Æsthetic Nihilism

One sees a work of art and is moved by a cathartic sense of æsthetic truth. Yet presently a profane realization reemerges: art, a mere phenomenalistic beau geste; its “truthfulness” naught but a refinement of deception. Æsthetics itself a simulacrum as it necessitates the abstraction of the totality of noumenal reality (primal Oneness) for the sake of gradation. Art is thus a reflection of a shadow.

For a particular type of man the aforementioned experience instinctually precludes the æsthetic mood. He cannot help but criticize art eschatologically, or to put it elsewise: his axiology, by virtue of recognition of its own obsolescence, seeks self-annihilation. He is the begrudging manifestation of Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values” and an avatar of active æsthetic nihilism.

However, through the denial of alienation (abstraction, duality) in pursuit of primal Oneness, such as this man of inherent nihilism, type homines eschatos, is destined, one suffers, because the subjectivization of sense-data is perennial in man—thus he is bound, and in denying duality he denies half his own nature. Therefore, regarding beauty and the metaphysically purifying effects of art, which to others is a placebo, is to this type a nocebo. Are you this type, my brothers?

When viewing a great painting one thinks: “But is not the subject itself superior?” and upon hearing a great composition one wonder: “Is this not an attenuation of the naked breath of the world?” Thus one telltales Schopenhauer’s “genius” who can view nature æsthetically as he, to term Evola, is more fully “unified,” meaning he is closer to “being,” the superior state, than “becoming,” the inferior state. This genetically transmitted resistance to duality makes eschatological man naturally ascetic in that his instincts make reification nauseating.

So what to do, ye nauseated ones? Indeed such a faculty as has hitherto been discussed—that of the man suffering half his nature—must be overcome in order that he not just tolerate art and life, as verily he sees life itself æsthetically, but ultimately leap over and above himself such that he dose not revile his fate but loves it and rides it to ever greater overcomings unto his unification with primal Oneness. This amor fati thus becomes an axiological phoínix, burning old reified values to ashes from which a new transvaluing being can be born.

Eschatological man vis-à-vis the establishment of art: schadenfro! Revel in the demise of reification; recognize æsthetic abstraction as a cultural plaything; create art which threatens and mocks contemporaries whilst didactically kindling the impression of artistic obsolescence within dispossessed kin; and foremost should be the utilization of ones inherent qualities, a fortiori, towards the accruement of power—and find the artistry in that!

Shayne