Jill Marsden

The contribution that arts can make to our health and wellbeing is widely acknowledged in public discourse, with the concept of ‘creative health’ having come to prominence in the UK in the last ten years. This paper asks about the kinds of values at play in contemporary appeals to creativity by exploring the value of art for life from a 8 philosophical perspective. Drawing on Pierre Hadot’s influential work on the ancient 9 philosophical practice of the ‘art of living’, it goes on to consider how aesthetic 10 perception of the world functions as a kind of model for philosophical perception. 11 Inflecting these ideas with Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of values, the paper 12 examines the role of art and philosophy in relation to luxury and need, and to fundamental conditions of life enhancement. Building on this distinctive application of Nietzsche’s genealogy, it develops the question of how to assess the value of art for life outside the current neoliberal narratives of wellbeing and the creative industries. In its focus on values rather than ideals, the paper makes an original contribution to current thinking and practice in creative health.

Mass Observation was the most ambitious and controversial investigation into cultural life in Britain in the twentieth century. Buoyed by a democratic spirit yet riven by eclectic intellectual allegiances, the project, in its inception, revelled in contradictions, many of which have endured in its legacy. This paper revisits the early countercultural aspirations of Mass Observation in order to reflect on the significance of these contradictions for the fate of popular writing. It is argued that the tensions between art, philosophy and science, as articulated in the inaugural statements of Mass Observation, are illuminated by the anti-elitist agenda of the founders. Building on these insights, the paper revisits controversies in the use of Mass Observation data for research and calls upon the findings from a recent recreation of Mass Observation Diary Day (12 May 2024) to argue that Mass Observation's 'science of ourselves' be reconsidered as creative cultural production and a contribution to the 'art of living'.

What is it to be a mother when you have been forsaken as a wife? Surprisingly, this question is largely absent from analysis of the “abandoned” woman in both literary texts and the cultural narratives that inform them. Taking Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed (1967) as the classic account of the abandoned wife, this chapter will argue that the mother is missing from the dominant patriarchal discourse of marriage. Too frequently critical attention is devoted to the plight of the failed wife at the expense of any acknowledgment of her successful mothering, an omission that attests to the invisibility of “motherwork” within the ideological construction of motherhood as natural, normative and apolitical. Situating Patricia Highsmith’s Edith’s Diary (1977) and Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002) in dialogue with Beauvoir’s text, this discussion will show how each text renders visible the labour of mothering, revealing not only how the literary protagonists “read” their respective maternal scripts but also how motherhood might be re-written once divested of patriarchal assumptions. Significantly, each character uses writing in order to process her changed circumstances, revealing the power of narrative to shape the material conditions of experience.

This paper draws connections between Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism, his philosophy of the “nearest things” and issues of orientation in contemporary thought. The trajectory which Nietzsche traces from “the devaluation of the highest values” to the task of transvaluation, supplies an overarching context for addressing nihilism as a crisis of orientation. It is argued that Nietzsche’s turn towards the “closest” things as a new direction for thought shares priorities named as the “keywords” of our time: “embodiment, affect, the quotidian, singularity, contingency, intimacy, precarity” (Laura Marcus, 2016). In order to pursue the deeper implications of this affinity, some recent engagement with Nietzsche in new materialist writings are considered. It is claimed that Nietzsche’s ideas about the nearest things provide these theories with resources to contest nihilism at the level of value, without reinstating an uncritical appeal to the authority of “lived experience.”

It is winter 1876 in Sorrento, the air bright and taut. Nietzsche’s pen is poised for a new direction in his philosophy but first he pauses ‘like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which [his] mind [has] hitherto travelled’ (GM P: 2). This ‘pause’ on the path marks the beginning of the aphoristic style of writing that will characterize Nietzsche’s ‘middle period’; from this point on, thought-as-travel will be less a metaphor than the material practice of thinking outside. As Nietzsche’s connection to university philosophy atrophies, walking becomes thinking. Writing from Sorrento to Reinhart von Seydlitz, Nietzsche imbues his strolling with allegorical significance.

Whitman’s professed sympathy for a diverse range of individuals in Song of Myself has been the subject of much criticism. Some readers see his ambition to speak to and ‘for’ all others as an imperialist prescription of homogeneity between humans, an arrogation of agency and erasure of difference. I ask if there a way of mobilizing sympathy in this poem which does not rely on the assumption of a common humanity. Briefly situating Whitman in relation to the nineteenth century discourse of sentimentalism, I go on to explore how sympathy can be heard as a shareable material affect which exceeds the moral and humanist register. With particular reference to Whitman’s use of ‘catalogues’ I look at how Song of Myself creates a ‘community of those who have nothing in common’.

The aloneness of creativity is quite unlike other solitudes. Time spent writing and thinking is time spent “away,” in a kind of exile from the daily clamor of life. For the migrant spirit of Emily Brontë’s poem, to be “most away” is to seek more than distance from the distractions of sociality. It is to slip out of existence for a while—to savor a kind of reprieve from a human location in things. “Wandering wide” the free spirit feels itself distributed through regions undetermined by the familiar co-ordinates of earth and sky. Night winds stir the starscape, tempting the wanderer with the promise of other suns. There is something both disarming and familiar about this freedom, as if in our creative solitude we reconnect with those domains guessed at and half-glimpsed in dreams.

In this essay I explore what might be meant by the “nearest things” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. In the first part of the essay I contextualise Nietzsche’s concerns with “the closest things of all” in the “free spirit” period (1878-1882) and raise the question of how knowledge of them is possible. This idea is developed in the second part of the paper in relation to the claim that dominant (Platonic/Christian) habits of thought impede our understanding of the body. In the third section, I suggest that Nietzsche’s interest in Epicurean thinking in this period enables us to situate the nearest things within the political aesthetics of a transfigured physis. In the final section, I examine how Nietzsche’s 1881 notes on eternal return provide a less-well known locus for his philosophy of the nearest things, one which suggests that to “incorporate” eternal return we need to become “good neighbours” to what is close.