Sunday, August 4, 2013

Will to Power and Architecture

The work that introduces the Will to Power does not exemplify the Art that, according to Nietzsche, best symbolizes the Will to Power.  For, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a 'Tragedy', according to The Gay Science, and, therefore, combines Dionysian Art and Apollinian Art, whereas, according to #11 of the 'Expeditions' section of Twilight of the Idols, the Art that best symbolizes the Will to Power is Architecture, which is "neither" Dionysian nor Apollinian.  Furthermore, Thus Spoke Zarathustra includes no methodical theory-construction, the species of Philosophical writing that best illustrates architectural principles.  Now, one way that Architecture, according to the passage in TI, expresses the Will to Power is as a "victory over . . . gravity", a relation which, upon further analysis, is revealed as requiring the support of every higher part of a structure by every lower part.  In other words, Architecture expresses how the stability of the higher is a function of the strength of the lower.  It thereby expresses a critique of the many passages in which Nietzsche endorses, on the basis of the Will to Power, the abuse or neglect of lower classes by higher classes, e. g. in #258 of Beyond Good and Evil, in which he asserts that it is "healthy" for an "aristocracy" that the parts of society on which it is propped be "reduced and "lowered".

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