LIFE AS ART

The necessity for the appeal to the metaphysical lies in the apparent possibility of sceptical questioning, of subjecting our forms of thought and life to a general doubt. Yet, of course, there has always been a difficulty in understanding how the philosopher, who is, after all, human, can have access to a standard which could fulfil the metaphysical need, one which would be able to stand in judgement over all human standards. We must either claim, as Plato and Aristotle do, that we are, in a sense, more than human, possessed of the ‘divine spark of the intellect’, or that we have in some other way, through faith in the Creator, for example, access to the ultimate ground in terms of which our forms of life and thought could be judged. But what if we were to recognize that such a claim was an illusion, born, no doubt, as Cavell will suggest, of a real human desire to be more than we are? What would it be to give up this desire? And how then would the philosophical significance of literature appear to us? From Kant to Derrida we can trace the development of a tradition of thought which attempts to divest us of this ambition. Kant, in returning us to our finitude, nevertheless tries to maintain an essential role in our thought and life for the idea of a more than human position, and literature and art play for him a part in the articulation of that role. If, however, with Schlegel and Nietzsche we recognize that even the idea of such a role is itself illusory, life becomes in a certain way its own measure. But that is something, as we shall see, that Kant attributes to the nature of art and literature itself. Both Schlegel and Nietzsche are inclined to draw the consequence from their unmasking of this illusion that life must be understood as itself a form of art, which raises the question whether they have freed themselves as radically as they suppose from Kantian conceptuality.