Volume one of Heidegger’s ‘Nietzsche lectures’, in which Nietzsche’s thought is
assimilated to the metaphysical tendencies of the philosophical tradition, turns
especially on the connection between the concept of ‘style’ and that of the will to
power of the artist, i.e. the artist’s ‘aesthetic experience’ of creation. I suggest in this
paper that in fact another understanding of Form is present in Nietzsche, an
understanding that explodes the dominance of the concept of ‘style’. This is the
concept of ‘rhythm’. The crucial difference is that whereas form associated with the
concept of style remains immanent within the creativity of the artist, and hence within
a metaphysical understanding of Being grounded in the will, the Form of rhythm
determines the creativity of the artist from the “outside” of his understanding of
Being. In a Nietzschean register, Rhythm is to the Dionysian, what Style is to the
Apollonian. With the idea of rhythm, we see the barely noticeable and hence
neglected ‘return’ of the Dionysian in the later work. Heidegger misses the
opportunity for linking the idea of Rhythm to the Being of the artist. Form, rather than
determining the subject through the reception of Rhythm, is itself determined by the
‘self-stylising’ subject in the will to power. The consequences of this are far-reaching.
Most importantly the Being of the Nietzschean ‘overman’ is understood in terms of
the ‘practical will’ rather than through a conception of ‘aesthetic experience’
grounded in an ‘indeterminate’ desire for the Beautiful. I argue that this latter
conception of the overman remains a possibility located in the Nietzschean text (if
largely ‘unthought’), from the early work on Pre-Socratic thought, to the critique of
Wagner’s lack of ‘rhythm’, to the crucial idea of the ‘genius of the heart’. If I am
right, my paper should offer a different perspective on Nietzsche’s work in relation to
Kant’s Critique of Judgement and should also highlight an important interpretive
fissure in Heidegger’s relegation of the Nietzschean corpus to ‘metaphysics’.
Tristan Moyle