Joseph Margolis 
All the Turns in »Aestheticizing« Life 
I 
I find that I must begin at a great distance from the question of aestheticizing 
ordinary life. Bear with me, the gap closes of its own accord. 
Modernity - or, better, that late phase of modernity, our own time at 
the close of the century, sometimes dubbed postmodernity - is a time of the 
greatest crisis and self-doubt among the cultures of the modern West. 
Certainly, it manifests itself already in the late n ine teenth century in 
Nietzsche's improbable pronouncement, concocted in a Schopenhaurean 
dream, in The Birth of Tragedy: that is, the ensorcelled Oedipal warning about 
the meaning of the meaninglessness of life that plays itself out from The Birth 
of Tragedy to The Gay Science to The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, 
down to the posthumous The Will to Power. In all of this, Nietzsche deepens 
his original inquiry - beyond all rational resolution - regarding the condition 
for »promoting [what he calls] the faith in life.«1 Whatever succeeds in this 
way extends and transforms the account of tragedy (as much on the comic 
side as the tragic). But what, more ominously, Nietzsche claims to detect 
through his various genealogies or deconstructions of morality, is this: »What 
will not be built any more henceforth, and cannot be built anymore, is [he 
says] - a society in the old sense of that word: to build that, everything is 
lacking, above all the material. All of us are no longer material for a society: 
this is a truth for which the time has come. It is a matter of indifference to 
me [he adds] that at present the most myopic, perhaps most honest, but at 
any rate noisiest human type that we have today, our good socialists, believe, 
hope, dream, and above all shout and write almost the opposite.«2 
This is the setting for the reading (advanced not many years ago by 
Alexander Nehamas) in which Nietzsche is said to aestheticize morality, to 
turn to the aestheticism of his own life shaped as a work of art against the 
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 
Bk. I, §1 (p. 74). 
2 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bk. V, §356 (p. 304). 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVICA), pp. 185-202. 185 
Joseph Margo lis 
futility of all the usual forms of politics and morality - perhaps even a hopeful 
exemplar for the rest of us.3 
What Nietzsche means here - I dare suppose - is that the h u m a n 
preoccupation with our own words and theories, which hold to their deeper 
life-affirming function chiefly in the greatest of the arts, is now perhaps 
pe rmanen t ly risked (as the example of the l ibera l , r a t iona l , a n d 
literalminded socialists confirm). The aestheticizing of life, in Nietzsche's 
most original sense, transformed from Schopenhauer 's, repairs as well as 
possible the rift that the theorizing mentality deepens at our peril.4 We draw 
away, through language, through cultural tradition, through our preoccu-
pation with actual history, from the sources of instinctual animal affirmation. 
Art in its best moments reconciles the hubris of, say, linguistic communication 
— a late evolutionary development in any case - with the deeper adequacy 
of instinctual life, the original societal sources that Nietzsche claims can never 
be recovered at our peculiar stage of development. Seen thus, »aesthe-
ticizing« signifies our bringing our lives to art (as best we can) in the spirit 
in which art brings life to its instinctual affirmation. 
But, if so, then Nehamas is very subtly off the mark when, comparing 
Nietzsche with Proust (with whatever caveats), he claims that »Nietzsche came 
to see perfect self-sufficiency [something like the Proustian recovery and 
coherent integration of every detail in the unending recovery of a single life] 
as a proper test for the perfect life [an individual life as a work of art] at 
least partly because his thinking so often concerned literary models.«5 This 
is actually Nehamas's gloss on Nietzsche's recommendation that »we should 
learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with 
them the subtle power [as in Proust, according to Nehamas's reading] usually 
comes to an end where art ends and life begins: but we want to be the poets 
of our life - first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters.«6 
Nehamas links the endlessness of the literary recovery of the details of 
a life (the Proustian theme) with the doctrine of the eternal return. But 
Nietzsche means, as the context of the passage cited makes clear, to urge 
that we work to recover the »beauty« of life in the face of the distancing 
danger that things are not beautiful at all (that is, life-enhancing) either in 
themselves or through the specialized perspectives of our languaged skills. 
3 See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 
1985); particularly, Introduction. 
4 I find this explained in one of the most remarkably up-to-date passages of Nietzsche's, in 
The Gay Science, Bk. V, §354. 
5 Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature, pp. 194-195; see, also, p. 164. 
0 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bk. IV, §299 (pp. 239-240). 
186 
All the Turns in »Aestheticizing« Life 
For precisely this reason, Richard Rorty, relying perhaps too much on 
Nehamas, offers the following diagnosis of Nietzsche - hence of aestheticizing 
life: »For Proust and Nietzsche... there is nothingmoxe powerful or important 
than self-redescription. They are not trying to surmount time and chance, 
but to use them.... The greatest task of the ironist [Nietzsche in particular, 
though Nietzsche is not quite the liberal that ironists like Rorty tend to be] 
is [Rorty informs us] the one Coleridge recommended to the great and 
original poet: to create the taste by which he will be judged. But the judge 
the ironist has in mind is himself. He wants to be able to sum up his life in 
his own terms.«7 The importance of these mistaken readings (of Nietzsche) 
is that they help to explain the growing tendency in our own time — possibly 
part of a natural declension from Nietzsche's very different conviction - to 
view »aestheticizing« as entrenching the propriety of individual autonomy, 
ei ther the democratized or the would-be meritocratic authority for the 
meaning and validity of one's own life, the enlargement of the official privacy 
of each life (ironic and liberal in that sense at least), and the self-indulgence 
with which we deem ourselves entitled to pronounce our own lives »works 
of art.« I have no doubt that that too is part of the meaning of die aestheticizing 
of ordinary life. But surely it is a corruption of Nietzsche's original theme. 
It is true enough that Nietzsche holds that no life is justified that cannot 
meet the test of the »eternal return.« But the point of that »test« - which is, 
of course, no test at all - is that success is entirely instinctual, not human at 
all, and that morality and tradition succeed only where they engage such 
incomprehensible energies. There's absolutely no room for optimism or 
reassurance there.8 Certainly nothing to cheer us on regarding »Nietzsche's 
[supposed] effort to create an artwork out of himself,«9 possibly something 
more convincing than Walter Pater's donnish pagan intensity or the effete 
energies of the Yellow Book or even the more charming dandyism of Wilde 
and Baudela i re ; certainly no th ing that would lead us to the kindly, 
democratic, consumerist aestheticism of John Dewey, in Art and Experience,™ 
7 Richard Rorty, »Self-creating and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,« 
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 97-
99. 
8 Compare Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature, pp. 6-7. 
0 Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature, p. 8. 
10 See J o h n Dewey, Art as Experience (Philadelphia: Minton, Balch, 1934); also, Richard 
Shus te rman , Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: 
R o u t l e d g e , 1997) . S h u s t e r m a n a t t empts to r e d e e m the Deweyan c o n c e p t i o n : 
»Pragmatism, as I conceive it after Dewey, [he says,] offers a distinctive way of defending 
the aesthetic model of philosophical life against these troubling questions [that is, 
questions that b u r d e n us with the defense of morality as opposed to 'lifestyles'] by 
187 
Joseph Margo lis 
which, I may add, is not terribly distant from Rorty's treatment of Nietzsche's 
aestheticism, under the shadow of his own treatment of Dewey's liberalism. 
The essential difference between Nietzsche and his successors - whether 
Heidegger or Rorty or Nehamas - is simply that, for the latter, aestheticizing 
is invariably optimistic, forward-looking, and self-justifying, whereas, for 
Nietzsche, such considerations are entirely irrelevant. The current debate 
is entirely skewed in the direction of the former, whether inspired by Dewey 
or Adorno or Wittgenstein or, indeed, Rorty. 
Are all these different currents really the same? No, it seems not . 
Aestheticism, or the aestheticization of life, if we may speak of Nietzsche thus, 
somehow p r e p a r e d the way for a very s t r ange series of i nc r ed ib l e 
displacements, mainly in Germany, that redirected Nietzsche's themes into 
the brilliandy intuited nonsense fashioned by Ernstjünger, Adolf Hitler, and 
Martin Heidegger, and that signified there a profound cry (regardless of its 
monstrous possibilities and irrelevancies) against the perceived vulgarity, 
glibness, vacuity, spreading power, acquisitiveness, anarchism, lack of nobility 
and heroism of the bourgeois market world that - to be sure - has now pretty 
well won hands down. 
Aestheticism in that sense, as much in Nietzsche as in Wilde - and, 
crazily, in Jünger - is a protest against the self-congratulatory moralities of 
the West. It is also, therefore, a self-congratulatory morality of its own, what 
we now call aestheticizing. But it is only in Nietzsche that the metaphysical 
appeal to the instinct for life (curiously cobbled by Bernard Shaw) confirms 
the futility of any would-be rationally grounded morality and politics of any 
stripe, a fortiori any aestheticized »lifestyles« offered in place of known 
moralities - or, as the apotheosis of such moralities, in the familiar manner 
modeled by Pater or Jünger or endorsed by Dewey or proposed by Nehamas 
( interpret ing Nietzsche) or, more pleasantly, by Richard Shus terman 
(interpreting Dewey) or Wolfgang Welsch, or self-deceptively proclaimed 
by Heidegger (in his most Hölderlinesque moments) ." 
These are very different ways of coopting Nietzsche: some congenial 
to our sensibilities, some utterly impossible to defend. But the important 
point remains: (i) that Nietzsche's use of the notion (aestheticism, life as a 
work of art) presupposes the futility of ever completely legitimating our 
undermining the traditional, stifling oppositions on which they are based«; hence, their 
exposé is supposed to lead to Shusterman's endorsement of »the aestheticization of 
ethics« pp. 5-6. See, also, Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking 
AH (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). 
11 See Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, 
and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), Division One. 
188 
All the Turns in »Aestheticizing« Life 
moral and political norms, for instance against both Kant and Hegel; and 
(ii) that nearly all post-Nietzschean uses of Nietzsche's alleged aestheticism 
restore the eligibility of what Nietzsche expressly denies. The question of 
what we should now mean by the aestheticizadon of life hangs in the balance. 
When, for instance, Nietzsche declares, in The Birth of Tragedy —a. theme 
he never relinquished but only transformed: »the entire comedy of art is 
neither performed for our betterment or education, nor are we the true 
authors of this art world. On the contrary, we may assume that we are merely 
images and artistic projections of the true author [the Will], and that we 
have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art - for it is only as 
an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified — 
while of course our consciousness of our own significance hardly differs from 
that which soldiers painted on canvas have of the battle represented.«12 
As I read this, Nietzsche is affirming (in his arch way) that our lives, 
manifesting the »lifestyles« that collect a viable society, are for that reason 
an »aesthetic phenomenon« justified »eternally« but not in any human way. 
Nietzsche's aestheticism, even the literary shaping of his own life, is no more 
than the explanat ion of the irrelevance, as far as the Will to Power is 
concerned, of the would-be rational defense of any personal or societal 
lifestyle, including any devoted to making that same lesson clear and 
convincing through the irony of its own success. That is what is missing in 
Nehamas and Rorty - and what is f reed from its moorings, naively but 
generously in Dewey, and also very cleverly but falsely in Heidegger. 
There is no sense in which Nietzsche can be made to provide a criterial 
ground for choosing any one morality or politics over any other or, indeed, 
a ground for any deliberate aestheticism or aestheticizadon of ordinary life. 
I don' t mean by that that it is impossible to reconcile Nietzsche's final reading 
of the Will to Power with the quotidian problems of justifying away of life, 
but they are not linearly connected in any way. 
More than that, when you separate aestheticism from Nietzsche's 
profound myth, you are left with nothing more than Dewey's consumerism, 
Jiinger's madness, Wilde's dandyism, Heidegger's grandiosity, Rorty's wilful 
anarchy, and similar exotica. Stripped of that connection, the aestheticizadon 
of life is anything we please, somehow relieved - by a supposed authenticity 
mere moralities cannot claim - of any need for explicit validation. 
Once you have this picture before you, you realize that, for us, for mere 
mortal humans attempting to justify one ideology or tradition or morality 
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §5, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter 
Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1977, cited by Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature. 
189 
Joseph Margo lis 
or lifestyle over another, it doesn' t matter, initially, whether we believe 
»aestheticizing« morality is or is not an improvement over resisting any 
intended practical change. The contest takes the familiar form it always has; 
or (better) if we could improve the rigor of moral argument, we should have 
to do so across the board - that is, to include aestheticized judgments as 
well. There's no way to coopt Nietzsche's use of the expression »aesthetic 
phenomenon« (or its intended doctrine) to gain a dialectical advantage in 
choosing, for instance, between Dewey and Jünger - if you can imagine that 
ever making sense! 
The idea is preposterous. Not only would such a choice invoke two 
radically different notions of aestheticizing life - for which, then, we would 
need a meta-aestheticizing rule and, for that, a meta-meta-rule - but the truth 
is: it makes no more sense to speak of correctly choosing aestheticized 
lifestyles than of making pedestrian moral choices. We cannot even fathom 
any principles or ordered distinctions between the moral and the aesthetic 
- a fortiori, between their respective grounds or criteria.13 
My own view is that the whole business is a terrible muddle. I have never 
seen a convincing account of the disjunction between moral and aesthetic 
values or, I may as well say, any convincing account of the distinct extensions 
of »moral« and »aesthetic« values that would bear in anyway on the precision 
or objectivity of pertinent judgments. I take the Kantian model to be a 
complete disaster, to have almost no bearing on either moral matters or 
matters regarding the quality of art or the sense in which aesthetic and artistic 
values differ or may be reconciled or graded. I have no conf idence in 
universal norms of any of these sorts, except, trivially, in the sense of 
consistency of usage. I don't believe there are any obvious criteria for making 
a life a »work of art« in the normative sense Nehamas draws from Nietzsche, 
or in the romantic sense of ennobling experience that Schiller draws from 
Kant,14 or even in the naive sense - hardly the equivalent of Roland Barthes's 
little joke - the »consummatory experience,« the lesser jouissance Dewey 
promises all of us.15 
I don ' t see anything ennobling about art tout court, unless contact with 
anything human is ennobling. I d o n ' t see that art or morality is ever 
universally compelling (where the claim is not vacuous) or ever sufficiently 
uniform to encourage us to search for underlying universal values — perhaps, 
13 See J. O. Urmson, »What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?« Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 
Suppl. Vol. XXXI (1957). 
14 See Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. 
Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). 
15 See Dewey, Art as Experience, Ch. 8. 
190 
All the Turns in »Aestheticizing« Life 
then, for specifically democratic or anti-democratic values. I take all of that 
to be a fake. If we really lacked grounds for an objective moral debate 
between competing visions, we couldn't possibly expect to gain a better 
argument by drifting to aesthetic or artistic grounds: I don' t even know what 
that would mean. There is no legible direction in art or aesthetic values. 
I d o n ' t believe that Nietzsche's splendid criticisms of traditional 
moralities ever required his own grand doctrine of the Will to Power, or 
are for that reason particularly weak in any dialectically important sense. 
The only reason aestheticism or aestheticization cuts no moral ice and affords 
no distinctive lifestyle is simply that where it is relevant it has always been 
relevant - even if, under other labels and for every conceivable cause. If 
you mean, by »aestheticizing,« using or directing art in the service of 
democratizing our society more than it has been, or strengthening a fascist 
society, then your moral and political objectives will surely take precedence 
over the aesthetic and artistic; and, in any case, changes in the one will go 
hand in hand with the other. There is no convincing privileging in either 
direction, and there are no particular values that are assured, or known to 
be worth saving, by turning from the putatively moral or political to the 
artistic or the aesthetic - that is, in any sense beyond the sense in which we 
have no wish to impoverish the culture to which we belong. 
II 
I have a very different reading of Nietzsche's aestheticism to offer. I 
mean a reading that is not merely bookish, a reading that bears rather on 
the real-world circumstances of moral and political life and does not pretend 
to snatch a conceptual privilege from any source. For, for one thing, the 
solution to the problem of the meaning of life is, actually, logically trivial 
(but not unimportant for that reason, and not assuredly sufficient for anyone 
who finds the question unnerving); and, for another, Nietzsche was plainly 
aware of that sense of the matter, since it's already embedded in his own 
account of Greek tragedy. 
The doctr ine runs as follows: life has no meaning apart f rom the 
entrenched traditions of one's own culture, where the question arises and 
is met at the level of instinct that Nietzsche himself invokes - but not, there, 
in recognizably human terms. That's all! It is the same doctrine that takes 
the form of the challenge of the »eternal return,« relative to which any cultural 
pract ice that survives over time and change counts as the successful 
aestheticization of ordinary life. 
191 
Joseph Margo lis 
There are no differential human values at this level of instinctual life; 
hence, there are no differential values apt for assessing the funct ional 
adequacy of aestheticized or cultural life. »Whatever has value in our world 
[Nietzsche declares] now does not have value in itself, according to its nature 
- nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present 
- and it was we who gave and bestowed it.«16 If you take this literally, as 
Nietzsche apparently intends it to be, then the normative grounds on which 
moral, political, artistic, aesthetic, and similar commitments and judgments are 
regularly assessed have nothing to do in any pointed way with the function 
of aestheticization, except in the negative sense that no such appraisals have 
any relevance for life if they are not pertinently life-affirming. The famous 
wisdom of Silenus, for instance, makes sense as a countermove only against 
those who affirm that life and nature have intrinsic value. 
Nietzsche is instructing us here about the inherent deficiency of all 
practical reasoning and judgment: it rests on »grounds« that cannot be 
converted into strict norms and, relative to that functionality in nature, no 
merely h u m a n norms could ever convincingly disqualify c o m p e t i n g 
»aestheticizations« (read: diverging cultures or diverging histories) that 
similarly survive. 
What Nietzsche obscures by this de l ibera te ext ravagance is the 
important point that the validation of moral and political and aesthetic 
arguments presupposes the life-enhancing viability such arguments cannot 
possibly provide; hence, that arguments about the right direction of life are, 
necessarily, rhetorically defective but not humanly irrelevant for that reason. 
That is also the lesson of the exemplary Greek tragedies, for aestheticization 
concerns the reasons for our loyalty to particular lifestyles, traditions, 
paradigmatic lives that we find compelling by our lights. To say that Nietzsche 
made a work of art of his own life is to say little more than that his 
philosophical objections to traditional moralities and ideologies cannot now 
be denied. We admit that we are taken with the relevance of his arguments, 
as we might be by the charm of an unexpected poem. Nietzsche is explicit 
enough about all this: »Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal,« he 
says, »that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: 
man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists: his race cannot 
flourish without a periodic trust in life - without faith in reason in life,«17 
If I understand this correctly, then, since any deliberately pursued mode 
of life, Nietzsche's life, say, viewed as an exemplar, or Nietzsche's own 
exemplar of Attic life construed in terms of Greek tragedy (that is, an entire 
16 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bk. IV, §301 (p. 242). 
" Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Bk. I, §1 (p. 75). 
192 
All the Turns in »Aestheticizing« Life 
society's tradition), counts as the aestheticization of life, there is no point to 
moral or political dispute that fails to come to terms with the protean nature 
of such »aesthetic« values; and no claimant can hope to vindicate the 
exclusive right of any single exemplar or state the conditions under which it 
has any differential right at all. In Nietzsche's terms, the inherent deficiency 
of practical legitimation answers to, and is made good in, the Will to Power. 
Nietzsche casts the idea of an approved life in terms of an ulteriorly inspired 
fo rm of self-deception; in the human world, we debate the merits of 
alternative lives at a certain displaced level at which we demand a convincing 
rationale, entangling ourselves thereby in the imagined sufficiency and 
objectivity (hence, also, the exclusionary power) of our fine arguments. 
I d o n ' t f ind this particularly alien to the conditions under which 
Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations, speaks of the human Lebensform: 
except that Nietzsche favors the lesson of the threat of meaninglessness and 
Wittgenstein, the slimmer thesis that all argument must ultimately be 
grounded, not in propositions, but in our form of life.18 The two doctrines 
go hand in hand. That is, the idea that theory is itself a form of practice 
signifies that human reasoning is largely ad hoc, occasional, contextually 
disciplined, logically informal, and incompletable in principle - in ways that 
go contrary to all the standard presumptions of systematic theory (closure, 
foundations, explanatory inclusiveness, and bivalence). That is certainly close 
to the heart of what Nietzsche means by aestheticism: something very far 
removed from all those other specimen views ranging, in however heterodox 
a way, from Schiller's to Adorno's to Rorty's. 
What needs to be especially remarked is the entirely subordinate nature 
of distinctions drawn between the moral, the political, the artistic, and the 
aesthetic. The principal clue to all the variant taxa is that the judgments in 
question are all practical, all grounded in a viable tradition - a sense that is 
common, I suggest, to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in an unexpected way. I 
don ' t mean to concede by that that there are theoreticaljudgments that have 
an entirely different cognitive source from practical judgments. On the 
contrary, the interesting possibility is that all judgments are practical (or 
grounded in the practical) in the same way. That is certainly a radical idea, 
but it is also thoroughly Nietzschean. For the moment, let me say that this 
small adjustment yields two benefits: for one, it opposes prioritizing the 
moral over the aesthetic or artistic, or vice versa, and it disallows any 
privileging of the validity of practical judgments in anyway; and, for a second, 
by admitting the inherent deficiency of every »rational« effort to legitimate 
18 See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: 
Basil Blackwell, 1953), for instance I, §§241-242, 479-481. 
193 
Joseph Margo lis 
moralities or lifestyles, it concedes the inescapable role of the entire span 
of historically divergent traditions, which, accordingly, cannot fail to be 
»equal« in the eyes of the Will to Power. 
The literal meaning of this last concession - to convert its lesson into 
terms that might reasonably belong to Wittgenstein's slimmer thesis - is 
simply that there are indefinitely many societal lifestyles to honor: no one 
choice could ever convincingly preclude the eligibility of the others, on 
grounds of divergence alone; and since no single lifestyle can expect to be 
exclusionary, practical arguments cannot adhere to an uncompromising 
bivalence or any principled privilege. Aestheticism signifies, in Nietzsche, a 
pagan respect for every powerful manifestation of human life. Some may 
see in it an implicit democracy, but that would betray the deeper doctrine: 
something akin to substituting Parsifal for Oedipus. 
Ill 
All the foregoing is true enough. But the persistence of the aestheticing 
move in our own late age has pretty well abandoned Nietzsche's sterner 
doctrine. It is now, I think, a kind of opportunism, conceptually released 
from all pretensions of modernist legitimation. Even in Heidegger, supreme 
philosophical opportunist that he was, the question of legitimation seems 
to have persisted. You find it, for instance, after the Kehre, when Heidegger 
is bent on recovering the themes of his early lectures on Hölderlin (1934-
35), as in »The Question concerning Technology« (1953) and related papers, 
where Heidegger offers an ingenious subversion of Nietzsche's more 
innocent doctrine, where he aestheticizes the final destinal calling of the 
German VoM19 Extraordinary! 
I don ' t doubt that Heidegger's final ontology - the one in which, per 
Hölderlin, the poet, like the Führer and, like Heidegger himself, is said to 
be gifted enough to receive the saving self-disclosure of Being that may yet 
reverse the entire Nazi blunder - is, by far, the most extreme form of the 
aestheticization of life that our end-of-century can boast. Nevertheless, its 
political opportunism is still soberly cast in terms of a kind of realism that, 
however mysterious and outrageous, is abandoned in turn by the post-war 
aestheticisms of the victorious West. 
You see this in its most fantastic form in Rorty, if the juxtaposition will 
19 Martin Heidegger, »The Question concerning Technology« (trans. William Lovitt), in 
Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: H a r p e r & Row, 1977). See, also, 
Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity, Chs. 7-8. 
194 
All the Turns in »Aestheticizing« Life 
not offend you. I can only plead that Rorty directly addresses the question 
in assessing Heidegger himself. Effectively, he dismisses Heidegger's doctrine 
by a sort of psychoanalysis, makes the entire tale of Heidegger's last version 
of aestheticization no more than a self-deceptive mask for his true ironism 
- according to the formula of ironism already cited. Which is to say, Rorty 
replaces Heidegger's aestheticization by his own more candidly opportunistic 
version: he returns us in a bolder way to the assertive, self-justifying, private 
or autonomous, even liberal, act of any of us by which we simply declare 
our lives to be a work of art. That is surely the last irony of all the turns of 
aestheticism. 
»'Dasein',« Rorty avers, »was, so to say, Heidegger 's name for the 
ironist,« that is, himself. »But, in his later period, [he warns,] this word is 
replaced by 'Europe' or ' the West' - the personification of the place where 
Being played out a destiny which ended in ironism.«20 Rorty thinks of 
Heidegger as »the greatest theoretical imagination of his time (outside the 
natural sciences).« But he failed »where Proust succeeded«; for, following 
Proust, Rorty finds that »novels are a safer medium than [philosophical] 
theory« for the aestheticization of private life.21 
T h a t is, Rorty r e tu rns us to someth ing like Nehamas ' s equally 
commodif ied reading of Nietzsche. Heidegger somehow believed that, 
beginning with the project of Being and Time, he could remake himself as 
the sage of the West, by isolating the essential words — yes, the words - by 
which (by analogy with Holderl in and even Nietzsche, but surpassing 
Nietzsche), we might vouchsafe the right receptive relationship to Being. 
There you have Rorty's gloss on that fateful line from Being and Time. »The 
ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elementary 
words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common under-
standing from leveling them off to that unintelligibility which functions... as 
a source of pseudo-problems.«22 
»Heidegger,« Rorty claims, »had set himself the [impossible] problem 
of how to surpass, place, and set aside all past [philosophical] theory without 
oneself theorizing.« He thought he could replace explicit theory by poetic 
»'hints and gestures'« (Heidegger's own characterization) »distinct from the 
'signs and chiffres' of metaphysics. «2S But he failed, because he failed to see 
20 Rorty, »Self-creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,« p. 113. 
21 Rorty, »Self-creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,« pp. 107, 118. 
22 Rorty, »Self-creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,« p. 112. The 
line is f r om Martin Heidegger , Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward 
Robinson (NewYork: H a r p e r & Row, 1962), §44 (p. 262). 
23 Rorty, »Self-creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,« pp. 112, 115. 
195 
Joseph Margo lis 
that the right form of aestheticization required abandoning even that higher 
metaphysics, opting more frankly for literature and »conversation.« In short, 
Rorty suggests, Heidegger was really an »ironist« in Rorty's own sense but 
simply failed to recognize the fact. 
This is a remarkable claim on Rorty's part, given the importance of 
the line from Being and Time. Heidegger had explicitly warned - in the very 
same passage - that »we must avoid uninhibited word-mysticism«; and, in 
offering this »definition« of »truth« and the associated account of »Being« 
and »the logos,« he adds that »we have not shaken off the tradition, bu t we 
have appropriated it primordially.«241 should say that this was not (yet) an 
aestheticization, in Heidegger's mind, but it surely counts as an anticipation 
of his eventual replacement of Nietzsche's version. But let that pass. It is 
closer to the truth to say that Rorty construes Heidegger and Dewey and 
Wittgenstein, his self-designated mentors, in ways congenial to his own variant 
of aestheticism, that is, closer to a liberal irony. On that reading, aestheticism 
is the Geist of history that brings Nietzsche home to bourgeois markets. 
I cannot forebear, therefore, citing the following passage from Rorty's 
essay, »Private Irony and Liberal Hope,« because it may be the most succinct 
statementwe are likely to find of Rorty's conception ofwhat it is to aestheticize 
one's life, hence also a statement of his most focused reading of moral and 
political issues in the aestheticist manner; and because I very much doubt 
that you would believe a mere paraphrase that suggested that Rorty was 
playing out a liberal reading of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's very different 
aestheticisms. Well, see what you make of this: 
We ironists treat these people [Hegel, Heine, Kierkegaard, Blake, 
Freud, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Nietzsche, Proust, Lionel 
Trilling] not as anonymous channels for truth but as abbreviations for 
a certain final vocabulary and for the sorts of beliefs and desires typical 
of its users . . . . We treat the names of such people as the names of the 
heroes of their own books. We do not bother to distinguish Swift from 
indignatio, Hegel from Geist, Nietzsche from Zarathustra, Marcel Proust 
from Marcel the Narrator, or Trilling from The Liberal Imagination. 
We do not care whether these writers managed to live up to their own 
self-images. What we want to know is whether to adopt those images — 
to re-create ourselves, in whole or in part, in these people's image. We 
go about answering this question by experimenting with the vocabu-
laries which these people concocted. We redescribe ourselves, our 
situation, our past, in those terms and compare the results with 
alternative redescriptions which are the vocabularies of alternative 
figures. We ironists hope, by this continual redescription, to make the 
best selves for ourselves that we can.25 
24 Heidegger, Bang and Time, p. 262. 
196 
All the Turns in »Aestheticizing« Life 
There is a danger here - which I would not willingly accuse Rorty of 
neglecting. Nevertheless, the plainly intended congruity between his own 
words and his ironist interpretation of Heidegger's words about »elementary 
words,« cited jus t above, raises the question how, if »theory« is to be 
al together abandoned , should we ever be able to justify the exposé of 
Heidegger himself, or Paul de Man for that matter, who (in another sense 
of »irony«) insisted on an inseparable linkage between metaphysics and 
poetry (against the evidence of his own life and against the view of Harold 
Bloom, whom Rorty follows here26)? 
Wha t is it that keeps Rorty's aestheticism f rom yielding to self-
congratulatory fictions that can now play themselves o u t - i n a fantasy world 
of affluence at least - that has no real bearing on the constraints of the public 
world? Nothing that I can see. 
Keep Rorty's words in view therefore: 
W e revise o u r own m o r a l ident i ty [he says] by revising o u r own f inal 
v o c a b u l a r y . L i t e r a r y c r i t i c i sm d o e s f o r i ron is t s w h a t t h e s ea rch f o r 
un iversa l m o r a l p r inc ip l e s is s u p p o s e d to d o f o r metaphys ic ians . 
Fo r us i ronis ts , n o t h i n g can serve as a cri t icism of a f ina l vocabulary 
[ r e m e m b e r H e i d e g g e r ! ] save a n o t h e r such vocabula ry ; t h e r e is n o 
a n s w e r to a r e d e s c r i p t i o n save a r e - r e - r e d e s c r i p t i o n . S ince t h e r e is 
n o t h i n g b e y o n d v o c a b u l a r i e s wh ich serves as a c r i t e r i o n of c h o i c e 
b e t w e e n t h e m , cri t icism is a ma t t e r of look ing on this p ic ture a n d on 
tha t , n o t of c o m p a r i n g b o t h pic tures with the original.2 7 
The proper, perfectly simple answer to all this is, of course: although 
there are no final vocabularies, every vocabulary harbors a discipline of 
responsibility. »Final« must mean - for Rorty - »arbitrary,« free of all 
responsibility, aestheticized. But if that is the tail-end of aestheticism, as I'm 
afraid it is, then let's have an end of it. Rorty could not be more explicit: 
»irony is of little public use . . . . Ironists should reconcile themselves to a 
private-public split within their final vocabularies, to the fact that resolution 
of doubts about one's final vocabulary has nothing in particular to do with 
attempts to save other people from pain and humiliation.«28 Rorty has made 
commodities out of Nietzsche and Heidegger; he is also of course entirely 
comfortable with hawking his own private ironism. But we ourselves are 
caught between the honest recognition of endlessly varied forms of viable 
25 See Richard Rorty, »Private Irony and Liberal Hope,« Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 
pp. 79-80. 
2r' See Richard Rorty, »The Contingency of Selfhood,« Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 
25nn2-3. 
27 Rorty, »Private Irony and Liberal Hope,« p. 80. 
28 Rorty, »Self-creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,« p. 120. 
197 
Joseph Margo lis 
life and the impossibility of accepting every alternative to our own. How can 
aestheticizing alter that? 
Hardly anyone whom Rorty admires or takes to be his mentor - certainly 
not Heidegger or Dewey or Wittgenstein - had the least temptation to accept 
anything like a »private-public split.« Perhaps one finds it in Proust or 
Nabokov, but almost nowhere else: certainly not in Derrida or Foucault or 
de Man or Bloom for instance. The private, in any pertinent »ethical« sense, 
is a »space« set aside for public reasons, not a disjoint sector of life in which a 
»final« vocabulary separated from whatever holds in the public sector rightly (perhaps 
arbitrarily) obtains. Whatever else is true, the disjunction demands a defense, 
but the idea is finally incoherent. For if art is, as it is, part of a public culture, 
then Rorty's »private« self-discipline is little more than a pose that has nothing 
to do with defensible distinctions of any sort. 
No. The final truth about aestheticism, or the aestheticization of 
everyday life, is simply that, if it has a message, it is a message of cultural 
generosity or a democracy of ideas (if saying that will not mislead you), 
perhaps a reminder of neglected or marginalized resources. I am not as 
sanguine for instance as Richard Shusterman about the possibilities of an 
aestheticism of rap, but I see no reason to exclude it.2u I also grant the point, 
therefore, of Wolfgang Welsch's tempered plea for extending our aesthetic 
concerns beyond art and traditional aesthetics to encompass the whole span 
of experience. But if you follow its logic, you see that it views the »aesthetic« 
as a way of defining the entire possible field of inquiry rather than as a 
criterion for assessing any elements that may be found in it.30 Welsch follows 
Adorno more than Schiller here, that is, in endorsing our transcending the 
aesthetic by finding the aesthetic in the whole of global experience and reality 
rather than in training up our sensibility and reason to a new unheard-of 
height.31 The theme strikes me as conceptually therapeutic rather than as 
politically corrective - perhaps also, then, at least distantly Nietzschean. If 
so, then I find the same idea very widely favored and present in many guises.32 
I have no quarrel with it. 
Also, then, aesthetic »self-enrichment and »perfection,« whether in 
Rorty's subversively democratic sense or in Shusterman's more optimistic 
2" See Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, Ch. 8, and Shus te rman ' s generally congenial 
summary, in Ch. 9, of what he takes to be the lesson of aestheticization. 
30 See Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics, trans. Andrew Inkpin (London: Sage, 1997), 
Ch. 4. 
31 Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics, pp. 65-71. 
32 For example, I find it in F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact 
and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), particularly pp. 16-18. Ankersmit 
expressly prefers Machiavelli to Schiller here. 
198 
All the Turns in »Aestheticizing« Life 
sense, strikes me as as difficult to refuse as apple pie (whether eaten in secrecy 
or at the dinner table). Both are versions of a form of consumerism that 
either refuses to spell out, or sees no need to spell out, how ethical matters 
might be affected by admitting aestheticism's concerns. I am as willing as 
the next philosopher to reject, for reasons, the standard forms of »modernist« 
philosophies, extending to ethics and politics. But I cannot see how, apart 
f rom a plea for cultural openness, the doctrine of the »aesthetic life« cuts 
any ethical ice at all: how or why, in particular, »aesthetic considerations 
are or should be,« as Shusterman insists, »crucial and ultimately perhaps 
paramount in determining how we choose to lead or shape our lives and 
how we assess what a good life is.« 
I'm afraid I don ' t really see how that actually »fleshes out Wittgenstein's 
ambiguous but well-known dictum that ethics and aesthetics are one by 
erecting the aesthetic as the proper ethical ideal, the preferred model and 
criterion of assessment for the good life.«33 Wittgenstein, you remember, 
explicitly meant his proposition to apply to the world sub specie aetemitatis. 
That is of course precisely nož what either Rorty or Shusterman have in mind. 
But, beyond that, i f , on the supposed argument, the aesthetic should be the 
»model and criterion« of the good life, then we have a right to ask what the 
distinction had formerly been between the aesthetic and the ethical and how 
it would now be improved; and that would surely bring us back to the age-
old questions that were to have been superseded. Lacking such a rationale, 
I cannot see how to escape the judgment that, now, at the end of the century, 
the aestheticization of everyday life can be anything but philosophical 
opportunism or anarchical or democratic consumerism. But, if so, I must 
admit that neither of these two pies suits me as well as apple pie. 
IV 
There 's much more to the matter than can be discerned by laying out 
all the odd twists and turns of seeming theory along the lines collected. I 
have no d o u b t that a good deal of the aestheticizing issue is entirely 
straightforward. But it is also an eccentric form of political statement and, 
in some instances, for instance those involving Heidegger and Rorty, it is 
very difficult not to suppose that the aestheticizing formula may be interpreted 
33 Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, p. 237. The reference to Wittgenstein is to proposition 
6.421 of the Tractatus, which makes an appearance in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 
1914-1916, ed. B. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe 
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), p. 83e (7.10.16). 
199 
Joseph Margo lis 
as a kind of Aesopian pronouncement. Quite frankly, in our own time, the 
aestheticizing issue is not unlike the dispute between modernism and 
postmodernism, that is, more a symptom of a deflected worry or concern 
than a legible dispute that is explicitly what it appears to be on its face. 
The aestheticizing issue seems to have congealed in two principal ways: 
one, by opportunistically reversing Nietzsche's thesis about the meanin-
glessness of the meaning of life; the other, by opportunistically distorting 
Kant's intuition (in the Third Critique), that is, that the aesthetic may promote 
and enrich the realization of our moral concerns , now, however, by 
disorganizing the hitherto valid distinction between the two. If you listen 
closely to all the principal voices already collected, you cannot fail to find 
that, despite enormous differences,Jünger, Heidegger, Nehamas, and Rorty 
propose quite arbitrary, idiosyncratic, surprisingly upbeat visions of life as 
art, whether proto-fascistor extreme laissez-faire liberal, that gymnastically 
convert Nietzsche's utter contempt for self-congratulatory moralities into 
newer forms of self-congratulation. The pronouncements of these worthies 
are noticeably unconstrained by any would-be schema of objective assessment. 
That is the source of their charm: evidently we are blessed, as Jünger and 
Heidegger suppose, with high revelations that eclipse the merely mundane 
choices of the bourgeois world or, as Nehamas and Rorty suppose, we are 
entitled to affirm straightforwardly the autonomous near-anarchy of the 
private lives we choose to pursue. In either case, there are no independent 
legitimative constraints to invoke - beyond our dicta: that is, r ead ing 
Nietzsche as seer or postmodernist, athletically or indulgently. It's in this 
sense that I take »aestheticizing« to be a political s tatement that ei ther 
accuses capitalism and communism of moral exhaustion or exploits the 
advantages of affluent privacy within the capitalist protectorate. 
Rorty is perhaps the most inventive of the »post-Nietzschean« and »post-
Kan tian« champions of aestheticizing, for Rorty manages to join Heidegger 
and Dewey in the liberal and democratic spirit he calls »irony.«34 The Kantian 
thread is far less explicit than the Nietzschean; it is in any case mediated, in 
the liberal-democratic spirit, by theorists such as Schiller and Adorno, as 
may be seen in the analyses and generous proposals offered by Shusterman 
and Welsch. Here, benignly, conceptua l arbi t rar iness appears as the 
a f f i rmat ion of polit ical equali ty and inclusiveness: r ap music a n d 
environmental concerns, for instance, testily to the eclipse of elitist values. 
In a perfecdy obvious sense, the liberal cast of postmodernism draws strength 
from Dewey's Art and Experience, which, in effect, is a democratized cousin 
of Schiller's vision of aesthetic education. 
34 See Rorty, »Private Irony and Liberal Hope.« 
200 
All the Turns in »Aestheticizing« Life 
Dewey, however, is no postmodernist. Nor is Adorno, of course. Both, 
in different ways, mean to preserve the relevance of continuing to link the 
moral and the aesthetic, all the while subverting the strong compart-
mentalization of objective (or at least universalized) judgment, according 
to Kant. The demarcation between the moral and the aesthetic dissolves in 
Dewey and Adorno, but neither denies the prospects of objective practical 
judgment . The subversive possibilities appear most saliently in Nietzsche, 
of course, running from The Birth of Tragedy to The Gay Science to The Will to 
Power. Nietzsche's theme collects the artifactual, even self-deceptive (life-
e n h a n c i n g ) n a t u r e of mora l and aesthetic concerns. In J i inger and 
Heidegger, it turns imperiously prophetic and destinal; in Adorno and 
Dewey, it turns egalitarian, perhaps more critically in Adorno than in Dewey 
(though one must remember Adorno's misreading of jazz). In Nehamas 
and Shusterman and Welsch, it becomes benignly tolerant: Proustian, in 
Nehamas, not yet democratic; almost Whitmanesque, in Shusterman and 
Welsch. 
In Rorty, the democratic theme takes a distinctly postmodernist turn -
which, politically, means that it veers off in a conserving, if not conservative, 
direction in the name of an unspecified »patriotism« said to be more of the 
Left than of the Right.35 That may even go some distance toward explaining 
Rorty's yoking Heidegger and Wittgenstein and Dewey, no one of whom is 
a proper postmodernist, in the name of aestheticizing life; in fact, each 
opposes anything like a Kantian rationale of practical judgment. I suspect 
that Rorty is genuinely postmodernist and the most prophedc of this company: 
he has a »philosophical« conviction of how to go on and has indeed prepared 
the ground for a liberalized - perhaps, better, a democratized - analogue 
(if you can imagine it) of Heidegger's Volk vision, now no longer ironic but 
merely patriotic.36 
This helps to mark the slim sense in which the aestheticization of 
ordinary life is instinctively meant to reorient our political sensibilities. 
Postmodernism seems to relieve us of the need for legitimation; we yield in 
3r' See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America 
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). See, particularly, »The Inspirational Work 
of Great Works of Literature.« 
3,i Rorty actually invokes Holder l in ' s inspirational role in a way that suggests that the 
democratically minded might use Holderlin as well as Heidegger at his most benignly 
fascist moments: see Achieving Our Country, pp. 139-140. But that is of course the crazy 
quilt consequence of Rorty's separating »hope« f rom »understanding«; see pp. 11,13, 
30-31. See also, for a sense of the Soviet analogue of Nazi aestheticization, Boris Groys, 
The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles 
Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 
201 
Joseph Margo lis 
the direction of our habituated impulses and are pleased to know that acting 
thus is self-certifying (revealed or privately autonomous) or simply no longer 
in need of the would-be objective scruple of the philosophically naive past. 
But that is a delusion - a dangerous oversimplification — that cannot be 
satisfactorily opposed by any linking of the moral and the aesthetic that does 
not recognize that legitimation cannot be more than (but is at least) a 
constructed projection from our own society's practices. 
The aestheticizing theme is ultimately a piece of political opportunism 
that senses that we find ourselves, at the present time, somewhere between 
the repudiation of moral and political privilege and the bewilderment of 
skepticism and conceptual anarchy. What we face is the recovery of critical 
judgment under the condition of changing history - in effect, the restoration 
of a problem that had already dawned nearly two hundred years ago. Either 
aestheticizing bids us abandon the need for legitimation by way of refocusing 
the public impulses of the »people« (whether in Heidegger's way or Rorty's) 
or assures us without argument that the aestheticizing impulse is reliably 
generous in the best democratic sense (as with Shusterman and Welsch). I 
find myself unwilling to trust either tendency and believe, rather, that if there 
is a disciplined debate that may be mounted , we will find that we have 
reclaimed the question of moral or ethical direction (however altered from 
the Kantian reading), which would mean outflanking both the revelatory 
and the postmodernist options once again - without falling back to modernist 
assurances. 
202