Towards a psychology of an artist. For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic society or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens. All kinds of intoxication, however different their origin, have the power to do this, above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of intoxication. Likewise the intoxication that comes in the train of all great desires, all strong emotions; the intoxication of feasting, of contest, of the brave deed, of victory, of all extreme agitation; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction, intoxication under certain meteorological influences, for example the intoxication of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; finally the intoxication of the will, the intoxication of an overloaded and distended will. The essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy. From out of this feeling one gives to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them - one calls this procedure idealizing. Let us get rid of a prejudice here: idealizing does not consist, as it is commonly believed, in a subtracting or deducting of the petty and secondary. A tremendous expulsion of the principle features rather is the decisive thing, so that thereupon the others too disappear.
In this condition one enriches everything out of one's own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, overladen with energy. The man in this condition transforms things until the mirror his power, until they are reflections of his perfection.
This compulsion to transform into the perfect is - art.
Twilight of the Idols, 1889.
- Friedrich Neitzsche -
