various ramblings.
Lindsay MacDonald continually pushed me to see the value in living poetically
when the idea for life as art was hatched. Conversations with Owen Ware helped
frame this project in its initial stages. And the mentorship of both Eleanor
Sullivan and Alan Hawkins planted the seeds of speculation which took root in
this project.
vii
viii Acknowledgments

Though she did not directly oversee any of the work which follows, this
project could not have been completed without the generosity and time allowed
by Professor Sarah Coakley.
Financial assistance for completion of my dissertation, from which this
book is derived, was given by Harvard University and Claremont Graduate
University, to whom I am incredibly thankful.
The opening poem of chapter 6, “Sunset at Twin Lake,” appears courtesy of
Anita Endreeze, whose new book of short stories, Butterfly Moon, will be
published in 2012 by the University of Arizona press. Her previous books
include At the Helm of Twilight (Broken Moon Press, 1992) and Throwing Fire
at the Sun, Water at the Moon (University of Arizona Press, 2000). Joy Harjo’s
poem, “Eagle Lake” (in chapter 6), also appears courtesy of Ms. Harjo.
This book was also skillfully guided by Jana Hodges-Kluck, an editor at
Lexington Books, who contributed support, enthusiasm, and an awareness for
the book’s scope and limitations. Her expertise was most appreciated.
Finally, my partner and true artist of living, Kenzie, who gave this project
meaning, shape, and what little beauty it may have. Your patience, love, and
intellect were a guide to every word I wrote. May we both continue to create
together.
 Part I

Introducing Life as Art

 1

The Path Ahead

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in
which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my
church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I
can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself
to use—silence, exile and cunning.
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce’s “artist,” Stephen Daedalus, stands abreast the simultaneous im-
peratives of creation and resistance. On the one hand, and like many of us,
Daedalus refuses the institutions and ideas which have traditionally structured
Irish and Western life: the Church, family, or even a unified cultural and politi-
cal life. Daedalus’s refusal should also be read as an acknowledgment, though,
that such concepts and structures never held significance for him in anything
more than an instrumental sense of allowing him to become who he was. This is,
to recite a familiar trope, the absence which undergirds Daedalus’s life and pre-
cludes a return to a transcendent source of meaning which grounds the events
and spaces of the everyday.
On the other hand, Daedalus’s declaration in The Portrait of the Artist pos-
its a way out, though it is certainly not escape. He hopes to find a mode of ex-
pression, one situated at the cusp between life and art, which allows him to craft
something wholly new. To be sure, this act of creation relies on the resources
that are present, but, notably, it is also an individual one: it is to be fomented
within the “smithy of [his] soul,” the raw material which stands in need of artis-
tic shape and style. True to the Greek god Daedalus, the patron god of craftsmen
and techne, Stephen Daedalus fills the absence of his refusal with the positive
effort of his creation.
This book situates itself at the fold between absence and creation marked in
the youth of Stephen Daedalus. Like Joyce’s Daedalus and the naturalistic litera-
ture and existentialist philosophy and theology of the early twentieth century,

3
4 Chapter 1

there is a realization of absence, both historically and prescriptively: the loss of

any overarching meaning and the simultaneous demand to deny those structures
which systematically extinguish meaning for others. On the other side of the
fold, and as a host of books and contemporary practices will attest, 1 there is the
desire to create meaning or a new self, even when one realizes it is only tempo-
rary or even provisional.
I contend that Joyce was right in a more-than-literary sense to connect these
two features using Daedalus, an “artist” who had no ostensible skill with a
paintbrush, piano, or chisel. For, in the absence of any transcendent meaning,
one must, as Stephen does, create something out of oneself which gives meaning
not only to one’s own life, but to those implicated in the struggles one meets.
Bereft of traditional symbols, metaphors, and narratives, we find ourselves in
need of a reserve of inspiration which is malleable, perfectible, and, above all,
creative and resistant. This is, arguably, the nature of art.

Daedalus and those like him are instructive insomuch as they see the connec-
tions between acts of resistance and self-creation. And, moreover, they reveal
that such tasks can be illuminated by the nature of art and artistic creation.
Hence the sociological, existential, psychological, and even political question of
the loss of meaning and its potential recovery can be seen as a meditation on
artistic concerns. The imperative to resist and create becomes, for many, a ques-
tion of aesthetics.
Such an idea has a philosophical history. As early as the Romantic period in
Europe, philosophers began to apply aesthetic criterion to living, thinking, and
acting in a historical climate which found itself at the crossroads between feu-
dalism, the rise of nation-states, the decline of the centralized European Church,
and the onset of nationalist and democratic social movements. Instead of apply-
ing religious, scientific, or economic criteria to one’s life, these movements re-
lied upon aesthetic criteria to frame modes of being which were intended to
achieve a sense of beauty or decadence, separate from a burgeoning democratic
mass, or recover a nascent orientation to nature. While these movements were
disparate, they did hold one common tenet: the potential for seeing and trans-
forming one’s life into a work of art.
Shortly preceding this movement was an explosion of discourses on aesthet-
ics and the nature of the beautiful. Gottlieb Baumgarten’s use of the term “aes-
thetics” in 17502 brought the term into the philosophical lexicon, followed short-
ly by Kant’s publication of the seminal Third Critique. Shortly thereafter were
aesthetic treatises and letters published by Schiller, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, and even Kierkegaard’s notorious negative assessment of “the
aesthetic” in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. While each sought to ana-
lyze the nature of the beautiful and the role of the aesthetic, as a group they belie
a more general observation: in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
especially in German idealism, the “aesthetic” increasingly became a locus of
 The Path Ahead 5

philosophical concern alongside epistemology, metaphysics, and the role of sci-

ence.
These early forays into aesthetics, alongside a conscious effort to recover
the aesthetic traditions of the Greeks, Romans, Christian ascetics, and especially
aristocratic elites of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, 3 were channeled
into an array of discourses which attempted to apply aesthetic criterion to how
one lived and thought. What would it mean to reconfigure life in terms of the
considerations embodied in theoretical discussions of art or the nature of the
artist? How could art be brought to bear on the problems of the everyday? Could
art be deployed, as religion once had been, as a means of rediscovering meaning
in the world while also instigating social change? These were the questions
which drove not only inquiry into the nature of art but also its potential as an
autonomous reserve of symbols which could restructure individual and social
life.
There is something wholly unique to this mode of thinking. For, contrary to
other forms of existential speculation which took religious, cultural, economic,
scientific, or biological norms as the foundation upon which one would judge
how one lived and thought, aesthetes used a highly subjective and often conten-
tious medium—art—as the chief source and metaphor for existential theoriza-
tion. While religion, science, and even the political-economic spheres often have
either historical, cultural, or universal phenomena as their basis, art, as has been
largely defined since Kant, is often broadly construed as subjective, individual,
and even incommunicable. Thus the turn towards art and aesthetics as a poten-
tial fount of ethical wisdom is symptomatic of a general trend towards individu-
alization but also shows tendencies toward autonomy and resistance.
Given the plurality of voices which seek to claim an aesthetic theory of liv-
ing and thinking, the goal of this book is not to give an overview of the various
movements which have claimed art and the aesthetic as their inspiration since
Kant. Nor is it to even normatively designate what the “genuine” aesthetic or
ethical position may be: given both the nature of art itself and the historical exi-
gencies which have given rise to aesthetic theorization, such a move would be
unjustifiable. Rather, the task here is to examine a subset of aesthetic lineages
originating in the nineteenth century and to delineate a distinct and internally
coherent constructive position which uses aesthetic criterion as the chief re-
source for envisioning how one lives and thinks. This position will come to be
known as “life as art.” In the pages that follow, life as art will be seen as a way
of envisioning how one lives and thinks which is responsive to the manifold
crises in Western advanced society by proposing forms of action which are both
resistant and affirmative in their scope and implementation. Though grounded in
the historical-philosophical traditions of the past and a strict adherence to ac-
knowledging and modifying the present, life as art will emerge as a way in
which we can live and create into the future.

This book begins with the historical-philosophical recognition that, since Kant
and Hegel, one cannot consider art and aesthetics aside from an account of the
6 Chapter 1

limits and objects of rationality. For, in both Kant and Hegel, art performs the
critical role of linking the work of the imagination with the limits or unfolding
of reason, respectively. In a descriptive sense, this means that an account of aes-
thetics is dependent upon epistemology. In a more normative sense, however, if
one is to use aesthetic insights as the means by which one frames the terms for
living (as I propose), then the work of Kant and Hegel makes clear that such
reflection must in principle be constrained by an account of how one thinks.4
Life as art, if it takes seriously the challenge of Kant and Hegel, thus hangs on
the ability to construct meaningful and coherent syntheses of epistemology and
aesthetics.
In a negative sense, the demand that accounts of aesthetics be linked to
epistemology may reveal a fundamental weakness in aesthetic reflection or
works of art themselves: they may be incapable of existing on their own as sepa-
rate fields of discourse. More positively, however, this constant pairing signals a
potentially intrinsic relationship between thinking and the aesthetic which lies at
the heart of life as art. The development of an artful life may depend on the con-
structive deployment of aesthetics through processes of deliberation which may
themselves be influenced by aesthetic accounts. If life as art is to remain in
communication with its historical forebears, it must therefore do so not only by
applying aesthetic insights into how one lives, but, additionally, by constantly
clarifying the relationship between rationality, aesthetics, and ethics. The artful
life is only viable philosophically insomuch as it is a concerted effort to both
problematize and systematize how one thinks, acts, and senses the world.
Life as Art proceeds based on the hypothetical recognition that thinking,
acting, and aesthetics form a core theoretical basis for any coherent theory of life
as art. Furthermore, the dependence between aesthetics and thinking is always
mediated, either implicitly or explicitly, through the allegiance to a common
object of epistemological or aesthetic reflection. In critical theory (see part 2),
for example, both aesthetics and thinking are to bring forth objects which have
been made to suffer by dominating reason. The same can be said of “the world”
in the work of Martin Heidegger (see chapter 6). Yet this mediating “third term”
is often implicit and can only be said to be a useful heuristic, for, as the follow-
ing chapters show, aesthetics and thinking are often used conjointly as part of
the greater project of refashioning the terms under which one thinks and acts.
Thus, while each of the following analyses begins with the hypothesis that aes-
thetics and thinking are separate fields united by a common object, what is re-
vealed is actually a more nuanced and often ambiguous relationship between
thinking and the aesthetic such that both are so intertwined as to be
indissociable. Life as art, as will become evident, operates by continuously in-
tensifying the relationship between thinking and aesthetics and the ways in
which both can be brought to bear on the problems of acting, seeing, and creat-
ing.
The relationship between art and thinking is only one axis of reflection
which culminates in life as art. Another, and equally vital, dimension to life as
 The Path Ahead 7

art is the historical and religious situation in Western Europe which gives rise to
the intensification of aesthetic discourses. The works of Kant and Hegel were
fomented within the struggles of nascent nation-states and the emergence of
parliamentary democracies in Western Europe. This period of consolidation
gave way to colonial expansion, Victorianism, and the horrors of two World
Wars and the Holocaust. In their wake, the Cold War was marked by an increase
in the role of government in the lives of individuals and the expansion of tech-
nology, which brought the prospect of ecocide and nuclear annihilation. These
developments were alongside, or correlative with, the decline of the role of the
Church in Western Europe and the loss of traditional modes of material and reli-
gious existence. Even before Nietzsche’s proclamation of the Death of God, the
moral, cosmological, and religious anchors for Western culture of the preceding
fifteen hundred years were being eroded or simply replaced.
It is into this historical, cultural, and religious tumult that life as art has con-
sistently situated itself. The Greeks, Romans, and other cultures used aesthetic
reflection to inform modes of thought and conduct, and the artful life was a live
cultural option often adopted by elites, religious figures, or aesthetes. However,
life as art as it has emerged in Western European society is consistently formu-
lated as a response, if not a rejection, of dominant forms of living and thinking.
To this end, figures such as Nietzsche and Baudelaire reject the burgeoning de-
mocracies of nineteenth-century Europe, while in the twentieth century Adorno,
Heidegger, Marcuse, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault each reject the ways
in which humans, the earth, and mystery have been violated and oppressed by
world war, genocide, and more subtle tactics of normalization and oppression. If
life as art is to meaningfully craft forms of living and thinking in the present, it
must present live options for resistance and autonomy from dominant modes of
living, governing, and believing.
Thus, in addition to elucidating the relationship between aesthetics and
thinking and their commitment to particular objects of reflection, the analyses
which follow will examine the ways in which life as art is consistently formulat-
ed as a rejection of, and form of resistance to, dominant or administered reali-
ties. These are not separate analyses, however: the relationship between thinking
and aesthetics and the constructive proposals which emerge from such a rela-
tionship should in itself be a form of resistance and response. That is, a response
to the contemporary situation should be embedded within the philosophical ex-
amination of the nature of art as well as how one should think. Taken together,
they should propose forms of living, being, and thinking which are not only
“aesthetic,” but are equally capable of formulating alternative modes of exist-
ence in relation to the realities of the present.
There is a second dimension to the historical situation in which life as art is
born. Contemporaneous with the injustices and horrors of the past two hundred
years is the loss of traditional forms of assigning meaning and significance to
one’s life. To be sure, life as art does not pose itself as the solution, much less as
any “solution” to the loss of meaning and the positive sensation of alienation
and anxiety in contemporary society. Yet, as before, life as art is a response to
8 Chapter 1

the manifold processes of alienation, nihilism, and objectification in contempo-

rary society. It does so not only through resistance, however; in a positive sense,
it attempts to find ways to assign meaning and significance to everyday life
without seeking external sanction or justification. Life as art does so by found-
ing practices and modes of thought which are affirmative in nature: meaning is
(re)discovered by constructing ways of thinking and being which allow for an
openness to the world traditionally reserved for the religious. In doing so, life as
art can be seen as a therapeutic operation in which forms of meaning are re-
stored and integrated into a coherent way of living and thinking. Life as art
must, in the absence of any transcendent meaning, find ways of redeeming and
justifying the immanent world. This occurs, as will be seen, by attempting to
modify, and save, time and space.
In addition to being a form of resistance, then, life as art should also be seen
as a philosophical practice in which meaning can be realized and the world re-
stored or reformed. The analyses that follow will attempt to trace these two dis-
tinct and yet complementary threads within life as art: the demand for resistance
and the radical affirmation of immanence. In short, life as art will be seen as a
multifaceted concept which links theories of aesthetics and thinking in order to
formulate ways of living and thinking which are both negative and positive in
their deployment.

To be sure, there are other ways in which one might develop a concept of life as
art. In a historical-philosophical sense, the aestheticization of life has been ex-
amined—with mixed prospects—by numerous thinkers over the past one-
hundred fifty years. Many such treatments have dealt with the authors above,
though they are by no means exhaustive of those which might be thought of as
thinkers within “life as art.” Viewed from a more constructive perspective, other
lineages and philosophies have advanced normative conceptions of life as art.
The life-artist dandies of the nineteenth century, for example, saw a clear analo-
gy between their own lives and the work of art (see the following chapter). Or,
equally, the works of thinkers as diverse as George Bataille, Carl Jung, or Italo
Calvino may be seen as falling, depending on one’s definition, under the appel-
lation of life as art.
Rather than arbitrate what constitutes a legitimate (and therefore illegiti-
mate) position within life as art, I have elected here to construct what I deem to
be a coherent notion of life as art, one which draws upon common resources and
touches upon a set of overarching themes. This means, however, that the follow-
ing does not touch on the broader conception of life as art explored historically,
philosophically, and sociologically over the past one-hundred fifty years. There
are two reasons for this, one practical and one philosophical. Practically, survey-
ing the various ideas which may be construed as life as art, much less the sec-
ondary literature on such figures, is simply beyond the scope of one book. Philo-
sophically, insomuch as the following is an attempt at both a historical assess-
ment of the aesthetic lineage as well as the formulation of a constructive posi-
 The Path Ahead 9

tion within life as art, it relies only upon those resources which lend themselves
to areas of overlap, resonance, and complementarity. Negatively, this means that
Life as Art does not deal with many interesting, and perhaps even legitimate,
philosophies that might be seen as falling under the auspices of life as art.
In line with the above logic, the following also does not attempt to negotiate
the significant secondary literature associated each of the figures I examine be-
low. Again, such an undertaking would be both impractical and undesirable, as
it would largely distract from the clarity and insight offered by the thinkers
themselves. Those interested in a short list of recommended readings within life
as art are advised to review the appended guide for further reading at the end of
the book.

In the following pages I aim to mount a two-fold argument for life as art along
the lines indicated above. By tracing the dual development of theories of aes-
thetics and thinking through a series of contemporary philosophical and literary
lineages, I propose to both examine the development of “life as art” as an im-
plicit concept within philosophies from the past two-hundred years and to de-
velop a coherent concept of life as art which is resistant, affirmative, and bal-
anced in its deployment. Each of the following analyses, at least in the latter
sense, will contribute to an internally coherent position which aims to construct
one’s life along aesthetic guidelines.
The path to my position is prepared by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche,
who provides a guiding framework for the analyses which are to follow. By in-
troducing a series of “ideal types”5 throughout his work, Nietzsche creates the
fundamental language for life as art. The ideal type is one who blends science
(Wissenschaft) and art (Kunst) playfully in order to create a life which is affirm-
ative, honest, and liberated. Science, as a form of thinking, is seen as resistant
and deconstructive, freeing one from the strictures of herd morality and tradi-
tion; art is seen as the careful deployment of illusion which allows one to affirm
the past, future, and present. The artful life is therefore seen as one which
“dances” between science and art, renunciation and affirmation, in order to cre-
ate an ideal self (or selves).
The work of Nietzsche is instructive in a dual sense. First, it is a potent ex-
ample of how one may live artfully by conjoining thinking and aesthetics in or-
der to create a self which is both resistant and revelatory. Secondly, and more
important for my analysis, it provides the fundamental architectonic for the
analyses which are to follow. If, as is presumed here, the language, concepts,
and guiding metaphors of Nietzsche are resonant in the idea of life as art thereaf-
ter, then one can investigate life as art through the central intuitions of Nie-
tzsche. The themes explored after Nietzsche, and, indeed, the whole of life as
art, should therefore be seen as Nietzschean in inspiration, though contemporary
in content.
This does not mean, however, that life as art poses itself as a meditation on
Nietzsche or the ways in which the various authors included hereafter reflect on
Nietzsche. Though Nietzsche is fundamental to life as art insomuch as he estab-
10 Chapter 1

lishes a set of themes and concepts which are resonant thereafter, his work does
not sufficiently engage the nature of art, the concepts of justice and affirmation,
or the “art of living,” each of which is to become an important dimension of life
as art. Moreover, each of the authors included below, though they are inspired
by Nietzsche, stand or fall on their own. Nietzsche’s work is instrumental in
establishing certain themes and modes of reflection, but the tradition which fol-
lows him is not captive to either his conception of life as art or his intended
thematics. Critical theory, phenomenology, and others follow different impera-
tives and respond to different demands. Life as art thus takes shape through Nie-
tzsche, yet those thinkers which follow him chart their own course.
The first conceptual extension of Nietzsche’s thematics is found in the work
of critical theory and examined in chapters four and five. The work of Theodor
Adorno and Herbert Marcuse shows the ways in which an account of art and
aesthetics can be used to reinforce patterns of negative thinking which have as
their aim an awakening to the damaged object and resistance to an administered
reality. Just as art is negative, so too is thinking. Art serves to reinforce negative
thought, helping to engender a dissonance between a mutilated reality and a
metaphysically ideal unreality. In doing so, art also has a positive function: it
may help create a constructive image for a world in which humans are ultimate-
ly reconciled with themselves and others.
It is into this space that the work of Marcuse, in particular, is instructive.
Not only does Marcuse adopt Adorno’s aesthetics of negativity, but, largely be-
cause of his Marxism, he also adopts a theory of aesthetics-as-sensuality which
informs a more positive utopian vision of society in which physical, emotional,
and spiritual needs are met through the minimization of domination and repres-
sion. In his later works, this concept comes to be known as “the individu-
al/society as a work of art,” in which a constructed social reality or individual
life comes to mirror the negative and positive dimensions of a work of art. The
artful life is therefore one which not only “thinks” in a particular fashion, but is
also one which aims to create more just and pleasurable forms of life.
The work of critical theory is contrasted with part three, where Martin
Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Luc Marion are seen as collective-
ly formulating a concept of embodied openness and responsibility towards the
world, or, in the case of Marion, revelation. The work of Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty, in particular, reveals a deep affinity between poetry and thinking
such that the two terms can effectively be conjoined into “poetic thinking,” a
form of thinking which is in the service of Being and its happening. To this is
added Merleau-Ponty’s seminal account of the body in the role of perception, a
critical addendum which allows for the formulation of embodied poetic thinking,
a term which signifies the role of the body, through its various modalities, in
remaining open to the surrounding world of appearances.
An openness to the world implies a commitment to its appearance through
immanence, a desire to safeguard and observe whatever occurs. It is in this sense
that the work of phenomenology can be seen as a form of affirmation. And if, as
 The Path Ahead 11

Marion admits, one allows for the possibility of such an experience to exceed
the structures of conscious reflection, then it is also in this sense that phenome-
nology opens itself up to the possibility of revelation. As such, the conjunction
of art and thinking opens itself up to the affirmation of the immanent and a re-
discovery of a form of religious consciousness grounded in the realities of the
present.
Taken together, the work of critical theory and phenomenology will show
the ways in which art and thinking can be assimilated or conjoined for either
resistance or affirmation. These form the dual poles of life as art, gleaned from
the work of art itself: both its capacity for critical reflection and its presentation
of the vivid and sensory world. Just as the work of art possesses within itself
both refusal and affirmation, absence and creation, so too does the artful life.
Moreover, while critical theory and phenomenology should be seen as separate
fields with distinct objects of aesthetic reflection, they can also be seen collec-
tively as discourses which link normative concepts of thinking with an ethics
intended to create artful forms of living, seeing, and experiencing the world
through the essence of the work of art. The twin dimensions of life as art operate
through the constant intensification of the relationship between art, thinking, and
acting, such that they become conjoined into a unified mode of existing which
is, in itself, artful.
Just as the work of parts two and three can be seen as constituting the dual
poles of resistance and affirmation in life as art, the thought of Camus and Fou-
cault in part four is given as the aesthetic ethics in life as art. That is, Camus and
Foucault provide a synthetic framework showing the ways in which the work of
parts two and three can be actualized in daily life. For Camus, this takes the
form of a strategic conception of thinking and a creative conception of the work
of art. These facets of the aesthetic and thinking are borne out in a series of
character studies by Camus, wherein a number of ideal types manifest the aes-
thetic characteristics of creativity, solidarity, autonomy, and perfectionism in
their daily lives. Similarly, Foucault’s aesthetic ethics operates through a con-
stant problematization of the present and its possible sites of resistance and of-
fers possible ways of self-construction through the various modalities of daily
life. Taken together, the aesthetic ethics given by Camus and Foucault formu-
lates the techniques and modes of thought required to construct a self, or many
selves, devoted to living an artful life.
Through the formulation of both forms of aesthetic thinking and acting, life
as art will be seen as a unified movement devoted to the fabrication of a self
which is both resistant and affirmative. The artful life is one wherein acts of
resistance and affirmation, negativity and positivity, are concretized through the
various modalities of lived existence. Creating an artful life depends on the abil-
ity to attend with care to the daily practices of maintaining and sacralizing the
body, mind, earth, and others while also crafting a space for their realization.
Life as art is dependent on many moments—the failure of certain modes of
discourse and the rise of aesthetics, the formulation of forms of judgment which
link aesthetics and thinking, and the practice of an aesthetic way of life—but my
12 Chapter 1

aim in the following is to show the ways in which life as art can be seen both as
a historical-philosophical phenomenon and as a unified conception which links
the best aesthetic insights with ways of living which create liberated and mean-
ingful lives. This stronger conception of the artful life effectively distills the
disparate historical and philosophical lineages from which it is born by creating
a self which is greater than the sum of its parts. While anchored to the past, life
as art is best conceived as a mode of living, thinking, and seeing which is loyal
to the future and affirmative of the present.

As we will see in the following chapter, life as art comes with a qualification.
The relationship between art and life is analogical at best, where the essence of
one is used as the foundation for the other. This is poetically expressed in Nor-
man Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, where, upon watching his prodigal
brother, Paul, catch and reel-in a trophy trout, Norman surmises: “At that mo-
ment I knew, surely and clearly, that I was witnessing perfection. . . . My brother
stood before us, not on a bank of the big Blackfoot River, but suspended, above
the earth, free from all its laws, like a work of art. . . . And I knew just as surely,
just as clearly, that life is not a work of art, and that the moment could not last.”
For Maclean, especially after the violent death of his brother, he could not
see any identity between life and art. This carries two meanings. In one sense,
one cannot literally become a work of art—Paul’s artistry remains on the bank
of the river, or lost in memory. Even more so, the autonomy and perfection that
Norman attributes to art is withheld from us. Those who have attempted to liter-
ally become works of art, such as the dandies of the nineteenth century, became
mere presentational surfaces for the display of beauty and self-perfection. As
literal works of art, they were either a superficial gloss or sublimated arrogance.
In another sense, life itself does not obey the same laws as art: it is neither
perfectible nor beautiful. Like the rivers in which Norman and his brother fish,
life is ephemeral and beyond any moral designation. To fish is to at least tempo-
rarily delight in the fleeting and the mysterious. After Nietzsche, this is the af-
firmation to which we are resigned. And, as Maclean recognizes, this is the only
sense in which life can be as art.
Thus, one can be like a work of art, striving for autonomy and perfection,
but the likeness is always provisional. Life as art is therefore committed to the
continuous and strategic creation of selves which recognize and respond to the
absence of meaning and autonomy. This project is guaranteed neither success
nor a match with reality itself. But it is one which, as Maclean attests in his nov-
el, can be both sublime, and, perhaps, the best we can do: “One of life’s quiet
excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly
becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.”

Notes
 The Path Ahead 13

1. For those interested in other treatments of life as art and contemporary meta-
ethics, please see the appended suggestions for further reading at the end of the book.
2. Reginald Snell, “Introduction,” in On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series
of Letters, trans., Reginald Snell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 5.
3. See, for example, Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More
to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
4. And, at least in the case of Kant, how one acts.
5. For example, the tragic poet, free spirit, philosopher of the future, Zarathustra,
Dionysian artist, and übermensch.
 2

Dandyism and Life is Art

The concept of life as art as it has been introduced to this point presents an inter-
esting possibility: the construction of a life along artistic lines. While the discus-
sion hereafter will center primarily on the lines of philosophical speculation aris-
ing from Nietzsche and continuing through Foucault, this formulation should not
be seen as a singular phenomenon. Other variants of life as art have arisen his-
torically, many of them producing coherent and valid modes of existentializing a
keen awareness of art and the aesthetic.
While it is not the task of this book to present the various strains of life as
art since the early nineteenth century, it will be instructive to provide one histor-
ical example of a valid form of life as art, that of “dandyism” and its various
proponents in France and England in the 1800s. Dandyism provides a vital
touchstone for an examination of life as art, as it presents not only an interesting
means of examining the aesthetic impulse, but also shows the potential perils of
any aestheticization of how one lives. Arguably, the aesthetic imperatives seen
in Nietzsche, Adorno, Foucault and others are also seen in dandyism, which
attempts a complete synthesis between life and art, such that life becomes art.
Furthermore, it employs a conception of art which is neither political nor phe-
nomenological; instead, for dandies, “art” is tantamount to beauty, presentation,
and gloss. The aesthetic life thus becomes the surface upon which beauty can be
presented. Dandyism thus poses as a tempting—and yet misguided—lure within
life as art.

While generally attributed to Charles Baudelaire, dandyism is a minor historical

phenomenon which can trace itself to European aristocratic mores of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. For the next two-hundred years, it made period-
ic appearances as both a code of social conduct and as a subject of philosophical
scrutiny in figures such as Barbey D’Aurevilly, Charles Baudelaire, and Oscar
Wilde. In each instance, it was a mode of self-presentation which sought to cre-
ate a sense of superiority in the dandy himself, an effect which was to be
15
16 Chapter 2

achieved through scrupulous attention to appearance, dress, conduct, sexual ex-

ploits, intellectual affairs, and social standing. Barbey D’Aurevilly, biographer
of the nineteenth century English dandy George Brummell, defines this aesthetic
and existential impulse as follows:

Dandyism is social, human and intellectual. It is not a suit of clothes, walking

about by itself!. . . It is the particular way of wearing these clothes which con-
stitutes Dandyism. One may be a dandy in creased clothes. . . . Dandyism is a
complete theory of life. . . it is a way of existing.1

Dandyism not only sought to be transformative of one’s appearance: it sought to

alter one’s entire existence. As a mode of reflection on the self, dandyism sought
to present itself as a complete existential perspective from which one is to view
the self in relation to the world. And, given the emphasis on externality and ap-
pearance, the self was to be seen as a created artifact, a work of art. Reflecting
on Baudelaire’s form of dandyism, Ellen Moers offers that, “No detail of Baude-
laire’s existence was too trivial to be scrutinized in the light of principle; no
principle too profound to be expressed in habit and gesture. In this sense, for
him as for his numerous followers among the ‘aesthetes,’ life and art were
one.”2 In dandyism, the merging of life and art were to be achieved in the con-
summate artistic figure, the dandy, who saw himself as “an artifact to created ex
nihilo.”3
The dandy became a mode of self-presentation which modeled itself on the
work of art and the artist. Yet dandyism did not deliberately attempt to take its
cues from the art-world or from aesthetic theory: the dandy himself was to be a
work of art, judged on his own terms, apart from the criteria one applies to
works of art. Thus, as Bernard Howells notes, themes of the dandy as self-
subsistent and self-creating come to the fore: “the purpose of life is to produce
culture, a coherent, unified culture in which self is sustained and nourished and
irresolution pacified.”4 As the dandy is conceived as a work of art in his own
right, apart from other works of art, the criterion by which he is judged are his
own. The dandy is simultaneously an artist, the work of art, and art-critic. The
dandy stands or falls on whether or not he has lived up to his self-same criteria
for presentation and if he achieves the desired effect from his viewing audience.
“Effect,” of course, was precisely what the dandy sought to achieve. The
meticulous attention to self-presentation and unity of appearance which defined
the dandy were formed through rites and customs formulated to achieve maxi-
mum effect for a potential viewer. Here, as Charles Baudelaire remarks, the
dandy-as-showman becomes a resonant motif:

[T]o see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of
the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense
and impartial spirits [dandies] who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic
definitions. . . . He, the lover of life, may also be compared to a mirror as vast
as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every
 Dandyism and Life is Art 17

one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the
flowing grace of all the elements that go to compose life. It is an ego athirst for
the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life
itself, always inconstant and fleeting.5

Grace and the play of images on a reflective surface are the marks of the dandy,
who has so mastered presentation and appearance such that the crowd sees in the
dandy images of his own choosing with redoubled intensity and energy. This
image is a common one in dandyistic thinking, and is reflected triumphantly in
Oscar Wilde’s description of the dandy Dorian Gray:

Yes, the lad was premature. He was gathering his harvest while it was yet
spring. The pulse and passion of his youth were in him, but he was becoming
self-conscious. It was delightful to watch him. With his beautiful face, and his
beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at. It was no matter how it all ended, or
was destined to end. He was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a
play, whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one’s
sense of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses.6

Gray’s graceful and “beautiful soul” were an idealization of the form to be at-
tained by the self-conscious dandy. While the effect of such presentation was
primarily aimed at self-adulation and even narcissism, one cannot underestimate
the fact that the reflective surface of the dandy was also an ideal medium for the
apprehension of beauty, delicacy, and a sense of the youthful.
Despite the internal dynamics of the dandy, the core motivation of the dan-
dy remains his desire to be a multi-faceted medium of presentation and appear-
ance. In his foundational essay, “The Painter of the Modern Life,” devoted to the
graphic artist Constantin Guys, Baudelaire describes the dandy as “a man of the
whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and legiti-
mate reasons behind all its customs.” 7 At other times, Baudelaire refers to the
dandy as “the scholar.”8 Both themes pale in comparison, however, to the most
repetitive tenet in dandyistic literature, that of detachment and indifference.
Here, the scholarly man of the world effectively coalesces into an attitude of
“cold detachment,” wherein aristocratic mores meet the rigor of self-
presentation and self-awareness. As Baudelaire concludes, “The dandy is blasé,
or affects to be, as a matter of policy and class attitude.”9 Reflecting on an entire
tradition of indifference and “blasé” behavior, Ellen Moers posits the dandy as a
“creature perfect in externals and careless of anything below the surface, a man
dedicated solely to his own perfection through a ritual of taste.” 10 In the figure of
the dandy, indifference and detachment serve to reinforce the superiority and
social standing of the dandy himself at the expense of the viewer. By playing on
given aristocratic formulae for conduct and emphasizing them for effect, the
dandy effectively creates an impression upon the viewer that the dandy is, in
fact, superior and worthy of reverence. It is only as a work of art that the dandy
receives or attains value—the dandy’s worth is measured only inasmuch as the
18 Chapter 2

dandy can create the vivid impression of aristocratic, intellectual, and social
grace while also forcing the viewer, like a work of art, into detached apprecia-
tion.
The potency of such effects is persistently reinforced and re-integrated into
the dandy himself by a painstaking attention to detail tantamount to asceticism.
Here, the overarching goal of beauty takes primacy over the individual, such that
dandies have “a rigorous code of laws that all its subjects are strictly bound by,
however ardent and independent their individual characters may be. . . . These
beings have no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own
persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.”11 Dandyism can
only be judged on its own terms. These terms, as Baudelaire and others make
clear, are chiefly to achieve beauty and, secondarily, pleasure through the dis-
play of appearance. In this way, dandyism and its singular sacrifice begins to
approximate a type of narcissistic asceticism, where “one is also required to dis-
play a Spartan ability to suffer—‘the proud satisfaction of never oneself being
astonished.’”12
It is likely for this reason that dandyism is often equated with a type of mo-
nasticism, a theme which permeates Barbey d’Aurevilly and Baudelaire. Monas-
tics provide the ideal image—and possibly foil—for the dandy attentive to the
development of self and the production of an artistic existence. As Ellen Moers
remarks, “Thus the dandy’s ritual of the toilette, even his addiction to the dan-
gers and rigours of sport, can be seen as a form of dedication to control…The
dandy doctrine of elegance and originality is as demanding as the most rigorous
monastic rule.”13 Or, in the words of Eugene Sue, “dandyism is a ‘kind of broth-
erhood whose rules . . . must be as strictly observed as those of the Trappist or-
der.’”14 Of course, there are salient differences between the dandy and the monk.
Yet the image of the monk still provides an instructive foil and ideal for the
dandy. For, in the figure of the monk, one sees a powerful instance of discipline
and self-abnegation for the sake of a higher purpose. While dandyism clearly
denies the teleology of monasticism, it does attempt to maintain the pose of self-
regulation and control, where the self is the medium of a higher ideal (in this
case, an artistic one). The monastic/ascetic ideal therefore becomes both a
touchstone and a foil for the dandy.
The invokation of the monastic image is important in one other respect, as
dandyism was clearly invoked as an alternative mode of existence in relation to
the religious. Or, rather, dandyism was seen as the historical consequence of the
failure of common religion, and, thus, in the wake of such failure, the dandy
himself was to become the ballast of a new cult of the self. As Baudelaire plain-
ly states: “‘In truth, I was not completely wrong in considering dandyism a kind
of religion.’”15 The attention to self, the spiritualization of detail, the utter
sacralization of the everyday—all are hallmarks of the dandy, who imposes a
type of religious order on artistic virtues. Bernard Howells adds: “If dandyism
looms large in [Baudelaire], that is because it is linked with the collapse of all
these forms of belief and takes on the status of an alternative solipsistic myth,
 Dandyism and Life is Art 19

tragic in its colouring.” 16 On the other hand, the dandy himself can be seen as an
atheistic declaration, a post-Enlightenment statement on the independence of
humanity.17 In both instances, the dandy finds God in tatters and declares him-
self God. What is unmistakable is the fact that dandyism is intertwined with the
breach created by the secularization of France in the nineteenth century and the
intellectual Death of God. The dandy figures as a potent ideal-type who symbol-
izes both God’s death at the hands of aestheticism and intellectualism, as well as
an alternative form of self-production in its wake.
One should not be too hasty in proclaiming the Death of God as the sole
cause for dandyism, however. In another, equally poignant sense, the rise of
dandyism as an aristocratic code of self-conduct came about in direct relation to
the nascent democratic movements in nineteenth century Europe and the at-
tendant loss of distinction amongst the landed and wealthy classes. For figures
such as Baudelaire (and later, Nietzsche), the rise of democracy, “which spreads
everywhere and reduces everything to the same level,” signaled the end of a
nearly mythic European heroism, “submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last
traces of these remarkable myrmidons.”18 At other times, Baudelaire sees dandy-
ism as symbolizing “the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.” 19 Abundantly
clear in the work of Baudelaire, and other figures like d’Aurevilly and Beer-
bohm, is that dandyism is consistently conceived as a dual movement in re-
sponse to democracy: a movement to recover a lost aristocratic heroism, and a
simultaneous renunciation of the masses which are implicated in the democratic
social order. Umberto Eco, in his History of Beauty, summarizes the point well:

Confronted with the oppressiveness of the industrial world, the expansion of

the metropolis swarming with immense anonymous crowds, the appearance of
new classes whose urgent needs certainly did not include aesthetics, and of-
fended by the form of the new machines that stressed the pure functionality of
new materials, artists felt that their ideals were threatened and saw the demo-
cratic ideas that were gradually making headway as inimical. Thus they decided
to make themselves “different.”20

The dandy thus does not have to feign indifference: it is a cultural attitude borne
of a genuine despise of all that is common as well as the instrumentalization of
humanity posited in the nineteenth century.
These two motivations—the rejection of democracy and the decay of tradi-
tional European religion—form the guiding impetus behind dandyistic tracts of
the post-Romantic period. It is in this sense that dandyists often see the dandy as
not only an effete cultural impresario, but as a replacement type for the religious
or new democratic figure. “Art,” and the artistic functions of the dandy as a re-
flective aesthetic surface, are the generic concepts which are seen as replacing or
usurping the traditional role of religion and aristocracy in European society. In
summarizing this aspect of dandyistic writing, Howells avers, “What emerges
here is a portrait of Baudelaire as a death-of-God, death-of-history and death-of-
self writer in whom metaphysical tragedy is masked by the persistence of reli-
20 Chapter 2

gious references.”21 Thus, these religious references constitute “Baudelaire’s

awareness of art as a replacement for what has been lost.” 22 To be sure, “art” has
a decisive meaning in Baudelaire, namely that which is presented par excellence
by the dandy himself, as a living work of art. Because of this transition from
traditional religious ways of being to the aesthetic, Baudelaire and other
dandyistic writers not only saw the dandy as a presentative surface for the por-
trayal and production of beauty, but as a critical solution to the problems pre-
sented by nineteenth century European democratic experiment and (the failure
of) religion. The dandy served the dual function of heralding in a new age in
which art and the aesthetic effectively supplanted the democratic and the reli-
gious, as well as recalling a previous era in which social decadence and self-
presentation held a significant role in European social and political custom.
The move to see the dandy as a replacement type for the religious is fully
contiguous with another movement: the development of the dandy as an exten-
sion of the Kantian notion of “genius,” whereby the heroic dandy not only takes
on the qualities of a lost religion, but of the gifted artist. Baudelaire, in this spir-
it, cites the fact that Constantin Guys’ “genius” allows for a “self-confidence, a
wonderful ease of manner, and with them a politeness that emitted, like a prism,
every shade from the most cordial bonhomie to the most irreproachable brush-
off.”23 “Genius,” in the mind of the dandy, is not merely the ability to transform
the common into the aesthetic, to give free play to the imagination; it is also the
capacity for the new, an ability to remain original, to constantly present novel
presentational appearances which arouse interest. To this end, Barbey
d’Aurevilly is said to have mastered the art of originality, 24 and, as Baudelaire
remarks, such originality is always in the service of youthful expression: “But
genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now
with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that
enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” 25
Genius is the means by which the dandy “recaptures” the lost amazement of
childhood and allows him a new interpretation—and expression—of the world.
The dandy’s usurpation of the religious is crowned in his ability to engender
new masks and appearances which call upon, and awaken, a unique experience
of the world.
One should not read too much into the invocation of genius as a recurrent
trope in dandyistic texts, however. For, just as the genius-dandy is intent on
originality for the sake of recovery, such a device is predicated on the under-
standing that the world stands in constant need of human modification and beau-
tification. Such an aesthetics is oriented towards “perfection,”26 a human gloss
on an imperfect natural world. Or, as Baudelaire states, mirroring a more classi-
cal aesthetic: “Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and
calculation.”27 Beauty, in dandyistic writings of the time, was consistently
equated with artifice and human creation. All were, according to the aesthetic
ideal, called into the service of perfecting that which was given as imperfect.
 Dandyism and Life is Art 21

It is therefore unsurprising that, if the dandy is seen as an artist of presenta-

tion and appearance, he is also the preeminent surface of perfection and artistic
development. In the dandy, life is art. Stanton captures the point well: “A sym-
bol of modernity, ‘the transitory, the ephemeral, the contingent,’ the self-as-art
is the ‘tittilating envelope’ which alone makes the ‘divine gateau’ of absolute
beauty digestible on earth.”28 To Baudelaire, the dandy becomes the “painter-
poet,”29 a title which no doubt captures both the unity between artist and work of
art, but also the visual and evocative aspect of the dandy’s task. The painter-poet
operates so as to infuse the everyday material of existence with beauty. Cos-
tume, diet, presentation, and gestures are readily translated into the media with
which the dandy works, helping him to achieve one with his art. George Brum-
mel can thus be described as an individual where “art was one with his life. His
achievements in costume and manner were living masterpieces. . . ,”30 or, as
Baudelaire states in equally plain tones, “Man comes in the end to look like the
ideal image of himself.”31 The dandy can only mediate perfection, heroism, and
genius if the dandy himself is the work of art. What dandyism achieves, then, is
the absolute unity of art and artist, wherein the perfection and beauty demanded
in an ideal work of art is exemplified—and rationally constrained—by the dandy
himself.
This identity between artist and art emerges as the first true concept of “life
as art” in the West. Its central conception is based on the realization that perfec-
tion, rebellion against democracy, the supplanting of the religious, and genius,
can only be expressed in a figure who is constantly in the process of changing
his appearance and initiating an aesthetic response from viewers. Aesthetically,
this means that art cannot be evoked on its own as l’art pour l’art; rather, the
artistic processes of production and display are to be applied to life itself. Only
then can the dandy achieve his true goal to be a “living work of art” 32 who sees
his public life as the medium “to be ‘worked’ and modeled like a work of art in
order to transform it into a triumphant example of Beauty. Life was not to be
dedicated to art, art was to be applied to life. Life as Art.”33 Of course, with the
dandy “life as art” is seen in perhaps its most literal incarnation, as the direct
equivalence between life and art. This means that art not only determines the
form of one’s life (as will be pursued more later), but is the very aim of one’s
own existence.
Life as art for the dandy therefore means the literal application of methods
of artistry and the norms of art itself to one’s own life. Yet dandyism argues for
more than the application of aesthetics to one’s life: for dandyism, life was not
to be as art; rather, life was positively identified with art itself. In a positive
sense, this enforced an austere attention to the details of one’s life, an asceticism
of appearance, diet, manners, and relationships that showed tremendous self-
discipline and an astute awareness of self-formation after the Death of God. It
also voiced, if only implicitly, the realization that art was historically and aes-
thetically insufficient in itself; with the dandy, art was to be used, along with
22 Chapter 2

thinking, for the production of a self whose goals were both aesthetic and politi-
cal.34
Yet dandyism also holds within it a pernicious dimension, one which speaks
to the negative possibilities within life as art in general. For, just as art for the
dandy is seen as production and display, the life of the dandy can tend towards
an extreme artificiality. As Oscar Wilde states, “The first duty of life is to be as
artificial as possible.”35 For Wilde, this meant the ever-present need to create,
and live through, various masks.36 But these masks were not merely alternative
identities that required different attitudes and dispositions (as we will see in fol-
lowing chapters), they were a means of creating a sense of superiority and dis-
tance. As Stanton states, this “artificial” self was “designed to exact recognition
of superiority through an elaborate strategy of seduction.” 37 Presentation was not
only in the service of beauty-as-perfection, but was also explicitly intended to
create a reaction of inferiority within a viewer. The dandy was to be superior in
all respects, and his appearance was an outward display of his standing. “In the-
se sophisticated contests, the self, transformed into a system of signs that in-
cludes body, gesture, adornment, manners, and speech, gears its strategy to the
captivation of others and to the imposition of its superiority.” 38
Just as the dandy aims to create a sense of superiority, he simultaneously
feeds the “cult of the ego”39 which lies at the heart of dandyism itself. The
dandyistic impulse is wholly inward. Again, as Stanton summarizes,“[T]he dan-
dy was self-possessed in total indifference to the mass of humanity in his
path.”40 Indeed, the self-construction of the dandy employed a form of function-
al solipsism, a disregard for the presence, much less the value, of others, in any-
thing other than their being possible subjects for the dandy’s artistry. 41 And,
similarly, the “narcissistic” impulse of the dandy is also a form of moral quiet-
ism and inaction. “Wilde placed the critic, as elsewhere he placed the dandy,
among the elect who exist to be somebody but to do nothing. Art is his refuge
against action, for it is ‘through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield
ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.’”42 Here, it is the
narcissicism of the dandy which merges with a sense of superiority to form a
wholly passive moral ideal: the dandy’s purpose, above all, is to be a dandy. His
aesthetic ideal renounces any need for participation, whether it be political, so-
cial, or otherwise.
As a viable and historically coherent articulation of life as art, dandyism
therefore presents one of the chief dangers inherent to the aestheticization of
life. While it reveals an emerging identity between self and art as well as a rig-
orous self-discipline that demands the regulation of impulses and one’s daily
life, dandyism also represents the most tempting—and yet most dangerous—
aspect of life as art: the conversion of the self into a work of art. To a large ex-
tent, this danger is owing to a particular deficit in the aesthetics which inform
dandyism: an aesthetics built on aristocratic virtues and a perfectionism of taste
can only be quietistic or aristocratic. Furthermore, the account of thinking in
dandyism is also impoverished, as thinking is only in the service of an aesthetic
 Dandyism and Life is Art 23

ideal which seeks to create sensations of shock and inferiority within a viewer.
The dandyistic life is artful, but the artistic and epistemic reflection it employs is
limited in both scope and sophistication.
Arguably, this is owing to the identity that dandyism creates between the
artist and the work of art. In dandyism, life and thinking do not emulate the es-
sence of the work of art; they are art. In doing so, art can only be seen as a form
of presentation, appearance, and perfectionism, just as thinking can only be seen
as the strategic presentation of effects on the surface of the self. That is, the im-
poverished aesthetics and epistemology of dandyism is symptomatic of a larger
flaw: the equation of life with a work of art. The air of superiority and indiffer-
ence assumed by dandies is a direct consequence of the identity drawn between
artist and the work of art.
From these reflections it is clear that any productive concept of life as art
must distinguish the artist and the work of art. There must be an intrinsic auton-
omy for both the work of art and the life-artist. This desideratum preserves the
critical and non-assimilated function of art while at the same time allowing for a
richer conception of the artist. It is in this sense that dandyism can be cast as a
foil for the reflections which are to follow: while dandyism represents a viable
form of “life as art,” it fails to provide philosophically or ethically adequate
norms for how one is to live, see, and think. This deficit will be corrected in the
coming pages, where the life-artist lives according to the essential features of a
work of art. Yet, as will also be shown, the spectre of dandyism remains a live
option within life as art, and the artful life can only be lived and thought by con-
tinually returning to its shadow, if only to see what it may become.

For many, life as art may be seen as violent, narcissistic, superficial, or obses-
sive. And, to be sure, the aestheticization of life bears within it the potential for
these vices, as the dandies show all too well. As indicated in the introduction,
seeing one’s life as a work of art allows for multiple interpretations, any of
which, given the nature of art itself, are sanctioned. Thus, a priori, there is no
one position that must be staked out in life as art. Such a position would violate
the artistry that life as art demands. There are ways, however, of contending
with the potential vices in an aesthetic approach to life. The above analysis of
dandyism is one way of forestalling the potential equation of life and art, as any
position which directly equates life and art abandons the critical distance needed
within life as art.
There are other ways of formulating life as art, though, which are not as
literalistic as the dandies and yet can be seen as violent, irrationalistic, or hedon-
istic. (One can imagine, for example, the use of certain surrealist art—as does
George Bataille—as an inspiration for how to live as falling prey to the above
criticisms.) Thus, I willingly concede that what I propose in the following is not
the only way of seeing life as art. It is, rather, a mode of reflecting on life as art
which attempts to balance the irrationalist and rationalist elements within the
work of art. Any form of reflection on art, I would argue, which alights on one
24 Chapter 2

dimension of aesthetic experience, is bound to excess. What is needed, then, is a

notion of life as art which moderates the disparate elements within art through
careful processes of diagnosis, prescription, and a consideration for otherness.
Such a position may not be the only form of life as art to be found, but it is one
which avoids the excesses and deficiencies found in a more narrow conception
of life as art. Life as art, if it is to be responsible, creative, and goal-directed,
demands a richer conception of the nature of art as well as a form of thinking
which can unlock aesthetic meaning. These need to be married to forms of de-
ployment which are also tempered with a respect for otherness and the dualing
imperatives within art. It is this richer conception of aesthetics, and the forms of
analysis and ethics which move in its wake, that I propose in the following chap-
ters.
With this guiding conception in mind, in the following chapter I turn to
Friedrich Nietzsche, who provides a radical vision for the life-artist, one which
constructively pushes life as art past the Victorian ideals of the dandy and to-
wards a more tenable concept of how one lives and thinks negatively and af-
firmatively, balancing the heat of art with the coldness of knowledge.

Notes

1. J.A. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Of Dandyism and of George Brummell, trans., D. Ainslie

(Dent Publishing, 1897), 20.
2. Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking Press,
1960), 274, emphasis added.
3. Donna C Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnete Homme and the
Dandy in Seventeenth and Nineteenth Century French Literature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), 43.
4. Bernard Howells, Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism, and the Philosophy of
History (Oxford: LEGENDA Publishing, 1996), 25. Also see Moers, 17.
5. Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans., P.E. Charvet
(New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 400.
6. As quoted in Umberto Eco and Girolamo de Michelle, History of Beauty, trans.,
Alastair McEwen, ed., Umberto Eco (New York: Rizzoli, 2004), 335.
7. Baudelaire, 396-97.
8. Baudelaire, 381.
9. Baudelaire, 399.
10. Moers, 13.
11. Baudelaire, 419.
12. Richard Pine, The Dandy and the Herald: Manners, Mind and Morals from
Brummell to Durrell (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 20.
13. Moers, 282.
14. As quoted in Stanton, 195.
15. As quoted in Stanton, 216. Also see his quotation of Vigny on page 213, where
Vigny states that “Art is the modern religion, the modern spiritual belief.”
16. Howells, xix.
17. See, for example, Richard Pine, 62.
18. Baudelaire, 422.
 Dandyism and Life is Art 25

19. Baudelaire, 421.

20. Eco, 329-30.
21. Howells, xxviii.
22. Howells, xxviii.
23. Baudelaire, 377. Also see 368 and 376, especially, in relation to Delacroix’s ge-
nius.
24. See Stanton, 149.
25. Baudelaire, 398.
26. See Baudelaire, 365-66, where he asserts: “A good picture, faithful and worthy
of the dreams that gave it birth, must be created like a world. Just as the creation, as we
see it, is the result of several creations, the earlier ones always being completed by the
later, so a harmonically fashioned picture consists of a series of superimposed pictures,
each fresh surface giving added reality to the dream, and raising it by one degree towards
perfection.”
27. Baudelaire, 425. Also see 369 and 426, as well as Eco, 340.
28. Stanton, 182.
29. Baudelaire, 367.
30. Moers, 263.
31. Baudelaire, 391.
32. Stanton, 155.
33. Eco, 334.
34. I see Foucault’s positive citation of dandyism in his “What is Enlightenment?” in
this sense. For more on the relationship between Foucault and dandyism, see chapter 9.
35. As quoted by Ellen Moers, 301.
36. For Wilde on masks, see Pine, 51ff and 73.
37. Stanton, 30.
38. Stanton, 7.
39. Baudelaire, 420.
40. Stanton, 86.
41. See, for example, Howells, xvii, where he states: “The ‘esthetique de
l’individualisme’ is therefore always prone to the slide into the kind of irrationalism and
narcissism that dispenses with the need to communicate at all.”
42. Moers, 302.
 3

Nietzsche’s Ideal Types

Introduction
In one of his earliest works, Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche grants
that, “Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of
innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those mo-
ments hover about us.” In the midst of this, Nietzsche, rather than lamenting the
infrequency of such events, claims that such moments must be embraced, for
they are both rare and “intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real
life.”1 As with Norman MacLean above, Friedrich Nietzsche removes any
equivalence between life and art. We have, like Stephen Daedalus and even
MacLean’s characters, only fleeting moments of significance from which we
may forge something that resembles art, to listen to that which yearns to “speak”
within the “symphony” of existence. Indeed, as Nietzsche will persistently af-
firm, existence itself is chaotic, amoral, and indifferent to human design. Thus
the ideal life—or any life which bases itself on an ideal—is a matter not of mi-
mesis, but of creation and destruction. Given the chaotic raw material of life
itself, Nietzsche proposes that the ideal life be one cast between the imperatives
of art and knowledge.
Those who preceded Nietzsche philosophically had seen both art and
knowledge as critical to framing the ideal life. Kant’s Third Critique famously
places judgment—best seen in aesthetics—at the hinge of his moral and episte-
mological edifice. As a student of Kant, Friedrich Schiller saw art as critical, if
not sufficient, for achieving moral self-legislation and full autonomy. Or, in an-
other spirit, Hegel made aesthetics (as the sensual realization of the Idea) the
necessary preliminary for the achievement of philosophy and full realization of
Spirit in religion. And, as seen in the previous chapter, the dandies saw life as
the medium for artistic and aristocratic presentation.

27
28 Chapter 3

Yet Nietzsche is different. For Nietzsche, art was not only to be seen as
anticipatory of knowledge, or as a vehicle towards morality and philosophy, but,
rather, as a central component in the ideal life alongside knowledge. The ideal
life was not simply the philosophical or moral life; instead, it was to be a crea-
tive life whose moral and philosophical imperatives were partially inspired by
aesthetic considerations. With Nietzsche, one sees a unique movement in which
art is no longer merely an object of philosophical inquiry, but is one of the pri-
mary tools an individual has at her disposal to create the ideal life. In denying
both an equivalence between life and art (contra the dandies) and the subordina-
tion of art to knowledge, Nietzsche gives birth to life as art.
This singularity is likely owing to Nietzsche’s post-theistic and postmodern
orientation. Tantamount to the “Death of God,” in which God has become both
unbelievable and seen as fabricated, is the Nietzschean realization that the self is
a material to be produced, molded, and crafted—not a stable, Cartesian subject.
Thus one cannot have, as in Schiller, an aesthetic “faculty” which one cultivates
to the end of moral and civil perfection. Nor, as in the dandies of the mid nine-
teenth-century, can one become identical with a work of art: if there is no stable
self, then the self is always in the process of being molded such that identity
between one’s character and the work of art is a regulative ideal at best. Bereft
of our previous assurance in the faculties or the ego, the self becomes an object
of creation. And, as will be seen below, both the goals and instruments for self-
creation come, in large part, from art and aesthetics.
For Nietzsche, then, the ideal life is one in which the horizons, goals, and
methods of self-cultivation are taken from the dual worlds of art and knowledge.
The ideal life is one forged through an intensification of the connection between
art and thinking, such that the two become integrated into the created self. Nie-
tzsche can be seen not only as the first thinker of life as art, but, further, as the
first post-Idealist thinker to posit a relationship between art and thinking which
is not logically or dialectically mediated. Rather, in Nietzsche, art and thinking
come together within the life and experience of an individual who chooses to
follow their simultaneous imperatives. In this way, Nietzsche provides an open-
ing to both the idea of life as art and its fundamental structure, in which the ideal
life blends artistic and epistemic considerations within the acts which define and
create the self.
Given the preliminary observation that Nietzsche’s formulation of the ideal
life necessarily turns on the question(s) of aesthetics, the creation of self, and an
account of thinking/knowledge, the task of this chapter is to clarify Nietzsche’s
normative conception of the ideal life and its complex entanglement with aes-
thetics and thinking. I begin this by outlining a method of analysis which sees
Nietzsche’s intuitions on life as art as exhibited in a series of metaphorical “ide-
al types” created throughout Nietzsche’s work. In examining these ideal types,
one sees a consistent portrayal of the ideal type as one who blends the illusions
of art with the resistance and criticality of thinking. Through a profusion of met-
aphors and concepts, Nietzsche’s artful life comes to be seen as one which calls
 Nietzsche’s Ideal Types 29

forth and blends the juxtaposed domains of art and thinking, affirmation and
resistance, destruction and creation, all to the end of self-perfection and a radical
affirmation of existence.

Method
It is my contention that Nietzsche introduces the fundamental language and ar-
chitectonic of life as art insomuch as he sees art and thinking, specifically de-
fined, as the modes of reflection which help define both the goals and methods
of creating an ideal life. Moreover, Nietzsche consistently argues that the ten-
sion between art and thinking, as well as affirmation and resistance, is not to be
mediated logically or by subordinating one to the other, but, rather, by manifest-
ing this tension in action and experimentation.
These insights are not offered by Nietzsche in a systematic fashion, though.
Rather, Nietzsche explores the topology of the ideal life elliptically, by casting
out multiple concepts, playfully deconstructing others, and delighting in over-
statement and metaphor. In order to explore Nietzsche’s intuitions on the ideal
life, then, a method is needed which explores his conceptualization of life as art
through the metaphors and identities in which they can be found. This more lit-
erary method of analysis is inspired by the work of Sarah Kofman and Gilles
Deleuze, who see Nietzsche’s deployment of metaphor and the creation of alter-
native identities as part of a greater effort to clarify a normative philosophy
which does not yet exist. Instead of specifying a precise literary, artistic, or logi-
cal aim, Kofman argues that in Nietzsche’s work each “concept is referred to
[another] metaphor,”2 allowing for metaphors to become ways of envisioning
other associated concepts. This is, as Kofman states, an “artistic model”3 of in-
terpreting Nietzsche’s work, wherein concepts are made to live within meta-
phors, and the process of metaphor-formation is in constant flux. Nietzsche’s
use of metaphor is not a product of a literary or mystifying impulse; it is part of
a consistent attempt to articulate a philosophy which does not yet have anteced-
ents and may be logically contradictory.
This interpretation is extended by Deleuze, who sees Nietzsche forming his
concepts through “conceptual personae.” In Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s What
is Philosophy?, conceptual personae are metaphorical figures in whom a philos-
ophy is exemplified. In most philosophies, the person who is to be exemplified
in philosophy is implicit. But, “in Nietzsche, the conceptual personae involved
never remain implicit. . . . [C]onceptual personae, in Nietzsche and elsewhere,
are not mythical personifications of historical persons or literary or novelistic
heroes. Nietzsche’s Dionysus is no more the mythical Dionysus than Plato’s
Socrates is the historical Socrates.”4 Contrary to a more mythic reading of Nie-
tzsche, Deleuze sees Nietzsche’s Dionysus, the “philosophers of the future,” and
other figures as deliberate attempts to conceptualize a philosophy as it is lived.
30 Chapter 3

Conceptual personae provide a canvas upon which Nietzsche’s philosophy may

be given texture and form.

Presocratics, Romans, Jews, Christ, Antichrist, Julius Caesar, Borgia, Zarathus-

tra—collective or individual, these proper names that come and go in Nie-
tzsche’s texts are neither signifiers nor signified. Rather, they are designations
of intensity inscribed upon a body that could be the earth or a book. . . . There
is a kind of nomadism, a perpetual displacement in the intensities designated by
proper names, intensities that interpenetrate one another at the same time that
they are lived, experienced, by a single body.5

Conceptual personae are the embodiment upon which Nietzsche’s philosophy

lives according to Deleuze; they are interdependent and yet self-referential and
individual. Like Kofman’s conception of Nietzschean metaphor, they refer to
one another while also referring to concepts.
Nietzsche’s use of conceptual personae is not just a means of multiplying
metaphors and creating new conceptual identities, however. It is a means of
multiplying and refining the intensity of a philosophical concept by envisioning
its concrete embodiment: “Intensity can be experienced, then, only in connection
with its mobile inscription in a body and under the shifting exterior of a proper
name, and therefore the proper name is always a mask, a mask that masks its
agent.”6 Each successive persona is a looking glass into the way in which a con-
cept may be lived and “inscribed” within a body. Yet these personae are, rightly,
considered as “masks.” The process of production is also one of dissimulation
and deferral, where each image of the persona gives rise to a new experience
that forces a re-evaluation of the previous one. As Kofman states: “Nietzsche’s
originality lies in his accumulating metaphors and substituting them for each
other, attaching a totally new figure to a stereotyped image, thus provoking a
revaluation of traditional metaphors at the same time as ridiculing them.” 7
Deleuze and Kofman rightly draw attention to the multiplicity of metaphors
and conceptual personae which proliferate in Nietzsche’s writing. Each persona
attempts to draw the reader into an intense experience of a concept or an embod-
ied reality. Metaphors are the means by which Nietzsche envisions a philosophy
which has not yet had exemplars. Nietzsche’s own self-assessments agree with
this interpretation. As early as his unpublished On Truth and Lies in an Extra-
Moral Sense, Nietzsche proclaims:

What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropo-

morphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and
rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to
a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has for-
gotten that they are illusions . . . 8

Nietzsche’s statement is here descriptive, explaining the ways in which “truths”

are seen as metaphors for a set of unstable relations which defy precise linguistic
equivalence. Yet it is precisely this process of metaphor-formation, doubling,
 Nietzsche’s Ideal Types 31

and intensification which Nietzsche sees as prescriptive for his own project. And
as he admits in Ecce Homo, these metaphors may be persona as well: “I merely
avail myself of the person as of a strong magnifying glass that allows one to
make visible a general but creeping and elusive calamity.” 9 Here the metaphor,
or “magnifying glass,” which allows insight into a concept or situation is the
person, or what he later refers to as a “type.” 10 These types should be seen as
typifications of a way of life, a conceptual persona: “Great men, like great
epochs, are explosive material in whom tremendous energy has been accumulat-
ed; their prerequisite has always been, historically and physiologically, that a
protracted assembling, accumulating, economizing and preserving has preceded
them.”11 Thus recurrent figures like David Strauss, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Je-
sus, and Socrates receive critical attention from Nietzsche not because they are,
in themselves, worthy of Nietzsche’s polemical efforts; rather, they are
typifications of a way of being, embodiments of a set of concepts and values.
Such figures may also be the manifestation of values, orders of rank, and
thinking expressed in their highest form. In a tone of reverence, Nietzsche de-
scribes Goethe thus:

[H]e disciplined himself to a whole, he created himself. . . . Goethe conceived

of a strong, highly cultured human being, skilled in all physical accomplish-
ments, who, keeping himself in check and having reverence for himself, dares
to allow himself the whole compass and wealth of naturalness, who is strong
enough for this freedom. . . . A spirit thus emancipated stands in the midst of
the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is
separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything is re-
deemed and affirmed—he no longer denies. . . But such a faith is the highest of
all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name Dionysos.12

Goethe not only comes to represent the nadir of self-formation, heartiness, and
freedom, but is, critically, an exemplification of the Nietzschean-Dionysian ide-
al. For Nietzsche, Goethe has been interpretively transformed into a curious
amalgam of a world-historical figure and a conceptual persona for Nietzsche’s
highest ideal. Nietzsche’s normative ideal is manifest through the persona of
“Goethe,” a figure who is equal parts historical and fictional.
Nietzsche’s use of historical figures, though they have received the most
attention from scholars, arguably represent the minority of Nietzsche’s attempts
at formulating conceptual personae. His most numerous conceptualizations ac-
tually lie in the construction of what I will hereafter call “ideal types,” fictional-
ized conceptual personae who represent an ideal embodiment of a concept, a
horizon of philosophical and artistic promise. Although it will remain the task of
the balance of this chapter to establish the identity of such figures, the role of
ideal types should be seen as central to an interpretation of Nietzsche’s work.
Steven Hicks and Alan Rosenberg argue, for example, that an understanding of
Nietzsche’s construction and employment of ideal figures is “essential for the
proper understanding of his direction and development, both intellectually and
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