(3) The compulsion to imitate: extreme irritability, by means of which a certain example becomes contagious—a condition is guessed and represented merely by means of a few signs.... A complete picture is visualised by one's inner consciousness, and its effect soon shows itself in the movement of the limbs,—in a certain suspension of the will (Schopenhauer!!!!). A sort of blindness and deafness towards the external world,—the realm of admitted stimuli is sharply defined.
This differentiates the artist from the layman (from the spectator of art): the latter reaches the height of his excitement in the mere act of apprehending: the former in giving—and in such a way that the antagonism between these two gifts is not only natural but even desirable. Each of these states has an opposite standpoint—to demand of the artist that he should have the point of view of the spectator (of the critic) is equivalent to asking him to impoverish his creative power.... In this respect the same difference holds good as that which exists between the sexes: one should not ask the artist who gives to become a woman—to "receive."
Our æsthetics have hitherto been women's æsthetics, inasmuch as they have only formulated the experiences of what is beautiful, from the point of view of the receivers in art. In the whole of philosophy hitherto the artist has been lacking ... i.e. as we have already suggested, a necessary fault: for the artist who would begin to understand himself would therewith begin to mistake himself—he must not look backwards, he must not look at all; he must give.—It is an honour for an artist to have no critical faculty; if he can criticise he is mediocre, he is modern.
812.
Here I lay down a series of psychological states as signs of flourishing and complete life, which to-day we are in the habit of regarding as morbid. But, by this time, we have broken ourselves of the habit of speaking of healthy and morbid as opposites: the question is one of degree, what I maintain on this point is that what people call healthy nowadays represents a lower level of that which under favourable circumstances actually would be healthy—that we are relatively sick....
The artist belongs to a much stronger race. That which in us would be harmful and sickly, is natural in him. But people object to this that it is precisely the impoverishment of the machine which renders this extraordinary power of comprehending every kind of suggestion possible: e.g. our hysterical females.
An overflow of spunk and energy may quite as well lead to symptoms of partial constraint, sense hallucinations, peripheral sensitiveness, as a poor vitality does—the stimuli are differently determined, the effect is the same.... What is not the same is above all the ultimate result; the extreme torpidity of all morbid natures, after their nervous eccentricities, has nothing in common with the states of the artist, who need in no wise repent his best moments.... He is rich enough for it all: he can squander without becoming poor.
Just as we now feel justified in judging genius as a form of neurosis, we may perhaps think the same of artistic suggestive power,—and our artists are, as a matter of fact, only too closely related to hysterical females!!! This, however, is only an argument against the present day, and not against artists in general.
The inartistic states are: objectivity, reflection suspension of the will ... (Schopenhauer's scandalous misunderstanding consisted in regarding art as a mere bridge to the denial of life)... The inartistic states are: those which impoverish, which subtract, which bleach, under which life suffers—the Christian.