The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
809.
All art works like a suggestion on the muscles and the senses which were originally active in the ingenuous artistic man; its voice is only heard by artists--it speaks to this kind of man, whose constitution is attuned to such subtlety in sensitiveness. The concept "layman" is a misnomer. The deaf man is not a subdivision of the class, whose ears are sound. All art works as a _tonic;_ it increases strength, it kindles desire _(i.e._ the feeling of strength), it excites all the more subtle recollections of intoxication; there is actually a special kind of memory which underlies such states--a distant flitful world of sensations here returns to being. Ugliness is the contradiction of art. It is that which art _excludes,_ the _negation_ of art: wherever decline, impoverishment of life, impotence, decomposition, dissolution, are felt, however remotely, the æsthetic man reacts with his _No._ Ugliness _depresses_: it is the sign of depression. It _robs_ strength, it impoverishes, it weighs down, ... Ugliness _suggests_ repulsive things. From one's states of health one can test how an indisposition may increase one's power of fancying ugly things. One's selection of things, interests, and questions becomes different. Logic provides a state which is next of kin to ugliness: heaviness, bluntness. In the presence of ugliness equilibrium is lacking in a mechanical sense: ugliness limps and stumbles--the direct opposite of the godly agility of the dancer.
The æsthetic state represents an overflow _of means of communication_ as well as a condition of extreme sensibility to stimuli and signs. It is the zenith of communion and transmission between living creatures; it is the source of languages. In it, languages, whether of signs, sounds, or glances, have their birthplace. The richer phenomenon is always the beginning: our abilities are subtilised forms of richer abilities. But even to-day we still listen with our muscles, we even read with our muscles. Every mature art possesses a host of conventions as a basis: in so far as it is a language. Convention is a condition of great art, _not_ an obstacle to it.... Every elevation of life likewise elevates the power of communication, as also the understanding of man. _The power of living in other people's souls_ originally had nothing to do with morality, but with a physiological irritability of suggestion: "sympathy," or what is called "altruism," is merely a product of that psycho-motor relationship which is reckoned as spirituality (psycho-motor induction, says Charles Féré). People never communicate a thought to one another: they communicate a movement, an imitative sign which is then interpreted as a thought. _Compared with music,_ communication by means of words is a shameless mode of procedure; words reduce and stultify; words make impersonal; words make common that which is uncommon.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.