Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Affirmations

Abstract There is some debate about whether Nietzsche’s aesthetic affirmations are best understood as Yes-judgements or as Yes-doings. The answer, the author argues, is that they can be understood as either, since he treats both as merely symptomatic of something that he regards as more fundamental, namely a state of being Yes. To be Yes, he thinks, is to be so constituted that one’s appetite for the Yes is the basic architectonic of one’s nature. It is, in fact, to be in the very opposite of the state that Kant and Schopenhauer had identified with the aesthetic—namely, disinterestedness. In Nietzsche’s preferred state, one is, as he puts it, ‘at once poet, actor and spectator’, a thought that the present essay attempts to make (at least slightly) less opaque by trying to unpick the various forms of interestedness, and hence the various Yeses, which such a state might comprise.