Cézanne and Nietzschean Becoming

Cézanne’s Viaduct at L’Estaque is a great example of the non-geometric,

unclear perspective emblematic of Post-Impressionism. Cézanne’s turbulent brush

strokes render the mountains and foliage volatile and fluid, and the landscape

resists stably focused comprehension. One’s eye cannot rest comfortably on any

spot, and so it is subject to rapid saccades all across the canvas. The painting creates

a disconcerting mood—this scene is not easy to process, cannot be mastered by the

viewer’s gaze. Perceiving this painting is a very active process, which does not end

in a complete understanding of how things are “actually” spatially distributed.

Cézanne, like many aestheticians of his time, was engaged in challenging the notion

of a stable geometric or camera-obscura-type perspective, and in attempting in his

work a “lived” perspective—sensual, bodily, and perceptually embedded in time.

Cézanne is in league with Nietzsche, by virtue of their shared interest in challenging

the fidelity of vision. Nietzsche’s aesthetic framework--with which he emphasizes

the necessity of “dreaming” in all aspects of experience-- does not quite overthrow

the dominant “perspectival” image of thought, but rather merely challenges the

notion of clear vision.

Viaduct at L’Estaque is challenging, especially if one is hoping for a fully

formulated presentation of a landscape. The painting feels restless due to its

destabilization of focus; there is a strange layering effect whereby the presumed

spatial background resists relegation to the foreground. The mountains, for

example, in a more perspectivally stable painting, would be more mountain-like—

they would presumably appear solid. In addition, they would at least seem further

away from the viaduct in the foreground, and our gaze would thus be able to locate

its own point in relation to the rest of the landscape. But Cézanne’s mountains are

shaky, volatile, and lurch out into view—the viewer does not remain comfortably

separated from them. Not only does Cézanne disrupt what the viewer could

presume about the “real” distribution of this space—he makes it impossible to

ideally envision this distribution distinctly from what is presented. In other words

there is no bottom line as to what is “actually” in this landscape or how it is

distributed.

An easy way into Nietzsche’s thoughts on the visual—his perspectivalism—is

the “evil eye,” which appears in Twilight, among other works (Shapiro 128). The

“evil eye” is a kind of hubristic perspective that effectively destroys what it sees.

Gary Shapiro writes that it is “reductionistic or nihilistic; it reduces whatever it sees

to the lowest common denominator of sameness” (Ibid). This is Nietzsche grappling

with what he sees as philosophically false vision—instead of truly seeing something,

the evil eye reduces and homogenizes what it sees into something predicted,

something stable. An analogy to Cézanne, Post-Impressionism, and even

Impressionism is obvious: these artists are not concerned with depicting stable

presence. Cézanne shifts his focus onto the process of perception, rather than

holding onto the false pretense of perceived reality itself. He thereby leaves the

question open as to what is actually in view, and gives up the hegemony of vision.

According to Martin Jay, Nietzsche “insisted that every viewpoint was always

value-laden, never detached. Vision was…as much active as passive” (Jay 191). Part

of the activity of vision is, importantly, the duration of perception. Instead of

assuming one can see everything “correctly” at a glance, Cézanne took on the task of

showing perception occurring across time, and he thus deferred a final grasp of the

scene. Time is certainly felt while looking at Viaduct, and it is the time of the

viewer’s perception itself rather than any depicted time within the context of the

scene. The eye is endlessly thrown about as it tries to comprehend what it is

presented. Jay terms Cézanne’s project the “pictorial realization of time as duration

rather than as instantaneous succession” (Jay 205). Cézanne does not merely force

the viewer to eventually grasp the reality of the scene, however; this supposed grasp

is endlessly deferred.

Nietzsche elsewhere deals with the problems of vision, and it is useful in

thinking about Cézanne. In his work Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche compares

Descartes and Schopenhauer to viewers of a painting (Shapiro 128). He

characterizes Descartes as confident in the reality of the thing depicted, and

Schopenhauer as wholly doubtful. Nietzsche writes:

“Both parties, however, overlook the possibility that this painting—which we call human life and experience—has gradually become, is indeed still fully in course of becoming, and should thus not be regarded as a fixed object on the basis of which a conclusion as to the nature of its originator… may either be drawn or pronounced undrawable. (Ibid)

Nietzsche is advocating for an awareness of our (and the world’s)

constant becoming. So he lies not entirely in opposition to the possibility of

vision itself, but merely opposes the pretense of ultimately accurate or

consistently stable vision—he considers vision, and the world, to be in a

constant state of flux. This awareness of becoming disrupts the “evil eye” of

homogenizing, projected vision, and brings one closer to seeing

multiplicities, changes, etc. Similarly, Cézanne is not attempting to enact any

Schopenhauerian disavowal of the reality of the external world, but is merely

venturing a depiction of the fluid multiplicity of the external world and,

consequently, the impossibility of coming to a final and clear understanding

of what is seen (to do so would be an “evil” reduction). Viaduct at L’Estaque,

for all its earthy richness of color, exists in a kind of constantly shifting

phenomenological space.

According to Shapiro, Nietzsche champions the “abyss” of vision, its

inherent “twilight” of uncertainty. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he contrasts the

vision of a dwarf to that of Zarathustra. While the dwarf sees essentially with

the evil eye, and considers the eternal return to be a repetition of the same,

Zarathustra considers it “a celebration of the depth, complexity, and abyss of

the same” (Shapiro 136). For Nietzsche, the life energy of apprehending

multiplicity, uncertainness of vision, and twilight trumps any possible

reduction of vision into a depiction of presence. The same is true for Cézanne

—we are left to contemplate the image endlessly; there is no epistemic end.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century

French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Shapiro, Gary. “In the Shadows of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Question of

Vision.” Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Ed. David Michael Levin.

Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.