Magnum Opus Bard College Year 1

I Admit, I didn't edit this the best I could and it isn't as I precisely wish it to be. But It is the launch pad.

Homer Shew

An Artist’s statement

Art is communication. Art is expression. Art is construction. Art is the imitation of nature. Many words have been spoken about art in all its forms but there is no concrete definition of art. E. H. Gombrich, the famous art theorist and historian, says, in his celebrated text The Story of Art, “It is probably no more true to say that ‘ art is expression’ or that art is construction’ than it was to say that ‘art is the imitation of nature. But any such theory, even the most obscure one, may contain that proverbial grain of truth which might do for the pearl.’(Gombrich 445) Gombrich’s words express that art is all these things and any basis or central idea will to for the beauty of art to be born. The theories of art seem to grow and change in response to time but yet it all comes back together in various forms. The ideas in art only exist as in so much as they manifest themselves in from.

It may first be noted that this essay does not deal with aesthetic judgments or rankings or the prioritization of any particular form or theory of art. But rather we would like to see the truth in Picasso’s words that “Art is a lie that reveals the greater truth.” (Gombrich 437) With all statements of art, art is acknowledged as a lie or an illusion. Picasso’s meaning of truth is unclear in this simple phrase but if we look the nature of art as an illusion we see more. Few people like to be lied to and fewer would pay large sums of money for lies, so what could be the value in this lie and wherein does the truth become revealed? If we acknowledge the illusion of art, we can see that painting and sculpture, the plastic arts, are the illusion of space; music the illusion of time accelerating and decelerating; poetry as the illusion of place; theatre as the illusion of being; etcetera. Seeing the fine arts as specific illusions, we can see that the lie reveals the truth because these illusions serve as basis for comparative analysis. The lies of art allow for an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon of existence by offering an obvious lie to compare to subjective experience. But an understanding of art as comparative to reality necessarily separates art from life where it would be more prudent to understand that the phenomenological experience of life, i.e. the sensations of our five sense with the mind, cannot be understood without the basis of these lies and the liars. The liars, the artist, construct these illusions as a communication of their independent phenomenological experience. This brings us back to Gombrich, who begins the story of art by saying, “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. Once these men who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave; today buy paints, and design posters for the Underground; they did many things in between.” (Gombrich 5) The artist, the creator, the progenitor of the lie has existence for at least 30,000 years roughing out bison’s on the sides of the cave. Whether art is an essential human activity from a biological standpoint is still left to be determined but art is the clear reflection of the artist, a man. In essence, art will always lead us back to the creator, a man, not unlike you or I. If we can understand that art elucidates the meaning in human existence than it is possible to elucidate meaning in the philosopher of life; Friedrich Nietzsche, who by some standards was an artist himself.

Nietzsche was an acclaimed scholar and the youngest philologist at the University of Basel yet he says, in Beyond Good and Evil, “When associating with scholars and artist we easily miscalculate in opposite directions; behind a remarkable scholar one finds, not infrequently, a mediocre man, and behind mediocre artist quite often- a very remarkable man.” (137) Nietzsche may be attacking his chosen profession but it is clear that he gives credence to the mediocre artist because any artist is endowed the ability to create and destroy within the framework of his work. The scholar however is bound to some superficial obligation to ‘”truth” or formal scholarship. Nietzsche elevates the artist-creator because the artist-creator can understand, via his work, Nietzsche’s two terms used to understand being: Eternal Return and the Will to Power.

Eternal Return is first expressed at the end of the Nietzsche’s 1882 book, The Gay Science as

The greatest burden. –What would happen if one day or night a demon were to steal upon you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “You will have to live this life- as you are living it now and have lived it in the past- once again and countless times more and there will be nothing new to it, but every pain and every pleasure, every thought and sigh, and everything unutterably petty or grand in your life will have to come back to you, all in the same sequence and order- even this spider, and that moonlight between the trees even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence turning over and over- and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not cast yourself down, gnash your teeth, and curse the demon who said these things?

Nietzsche initially interprets this proposition as utterly nihilistic that causes the reader to “gnash their teeth,” reaction to “cast” oneself down and “curse” because everything “petty’ and painful must happen again for all eternity. This negation of free will and the subjugation of man to his fate is the “greatest burden.” This diagnosis of existence is one of terminal recurring fate with no hope for a future. One was born to live exactly one unalterable life and one will always live that life for all eternity. Nietzsche’s presentation of this matter as hypothetical derived from a demon does not devalue the matter of the question because Nietzsche start’s by informing the reader that it is the “greatest burden.” The power of this hypothetical is not, despite being unable to be proven, merely a mind game but rather a method of considering how to live. “The Greatest burden” is unambiguous title for eternal return as presenting life and all that happens as something that must be carried for all eternity and that death is no escape. This presentation of existence annihilates any hope for an after life or change or even meaning and value derived from universal. All of existence is presented as something that must be and is unalterable. This eternal recurrence and dissolution of absolute meaning is essentially tragic that leaves no hopes for the heroic or triumphant. There is no rest in peace.

This terrifying thought haunts Nietzsche’s protagonist Zarathustra across his discovery of it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra is broached by the concept from a dwarf saying “…O Zarathustra, far indeed have you thrown the stone, but it will fall back on yourself.” Zarathustra responds by saying, “I climbed, I climbed, I dreamed, I thought; but everything oppressed me.” Zarathustra reacts to Eternal return as the vain collapse of his efforts. Despite however far he “climbs” or “dreams” he is continuous oppressed because no matter how far Zarathustra throws his stone, his efforts, it shall forever return him. But not three sentences later, Zarathustra find’s the beginning of his resolution of eternal return; courage. Zarathustra says, “courage however is the best slayer- Courage which attacks which slays eve death itself for it says, ‘Was that life? Well then! Once More!” Courage is Zarathustra’s first reaction to his nauseating feelings from eternal return. Courage will destroy the oppressive feeling of eternal return and allow him to climb and dream once again. This Courage is the root of the will to power.

Nietzsche explains The Will to Power in Beyond Good and Evil saying, “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength- life itself is Will to Power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.” (Nietzsche 13) This concise definition of The Will To Power explains it as life itself. The Will to Power is life’s meaning and essence and we must have the courage to live it. The nauseating repetition of every petty and grand moment in life can only be counter by the “discharge of our strength.” But in truth, this discharge of strength is a part of eternal return. Our resistance to eternal return or counterforce to eternal return is the most important aspect for the continuance of eternal return. The Will to Power in essence is not a counter to Eternal Power but rather a way to remove the nauseating oppression of it. Understanding the Will to Power is critical to being and an attitude towards being. It is the absolute understanding that this eternal return must be fought with and simultaneously embraced. Life is equated to The Will to Power but not any life. Life cannot be interpreted as merely life in the biological living sense but rather whatever discharges its strength. The existence that exerts itself completely on to the universe is what is considered alive.

These twin ideas of Eternal Return and The Will to Power are essentially abstract. Their meaning still remains vague in the sense that they cannot be attached to anything. It may be best to find our grounding in Martin Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche. In the section The Will to Power as Art, Heidegger analyzes Nietzsche’s Five statements about Art in Nietzsche’s final incomplete text The Will To Power. Heidegger asserts that Nietzsche means, “The innermost essence of Being is will to power. In the being of the artist we encounter the most perspicuous and most familiar mode of will to power. Since it is a matter of illuminating the Being of beings, meditation on art has in this regard decisive priority.” (70) When Nietzsche says, “Art is the most perspicuous and familiar configuration of will to power.” (797) The two most influential philosophers of the modern era both assert that art can be the fine medium for understanding the Will to Power and in essence being. So, long as Nietzsche’s ideas remain theory then they become inanimate, which would be a disservice to Nietzsche’s desire to see everything expose it’s strength. There is one final quote to set our context for our examination of Being through art. Heidegger says, as a preface to his chapter The Eternal Recurrence of the same,

Nietzsche’s thought must first be brought before us if our confrontation with it is to bear fruit, our lecture course will take as its guiding thought the following words of that thinker:

Everything in the hero’s sphere turns to tragedy; everything in the demi-god’s sphere turns to satyr-play; and everything in God’s sphere turns to… to what? “world” perhaps? (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 150) Heidegger starts of his analysis of Eternal Return with their particular quote because Nietzsche’s quote indicates the differentiated and stratified nature of life and it’s goals to individuals in different positions. The hero, the demi-god, and god intake the same everything but for each the nature of reality appears before them as something rather different. The essential distilled truth is that we all must form our own values and thoughts and we are totally and completely utterly attached, responsible, connected, and embody every last one of them. Will to Power and Eternal return do not exist as duality of opposites but an integrated whole. They exist for each other. In binding whole. They are not ends to each other but the necessary continuum of resolution and dissolution. They are the binding of chaos and cosmos.

The three Theban tragedies of Sophocles will serve as a capable lens for which to comprehend Eternal Return and the Will to power. Imagine for a moment being the reader of the Theban tragedies that you are all of the actors, the director and stage all at once and you must give yourself, the audience, the exact same performance every time for all eternity. You do a damn good job at this performance. How do you construct meaning within this metaphysical framework? The will to power is the ability to construct meaning within tragedy. Sophocles’ characters offer inherent insight in to both eternal return and the nature with which the Will To Power meets with Eternal Return.

The short of the Theban tragedies is that Oedipus, King of Thebes, unknowingly murdered his father and fathered children with his mother. And for this act his spawn, Antigone especially, are also cursed to doomed existence. Now, if this brought to greater metaphysical idea that this play is repeated ad infinitum how does one find meaning within this framework? Oedipus himself offers the finest insight, saying, after he has gouged his eyes out with his mother’s brooch and is soon to banish himself from Thebes, “What I have done here was best done- Don’t tell me / Otherwise, do not give me further counsel. I do not know with what eyes I could look / upon my father when I die and go under the earth, nor yet my wretched mother-“ (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 1370) Oedipus acknowledges that despite his enormous suffering and the further suffering forecast in his banishment that what he has done was “best.” Oedipus understands that there could not have been another alternative in his existence that the forces of his wretched mother and father had brought him to this point. Oedipus recognizes that he is responsible for his actions despite being unable to control the forces of his mother and father. Oedipus also understands that death will not alleviate his suffering and he must carry this curse through death. Oedipus embodies Nietzsche’ Will to Power in this moment because he cognizant of his actions and their unchangeable nature as well as the matter he has no control over but instead of wishing he acted otherwise or attempting to avoid what had occurred to him. Oedipus embraces life and rejects regret. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche declares the value of responsibility saying that the noble never degrades his duties and responsibilities and holds them up. (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 221) Oedipus’s actions conform to the Nietzsche’s understanding that responsibility no matter how burdensome must be embraced.

Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, inherits her father’s curse and when she is sentenced to death by her uncle Creon, current King of Thebes, She responds, like her father, “I know that I will die-of course I do- / Even if you had not doomed me by proclamation. / If I shall die before my time, I count that / a profit. How can such as I, that live / among such troubles, not find a profit in death? / So for such as me, to face such a fate as this / is pain that does not count. But if I dared to leave / the dead man, my mother’s son, dead and unburied, / that would have been real pain. The other is not. / Now, if you think me a fool to act like this, / Perhaps it is a fool that judges so. (178 Sophocles). Antigone’s speech boldly proclaims, no a mere matter of justice, but a matter of existence. Her will to power manifested itself not only in burying her brother but also in acknowledging her imminent death. Her strength expelled itself in defending her actions as not a matter of justice but a matter of being. The burial of her bother and confession of it would have a “real pain.” A “pain” truly felt. Antigone acknowledges how foolish this may seem and embraces that it cannot be considered rational. In this way the will to power cannot be seen as a rational force and reason was not the primary motivator for her action. Antigone faces her fate as “profit over such troubles.” These troubles can superficially be seen as the chaos of her particular situation but because of the existential nature of her speech in the troubles should be thought of as the oppressing forces in existence. Antigone’s actions represent the expression of her strength outward towards life and an attack and simultaneous embrace of life’s challenges.

Neither Oedipus and Antigone necessarily represent the Will to Power in it’s full because they lack the ability to say that they willed what was in the past and they lack the ability to create their own values. Nietzsche explains a caveat of the Will to Power, saying, “I taught them all my creating and striving, to create and carry together into One what in man is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident; as creator, guesser of riddles, and redeemer of accidents, I taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been. To redeem what is past in man and to recreate all “it was” until the will says, “thus I willed it! Thus shall I will it” this I call redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption.” (Nietzsche Zarathustra 198). Nietzsche’s works express that the Will to Power is not limited to the future and present tense but that all must stakes must be taken as actions of the will. Man must will their own past. Oedipus claims that he acted as he did unconsciously and variously attempts to excuse or make right what he has done wrong. Oedipus says, in Oedipus at Colonus, “How can my nature be evil, / when all I did was matching others’ actions?/ Even had I done what I did full consciously, / Even so, I would not have been evil. But the truth is, I knew nothing/ when I came where I did. He explains to Creon that his actions were unconscious and though still not justified, not entirely wrong. Oedipus even has tinge of regret for the past saying hypothetically even if he had “known fully consciously” the nature of his actions. Oedipus’ inability to will the past or take the actions of the past and fully embrace their horror reflect a lack of Nietzschean Will to Power.

Antigone, however, though curses her circumstance does not attempt to dismiss her actions as unconscious. Instead, she falters in the greater scheme of the Will to Power by calling upon a different set of morals. She takes claim to older laws than Creon’s in order to justify her actions instead of creating her own. Antigone calls out, before she is taken to her living tomb, “What Law of God have I broken? / Why should I still look to the gods in misery?/ Whom should I summon as ally? For indeed / because of piety I was called impious.” (921-925 Antigone) Antigone’s words ask what divine law she had broken and call to higher order than Creon’s law. She claims her piety as a defense. These two facts would fail to meet the criteria of the Will To Power if the Will to Power were imagined as dogma itself. However Nietzsche despises dogmatist and conformed to laws. (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 9) Antigone’s call to other laws and inability to form her own certainly implicate a different sense of the world. Antigone’s inability to declare on the basis of her own will that she took such actions but rather being at the mercy of the God’s law certainly deflates her stance for Nietzsche.

But more importantly, even Sophocles stands in opposition to The Will To Power. Creon’s words in Oedipus to the blind exiling Oedipus, “Do Not Seek to be master of everything, / For the things you mastered did not follow you throughout your / life.” To which the chorus chimes in (Oedipus Rex76) The warning itself, ironically for Creon, echoes in Antigone, moments before Creon loses everything, Antigone says, “Do you want anything / Beyond my taking and my execution?’ ‘Oh, nothing! Once I have that I have everything.” (Antigone 179) In these words Sophocles explicitly disavows any control over life that can be afforded through ambition. Hubris becomes the highest priority. Hubris on the whole acts contrary to Nietzschean concepts of The Will To Power. Hubris asks the will not to be acted upon because ambition will crush the ambitious. If Sophocles’ meaning or moral lesson is that Hubris will crush the ambitious then Sophocles essential meaning would be formed in as a fable of Aesop.

But a refocusing of the lens of the play as actions read and taken by actors of the mind and seeing that the actors of the mind must take these actions or else the play cannot go on. In essence life cannot go on, no matter what lesson can be learned from hubris. Hubris is a mere fragment of the message that Sophocles attempts to carry. The essence of art as metaphysical template is that as it is presented it should not be altered because everything had to happen.

If we further examine another canonical work of Western art, we should not neglect the painter’s painter Diego Velazquez and his magnum opus Las Meninas. Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas, Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain, (Fig 1), is a painting about painting. This painting, in its self-conscious evaluation of painting, has served to influence every modern western artist. In it, Velazquez eschews the idea that he, or any artist, is a mirror to the world. Instead, he shows that the artist is the maker of worlds.

Las Meninas represents Velazquez’s self-conscious attempt to understand art’s place in the world. In order to evaluate this painting, it can be broken up in to three distinct regions that display the different elements of painting.

The first region is the immediate foreground where the light shines on the handmaidens. This region, with its sharp clarity and strong attention to detail, represents reality. The young pale-faced Infanta is posed at the center as a display to the audience. Her clothing of fine fabric is animated with the illusion of satin smoothness by Velazquez’s hand. The women to the left and right of the Infanta work to care for her and kneel to meet her needs. Each of their faces and outfits are clear and distinct. Their dresses ripple and sway with the clarity of realism. These figures represent specific people in a specific time and place. This illuminated foreground illustrates a scene of domesticity for Velazquez’s patron, King Philip IV of Spain. This scene was as an ordinary reality for both Philip and Velazquez.

The next region of the painting is the left foreground. Here, Velazquez paints his self-portrait. The portrait looks at audience from behind his canvas. He is in the act of painting. He has not stopped. His hand is about to return the brush to the palette. This self-portrait shifts the scene, from a moment of domesticity, to a self-conscious illustration of the painter and the canvas. Velazquez by positioning his self-portrait’s body behind both the canvas and one of the handmaidens represents himself linking the two worlds: the world of the canvas and the world of domestic reality. The handmaiden’s dress, the canvas, and Velazquez all intersect together in a single line indicating a unified reality made possibly by the mediating force of the artist. This unification is a rebuke to the belief that painting’s illusion is in opposition to the handmaidens’ real world. Velazquez positions the artist as the central character to combine the forces of life and illusion through the brush and palette.

The final region, the background, is Velazquez’s tour de force about painting. The background can be broken up in to three constituent parts, the mirror, the paintings on the wall, and the doorway.

The mirror serves as a reflection. We give meaning to the reflection but the reflection does not give us meaning. In the painting, the mirror reflects the patrons, King Philip IV and his wife. It reflects without bias. The mirror does not give character to what it reflects. The space, which the mirror’s reflected individuals are seen, does not exist. It is the delusional eye fooling the viewer. There is nothing human or intellectual about what a mirror does.

Nearby in the background, there are paintings on the wall that surround the figures. Some of the paintings are recognizable in terms of the actually belonging to Philip. Some are not. For Velazquez, they serve as a symbolic opposition to the mirror. They surround the mirror and line the walls. They represent concerted intellectual activity. These paintings may show myths, histories, allegories, or landscapes. All of the genres of painting are worlds invented by the artist through their craft and intellect. Though they are invented worlds, they can act, like fiction, to comment and describe reality. Reality and fiction do not exist as divorced existences but, in fact, act as intermingling forces that work to provide texture to the human condition. Velazquez expresses this truth when he unifies the canvas, handmaiden, and himself in one intersecting line. Velazquez sees that the mirror is a delusion where we project our values. We project what we know on to the illusion that we see. We can learn little from it because all we can see is what we know to look for. The painter’s illusion is very different from the mirror. The painter’s illusion is a communication of insight that allows the viewer to step in to different world.

Finally, the doorway in the background acts a symbol of the doorway that art can provide. In this doorway, Velazquez painted a figure illuminated by light. This figure symbolizes the entrance in to the world created by art. He has physically passed plane of the hanging paintings and thus has been illuminated by engaging with the artwork. But the figure is not lost in some magical fantasyland; he looks back toward the reality of the handmaidens. His engagement with art is not as an escape but as conscious connection between the fictitious painted plane and its relation to reality.

Though Las Meninas can be described in these separate parts, it is not truly fractured into parts. Velazquez’s painting on painting is not a neatly compartmentalized treatise. It is a cohesive whole. A flowing movement of organized figures in space; it’s meaning is derived from the experience of the whole. This whole should be treated like the figure in the illuminated doorway. One should engage in the world created by painting.

Las Meninas on a whole serves as a metaphysical examination on existence in the sense of that it reveals the artist a work on the painting being seen. Velazquez positions himself the artist and creator at the crux of reality and artifice. The artist represents the being that can enable understanding of reality through painting. In respect to Nietzsche, Velazquez’s self portrait represents the artist’s ability to will in to existence reality and also understand what is seen in reality. Nietzsche speaks, in Beyond Good and Evil, “Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go to his ‘most natural’ state is- the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of ‘inspiration’- and how strictly and subtly he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of there hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts (even the firmest concept is, compared with them, not free of fluctuation, multiplicity, and ambiguity). (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 100-1) Velazquez’s metaphysical placement of himself both on the picture plane and outside of it as the artist who binds both reality and artifice together with his own laws. The laws of his palette and eye. Velazquez’s laws are firm and distinct to the viewer but also contain the mystery of ambiguity that drives interaction and illuion.

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is another canonical work of art in the western tradition. It’s renowned plot pit’s the Prince Hamlet of Denmark search for justice for the death of his father King Hamlet at the hands of Prince Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, who has taken the throne and Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, as his wife. Shakepeares’ play details Hamlet’s internal conflict in his search for vengeance. The most famous passage is Hamlet’s soliloquy[i](Act III, Scene I, Line 20-74) given after the ghost of King Hamlet confronts Hamlet with the truth that Claudius killed King Hamlet. The soliloquy fundamentally details an existential crisis of the highest magnitude beginning with the eponymous lines ‘To be or not to be- that is the question / Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / and, by opposing end them.” The matter of being, the concern with which we wish to elucidate the most appears before us. Hamlet uses the parallelism of being with suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And not being by taking arms against the sea of troubles, this taking of arms against troubles can be considered suicide because he wishes for an end. The existence that Hamlet confronts is a being that is one of great suffering or no being at all in suicide. But there is caveat, Hamlet’s arms against a sea of trouble, though certainly paralleled with “not to be,” implies an active means to suicide or active means to death. This active means may be thought of as a premonition of his future and the inevitability of death but immediately after this line he turns his attention to suicide.

In viewing death, Hamlet initially says “to die, to sleep, no more- and by a sleep to say we end / the heartache and the thousand natural shocks / that flesh is heir to – ‘tis a consummation / devoutly wished.” It is devoutly wished to sleep and escape the heartache of living. Nietzsche certainly would say that Hamlet’s wish for death is merely belief in some otherworldliness and certainly no means of living from the earth. But Hamlet’s wording also indicates his understanding that it is a sleep. A sleep that he knows is a dream but Hamlet also understands that he knows not what is in the dream. He sees the uncertainty of the dream. Nietzsche says, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Verily, it is not in afterworlds and redemptive drops of blood, but in the body, that they too have most faith; and their body is to them their thing-in-itself. But sick thing it is to them, and gladly would they shed their skins. Therefore they would listen to the preachers of death and themselves preach afterworlds.” (Zarathustra 33) Nietzsche thought is that those who wish for death ask for an unearthliness that despise the body. Nietzsche understands that the body is all that is given to man and cannot be forsaken. Hamlet’s death wish is an inability to live and exhaust one’s strength unto life.

But towards the end of the soliloquy, Hamlet sees that “not to be” is untenable and no better solution that living saying that “the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” Thought has overwhelmed Hamlet and he turns away from death declaring to Ophelia, “Nymph, in thy orisons/ Be all my sins remembered.” This singular phrase sums up the Will to power. Hamlet has chosen, beyond good and evil, that he shall take action whether sinful or not. Hamlet has abandoned any sense of good and evil morality and decided to take arms against his personal struggle. Hamlet’s resolution is not unlike Zarathustra’s “courage that slays death” in that it realizes human mortality but declares that one must by the hands.

The most important aspect of criticism that can be leveled against the will to power as seen through these particular works of art is that they are a narrow view of art. The two plays and painting offer only a small view of art as a whole. It may have been fair to analyze music, dance, film, photography and the other arts that I missed but I certainly do not feel any particular confidence in ability to give any analysis of music or dance that would give any work in those mediums justice. A view further narrowed on to subject matter that is of kings, princes, and princesses. This is certainly an elitist perspective that belittles any sense of equality that is generally engendered. The subjects of these particular works of art would certainly fit in to Nietzsche’s love of the aristocratic and noble. (Beyond Good and Evil, 201) But to view that this view of life as a eternal struggle that we must bravely struggle against cannot be limited to just those of us who are born noble. This struggle is exaggerated by the placement of these elite members of society but to believe that struggle on a grand scale is the only worthwhile view certainly is not true.

Art as we have seen is the method with which to elucidate the metaphysical inspection of life. Art shows us life is not nihilistic or meaningless but subjectively developed by the being. The individual as the creator and destroyer of meaning, which most importantly bring us back to communicative value of art as the method with which we transport this meaning across peoples, cultures, and ages. But the Will to Power consistently is a struggle that must be undertaken and reconsidered by the parties because some of the actions that are asked to be taken run contrary to the general ideas and laws of society. The Will to Power is the struggle of the individual not only against nature but also against the artifice of human rules.

Bibliography

1. Gombrich, E. H.. The Story of Art. London: The Phaidon Press, 1983. Print.

2. 
 

Greene, David, and Richard Lattimore. The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles I [COMP GREEK TRAGEDIES 2/E]. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991. Print.

3. 
 

Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two: Volumes One and Two (Nietzsche, Vols. I & II). New Ed ed. SanFrancisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Print.

4. 
 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New York: Penguin Publishing, 1974. Print.

5. 
 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.

6. 
 

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet (Folger Shakespeare Library). New York: Washington Square Press, 2004. Print.

Fig. 1

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[i] To be or not to be– that is the question:
/ Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, /
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
/ And, by opposing, end them. / To die, to sleep
 No more – and by a sleep to say we end
/ The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
/ That flesh is heir to – ‘tis a consummation
/ Devoutly to be wished. / To die, to sleep
/ To sleep, perchance to dream. / Ay, there's the rub,
 / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
/ Must give us pause. / There's the respect
/ That makes calamity of so long life.
/ For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
/ Th’ oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
/ The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
/ The insolence of office, and the spurns
/ That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
/ When he himself might his quietus make
/ With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
/ To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
/ But that the dread of something after death,
 /The undiscovered country from whose bourn
/ No traveler returns, puzzles the will
/ And makes us rather bear those ills we have
/ Than fly to others that we know not of?
/ Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
/ And thus the native hue of resolution
/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
 / And enterprises of great pitch and moment
/ With this regard their currents turn awry,
 / And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!
/ The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
/ Be all my sins remembered.

Source: http://thesliceofhome.blogspot.com/2010/05/magnum-opus-bard-college-year-1.html