Songs of the Last Philosopher: Early Nietzsche and the Spirit of Hölderlin
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Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2013 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2013 Songs of the Last Philosopher: Early Nietzsche and the Spirit of Hölderlin Sylvia Mae Gorelick Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Recommended Citation Gorelick, Sylvia Mae, "Songs of the Last Philosopher: Early Nietzsche and the Spirit of Hölderlin" (2013). Senior Projects Spring 2013. 318. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2013/318 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Songs of the Last Philosopher: Early Nietzsche and the Spirit of Hölderlin Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College by Sylvia Mae Gorelick Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 1, 2013 For Thomas Bartscherer, who agreed at a late moment to join in the struggle of this infinite project and who assisted me greatly, at times bringing me back to earth when I flew into the meteoric heights of Nietzsche and Hölderlin’s songs and at times allowing me to soar there. For Daniel Berthold, who has guided me along the philosophic path with rigor, diligence and kindness for four years, and whose help and support in this project have been profound and constant. For Ann Lauterbach, my longtime mentor in the space between theory and literature, who taught me to remain with grace in the changeable disquiet of that gap. It was she who advised me to use this title, originally destined for a chapter, for the project as a whole. For Robert Kelly, whose poetical encouragement unceasingly reminded me to thrust myself again in the volcano of Nietzsche’s thought not only as philosopher but always, too, as poet— 2 take the air inside you as a set of axioms grinding on each other, the dead thinking in us is what we call thinking. […] Now help him think, the dead are hard of hearing hence music, that special art of being dead for the benefit of the living. —Robert Kelly, Untitled (“Help Nietzsche thinking”) Would I like to be a comet? I think so. They are swift as birds, they flower With fire, childlike in purity. To desire More than this is beyond human measure. —Friedrich Hölderlin, Untitled (“In Lovely Blue”) Do I still hear you, my voice? You whisper when you curse? And yet your curse should cause the bowels of this world to burst! But it continues to live and merely stares at me all the more brilliantly and coldly with its pitiless stars; it continues to live, dumb and blind as ever, and the only thing that dies is—the human being. —And yet! —Friedrich Nietzsche, “Oedipus: Soliloquies of the Last Philosopher” Friedrich Nietzsche: Notebook U-I-5 Spring 1873 3 Contents Preface 5 Philosopher as Comet 15 Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of Music 27 Imitation and the Approach to History 41 Knowledge, Wisdom, Belief 51 Truth and Lie: The Need for Myth 60 Agonal Hellenism 74 Cosmogony: Heraclitus and Democritus 79 The Young Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer and Lange 98 The Ground of the Tragic 111 Hölderlin’s Passage: Divine Infidelity and Downgoing 116 Human Measure: Nietzsche and Hölderlin 118 The Perspective of the Moderns toward the Ancients 138 Tragic Ode, Tragic Drama 146 Hölderlin and Intellectual Intuition 154 Schelling’s Tragic Philosophy 167 Hölderlin: Poetology, Tragedy, Excentricity 172 The Ground of Empedocles 190 Hölderlin’s Injunction 203 The Time of Tragedy 209 Loneliness of the Tragic Hero 210 Nietzsche’s Tragic Philosophers 237 The Tragic Rhythm of Becoming 261 Interlude: Anaxagoras 275 Nietzsche’s Temporal Atomism: Zeitatomenlehre 279 Memory and Forgetting at Dawn 292 Primordial Becoming 307 The New History 312 Sacrifice of the Last Philosopher 331 Coda 338 Bibliography 340 4 Preface Soliloquies and Songs: The Philosopher’s Birth Young Friedrich Nietzsche stands continually over an abyss: an abyss between poetry and philosophy, between art and science, between myth and knowledge, between a world in dissolution and the promise of a rising culture. It is a yawning chasm between finite past and infinite future, between the life of the ancients and the life of the moderns—between the mode of the soliloquy and that of the song. Hence the title, Songs of the Last Philosopher, in part borrowed from a fragment of Nietzsche’s (called: “Soliloquies of the Last Philosopher”) and in part renewed by my own perspective and the impulse that Nietzsche’s task as a boundary figure —perhaps as a tragic hero, a last philosopher—was in great part to weave music and poetry, these rich artistic sources that open and expose the emptiness of the ground of so-called philosophical reason, into the discourse of that very reason: to push philosophy outside itself. Such songs lead to a madness—the madness of the unexpected—from which arises, as a need, the embrace of cosmic chance and eternal transformation across the tragedy of time. This is also the madness of action, posed in opposition to the sphere of thought. In order for philosophy to enter the world, to change it, it must freely exercise the mobile plasticity of the art instincts of nature, as Nietzsche calls them. Heraclitus’ enigmas, too, are songs. * Nietzsche’s early philosophy shall form the object of this work. It is a philosophy rife with contradictions. Most stunning, arresting, thoroughgoing of these contradictions is that between the drives within the young philosopher towards metaphysics and towards science. I have endeavored to show this contradiction, as well as the innumerable others, of which this 5 constitutes, in a sense, the root, neither as a dialectical opposition nor as an irreconcilable schizophrenia, but, in keeping with the philosopher’s early thought, as a dissonant harmony—an ἀγών in the pervasive sense this had for the ancients. Nietzsche’s early philological study of the Greeks before Plato was not merely an academic endeavor; rather, it was necessitated by a crisis in culture, indeed by what the blossoming philosopher perceived to be a lack of culture in his contemporary Germany. He saw his time as an age of degeneracy, where the rise of philistinism and the radical separation of science, art, philosophy and philology threatened to so homogenize his people that the very possibility of unity and vitality in the nation was eradicated from the national horizon. Not only Germany, but indeed, modern Europe as a whole, for Nietzsche, did not exist, but merely subsisted in a blind and painful disunity, and herein lay, for him, the tragic nature of his time. Nietzsche perceived the imminent death of metaphysics, or rather, the radical impossibility of metaphysics in his era, in his contemporary Germany. We mustn’t forget that this work was contemporary with the Franco-Prussian War, in which Nietzsche served as a medical orderly and, after perceiving this war’s fascistic effects, turned against it. At the opening of the war, in July 1870, Nietzsche wrote to his friend, Erwin Rohde: “Our entire threadbare culture is plunging at the breast of the horrible demon.” (B 3, 130) This demon he called “military genius” (1, 775; TGS).1 He consequently believed, initially, that this explosion of Dionysian strife, the force of this military genius, would be capable of reviving culture. Yet, after experiencing the horrors of war and contracting dystentery and diphtheria, he began to view this war, rather, as a subordination of culture to the state. He wrote to Carl von Gersdorff in November, 1870: “I now 1 Cited in Rüdiger Safranski, Nietzsche, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York-London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 67. 6 consider Prussia a power that is extremely dangerous for culture” (B 3, 155).2 Nietzsche’s philological work coincides with the unification of Germany; the question of the possibility of a culture proper to Germany is, indeed, highly contemporary. His response to this question, however, was to be an untimely one, primarily involving a return to the rich source of ancient Greek culture. Nietzsche’s main concern, therefore, in his writing of the early 1870s, as a professor of philology at the University of Basel, was to open wide the possibility of creating culture. This entailed, in his view, a radical transformation of philology, then circumscribed by esoteric academicism, so that it could finally unite with philosophy, with art and with science, to reestablish the systemic unity internal to culture. He therefore contrives a series of figures and formulas destined to bring about this end—this restored harmony of national life. These figures emerge, moreover, from his study of the “pre-Platonic” Greek philosophers. Traveling with a great mobility of spirit between the cosmic visions of these early philosophers, of which Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus are the most important to him, Nietzsche developed, from the ground of their tragic and secret fecundities, a series of theories on the role of the philosopher in the creation of culture. This hypothetical philosopher is conceived in a sense that owes much both to the genius of Schopenhauer, and to the Greek tragic hero. Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt both conceived the ἀγών—the contest or competition— as the central aspect of ancient Greek culture.