Nietzsche and Tolstoy: Letting Art Consume the Artist

While Nietzsche and Tolstoy take very different approaches to explaining their art theories (and I don’t think anyone needs me to tell them which approach is easier to understand and therefore preferable), I think they are both getting at the same concept at the core. I did not realize this until I went back and reviewed the principium individuationis and the infection because I had been more focused on the larger picture, but these two terms seem essentially the same to me.

Nietzsche is saying that people are usually cautious in their dreams/art, but when they let the impulsive Dionysian aspect of their personalities take over, they achieve “the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature” (164). To me, that sounds suspiciously similar to when “a man is infected by the author’s condition of soul, if he feels this emotion and this union with others” (179) as described by Tolstoy.

So if we step back from the philosophy itself, both of these men are essentially saying that an artist has to let their work take over in order to produce something that will be valued by outsiders. Whether one views this “taking over” as a chaotic breakdown of order and harmony, or as an infection that is potentially contagious to viewers, does not really matter because both of these definitions explain the same concept. I am glad that I see this now, because when I first read these tracts I saw absolutely no overlapping between the two and was very frustrated, especially in trying to find a way to ground Nietzsche’s art theory in something that made a little bit more sense.