8
body”
18
and Bourdieu’s notion that the “eye” is “a product of history produced by education.”
19
The famed Japanese Tantric Buddhist D gen insisted that only by way of cultivation or training
(e.g. zazen or seated meditation) do we grasp the primacy of the body over the mind.
The body for Nietzsche may be likened to the work of art. As such it is a hermeneutical
topic. Terry Eagleton fleshes out the twofold Nietzschean principle of carnal hermeneutics as an
aesthetic project: (1) the aesthetic (aisthesis) is or begins as a discourse of the body and (2) it is
the body in revolt against the tyranny of the theoretic (theoria) which is a spectatorial idea in its
Greek origin.
20
The “aesthetic” is preeminently a carnal affair, it is unquestionably kinaesthetic.
It is Nietzsche who radicalized the body as an aesthetic phenomenon. By way of the body, he
subverts and overcomes the speculative conundrum of theoria and attempts to replace it with
aisthesis. By so doing, he inverts Platonism which seeks eternal ideas (eidos) radiated from the
“mind’s eye.” Nietzsche’s aesthetic politics joltingly overturns the long-established tradition of
all that theoretic speculation entails in Western philosophy since the time of Plato including
Cartesian epistemocracy. When in The Birth of Tragedy, the young Nietzsche trained as a
classicist praises music, he was trekking the ancient Greek tradition of mousike as “performing
arts” which consisted of oral poetry, drama, dance and above all music. He advanced music as
consummately aesthetic: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are
eternally justified” and that “only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea of what is
meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.”
21
For Nietzsche, in
essence, music is paradigmatic to all the other arts and, as performing art, consummates the
aesthetic as it is the carnal performance par excellence. That is to say, music embodies the
body’s profound revolt against the theoreticism of the mind. In (Homeric) oral poetry whose
primary function was to transmit cultural messages, composition was performance. When
Convention