Czanne and Nietzschean Becoming Czannes Viaduct at LEstaque is a great example of the non-geometric, unclear perspective emblematic of Post-Impressionism.

Czannes turbulent brush strokes render the mountains and foliage volatile and fluid, and the landscape resists stably focused comprehension. Ones eye cannot rest comfortably on any spot, and so it is subject to rapid saccades all across the canvas. The painting creates a disconcerting moodthis scene is not easy to process, cannot be mastered by the viewers gaze. Perceiving this painting is a very active process, which does not end in a complete understanding of how things are actually spatially distributed. Czanne, 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 perspectivesensual, bodily, and perceptually embedded in time. Czanne is in league with Nietzsche, by virtue of their shared interest in challenging the fidelity of vision. Nietzsches 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 LEstaque 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 Czannes mountains are shaky, volatile, and lurch out into viewthe viewer does not remain comfortably separated from them. Not only does Czanne disrupt what the viewer could presume about the real distribution of this spacehe 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 Nietzsches thoughts on the visualhis perspectivalismis 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 visioninstead of truly seeing something, the evil eye reduces and homogenizes what it sees into something predicted, something stable. An analogy to Czanne, Post-Impressionism, and even Impressionism is obvious: these artists are not concerned with depicting stable presence. Czanne 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 wasas 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, Czanne 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 viewers 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 Czannes project the pictorial realization of time as duration rather than as instantaneous succession (Jay 205). Czanne 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 Czanne. 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 experiencehas 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 worlds) 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 visionhe 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, Czanne 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 LEstaque, 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 Czannewe 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.