다카야마 조규의 「 미적 생활을 논하다」와 니체사상

Abstract

TAKAYAMA Chogyū (1871 – 1902) published “On the Aesthetic Life” as the chief editor of the general journal “Taiyō” (The Sun) in August 1901. It was a year after the death of Friedrich NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) and a year before the death of Chogyū himself. Chogyū is known as one of the earliest affirmations of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Japan. Furthermore, in his short but dynamic career of writing and criticism after graduating from the Tōkyō Imperial University, Chogyū was wandering through the three eras of “Romanticism”, “Japanism” and “Individualism-Nietzscheanism”. He caused a great deal of controversy in the literary world (bundan) in Meiji-Japan with his “On the Aesthetic Life”, which held that ‘the satisfaction of instinct is the aesthetic life’. The establishment of the modern state system and beginning of capitalism as the economic system after the Sino-Japanese War (Nisshin sensō 1894-95) led to the emergence of individualism. Japanese society was in a transitional period, in which the modern subjective individualism was becoming more and more conscious. In such a Japanese philosophical phase, the influence of Chogyū on the reception of NIETZSCHE’s thoughts was significant, although it cannot be called academic NIETZSCHE research. The images of NIETZSCHE in Chogyū’s work are mainly based on the work of early European Nietzschean scholar Theobald ZIEGLER’s “The history of civilisation in the nineteenth century”. He presented NIETZSCHE as a ‘great poet’, a ‘critic of civilisation’ and an ‘individualist’. As a result of this, and through the influence of Meiji romanticism, Chōgyū’s own individualist aesthetics, instinctualism and theory of happiness were conceived. In this paper, by reference to ZIEGLER’s writings, I will show how Chogyū accepted NIETZSCHE ‘intrinsically’ within his ‘aesthetic theory of life’, and how he developed a new ‘superhuman’ theory of happiness. This examines how he attempted self-realisation through the ideas of ‘the inversion of moral values’.