The Problem of the Actor

Abstract At one place, Nietzsche claims that all artists are essentially actors and that actors are inherently inauthentic. Here, the author asks how this claim can be consistent with his praise, elsewhere in the same work, of, e.g., Rubens, Goethe, and Beethoven. If artists are actors, and actors are the inauthentic projectors of false appearances (and hence to be disdained), how can Rubens et al possibly be admirable? And how can the ‘philosopher’, whom Nietzsche values but advises to be ‘mistaken for what you are not’, emerge as anything but inauthentic and actorly? The answers to these questions turn out to diverge, and to do so in ways that bring out a confusion in Nietzsche’s handling of the notion of ‘appearance’, but which, once compensated for, allows both artists and philosophers to come out as authentic in senses that Nietzsche should probably have been happy with, at least in principle.