Nietzsche and "An Architecture of Our Minds". - Review - book review

ALEXANDRE KOSTKA AND IRVING WOHLFARTH, EDS.

Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999. 376 pp.; 75 b/w ills. $45 paper

In the final section of Ecce Homo, entitled "Why I Am a Destiny," Nietzsche makes the following famous prophecy: "One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous--a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man. I am dynamite." [1] His self-belief is admirable. At the time of writing--1888--his published oeuvre had failed to make any substantial impact; evidence, Nietzsche thought, for the untimely nature of his work, and an indication that European culture was not yet able to absorb the explosive implications of his project.

Ecce Homo itself was to remain unpublished for twenty years; it eventually appeared in a limited edition of 1,250 copies through the Insel publishing house, the volume having been designed by Henry van de Velde. By this time Nietzsche had become a cult figure both in Germany and abroad. Though one may be skeptical of the claim that a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra could be found in the knapsack of every German soldier on the Western Front during the First World War, he had nevertheless become a central figure in the European intellectual landscape. Indeed, the emergent Nietzsche cult had already been subjected to criticism within the philosopher's lifetime. [2]

Much of this is widely known, and it has been subjected to exhaustive studies. [3] However, attention has tended to focus more on his impact on philosophy and literature than on the visual arts. [4] This has been especially the case within Anglophone scholarship; Nietzsche's influence on Expressionism is, of course, well documented, hut his wider influence has been less carefully researched. The reasons for this are perhaps obvious. Although "art" was central to his vision of cultural reform, Nietzsche was primarily concerned with music and literature. Among the list of "decadents," it is writers such as Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert, or, of course, the operatic "showman" Richard Wagner who are most prominent. And in opposition to these weak spirits, it is Greek tragedy that embodies the movement of counter-nihilism, rather than the Greek sculpture that had inspired his forebear, Winckelmann.

As Sarah Kofman demonstrated some thirty years ago, however, a significant role in Nietzsche's philosophical thinking is played by architectural metaphors. Figures such as the labyrinth, the columbarium, and the pyramid recur in his writing, while the human being is regarded as a "bridge" (Nietzsche's best-known such metaphor, thanks to Kirchner, Heckel, and others). Similarly, he regards European culture as an edifice on the point of collapsing in on itself--though his critique of metaphysics makes him wary of relying too much on the idea of laying new foundations subsequently. This volume takes up from Kofman's original study, but rather than remaining at the level of purely philosophical discourse, it draws out the relation between Nietzsche's architectural metaphors and the practices of early modernism. It evolved from a symposium held in Weimar, Germany, in October 1994, co-sponsored by the Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar and the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Divided into three sections, the first examines the role of architectural metaphor in philosophy, the second explores in broad outline the emergence of a Nietzschean modernism in the visual arts, while the final section analyzes specific examples of the influence of Nietzsche on modernist architecture.

Architectural metaphors have played a central role in Western philosophy since Plato's use of the image of the cave, and this has been doubly so since the inception of modern philosophy. As Claudia Brodsky Lacour demonstrates in her contribution on "Architecture in the Discourse of Modern Philosophy," construction functions as a fundamental trope in Descartes's conception of philosophy, with the philosopher likened to an engineer or an architect, and this continues to a heightened degree in the work of Kant, which is so very preoccupied with the architectonics of thought and with the task of erecting a systematic philosophical edifice. Indeed, the stated rationale for the Critique of Judgment is the necessity of making good a lacuna within the architectonics of Kant's critical project. Nietzsche is heir to this tradition, but as the essays in the first section demonstrate, he does not leave it untransformed. Where the philosophical tradition had employed architectural metaphors to describe the aim of providin g a form basis for knowledge, Nietzsche inverts their significance, often using them to evoke primarily negative connotations. For Nietzsche the immovability of architectural form is a metaphor of the rigid logic of metaphysics, in which will to power has become congealed and petrified. Thus, as Brodsky Lacour points out in her concluding remarks, one important strategy adopted by Nietzsche is to attempt to prise apart the architectonic, with its ahistorical connotations, from the architectural, conceived as an aesthetic phenomenon. Nietzsche's goal is thus what Brodsky Lacour terms an "architecture for knowing" rather than an architectonics of knowledge. While in rhetorical terms this presents a neat distinction, it is not that clear what an "architecture for knowing" actually refers to, nor is it evident that Nietzsche carried it through consistently in his writing. As Karsten Harries shows in his contribution to this volume, Nietzsche reworks the classical motif of the labyrinth as a metaphor for the probl ematics of modern culture. He is not the first to do so, for it figures prominently in Baroque culture--and here we may recall Walter Benjamin's view of Baroque culture as the essential precursor of modernity--and in Nietzsche the image of the labyrinth appears to have the same kind of function as do other architectural metaphors in the work of Kant, Hegel, or Descartes. As with so many of Nietzsche's terms, such as the Dionysian, the Apollonian, or the will to power, the image of the labyrinth is semantically overdetermined. On the one hand, it functions as a token in Nietzsche's polemic against the orderly and all-too-rational architectonics of the modern episteme. On the other, Nietzsche regards the fantasies and dreams of labyrinths in modern culture as a symptom of its decadence, of its enfeebled will to power. And the meaning of the labyrinth in Nietzschean discourse is amplified further in Anthony Vidler's contribution on the same topic. For Vidler, the significance of the labyrinth is that it cuts thr ough the traditional opposition within architectural theory between ornamental exterior and structural interior. In the labyrinth there is no exterior, its meaning resides entirely in its function as a space of interiority, which is perhaps why Nietzsche himself uses it as a metaphor for the soul. Of equal importance, however, is the fact that the dissolution of the interior/exterior opposition mirrors Nietzsche's critique of the ontological and epistemological dualism so fundamental to metaphysics.