Dithyrambs and Ploughshares: The Cycle of Creation and Criticism in Nietzsche's Aesthetics

Abstract

Pairing Thus Spoke Zarathustra with On the Genealogy of Morality foregrounds tensions between artistic creation and critical interpretation in Nietzsche's work. From The Birth of Tragedy to his genesis of the concept, Will to Power, Nietzsche describes the real, or “what is,” in terms of a creative, form-giving force. We might therefore read Zarathustra—a linguistically experimental, richly allegorical, self-reflexive, modernist prose poem—as the pre-eminent, artistic mode of philosophical expression, at least for Nietzsche. But Zarathustra is followed by a sober Abhandlung (treatise), which professes a scientific goal of “getting to the bottom of things” by uncovering the contingency, origin, and fabricated nature of supposedly eternal, “given” values. These instantiations of Nietzsche-the-artist and Nietzsche-the-critic suggest art's “double” or contradictory nature—a nature that accents its kinship with philosophy. Zarathustra and the Genealogy, read together, hint that the destruction of idols—or de-constructive, critical interpretation more generally—is not just supplemental to, but a necessary moment within the aesthetic itself.

Notes

1. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche famously claims that “art represents the highest task and truly metaphysical activity of this life.” The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). In his late notebooks (1885–88) we find: “The phenomenon ‘artist’ is still the most transparent:—to see through it to the basic instincts of power, nature, etc.!” (§797); and “In all philosophy hitherto the artist is lacking—” (§811). The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967); henceforth cited as WP.

2. Nietzsche's emphasis on style destabilizes any usual opposition between form and content. Interestingly, he maintains: “One is an artist at the cost of regarding that which all non-artists call ‘form’ as content, as ‘the matter itself’ … henceforth content becomes something merely formal—our life included” (WP, §818).

3. This is Michel Haar's coinage in “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language,” trans. Cyril and Liliane Welch, in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), which is a study of terms such as Will to Power, Nihilism, Overman, and Eternal Return.

4. There has been much debate about what exactly in Nietzsche's writing makes it “literary,” and one might ask what the term “literary” means in this context. Alexander Nehamas, in Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), identifies Nietzsche's perspectivism as that which makes his philosophy literary. M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, in Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) identify in Nietzsche's first work an “imaginative and empathetic … faculty which, since the Romantics, has been regarded as a necessary constituent of the poetic character.” They also describe the prevalence of myth, imagery, metaphor and simile in Nietzsche's “search for an idiom” as well as an intensely personal mode of writing, which, they argue, challenges the opposition between objective knowledge and subjective experience (188–96). In his reading of Zarathustra, David B. Allison notes Nietzsche's use of aposiopesis—a rhetorical device that involves using silence and indirection in such a way that the reader is forced to draw his or her own conclusions, without explicit guidance from the author. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 118. I would add to these observed “literary” features of Nietzsche's writing what I will call a “sense of its own contingency”—the self-reflexivity of a fiction (not unconnected to perspectivism) that proclaims “it is,” but it might just as well be otherwise.

5. This is, of course, an extension of the notion of the performative in Austin's sense. I’m indebted, in my understanding of this term, to Judith Butler's Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997); Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event Context,” in Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988); and Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, ed. John Thompson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). See also J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

6. The formulation Artisten-Metaphysik first appears in Nietzsche's 1886 “Attempt at Self-Criticism” [Versuch einer Selbstkritik], which he wrote to accompany the third publication of The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche describes his first work as having an “artists’ metaphysics in the background” [Mit einer Artisten-Metaphysik im Hintergrunde], §5.

7. In “Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language,” Haar claims that “the substance of Nietzsche's effort is already to be found, although in an enveloped, unthought, and veiled way, in The Birth of Tragedy—his first work, and one that he never ceased to rethink and defend” (in Allison, The New Nietzsche), 8. In the closing lines of Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche writes: “And with that I return to the place from which I set out—Birth of Tragedy was my first revaluation of values” (“What I owe to the Ancients,” in Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [London: Penguin, 1968], §5).

8. In the Selbstkritik [“An Attempt at Self-Criticism”], Nietzsche defines the “Dionysian” as an instinct that turned against morality and “aligned itself with life”—an instinct that is “purely artistic and anti-Christian.”

9. Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Genealogy were published within two years of one another: Zarathustra was published in three installments between 1883 and 1885, while the Genealogy appeared in 1887. The other major work of this period, Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1886, might be considered a prelude to the Genealogy insofar as it deconstructs Platonic-Christian morality without explicitly identifying Nietzsche's method as genealogical. But because genealogy as a critical method comes to the fore only in the later work, it is that work that will be paired with Zarathustra in the present study.

10. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, §5.

11. This might be done, Nietzsche writes in the Selbstkritik, by inventing a philosophy that would “demote morality to the realm of appearance” [eine Philosophie, welche es wagte, die Moral selbst in die Welt der Erscheinung zu setzen].

12. By describing the Genealogy in this way, I do not wish to limit readings that emphasize its moments of irony and parody (of which there are many), but to insist that its mode of philosophizing is primarily investigative; the work announces itself as critical. In her essay, “The Genealogy of Morals and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean Aphorism and the Art of the Polemic,” Babette Babich criticizes the tendency of scholars to read the Genealogy as a Tractatus or straightforward account of Nietzsche's thinking on moral philosophy on the grounds that they do not attend adequately to the book's subtitle: a polemic. (“The Genealogy of Morals and Right Reading: On the Nietzschean Aphorism and the Art of the Polemic,” in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, ed. Christa Davis Acampora [Rowman & Littlefield, 2006]). In the present study, I argue that it is precisely the Genealogy's polemical nature that characterizes its approach as critical and scientific (Wissenschaftlich) in opposition to the more ebullient, creative approach of Zarathustra.

13. I use the word ‘foil’ in its etymological sense to convey the idea that the Genealogy challenges—even bests Zarathustra—but also, in doing so, brings it to its fullest potential. One etymological root of ‘foil’ is the latin folium, and this connection to leaves (to foliage un-leaving) evokes the cyclical passage of seasons as well as the necessity of turning over leaves (in, for instance, a book). Aside from an embedded reference to the necessity of change, ‘foil’ also designates that which serves “by contrast of color or quality to adorn another thing, or set it off to advantage” (for instance, a leaf of metal placed under a precious stone to increase its brilliancy in the setting of a jewel). The verb ‘to foil’ is related to the French ‘fouler’ (to trample or tread on), but also carries an obsolete meaning related to ‘fouiller,’ which refers to the third round of ploughing that prepares the ground for sowing. The idea that the Genealogy is Zarathustra's foil therefore exposes the dual gesture inherent in the act of interpretation: the interpretive ‘fulfillment’ of an object is bound up with its overcoming (its necessary downfall) and prepares the ground for new creation. “foil, n. ¹ -v. ⁴,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (1989); OED Online (Oxford University Press) (accessed 4 April 2010).

14. Research into Nietzsche's sources and reading material has yielded specific information regarding his fascination with the natural sciences. For a comprehensive account of relevant Quellenforschung, see Thomas H. Brobjer, Nietzsche's Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008), and for Nietzsche's specific interest in the natural sciences, see Nietzsche and Science, ed. Gregory Moore and Thomas H. Brobjer (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2004).

15. Nietzsche, “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” §2.

16. In the 1862 essay, “Fate and History,” Nietzsche writes: “In the middle of the vast ocean of ideas, one longs for solid ground; how often, when engrossed in fruitless speculation, has the yearning for history and natural science [Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft] not crept over me! … History and natural science … they alone are the secure foundation upon which we can build the tower of our speculation”; quoted in Thomas H. Brobjer, “Nietzsche's Reading and Knowledge of Natural Science: An Overview,” in Nietzsche and Science, 21–51, 25.

17. Many of Nietzsche's critics have observed a homological relation between Nietzsche's early conception of art as the “metaphysical activity of life” and his formulation of the Will to Power. Haar views Dionysus as a synonym for Will to Power, while Sarah Kofman, in her gloss of Nietzsche's turn away from metaphysics (i.e. the idea of a true or “hidden nature” to things), describes an “artistic force” that “constitutes the very interpretation of what is ‘proper’” and that “will be termed, metaphorically, ‘will to power.’” (“Metaphor, Symbol, Metamorphosis,” in Allison, The New Nietzsche, 208). For Nietzsche's own definition of Will to Power as a creative drive, see WP, §619. Nietzsche ascribes a “transfiguring power” to the aesthetic state—the power to create, impose, or destroy form (WP, §809), and praises the artist's indifference to “eternal values” (WP, §816). In an early draft of “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche praises his first book for teaching that “there is something ‘more divine’ than truth: art”—“that art is worth more than truth” (published as WP, §853). Here Nietzsche replaces the necessity of discovering Truth with the capacity to create new values (art in its most capacious sense).

18. Nietzsche writes at a time when the opposition between “humanist” disciplines and the natural sciences was being called into question. For further discussion of this late- nineteenth-century debate, see Dilthey's Introduction to the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Dilthey, among others, argues that positivism reaches its limit at the humanist disciplines. But the “sure foundations” that the young Nietzsche associates with science (e.g. the separation between observer and observed) break down: on the “mythology of science” see (among others) Stephen Toulmin, The Return of Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University Press, 1983).

19. Nietzsche writes: “Originally, as we have seen, it is language which works on building the edifice of concepts; later it is science,” thus explicitly linking science with conceptual language (“On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” §2).

20. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” §1.

21. Kofman, “Metaphor, Symbol, Metamorphosis,” in Allison, The New Nietzsche, 201–6.

22. §16. The long quotation in this section also contains the following: “[music is] an immediate copy of the will itself, and therefore complements everything physical in the world and every phenomenon by representing what is metaphysical, the thing in itself … music … gives the inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things.” Similarly, in 1887, Nietzsche writes: “Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common” (WP, §810).

23. Nietzsche also wrote lyric poems in verse, which he included in several of his “philosophical” texts. For instance, the aphorisms that compose The Gay Science are set between two collections of poems: “Joke, Cunning and Revenge” [Scherz, List und Rache]—the title alludes to a libretto by Goethe—and “Songs of Prince Vogelfrei.”

24. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” trans. Ronald Speirs, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), §2.

25. Many of Nietzsche's critics refer to the work as a literary text, but mention the hybridity of its genre. See especially Robert Pippin, “Irony and Affirmation in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” and Hans Georg Gadamer, “The Drama of Zarathustra,” in Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, ed. Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy Strong (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Gadamer writes: “It is a half-poetic book that belongs to the species of mimesis, of imitation. It is a literary work of art” 220.

26. Nietzsche asks: “Can you furnish your own good and evil and hang up your own will above yourself as law?” “Of the Way of the Creator,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1961). Similarly: “I disturbed this somnolence when I taught that nobody yet knows what is good and evil—unless it be the creator!” (“Of Old and New Law-Tablets”).

27. Nietzsche, “Of the Three Metamorphoses,” in Zarathustra.

28. The lion is the middle stage of a tripartite metamorphosis from camel to lion to child that Zarathustra lays out in his “discourses” in the first book. While the lion is no longer weighed down by the burden of carrying of age-old values (like the camel), his power extends only so far as the destruction of old values. He does not yet have the power to create—this power, Nietzsche explains, belongs to the child.

29. Nietzsche, “Why I am a Destiny,” in Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), §3.

30. Robert Hollingdale renders Untergang un-problematically as “down-going” and does not make note of the term's double meaning in the appendix of his translation. By contrast, Robert Gooding-Williams in Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) makes much of this term by expanding its semantic possibilities (57).

31. In the last line of Zarathustra, Nietzsche explicitly likens Zarathustra to a sun: “Thus spoke Zarathustra and left his cave, glowing and strong, like a morning sun emerging from behind dark mountains” (336). In “Zarathustra's Prologue” Allison also comments on the manner in which Zarathustra identifies himself with the sun as he addresses it: “I must descend … as you do … in the evening, when you go behind the sea … you overrich star. Like you I must go under” (quoted in Reading the New Nietzsche, 130).

32. Gooding-Williams considers Zarathustra's Untergang in relation to Nietzsche's anti-Platonism by reading Zarathustra's emergence from the cave as a reversal of Plato's myth. He also considers Nietzsche's parody of Christ's sacrifice and a possible allusion to St. Paul's hymn composed to describe Christ's incarnation, death and resurrection (St. Paul's epistle to the Philippians, 2:6–11). A particularly surprising reading is his idea that Zarathustra's ignorance of the double meaning of the term Untergang is the source of the dramatic irony that distances Nietzsche as author from Zarathustra as tragic hero (the victim of tragic irony) (Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 45–60).

33. Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 59.

34. That Zarathustra aspires to the status of tragedy is suggested by Nietzsche himself in §342 of The Gay Science. Following the words “Incipit Tragoedia,” we find the beginning of the prologue to Zarathustra. Much has also been said about the structure of Zarathustra in relation to Attic tragedy, for instance Pippin's discussion of Book IV as a comedic “satyr play” in his introduction to the Cambridge edition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

35. This is not always successful; Gadamer comments on the “forced style” of the work in “The Drama of Zarathustra,” 220.

36. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, §7.

37. Nietzsche, “The Child with the Mirror,” in Zarathustra.

38. Nietzsche, “The Night Song” (which ends as it begins), in Zarathustra.

39. John T. Wilcox argues that Zarathustra is different from all of Nietzsche's other works by virtue of the fact that it is associated less with an aphoristic than with a dithyrambic style, thus underscoring the idea that the Genealogy and Zarathustra are different stylistic approaches to the question of revaluation. See “What Aphorism Does Nietzsche Explicate in Genealogy of Morals, Essay III?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 35.4 (October 1997).

40. Nietzsche, “Prologue,” §4, and Book I, “Of the Three Metamorphoses,” in Zarathustra.

41. See the translator's “Introduction” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). He notes that as far as the literary style of Zarathustra is concerned, Nietzsche cites Luther and Goethe as his two sources. He quotes Nietzsche: “‘With Zarathustra I believe I have brought the German language to its culmination. After Luther and Goethe there was still a third step to be made’” (B 22 February 1884), xiii.

42. Gooding-Williams, Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 23.

43. See Parkes, “Introduction,” xxxi, where he also comments on the preponderance of repetitions and the musical qualities of the text.

44. Nietzsche, “Why I Write Such Good Books: Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,” in Ecce Homo, §1.

45. For a more detailed study of Nietzsche and music, see Curt Paul Janz, “The Form-Content Problem in Nietzsche's Conception of Music,” trans. Thomas Heilke, in Gillespie and Strong, Nietzsche's New Seas, 97–116.

46. Allison gives an account of the painful biographic events surrounding Nietzsche's composition of Zarathustra: two failed marriage proposals to Lou Andreas Salomé and the break with his friend, Paul Rée. He cites a letter in which Nietzsche writes: “[Zarathustra] is full of detail which, because it is drawn from what I’ve seen and suffered, only I can understand. Some pages seem to be almost bleeding” in Reading the New Nietzsche, 111.

47. This is a version of the argument Judith Butler makes in her Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. After explaining the manner in which illocutionary utterances (the class of performatives that produce immediate effects) are supported by linguistic and social conventions, Butler argues that citational repetition (hate speech is her example) may destabilize the structures from which such utterances derive their power and encourage re-signification, which “requires opening new contexts, speaking in ways that have never yet been legitimated, and hence producing legitimation in new and future forms” (41). Butler aligns her reading of the performative with Derrida's sense that a performative's force inheres in its break from established context through its iteration (this promises re-contextualization and re-signification). This contrasts with Bourdieu's idea that it is the social context that gives the performative utterance its force (141). Important for the present study is Butler's idea that responsibility is “linked with speech as repetition, not as origination” (41).

48. For instance, Zarathustra is a character, and we must recognize the fact that his words might not reflect the convictions held by Nietzsche himself as an author. See Pippin, Introduction to Zarathusra, xxxiii.

49. Nietzsche, “Of Poets,” in Zarathustra.

50. Pippin, Introduction to Zarathusra, xxxi.

51. Graham Parkes cites a letter to Erwin Rohde, in which Nietzsche describes his style as a dance: “My style is a dance; a play of symmetries of all kinds and an overleaping and mocking of these symmetries. This goes as far as the choice of vowels” (B 22 February 1884) (Introduction to Zarathustra, xxxi).

52. Nietzsche, WP, §821.

53. Nietzsche himself accounted for his change in genre and tone by describing Zarathustra as the “Yes-saying” part of his task, and subsequent works (the Genealogy included) as the “No-saying, No-doing” part. Aside from foregrounding the critical intentions of his later works, Nietzsche describes them as “recuperation” after having produced the masterpiece, Zarathustra. In a twist on the Christian theological paradigm of creation, Nietzsche quips: “it was God himself who at the end of his days’ work lay down as a serpent under the tree of knowledge: thus he recuperated from being God—” (“Beyond Good and Evil,” in Ecce Homo).

54. Allison suggests that Nietzsche wrote the Genealogy so that he would be understood by a reading public and to help with the sales of his earlier works. Allison cites a letter from Nietzsche to Peter Gast (Nietzsche's name for his friend, Johann Heinrich Köselitz): “Perhaps this small polemical pamphlet will help sell a few copies of my older writings.” Allison notes that “the coherence of argument and the clarity of expression in On the Genealogy of Morals—even its quite polemical tone—would prove successful. The Genealogy was accessible to a broad audience, and, through it, all the author's works would find a wide and influential readership” (Reading the New Nietzsche, xvi).

55. In his preface to the Genealogy, Nietzsche writes: “interpretation must now begin, and for this an art of interpretation is needed. In the third treatise of this book I have offered a sample of what I call ‘interpretation’ in such a case: an aphorism is placed before this treatise, the treatise itself is a commentary on it.” On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudmarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998). Preface, §8; henceforth GM. In the late 1990s John T. Wilcox and Maudmarie Clark established that the ‘aphorism’ interpreted by the third essay of the Genealogy is its first section (rather than the epigraph from Zarathustra with which it opens). See: “What Aphorism Does Nietzsche Explicate in Genealogy of Morals, Essay III?” and “From the Nietzsche Archive: Concerning the Aphorism Explicated in Genealogy III,” in the Journal of the History of Philosophy 35.4 (October 1997). In a later essay, “That Exegesis of an Aphorism in ‘Genealogy III’: Reflections on the Scholarship,” in Nietzsche Studien 28 (1998), Wilcox explains that Nietzsche commentators who mistook the epigraph for the aphorism erroneously concluded that interpretation for Nietzsche was a form of mastery and a continuation of creation (reasoning that the ‘interpretative’ essay had little to do with its epigraph). The fact that Nietzsche's essay interprets the aphorism and not the epigraph allows Wilcox to argue that interpretation for Nietzsche has more to do with commentary and explication (Auslegung) than with creation or mastery, thus underscoring the difference in approach between the Genealogy and Zarathustra (for the purposes of the present study).

56. Nietzsche explicitly relates his erstwhile profession (philology) to his current effort by asking: “What clues does the study of language, in particular etymological research, provide for the history of the development of moral concepts?” (GM, I, 17).

57. Nietzsche, GM, I, 26.

58. Nietzsche, GM, I, 17.

59. Gooding-Williams writes: “Genealogy emphasizes the contingent character of the shapes and forms that human life typically assumes. By highlighting the origins of these shapes and forms, the genealogist shows them to be dispensable and unnecessary features of the world we inhabit. By unmasking the contingency that the dogmatist (the person who denies that things could be otherwise) disguises, she illuminates possibilities of change and transformation” (Zarathustra's Dionysian Modernism, 85–86).

60. As its subtitle makes clear, On the Genealogy of Morality is a polemic [Streitschrift], which indicates its deconstructive task.

61. We find a paradox that alludes, perhaps, to the impossibility of prescriptive values in the subtitle to Zarathustra: “A Book for All and None.”