being-unto-death).^12 One is reminded of Sartre’s famous challenge to
the young man facing a far-reaching moral dilemma: “You are free, so
choose; in other words, invent” (EH 33 ). He even risked likening moral
choice to constructing a work of art, but hastened to caution: “We are not
espousing an aesthetic morality” (EH 45 ). Some of his critics failed to
honor that caveat.
Gift-responseInNotebooksthat risk is intensified when he extends the model of gift-
response between artist and viewer, author and reader, from his aesthetic
writings to authentic interpersonal relations and even to political situ-
ations, where one hopes to communicate among free agents without
alienating or objectifying them in the process. We have encountered this
model in the author–reader relation discussed inWhat is Literature?,
serialized inLTM, while theNotebookswere being composed. In the
Notebookswe find this analogy elaborated:
The work of art, for example, demands that its content be recognized materially by
the freedom of a concrete public. It is gift and demand at the same time, and only
makes a demand insofar as it gives something. It does not ask for the adhesion of a
pure freedom, but rather that of a freedom engaged in generous feelings, which it
transforms. It is therefore something completely other than a right. It is the means
of directly affecting a qualified freedom.
(NE 141 )
As the work of art reaches its aesthetic actualization when individuals
adopt the aesthetic attitude by considering the artifact as an analogon
(the thesis ofThe Imaginary), so social relations must move beyond
the abstract freedom of man in general (“the tiresome character of a
humanism founded on rights” [NE 140 ]) by a generous, transformative
attitude toward concrete freedoms:
Relations among men must be based upon this model if men want to exist as freedom
for one another: 1 st, by the intermediary of the work (technical as well as aesthetical,
(^12) Nietzsche,Portable Nietzsche,The Gay Science, 101 – 102 , andThus Spoke Zarathustra,
269 – 271 and 327 – 333 ; Martin Heidegger,BT§ 53.
Notebooks for an Ethics 267