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Does art teach us truths and is that its purpose? Friedrich Nietzsche was, by critical

consensus, a tin-eared composer, and by universal consensus a Virtuozo writer. Nietzsche took art seriously.

Until they had a massive falling out he was a close friend of Richard Vardners.

For Nietzsche, the function of art, of music and theatre, was to give us a hint of a truth,

the truth that the world was chaotic and meaningless. But equally, art had to shield us from this dreadful reality.

Aaron Ridley is a Nietzschean scholar.

Aaron Ridley, welcome to philosophy, Bites.

Hello, Michael.

We're going to focus on Nietzsche and particularly Nietzsche's ideas about art and truth.

Could you just say a little bit about Nietzsche's relationship to art?

Well Nietzsche was arguably the most art obsessed philosopher there's

been. Throughout his life he regarded himself as a serious poet. He also regarded

himself as a serious composer, the actual evidence of his own compositions to the

contrary notwithstanding, and assigned throughout a really very significant

place to art. He was serious about art. And in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy,

he focused in on the art of Tragedy,

but it illuminated further things about art and truth.

Well, Nietzsche wrote the birth of tragedy very much under the spell of Schopenhauer, who had thought that the world was an utterly vile, ghastly ghastly place, and if one really grasped the nature of it, you would see that the whole thing was a terrible mistake, that existence

itself was a terrible mistake.

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