Friedrich Nietzsche’s Subjective Artist

The ancients, Friedrich Nietzsche notes, held Homer’s objective art and Archilochus’s subjective art in equally high esteem. However, if a work of art must be “objective,” how are we to understand the subjective artist, who, like Archilochus, produces art from his own subjective experience? Guided by a clue from Schiller’s May 18, 1796, letter to Goethe, Nietzsche employs Schopenhauer’s theory of music in his consideration of the subjective artist. Turning to Paul Ricoeur’s distinction between image as copy and image as fiction, I argue, will assist us in understanding how Nietzsche resolves the problem of the subjective artist.