POETICS OF PHILOSOPHY NIETZSCHE, WITTGENSTEIN, AND THE ART OF LANGUAGE PHILIP MILLS ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 2 Declaration of Authorship I Philip Mills hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: 25th August 2018 3 4 Abstract My thesis elaborates a philosophy of poetry in two interrelated ways: a philosophical study of poetry and an exploration of the impacts of poetry on philosophical investigations. Whereas poetry was considered as one of the highest arts in the 18th and 19th century aesthetics, 20th century analytic aesthetics has left poetry aside, focusing much more on visual arts or music. The so-called ‘analytic-continental divide’ which has shaped the philosophical landscape in the 20th century provides an element of an answer to explain this disappearance: following the ‘linguistic turn,’ the dominant conception of language in the analytic tradition is the representational conception of language which fails to give an account of what happens in poetry. On the continental side, on the contrary, some philosophers such as Heidegger have gone as far as to consider philosophy as poetry. These two extremes map out two questions that a philosophy of poetry must answer: What conception of language can give an account of poetry? And how does poetry affect philosophical investigations, especially regarding the question of style? Nietzsche and Wittgenstein both offer interesting insights to answer these questions and bringing them together lead to reconsidering the analytic-continental divide and the ‘quarrel between philosophy and poetry.’ I approach poetry by transposing Wittgenstein’s notion of ’seeing- as’ to ‘reading-as,’ and bring this notion in relation to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. Following these ideas, I consider poetry as a way creating perspectives and elaborate the notion of ‘perspectival poetics’ in the etymological sense of poiesis, creation or making. Philosophy’s encounter with the language of poetry does not only entail a change in conception of language, but also a change in philosophy’s own use of language. Philosophy’s encounter with poetry brings the question of style to the fore and leads to reconsidering the relations between philosophy and poetry. 5 6 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations 9 Introduction: Poetry and the Question of Truth 11 Part One: Setting the Stage 23 Chapter One: Crossing the Analytic-Continental Divide: Metaphysics, Language, and Poetry 25 1. The Terms of the Debate: Analytic and Continental Philosophies 30 2. Metaphysics and Language: Connecting Nietzsche and Wittgenstein 36 3. Metaphysics, Language, and Poetry: A Short Story in 20th Century Philosophy 42 Chapter Two: Representation and Expression: The ‘Linguistic Turn’ in German Philosophy from Herder to Wittgenstein 63 1. ‘A Picture Held Us Captive:’ The Representational Conception of Language 66 2. A Shift to Expression: Herder, Hamann, Humboldt, and Lichtenberg 76 3. The Poetic View: Friedrich Schlegel and the German Romantics 89 Chapter Three: Connecting Nietzsche and Wittgenstein: The ‘End of Metaphysics,’ the ‘Linguistic Turn,’ and the Problem of Relativism 97 1. Three Problems of a Nietzschean and Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Language 102 2. Nietzsche, Metaphysics, and the Seduction of Language 107 3. Wittgenstein and the Traps of Language 118 4. From Logic to Relativism 130 7 Part Two: Perspectival Poetics 143 Chapter Four: Approaching Poetry After Nietzsche and Wittgenstein 145 1. What Is Poetry? 150 2. What Is Poetic Language? 163 Chapter Five: Towards a Perspectival Poetics 177 1. Nietzsche’s Perspectivism 180 2. A Poetic Worldview 196 Chapter Six: Metaphor: A Case Study in Poetics 205 1. From a Rhetoric Trope to a Way of Seeing the World 206 2. Metaphor ‘Refreshes the Intellect’ 213 3. Metaphors in Philosophy 218 Chapter Seven: Style in Philosophy 223 1. Style and Thought: Why Style Matters in Philosophy 229 2. Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s styles 236 3. Style as Critique 248 Conclusion: Poetics of Philosophy (Or Philosophy and Poetry reconsidered) 255 Bibliography 265 8 List of Abbreviations Nietzsche AOM—Assorted Opinions and Maxims BGE—Beyond Good and Evil BT—The Birth of Tragedy D—Daybreak DD—Dionysus Dithyrambs DS—David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer EH—Ecce Homo GM—On the Genealogy of Moral GS—The Gay Science HH—Human, All Too Human NF—Nachgelassene Fragmente (posthumous fragments) TI—Twilight of the Idols TL—On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense WS—The Wanderer and his Shadow Z—Thus Spoke Zarathustra Wittgenstein BB—Blue Book CV—Culture and Value LA—Lectures on Aesthetics LW—Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1 NB—Notebooks 1914-1916 PG—Philosophical Grammar PI—Philosophical Investigations PPF—Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment (former second part of the Philosophical Investigations) RFM—Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics RPP—Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1 T—Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus Z—Zettel I refer to Nietzsche’s works by indicating the book title and the aphorism number as well as the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) volume and page number. When referring to the notebooks, I indicate the year and the note number as well as the KSA volume and page number. I refer to Wittgenstein’s works by indicating the book title and aphorism, page or proposition number (or date in the case of the notebooks). 9 10 Introduction: Poetry and the Question of Truth Like a painter, [the imitative poet] produces work that is inferior with respect to truth and that appeals to a part of the soul that is similarly inferior rather than to the best part. So we were right not to admit him into a city that is to be well-governed, for he arouses, nourishes, and strengthens this part of the soul and so destroys the rational one, in just the way that someone destroys the better sort of citizens when he strengthens the vicious ones and surrenders the city to them. Plato, The Republic, 605a-c When Plato banishes poets from his ideal city because they tell lies which corrupt the minds even of good citizens and thus evaluates poetry negatively, he opposes the poet’s task to the philosopher’s search for truth and, insofar as a city should not surrender itself to the vicious citizens, philosophy should not surrender itself to poetry. His banishing poetry from the ideal city can thus be understood as a metaphor for what he calls ‘an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry:’ the city is philosophy and poetry should not be admitted in it. Despite the modifications and evolutions of both the notions of poetry and of philosophy, Plato’s setting of poetry as philosophy’s ‘other’ seems to maintain an effectiveness for many philosophers in various periods in history and the latest development of this ‘ancient quarrel’ could be seen in the analytic-continental divide. In a schematic way, analytic philosophy would in this sense pursue Plato’s ideal of removing poetry from the philosophical realm whereas continental philosophy would work against this removal by embracing poetry as a means to knowledge and by including poetic elements. We will see that this picture is far too schematic but the rejection of poetry has also and above all had an impact on the field of analytic aesthetics. Poetry is, as John Gibson suggests in his introduction to The Philosophy of Poetry, ‘the last great unexplored frontier in contemporary aesthetics.’1 By ‘contemporary 1 Gibson (2015), p. 1. 11 aesthetics,’ one must understand here ‘analytic aesthetics’ as many continental philosophers of art have given a prime role to poetry, thus following the long tradition in which philosophers granted poetry the status of the highest art such as Kant or Hegel. The relations between philosophy and poetry are not only one-sided: philosophy does not only observe and study poetry from an external point of view but is also affected by poetry in return. Paradoxically, Plato himself, by staging his philosophy in dialogues uses a poetic device to express his philosophy. This might already suggest that philosophy cannot escape the question of its own presentation, the question of style, and this question is closely linked to philosophy’s relation to poetry. Against analytic philosophy’s turn to science and logic, continental philosophy could thus be seen as embracing poetry, and Plato’s distinction between the rationality of philosophy and the irrationality of poetry could therefore be transposed in terms of the logicism of analytic philosophy and the anti-logicism of continental philosophy. This picture is however quite misleading and the distinctions cannot be so easily pinned down. As I will argue, some bridges can be built between analytic and continental philosophers, especially between two of their important figures: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Nietzsche is among the philosophers who reply to Plato’s banishing of poetry by embracing it and, to that extent, he considers his philosophy to be an inverted Platonism: ‘My philosophy is an inverted Platonism: the further something is from true being, the purer, the more beautiful, the better it is. Living in illusion as the goal.’ (NF-1870-1871, 7[156] / KSA 7.199) This inversion therefore brings Nietzsche to adopt an attitude towards poetry fundamentally opposed to Plato’s: rather than criticising the poet’s distance from the truth, Nietzsche praises it because the whole idea of the ‘Truth’ is misleading according to him. His poem ‘Only fool, only poet!’ responds to Plato’s banishing of poetry from the realm of truth and explores precisely this question of truth and poetry: 12 ‘Der Wahrheit Freier—du?’ so höhnten ‘The free truth—you?’ sie They scoffed ‘nein! nur ein Dichter!’ ‘No! Only a poet!’ ein Thier, ein listiges, raubendes, A nasty, robbing, and schleichendes, crawling animal, das lügen muss, Who must lie, das wissentlich, willentlich lügen Must wisely, willingly lie, muss, Lusting for booty, nach Beute lüstern, Colorfully disguised, bunt verlarvt, Who is the masque, sich selbst zur Larve, Who is the booty himself, sich selbst zur Beute Is that—the free truth?..