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Thursday, January 10, 2008
Was Nietzsche a Closet Straussian
No, not Leo. David.
I’m preparing to teach Nietzsche again - always the most fun class to teach. I’ve written before about how there seem to be odd, early occurrences of the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence. In preparing for my first lecture I just noticed another. I’m rereading Untimely Meditations, which is where I choose to start. Usually I do a bit of “Uses and Disadvantages” and several sections of “Schopenhauer as Educator”, my two favorites. But this time I decided to reread “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer”. Nietzsche glowers and generally chews the scenery in response to Strauss’ inane, philistine, think-positive attitude (§6):
There is one passage in the confessional book in which this incurable optimism goes strolling along with a downright holiday air of complacency (pp. 142-3). ‘If the world is a thing that it were better did not exist,’ says Struass, ‘well then, the thought of the philosopher, which constitutes a piece of this world, is a thought that it were better was not thought. The pessimistic philosopher does not see that he declares his own thought bad when his thought declares the world bad; but if a thought which declares the world bad is itself bad thinking, then the world is, on the contrary, good. Optimism may as a rule make things too easy for itself, and here Schopenhauer’s insistence on the role which pain and evil play in the world is quite in order; but every true philosophy is necessarily optimistic, since otherwise it denies its own right to exist.’ If this refutation of Schopenhauer is not the same as that which in another place Strauss calls a ‘refutation to the loud rejoicing of the higher spheres’, then I do not and understand this theatrical expression, which he once employed against an opponent. (Hollingdale trans.)
And yet this argument of Strauss’ is quite like the one Nietzsche himself eventually - years later - comes around to, indeed identifies as his own central teaching: as a condition of affirming the self, one must affirm everything about the world. Optimism as amor fati. Maybe I’ll finish this thought later. (I realize just saying this is not going to be clear unless you are already familiar with Nietzsche on Eternal Recurrence.)
He goes on to criticize, in bitterest terms, two other lines he himself pushes years later. First, Strauss makes the argument that, since suffering is a condition of Beethoven’s genius, we must affirm that suffering as a good thing, since we affirm Beethoven’s genius as a good thing. Then Nietzsche gets even more tightly wound when Strauss suggests that Christianity originated in a “preceding surfeit of sexual indulgence of all kinds and the disgust and nausea that resulted.” Christianity as Katzenjammer [hangover]. Nietzsche, on how we should respond to Strauss saying such things: “We, however, turn aside for a moment to overcome our disgust.” And yet Nietzsche himself says very similar things years later. Curious.
OK, for the uninitiated, here is Nietzsche’s most famous statement on Eternal Recurrence (although it is hardly clear, just standing by itself). From The Gay Science (§341):
The greatest weight: - What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?"
Another clue - perhaps an acknowledgement of the Strauss connection, or at least of the source of his original revulsion at this idea: Zarathustra’s animals tell him he is the teacher of Eternal Recurrence and he calls them buffoons and accuses them of turning his teaching into a Leierlied. That is, a pop tune. A bit of feel-good, optimistic fluff, rather than the abyss of thought it should be recognized to be.
I’m still working through The Black Dossier. Very Nietzschean, the scene in which 3,000 year old Orlando drinks to the bombing of London, reflects on all the senseless ‘smudges’ made by the stupid thumb of history. Affirms it all, because he has enjoyed being Orlando.
Comments
John, along these lines you might be interested in Pious Nietzsche, a new book by my colleague Bruce Benson, which argues that the forms of Nietzsche’s thought are permanently and deeply marked by the Pietism of his youth. This argument would (among other things) make a residual Straussianism seem more plausible.
Has a transcription error crept into the first passage quoted there from N.? “If this refutation of Schopenhauer is not the same as that which in another place Strauss calls a ‘refutation to the loud rejoicing of the higher spheres’, then I do not and understand this theatrical expression, which he once employed against an opponent.”
Affirming is not liking, right? You can affirm something as bad, even as you affirm it. Nietzschean affirmation is like self-help acceptance. Which means that the Eternal Occurance is basically what is taught to victims of abuse and rape: in order to like yourself *now*, you’re going to have to accept the fact that you were once raped/abused. But that’s not to say that Nietzsche or his buddy Oprah think that affirming means liking or thinking good of something.
Most of my comment got eaten up.
At my URL is my own interpretation of Nietzsche as a super-Lutheran who needed to learn to chill. And back by popular demand, J.S. Mill on eternal recurrence:
And it is very characteristic both of my then state, and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be burnt out.
http://www.bartleby.com/25/1/5.html
In fact, a lot of Western music from 1828 to about 1880 consisted of attempts either to imitate Beethoven Mozart, and Schubert, to surpass them, or to find something different but equally good.
Innovation solutions included instrumental virtuosity (Liszt and Paganini), flashier orchestration (Berlioz) musical nationalism, program music, freer and looser forms, miniaturism (piano solos and songs), and opera. A lot of that has not worn well, and with the possible exception of Brahms, I don’t think that the attempts to match or surpass Beethoven wore well at all. (Of course, this period has gone out of style, and I myself have no taste for it, so a reevalution may be in the wings).
Only when the old rules of harmony and voice-leading and harmony were junked did things start to get interesting. In a sense, Mill was right that the old forms were exhausted (though not for the mathematical reasons Mill gave).
The first two innovators, Musorgsky and Satie, were mostly autodidacts. From there, Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky developed more systematic harmonic practices.
My theory is that the Germans never got it right. Wagner and Brahms were super-Beethoven, and Schoenberg et al were super-Wagner and super-Brahms, and it all became very tedious. To hell with them, and Adorno too.
It seems to me that the affirmative moment in Nietzsche is intended to express his amor fati as the state of abiding in the most extreme form of tension, all for the sake of avoiding lapsing into Buddhist-Christian-Schopenhauerian forms of resignation. Thus, every kind of experience, including the horrors endured by an Oedipus or Job, must be regarded as affirmative. But then one comes up against the concentration camp, which for so many theorists has come to signify what can never, ought never, to be affirmed. Hence, the limitations of Nietzschean thought in the present-day - very few are willing to take the “positive” step to follow Nietzsche all the way.
On the esential inhumanity of historical optimism: Stanley Rosen, that most non-Straussian student of Leo S., has a marvelous sentence in _Hermeneutics as Politics_ on the liquidation of millions of innocent persons that runs something like (I’m away from my library): History is a slaughter-bench on which are prepared the feasts of the gods - the residents of the post-historical utopia.
As for Orlando, where did he stick the renamed Excalibur?
There are two excellent books on Nietszche and Buddhism, by F. Mistry and by Keiji Nishitani. Schopenauer and Nietszche badly misunderstood Buddhism, to the point that what they say should be ignored.
Thanks for comments. The quote is right, Adam R. I presume that the point of the thing Nietzsche flings in Strauss’ face is that Strauss wants to be a rather down-to-earth fellow and would regard ‘refutation to the loud rejoicing of the higher spheres’ as a reductio on the refutation, there being no such spheres, strictly. So if he himself is offering such ‘refutations’, he is doing what he has denounced, when others do it. (Just as Nietzsche, in affirming this argument years later, is doing what he has apparently denounced in Strauss.)
Thanks for the other suggestions as well.