| סיכום: | <p>This thesis examines aesthetics through the lens of anaesthesia. Focusing on Friedrich Nietzsche's (1844–1900) theory of art, it argues that the anaesthetic forms a critical component of the framework within which Nietzsche developed his aesthetic ideas, and that the anaesthetic dimension operates within Nietzsche's aesthetic discourse as conceptual metaphor, historical context, and material condition. </p>
<p>The thesis is structured around four key clusters of concerns within Nietzsche's aesthetics, set in conversation with four important aspects of coeval anaesthetic discourse and practice: firstly, the Dionysian Rausch in Nietzsche's earliest writings (to 1872) and the anaesthetic use of chloroform; secondly, the relation of art to truth and memory in Nietzsche's early essays (1872–1874) and the anaesthetic use of ether; thirdly, the aesthetic relevance of the senses in Nietzsche's early positivistic works (1876–1879) and the anaesthetic discourse around carbonic acid; and fourthly, aesthetic pleasure in Nietzsche's late positivistic period (1880–1882) and developments in electroanalgesia. I discuss these in turn in the thesis's four chapters, showing that Nietzsche's aesthetic ideas are often articulated in physiological or outright anaesthetic terms, and that they were significantly impacted by contemporary scientific discussions of anaesthesia and by Nietzsche's own direct exposure to and experience of anaesthetic practices.</p>
<p>Nietzsche scholarship has tended to interpret the physiological and anaesthetic language in Nietzsche's aesthetics either solely figuratively, as part of his broader philosophical arguments; or at face value, in their physiological denotation. This thesis makes a double intervention in Nietzsche scholarship in that it identifies in the anaesthetic a conceptual hinge between physiology and philosophy, through which Nietzsche could develop nuanced aesthetic views that balanced philosophical commitments with physiological states; and it locates in this superposition of physiological and philosophical dimensions an important moment through which Nietzsche's physical state impacted his thought. </p>
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