Nietzsche and Mountains

NIETZSCHE AND MOUNTAINS The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the written consent of the author and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Thesis submitted for the degree of Do it of Philosophy. Aft Mark Edmund Bolland. #114/0 University of Durham, 1996. 2 8 MAY 1997 ABSTRACT M. Bolland Nietzsche and Mountains This thesis attempts to demonstrate the importance of mountains within Nietzsche's thought, and the significance of Nietzsche's mountains within the context of nineteenth-century literary and philosophical culture. This inquiry into a neglected region of both Nietzsche and "mountain" studies is shaped around the general history of his ambivalent relationship with the metaphorical, aesthetic and cultural aspects of mountains. Nietzsche's ambivalence, as well as his concern about this ambivalence, is seen to emanate from the Classicism implicit in his notion of the "will to power" struggling against the remnants of his own Romanticism. Chapter 1 deals with the origin and function of Nietzsche's mountain metaphors, arguing that by a progressively greater immersing of his personality into specific areas of mountainous nature, Nietzsche self-consciously strove to become the mountain's mouthpiece in the articulation of the theory of the "will to power". Chapter 2 demonstrates the purpose of Nietzsche's geological metaphors in his break with traditional Romantic motifs and dogmas. These metaphors transfer scientific theories about the varied phenomena found amongst mountains onto Nietzsche's psychological accounts of man and culture. Chapter 3 follows Nietzsche's inquiry into the meaning of the Romantic aesthetic reaction to mountains, and analyses his critique of two forms of the Romantic mountain experience: the adoration of "the massive", and the application of moral predicates to nature. Chapter 4 shows the consonance of Nietzsche's mature mountain aesthetic - the "heroic-idyllic" - with his post-Wagnerian philosophy of music and landscape. Chapter 5 compares and disassociates the mountains of Nietzsche from those employed in the ideology of the Third Reich. Appendix 1 surveys the biographical detail surrounding Nietzsche's relationship with mountains in the period (1858-1879) leading to the discovery of the "heroic-idyllic" in the Engadine. Appendix 2 looks at Nietzsche's thoughts on alpinism. Copyright. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Declaration. The work contained in this thesis was carried out in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy in the University of Durham between October 1988 and October 1996. All the work was by the author. It has not been previously submitted for a degree at this or any other university. Table of contents Introduction. a. The disappearance of Nietzsche's mountains. 1 b. In defence of detail. 3 c. Nietzsche's novelty, and the battle with Romanticism. 4 Chapter 1. Nietzsche's mountain metaphors. a. Critical comment on the origin of Nietzsche's mountain metaphors. 9 b. An alternative account. 14 c. Walking, looking, thinking. 16 d. Philosophy as pictorial metaphor. 18 e. Identification with nature. 20 f. The metaphysical truth of nature: power, not suffering. 22 g. The articulation of the "will to power" and the question of identity. 25 h. The lack of a singular summit. 30 i. The mountain-range. 32 j. Herd and valley. 35 k. Summit vision, power, and the overcoming of "the tragic". 39 Chapter 2. Cold scientific metaphors. a. The necessity of the cold. 49 b. Literary and scientific cold. 51 c. Geophysical metaphors. 56 d. Metaphors of the mine. 67 Chapter 3. Nietzsche and the aesthetics of mountains. a. The question: "our feeling for high mountains?" 74 b. The conflict hypothesis. 77 c. Nietzsche's critique of the "gross sublime". 80 d. Nietzsche's critique of the cult of "ethical" mountainous nature. 93 e. The consequences of our feelings for high mountains. 103 Chapter 4. The classical aesthetic of mountains. a. Introduction. 106 b. Classical models. 109 c. The elision of landscape, music, and mountain-painting. 113 d. Ratio and proportion in Nietzsche's classical landscape. 122 e. Literary-climatic aura of the classical landscape. 126 f. The heroic-idyllic mode. 129 Chapter 5. Nietzsche, mountains and the Third Reich. a. Introduction. 137 b. The Nazi mountain. 140 Conclusion. 151 Appendix 1. Nietzsche in the mountains: 1858-1879. 154 Appendix 2. Nietzsche and alpinism. a. Alpinism in 1876. 193 b. Nietzsche and his vicarious experience of alpinism. 194 c. Nietzsche's alpine acquaintances. 195 d. Nietzsche's alpine reading. 199 e. Nietzsche on alpinism. 200 Bibliography. 208 Introduction. "By a stroke of bad luck there are no high mountains near Paris: if the Gods had given this area a passable lake and mountain, French literature would have been much more picturesque [...] in sad compensation, the flat writers of our century speak without shame and quite disproportionately about these things, and spoil them as much as they can". (Stendhal, Memoires d'un Touriste. 1803).1 a. The disappearance of Nietzsche's mountains. Nietzsche and mountains were much more easily spoken of in the same breath during the first quarter, or so, of this century. After that, they were less frequently mentioned together. In effect, Nietzsche and mountains, about which there had earlier been much excited talk, disappeared from view.2 1 Stendhal, 1968, pp. 113-14. 2 The following pages will furnish ample evidence of the relative decline in investigations into the part mountains played in Nietzsche's life and thought. This is no doubt because throughout this century mountains have been playing lesser and lesser roles in academic life, just as the intellect has become more narcissistic, book-bound, interested "in its own operations". So much is obvious just from looking at the differing language in which different ages have chosen to address Nietzsche. During the decades around the turn of this century, when mountains were still part of many academics' "kit", it was by no means unusual for writers on Nietzsche to reproduce the mountain language of which he himself had made such extensive use. The laval stream of mountain metaphors that had carried him down to his readers was mimicked by those readers of his who imagined him back up amongst the glittering Alps. This tendency first appears in his correspondence: letters from Romundt ("You lead us quite gradually and unremarkably out of the plain and up the mountain, until we suddenly stand up above and see everything as though it were new Li" (K.G.B. II(2), 25.3.1870)); Wagner (" [...] through you I have gained a wide and sweeping perspective and immeasurable vistas of promising activity open up before me - with you at my side [...]" (10.1.1872: quoted in C. Wagner, 1978, p. 172)); Burckhardt ("I watch with a mixture of fear and pleasure as you safely climb the giddying mountain ridges [...]" (K.G.B. 11(6/2), 5.4.1879)); von Gersdorff ("you are like [...] a good mountaineer. Many will become dizzy on your heights, but up there the ozone-rich air wafts around [...]" (K.G.B. III(2), 7.9.1883)) are a few amongst many similar letters that Nietzsche received throughout his life. The least these show is how influential was Nietzsche's rhetoric in convincing others that the mountain was the terrain, above all others, upon which he should be approached. By the turn of the century such mountaineering language was almost de rigueur in discussing Nietzsche, as if the very experience of reading Nietzsche were but a twin of that compound of visionary enthusiasmos and terror that characterises mountaineering. Added to this was the interest his earlier readers had in that most Nietzschean of mountain landscapes, the Engadine. A pamphlet obtainable from the Nietzsche-Haus in SiIs-Maria - Uber Sils and das Oberengadin - contains "Engadine reminiscences" by writers such as Adorno, Benjamin, Rilke, Hesse, Thomas Mann and Proust, as well as "Engadine" poems by Jean Cocteau ("Le requiem"), Karl Kraus ("Fahrt ins Fexthal") and Gottfried Benn ("SiIs-Maria"). If they remained, they did so briefly, as two caricatures; and since these caricatures contained much that was apparently repellent, in time silence was the preferred option. This thesis will attempt to demonstrate that this disappearance of the entire topic of Nietzsche and mountains has come about on the back of a series of misreadings, or caricatures of Nietzsche. The first of these arose out of the Nazi misreading - briefly, Nietzsche as advocating a superman alpinist. Once Nietzsche was able to be linked to the Nazis, both were seen to share common melodramatic fantasies about mountains, and the conjunction Nietzsche-mountains was damned by the association. Nietzsche's mountains, or what were thought to be Nietzsche's mountains, were turned into a Nazi-tinged shadowland of the soul. Less conspicuous, but perhaps more effective in bringing and keeping down a blanket of silence over the conjunction of Nietzsche and mountains, now that Nietzsche has been all but wholly de-Nazified, was a "misreading" which is associated with a set of intellectual and stylistic procedures which will be called "Paris". 3 Although "Paris" is - and was, in its nineteenth-century manifestation - particularly silent about mountains, it has attempted, albeit not unsuccessfully, to transform Nietzsche into someone who was not only

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