76 NietzscheNietzsche was touching on an old issue, namely the question of
theodicy, which was once applied to the relationship between God and
the wodd and was now being reframed in terms of the relationship
between art and non-artistic reality. By formulating the aesthetic justifi-
cation of the world in the way he did, he was explicidy reworking the
classic theodicy question, which had been posed as far back as Job and
continued to be pondered by Leibniz: How can the existence of God be
justified when there is evil in the world? Once the ancient God was no
longer in the picture, the theodicy question could be applied to art in
roughly the following terms: How can the relatively luxurious enterprise
of art be justified when there is evil in the world? The fact that some
produce art while others suffer is surely a scandalous proof of injustice
in the world. The misery of the world and the incantation of art—how
can they fit together? The young Hugo von Hofmannsthal later wrote a
celebrated poem on this theme: "Many truly down below must perish /
Where the heavy oars of ships are passing; / Others by the helm up
there have dwelling, / Know the flight of birds and starry countries"
(Hofmannsthal 34-35).
Nietzsche's notion that art grows out of a dark foundation of injus-
tice and that "cruelty" and sacrifice are essential components of culture
would provoke anyone who would prefer to see art paired with social
progress. Nietzsche welcomed this provocation because he regarded
social progress as a threat to art. One day, he wrote, there would be a
"rebellion of the oppressed masses against drone-like individuals." It
would be "the roar of sympathy that would knock down the walls of
culture. The urge for justice, for equal sharing of suffering would engulf
all other ideas" (7,340).
This is precisely what happened In the revolutionary social move-
ments of the twentieth century, there occurred a large-scale betrayal of
art motivated by solidarity with suffering. Heinrich Heine had predicted
this turn of events along with Nietzsche. In 1855, Heine described the
communists, with whose goals he sympathized, as follows: "with their
red fists they are smashing all of the marble structures of my beloved art