Jul
19
Towards a Nietzschean Understanding of Politics: Notes on "The Case of Wagner" (Part 3)
Filed Under nietzsche, philosophy, politics | 1 Comment
II. Music, Art and Politics
for Nancy Ruggeri
1. A fellow student in graduate school remarked that after reading Nietzsche, his love for the band Cursive fell away - the nihilism in their lyrics and their overly emotional tropes struck him as decadent and he couldn’t take them seriously anymore. Straussians are also notorious for having some sympathy with Allan Bloom’s critique of popular music in “The Closing of the American Mind:” music stripped only to the essentials of passion must become bland and commercial, whereas an attempt at refinement may elevate the creator as well as the listeners.
I’m sympathetic to Nietzsche, Strauss and Allan Bloom. And I listen to indie rock and popular music generally more than I ever have in my life.
2. In “The Case of Wagner,” we may say that Nietzsche’s surface teaching is this: Wagner is bad for the same reason as Christianity, except that his hypocrisy, cult, and exacerbation of nationalist sentiment makes him that much worse. Both Wagner and Christianity posit a morality, and thus enervate life.
But that surface quickly dissipates once we see Nietzsche’s persona of a scientific moralist emerge in the Preface. The scientific moralist is distinguished from the philosopher, yet dominates the essay in two separate halves. From sections 1 - 5, Nietzsche’s persona is that of a moralist: Bizet’s “natural” love, complete with martial emotions that cause lovers to hurt and kill each other, is a more honest starting point than an artist claiming he knows exactly where redemption lies in love. It could be said that the story of Siegfried and Brunhilde finding free love apart from the old deities is also a “natural” love, but the objection to that point of view is not considered in these sections. The critique of myth only comes up when Nietzsche, in sections 7 - 12, says that Wagner’s mythological themes are barely distinguishable from dime store romance. The moralist cannot make this complaint, for what gives strength to his critique is precisely that Wagner borrows so freely and carelessly from Christianity. Myth is crucial to the moralist because it connects with the present day, not because it is at a remove.
Sections 7 - 12 seem to be where Nietzsche acts as a scientist. The trouble with Wagner is the atomism that generates him and he excels at using. There is no whole anymore, only an “anarchy of atoms,” created by the conditions of modern democracy. Those passions which stem from disunity can be united artificially as long as a crude appeal to equality is made. That appeal can take any number of forms - one could be by using “rights” to tear apart high culture (i.e. cursing loudly in museums and calling it free speech), another could be in a conception of love where everyone would win if it weren’t for sinister oppressive forces that we recognize because they hate equality. The concern in this section is with the truth, which depends on a concept of the whole which an actor must of necessity deny. An actor’s job is to make a lie seem true; his “whole” stems from a very partial need.
Section 6 is the midway point of sorts: it is where Wagner’s music speaks for itself; the narrator introduces it in his moralist guise. If we add in the two postscripts and the Epilogue to the letter, we get 15 sections and the midway point becomes section 8. The issues of tyranny and theater come into sharp relief there, and Wagner is dismissed explicitly from being considered a musician during that discussion. That seems to fit what the postscripts and the Epilogue discuss: tyranny, other musicians and the master/slave morality are the themes of those last sections respectively.
3. So now we’re stuck with two giant questions: How do love, truth and politics relate? How do the moralist and scientist synthesize?
The “brutality, artificiality and innocence” of the modern soul makes Wagner a symptom of our times. But we note that Bizet’s stronger notion of love, one that might lead to cheerfulness and virtue if properly addressed, shares at least two of these characteristics (brutality and innocence) and could share a third (the artifice may be what takes us from the tragedy of Carmen to virtue). “Artificial” is not necessarily bad - politics for Aristotle is a nature/convention blend, neither wholly one nor the other.
Bizet’s notion is probably flawed: again, the French are ultimately lambasted as decadent. But the fact that a moralist can engage him might be why a scientific moralist and not a moralistic scientist is closer to the truth to begin with. Nietzsche’s moralist says that he seems to himself to be “a better philosopher” when listening to Carmen; certainly he becomes “a better human being,” “a better musician, a better listener.” He tries to listen to the “causes” of the music and hears “its genesis,” seemingly. “I tremble before dangers that accompany some strange risk; I am delighted by strokes of good fortune of which Bizet is innocent” (613-614). He feels answers drop into his lap, that philosophy solves problems from the high vantage he is given (614).
In section 6, Wagner’s music incarnate speaks of “inducing intimations” instead of putting forward “thought.” “The state preceding thought” is what Wagner’s music is aiming for - “Chaos induces intimations,” “the world as it was before God created it.”
We could be cynical and say that whatever makes Wagner’s music work also makes Nietzsche’s moralist feel thoughtful. There’s only one problem: Nietzsche’s moralist is able to take apart Wagner’s music on its own grounds and expose it for what it is. The scientist aids the cause, but the excoriation of Wagner is fairly complete before we encounter the music speaking. There is a difference: Nietzsche’s moralist does have thoughts, he has serious questions. The questions are coming from taking piety and the greatest passions - not just what we think are the greatest passions, our own - seriously.
But we need to be sure of these answers. Hence, the moralist must join forces with the scientist: the passion animating the ancestral faith is elsewhere now. What the scientist finds out is how Wagner exercises power over others. He categorizes Wagner as a man of the theater and moves to consideration of politics from that same logic.
How love ties to piety we can plainly see, but the relation of truth to power is a more difficult task. Again, the atomistic imagery is key - when our passions are bundled, we can be organized by one who is clever enough however he likes. We’ve traded freedom for satisfaction, thinking the latter is freedom, and utterly unaware of the cycle of dependency we embrace.
4. There are many other sections which are cryptic in this essay, meant to push us towards the philosophic. I have given any thoughtful reader enough suggestions with which to start piecing together the teaching. I do realize those suggestions could be wrong, but I didn’t pursue the truth because I thought of myself as always being right.
What I want to do now is spend some time on our conception of politics and love - these directly as opposed to indirectly relate for us. Philosophy in truth was eros for Socrates, but our age purposely eschews philosophy because of its implications of inequality. Philosophy’s relation to the political then was ambiguous and indirect; for us, it is simply nonexistent. This is well and good, for we do strive to be a loving order when we can. A virtuous monarch does preclude the need for philosophy. However, once in a while problems will show up, and they can threaten to tear us apart, and nothing within our toolbox of typical solutions will fix them.
Right now our biggest problem is that we might not be able to fall in love anymore. If this sounds idiotic, consider The Good Life’s “Inmates:”
When you said you loved me, did you really love me?
Or did the words just spill out like drool on my pillow?
Because I was naked when you said those words
But I felt covered in your whispered worship
And as you passed out fast on my shoulder
I imagined a child
Waiting so sad and still for his mom to arrive
That’s just the first stanza of lyrics to this song, but you can see the continuity of theme from the discussion of Nietzsche. The question of communication - do I know you love me? - becomes a recounting of past history, and then, since mythologized moments won’t do, a discussion of who the beloved is.
So the song turns into a psychoanalysis of the beloved - if I imagine a child, maybe I can love him. Oh wait, I can’t, because even a child nowadays learns how not to be vulnerable no matter what. If I imagine the beloved as needy, then again a trap is sprung - it looks like his neediness will always exceed my affection and end with me getting hurt.
This line of logic - the sexes perpetually at war - almost turns comical in a way all of us know too well. The third major theme in the lyrics is the beloved apologizing for hurting the speaker, and the speaker pretty much responding “what kind of sucker do you think I am?”
One party simply is, the party that says she really meant everything, and the other party has a past he can’t escape. Which is as one-sided as one can get: it’s as if the other party had no past, no childhood? Nothing that could stir up these awful emotions? And how is it a relationship of this sort lasts as long as it does, where neither party can leave?
Again, the fourfold regression is key - we move from love to need to harm to where we lie. The dual sense of “lie” is what our speaker says has bound them and she’s breaking free from. As the fourth element, it is singled out as the worst condition, one beyond need and harm.
And yet, while we haven’t discussed it directly, it isn’t clear art can escape lies. We have seen Nietzsche castigate Wagner for being a liar, but that was from a scientific perspective, where Wagner is lying about being a musician. In truth, all art does is set up lies. And art sets up incredibly meaningful, noble lies that make love possible.
If we take lying to be a condition of untruth, then lying could be a metaphor for the pursuit of anything that matters.
5. So is our problem that we want the truth? That “we can’t handle the truth?” Perhaps it’s not our pursuit of truth that’s the problem - again, Nietzsche does assume a scientist’s guise to critique Wagner - but our relentlessness. Dickinson has written eloquently on how to avoid this problem.
Our problem is more like this: We want a truth that tells us everything we want to hear. Wagner appeals to us because we want to act, too. What we want to hear is that love is wholly perfect and that any choices made for its sake are good. It’s not entirely wrong; The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” is beautiful because there’s truth there. But it is not entirely right - if love is so flexible, how come individuals will kill over it?
If you want to think of contemporary politics as us bickering about what love is, you’re not far off the mark. The bickering is so severe that we talk past each other and see reasonable appeals as apolitical. Politics has to be passionate for us, for that’s the only sign that anything matters. The notion that someone’s passion could be wholly absorbed in making the best argument possible - in crafting words that last - is just absurd. Passion is the only common marker we have for love: a flexible notion means that passion can be shaped however.
Moreover - the complete breakdown of communication in public life has transferred over to private life. How can we know where one’s heart lies, when we don’t agree on what we value?
I think you can see that our eros is antagonistic to the philosophical, and if you can see that, that’s the beginning of a Nietzschean understanding of politics, one that can be explored via the everyday things around us. Our decadence isn’t in our culture - Nietzsche would probably be listening to indie rock too, even if it was just to see what it was. It’s in us, and the changes have to be incremental, because we’re doing a lot right. If we weren’t doing anything right, then and only then would a revolutionary politics, or a politics of mass, be justified.
Jul
18
Towards a Nietzschean Understanding of Politics: Notes on "The Case of Wagner" (Part 2)
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In the first part, we went through the Preface of this work very carefully in order to discuss how Nietzsche sets up possible personae for the sake of delivering both an effective teaching and a more difficult teaching.
Now I want to achieve two things: outline the work section by section as quickly as possible, so you get a sense of the whole, and then make some remarks on music, love and politics.
The outline below is not meant to be lingered over. It pretty much reads “Wagner did this, Wagner said that.” I would have written it in bullet notes but for a few major points I wanted to convey.
I. Section-by-section outline
1 (p. 613-614). Wagner is contrasted with Bizet’s Carmen: the latter feels like “the first stage of holiness.” Wagner’s “orchestral tone” is “brutal, artificial, and ‘innocent’ at the same time - thus it speaks all at once to the three senses of the modern soul.”
Bizet’s orchestral tone is endurable, “it approaches lightly, supplely, politely” - we note that “politeness” is is the opposite of “innocent,” not mere “experience.” Also: his music “builds, organizes, finishes” - an echo of Aristotlean dramatic unity. Wagner’s uses an “infinite melody” of sorts. Finally, Bizet’s music “treats the listener as intelligent, as if himself a musician.” Wagner “was… the most impolite genius in the world.”
2 (614-615). Bizet’s work “redeems” - Wagner was called the “redeemer,” it even says so on his tombstone. Bizet’s music is “cheerful” in an African way and this sensibility is a good thing for Europe as a whole.
“Love translated back into nature” is Carmen. Such a love is “fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel.” There is a “deadly hatred of the sexes” within it, it is “war in its means.” This “natural” love is misunderstood by artists, including Wagner.
I have to note here that yes, Bizet is probably being implicated here too. By the end of the essay we will have heard numerous times that the French are decadent, moreso than the Germans. Whether Bizet is an exception is a good question, but that Carmen leads one to holiness while having this “innocent, cruel” conception of love makes me wonder.
3 (615-619). Nietzsche says Bizet’s music improves him, perhaps because it is Mediterraneanized. It leads from “nature” to “cheerfulness” to “virtue.”
Wagner, on the other hand, was a “rattlesnake” who corrupted him wholly once. His central problem, the one animating his work, is “redemption:” “somebody or other always wants to be redeemed in his work.” He drives one to “despair” and “virtue;” “inquiry and questioning” are “excommunicated in his insistence on holiness. Wagner is most certainly no Christian, but is using Christian concepts and sentiments to drive his work.
4 (619-620). The Ring cycle is discussed. Wagner is described as believing in the Revolution “as much as ever a Frenchman believed in it.” His protagonist Siegfried demonstrates this - he believes all misfortune comes from “old contracts,” things like custom and law and morality. Sigfried “declares war against morality” even in being - he is created from adultery and incest. “He overthrows everything traditional, all reverence, all fear. Whatever displeases him he stabs to death.”
Nietzsche says Brunhilde’s “emancipation” is Siegfried’s “main enterprise” - the old deities are overthrown for the “sacrament of free love.” Are you convinced yet that Wagner and modernity go hand-in-hand?
However, this plot did not quite suffice for Wagner, because it was too optimistic. It was perhaps too much of a myth, and needed some philosophical backing, some indication that Wagner was the one telling the story and offering a worldview. So he made everything go to hell in his telling: “everything goes wrong, everything perishes.” A crappy socialist drama with a happy ending turns into a crappy socialist drama with a bad ending.
5 (620-622). Wagner is a sickness. He has afflicted Germany, France and St. Petersburg - the whole of Europe is decadent. “The exhausted are attracted by what is harmful: the vegetarian by vegetables. Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant.”
6 (623-625). Nietzsche personifies Wagner’s music, and has it speak to an audience of musicians. This is the center of the essay. It argues that music “saves” and so should never bother with lower goals, like “giving pleasure.”
7 (625-628). The decay Wagner brings about is not a simple degeneration, where life simply dissipates, although Nietzsche plans later to argue that such is ultimately indeed the case. The moralist narrator starts to sound like a scientist from this point on. Wagner is accused at the end of this section of having the decadent virtue of “pity.”
In the middle, Wagner is accused of being a “miniaturist.” The full significance of that idea is in this passage:
What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole - the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disgregation of the will, “freedom of the individual,” to use moral terms - expanded into a political theory, “equal rights for all.” Life, equal vitality, the vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the smallest forms; the rest, poor in life.
Wagner has no sense of the whole, but that is not stated directly here. Instead in this section his power over the “smallest” is emphasized over and over.
8 (628-630). Wagner isn’t really a musician; he thows away all the rules of music for dramatic effect purely. He’s an actor. What he does is insinuate things in his stage productions through the smallest details. Everyone is taken in by that sensuousness.
The key to acting - “One is an actor by virtue of being ahead of the rest of mankind in one insight: what is meant to have the effect of truth must not be true.”
9 (630-632). Wagner is no dramatist: his artifice in putting his excellently made smaller parts together is bald. His “mythic content” is nothing but cheap romance novel drama. No one in Wagner’s operas is capable of having children.
10 (632-634). Wagner writes, but why on Earth would a musician need to write literature to accompany his work? “Is it that Wagner’s music is too difficult to understand? Or is he afraid of the opposite, that it might be understood too easily - that one will not find it difficult enough to understand?”
Wagner seduces along Hegelian lines: his “music” is the unfolding of an “idea” (”spirit”), an “idea” that links “infinity” and “meaning” (and, we can safely add, “freedom”).
11 (634-636). There are benefits to Wagner’s productions. Many who were modest before in the production of opera have emerged; new fields of knowledge have even been created. But this new sense of “merit” comes at the expense of “talent.” Wagner is sung only with a ruined voice: the effect is “dramatic.”
Moreover, there is a deeper problem: merit requires “training, automatism, self-denial.” It “coincides in time with the arrival of the Reich.”
12. Nietzsche concludes that yes, actors may be “deserving of admiration,” but that “does not imply that they are any less dangerous.” He lists 3 demands stemming from his “wrath,” “concern,” and “love of art:”
That the theater should not lord it over the arts.
That the actor should not seduce those who are authentic.
That music should not become an art of lying.
Jul
18
Towards a Nietzschean Understanding of Politics: Notes on "The Case of Wagner" (Part 1)
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All citations from the essay throughout the course of this series are from the Kaufmann translation in the “Basic Writings of Nietzsche” published by Modern Library, copyright 1992, p. 611-653.
First part: “Preface,” p. 611-612, with commentary.
Note: Words in italics those of Nietzsche’s. Each paragraph from the translation is reproduced. A commentary is between each paragraph.
1. I have granted myself some small relief. It is not merely pure malice when I praise Bizet in this essay at the expense of Wagner. Interspersed with many jokes, I bring up a matter that is no joke. To turn my back on Wagner was for me a fate; to like anything at all after that, a triumph. Perhaps nobody was more dangerously attached to - grown together with - Wagnerizing; nobody tried harder to resist it; nobody was happier to be rid of it. A long story! - You want a word for it? - If I were a moralist, who knows what I might call it? Perhaps self-overcoming. - But the philosopher has no love for moralists. Neither does he love pretty words.
Pre-paragraph 1: The letter begins with an inscription - “ridendo dicere severum,” which Kaufmann translates as “Through what is laughable say what is somber.” Kaufmann points out that Horace has a similar saying, “ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat” (Satires I.24), which he translates as “What forbids us to tell the truth, laughing?”
Nietzsche has turned a question - albeit one that could be rhetorical - into an aphorism or command. That transformation of what could be philosophic into what is explicitly political (law-discoverer vs. law-giver) is our concern. Somehow the question of art is central to this: tragedy and comedy, solemnity and laughter somehow tie into all of this. “Truth” has dropped out of Nietzsche’s forumlation entirely, but we recall Strauss invoking Thomas More in The City and Man p. 61: Socrates laughs, Jesus weeps.
On Paragraph 1: The difficulty with Nietzsche is establishing what persona he is using at any given time. In this paragraph he rejects explictly the persona of a “moralist,” but we have to take that with a huge grain of salt. When we reach the end of this essay, he will have completely trashed Wagner for relying on a redemption narrative that prevents self-overcoming and emphasizes weakness. It looks like he is taking on the persona of “philosopher,” but that too can be defeated - “pretty words” are all Nietzsche writes, and he knows it.
So what “relief” has Nietzsche afforded himself? I think we could go as far as provisionally terming him a “moralist” in this essay. That’s not going to hold up, for obvious reasons. But in this paragraph, we see he has turned his back on Wagner, and that was “fate.” Now he has new tastes, and that is a “triumph.” This is a testimonial for the most part. There is one catch: note the list of four stages - “attached to,” “grown together with,” “resist,” “rid of.” What’s missing is the middle stage between “growing” and “resisting.” In Plato’s Republic, how exactly anyone is turned from the cave’s images to seek the light above is an open question.
2. What does a philosopher demand of himself first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become “timeless.” With what must he therefore engage in the hardest combat? With whatever marks him as the child of his time. Well, then! I am, no less than Wagner, a child of this time: that is, a decadent: but I comprehended this, I resisted it. The philosopher in me resisted.
On Paragraph 2: Why is Nietzsche insisting that he is a philosopher? And why is he insisting a philosopher resists, when we know full well a philosopher is far more than a believer being confronted with an opposite creed?
I think the answer is something deeply learned from Spinoza: it does no good to tell people that they may not know something, especially not ambitious people with technical skills or enormous talents. Best thing to do is just go “you know what? you know everything” - but one can’t flatter simply to do this. One has to establish one’s own authority, so what you do is you play up to what your audience thinks of themselves, put yourself in their shoes, and then start stepping back.
This requires incredible skill to pull off. It also makes Nietzsche very difficult to access.
3. Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence - I had reasons. “Good and evil” is merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eye for the symptoms of decline, one understands morality, too - one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and value formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality negates life.
On Paragraph 3: Nietzsche in this paragraph is a scientific moralist. He traces “good and evil” to a larger problem, that of “decadence.” This perspective leads his narrator to say that under morality is decline.
Why should we not take the surface absolutely seriously? Precisely because as the essay develops, Wagner will be accused of negating life by propping up something that is moral inasmuch as it is immoral. A “great weariness” will describe the effeminate heroes who need to be redeemed by women in Wagner; a “will to the end” describes the suicides in those same operas, and “impoverished life” describes aptly the people who buy tickets for Wagnerian mush and sing its praises incessantly.
Perhaps the critique of Wagner is in some ways a critique of Christianity. But that’s a deep, serious question that Nietzsche’s immediate audience isn’t terribly interested in. They know Nietzsche is reputed to be an atheist, and assume that Christianity sucks. What they need to know from Nietzsche’s narrator’s perspective is why Wagner sucks. That’s the immediate rhetorical task, and only by working through it are we going to get the proper critique of Christianity, the one Nietzsche might actually mean. Right now, our narrator is a moralist who has used moralistic logic so well he’s undermined morality.
4. For such a task I required a special self-discipline: to take sides against everything sick in me, including Wagner, including Schopenhauer, including all of modern “humaneness.” - A profound estrangement, cold, sobering up - against everything that is of this time, everything timely - and most desirable of all, the eye of Zarathustra, an eye that beholds the whole fact of man at a tremendous distance - below. For such a goal - what sacrifice wouldn’t be fitting? what “self-overcoming?” what “self-denial”?
On Paragraph 4: The moralistic crusade continues. Our narrator is in love with the timeless, and stands above humanity. Again: for Cicero, the greatness of Socrates was that he compelled divine wisdom to speak about mere human things. Here, however, man is beheld from above only. Notice that the moralistic method means that the moralist is “sacrificing” as well as conquering his previous opinions and wants. A purification is taking place.
So is Nietzsche serious? Absolutely: this is the bare minimum needed to indict Wagner, this is the necessary and sufficient case. And it isn’t just piety being invoked; we’re getting a critique of how far piety can go. To get to the real philosophy, which I know I’m whetting your appetite for, we have to get the surface known well first.
And trust me. It takes years to make a real discovery in philosophy, and usually you have no clue what it means until it is too late. I’m doing you a favor by sticking to the surface.
5. My greatest experience was a recovery. Wagner is merely one of my sicknesses.
On Paragraph 5: If you’re tempted to say “hey, things that are tied to decline are bad, and he said morality negates life, so he must hate morality,” think about the implication of this section. Does the narrator appreciate one recovery all the more because he is still so sick?
6. Not that I wish to be ungrateful to this sickness. When in this essay I assert the proposition that Wagner is harmful, I wish no less to assert for whom he is nevertheless indispensible - for the philosopher. Others may be able to get along without Wagner; but the philosopher is not free to do without Wagner. He has to be the bad conscience of his time: for that he needs to understand it best. But confronted with the labyrinth of the modern soul, where could he find a guide more initiated, a more eloquent prophet of the soul, than Wagner? Through Wagner modernity speaks most intimately, concealing neither its good nor its evil - having forgotten all sense of shame. And conversely: one has almost completed an account of the value of what is modern once one has gained clarity about what is good and evil in Wagner.
On Paragraph 6: This is a moralist telling us what the use of philosophy is. Note that “good and evil” - I thought that was just the problem of “decadence?” - is now the criteria for evaluating Wagner and all of “modernity” (American Constitutionalism, capitalism, socialism, modern Parliamentary democracy, Church/State separation, education in technical skills only, nationalism, etc. In short, our world).
Is the moralist wrong about philosophy? Not really - it is partly because a philosopher can have insight into his time that is especially accurate that we appreciate his wisdom. The only problem is that recognition of philosophy has to come about through “sickness:” there are other things a philosopher does and is, but the moralist isn’t quite going to be able to appreciate them all.
7. I understand perfectly when a musician says today: “I hate Wagner, but I can no longer endure any other music.” But I’d also understand a philosopher who would who would declare: “Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian.”
On Paragraph 7: Gk. “mousike” - this isn’t just music, this is a complete liberal arts education. Homer is sung, after all, and there are all sorts of accompanying arts used to truly appreciate what is virtually the Bible for the ancient Greeks.
Our moralist now “understands” a musician and philosopher. Is his insight accurate? Must one become a Wagnerian first in order to understand modernity?
The proof of the last statement is all too circular. Our moralist’s personal experience is allows him this “understanding.” And yet: this is our introduction to the problem, and a hint that perhaps the problem cannot be transcended. Perhaps something has fundamentally changed about the modern soul.
Nietzsche does not require a philosopher to say this to us, and raise the crucial questions: taking good and evil seriously lets us see quite far. It is only people who think they can see that much farther who make appeals to dogmatic philosophy, set up their cults, and become as Wagner.
May
14
On the Nature of Teaching: Regarding Three Aphorisms from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
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Whoever is a teacher through and through takes all things seriously only in relation to his students - even himself.
- Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil section 63, trans. Walter Kaufmann
This is one of those things which has been around for a long time, and I have dwelled on it for an even longer time, and come to no certain conclusions.
What seems to be immediately going on is revealed in the epigrams that follow:
(64) “Knowledge for its own sake” - that is the last snare of morality: with that one becomes completely entangled in it once more.
(65) The attraction of knowledge would be small if one did not have to overcome so much shame on the way.
The issue generally is the relation of having knowledge to being human. A teacher that takes his students seriously knows, in a way, through and because of his students. He does not know a science, say geometry, and then puts it forth in lectures and papers. Rather, the activities are intertwined with something key to communicating knowledge.
Now granted, we live in a day and age where teachers don’t really have to “know,” as much as “know how to teach” - if that sounds disparaging, note that it probably isn’t too far off the mark from where education schools want to go. The key is method - method itself may not be self-evident, but it seems to make knowledge self-evident when used correctly. I assume Nietzsche has a more complicated understanding of how an educator relates to his own knowledge - he probably doesn’t think of an educator as a device for putting forth a method, and rather sees the character of the educator himself as something we need to pay attention to.
After all, he says that an insistence on the purity of knowledge inevitably leads to a morality of sorts. We wonder what kind of morality it could lead to, since it does not seem the sorts of people who say “I’m pursuing knowledge for its own sake” use that pursuit to bolster morality. They seem indifferent to morality, actually, if they are not outright hostile.
And to say “modern science, for example, has an ethic of its own that is implicit” gets tricky. Mansfield did a very nice job illustrating that in the Jefferson lecture, but he did it through modernity’s only apparent ability to sidestep the issue of pursuing greatness. It seems like the claims of modernity are full of hubris in the final analysis, but what about before such a conclusion is drawn?
Perhaps what Nietzsche means in 64 is that any attempt to divorce knowledge generally from the human ends up as a restraint on humanity for both better and worse. The only issue is whether one wants to be caught up in the project of such restraints knowingly or unknowingly.
65 is an understanding of what went wrong in Eden. Knowledge was to be had at the expense of obedience, and in order to be liberated from obedience, one had to start hating being ashamed.
It should be noted that 65 is a slight on the sort of person who would declare having knowledge for its own sake. No one really pursues knowledge for its own sake. Overcoming shame, like trying to be beyond all earthly honor, is impossible. We need to feel respected, and note that the overcoming of shame only means total freedom for the most boorish, those who would act however they wanted anyway. For the rest of us, the attempt to overcome shame would probably result in a greater feeling of shame from within if there was something we didn’t get.
With all that in mind, let us return to the beginning. A good teacher will know how to employ shame and convince his students of the truth of certain moral observations. He will do this not by lording over them, but by seeing as they see, and taking what they see of him seriously.
His position, on earth, is actually beyond pride and beyond morality. Students nowadays almost pay a homage to this truth by keeping their teachers at a distance and not relating to them as people. They’d rather sit and gossip about their teachers instead of asking them questions directly.
No one said we know how to pay homage.
For the teacher, equality with the student through the means of the literal condescension - the teacher assesses seriousness through their values - implicitly means that he is the ultimate student. In all this pride, there is humility. And yet there is a darkness to the teaching, for the moral observations that a teacher may impart - well, not everyone is going to understand them.
The equality occurs for the best teacher because the best students have already selected themselves, perhaps have been worked with, and are drawing their own conclusions.
Sep
30
Nietzsche on the Opposition
Filed Under nietzsche, philosophy | 1 Comment
Posted elsewhere on the Internet in another guise, but I thought it good enough to repeat here.
“They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality; that is English consistency….
Christian morality is a command: its origin is transcendental; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticize; it possesses truth only if God is truth - it stands or falls with the belief in God. - If the English really do believe they will know, of their own accord, ‘intuitively,’ what is good and evil; if they consequently think they no longer have need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality; that is merely the consequence of the ascendancy of Christian evaluation and an expression of the strength and depth of this ascendancy…”
- Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols”
What is most interesting about this passage is that Nietzsche is indirectly saying that those who are most critical of Christianity but presuppose Judeo-Christian norms are, in a sense, more deeply accepting of Christianity than they would like to admit.
Which raises an interesting question - are those who are proclaimed secularists in actuality agreed on such norms? It would seem that the emphasis on rights, on the freedom to speak and worship, actually has a lot to do with the potential for evangelism for any cause. It would also seem that the crusade for such things as political correctness, or saving the environment, or keeping the rich from getting richer have a lot to do with getting rid of feeling guilty for being “intolerant” or “powerful” merely by virtue of existing. This could be interpreted as a form of guilt for merely being human acting itself out in our society today.
Even those who claim we can explain all physical and moral phenomena via evolution might be acting out something in accordance with this “weak form” of Christianity that might exist. After all, to say that our nature is contingent on how we respond to our environs, environs that are not exactly gentle, is to pretty much say that since the world is fallen, we must be fallen too.
Your thoughts and responses are most welcome. Is this an accurate way of viewing the opponents of the established and traditional?