Nietzsche and Early Romanticism

Judith Norman

Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 63, No. 3. (Jul., 2002), pp. 501-519.

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Nietzsche and Early Romanticism

Judith Norman

Nietzsche was in many ways a quintessentially romantic figure, a lonely genius with a tragic love-life, wandering endlessly (through Italy, no less) be- fore going dramatically mad, taken by his gods into the protection of madness (to quote Heidegger's epithet on Holderlin. one of Nietzsche's childhood fa- vo r i t e~ ) .~But this is to be a romantic in an uncapitalized manner, and has noth- ing to do with the literary movement of Romanticism, a movement from which, as is well-known, Nietzsche distanced himself loudly and vigorously. Nietzsche famously follows Goethe in his verdict that Romanticism is a form of sickness and classicism a form of strength, and commentators, for the most part, have accepted this self-description.? That is, they do not blithely identify Nietzsche with that nineteenth-century artistic movement, whose proponents include Victor Hugo, Eugene Delacroix, and Richard Wagner.'

But Romanticism is a plural phenomenon. When Goethe made his famously dismissive remark, he was clearly not talking about Hugo and Wagner; he meant Romanticism in an earlier incarnation. Commentators have been less reticent about finding all sorts of affinities between Nietzsche and some of these earlier movements. In particular Nietzsche is frequently and positively compared to Jena Romanticism (also known as early Romanticism), a movement whose principal figures included August and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, Schleiermacher, and Schelling, and the writings they published in the 1790s, principally in the journal, Athenaeum. It is this romantic movement that will be the focus of my paper. Jena romantics, while Grecophile, had nothing to do with Rousseauean primitivism (they were well aware that their image of the

' Martin Heidegger, Schelling ifiearise on the Essence of' Hzrn~an Freedom, tr. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, Ohio, 1985), 2.

' Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Cot~versatiorzs with Eckernlann. tr. John Oxenford (San Francisco, 1984), 248 (2April 1829); Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Frohliche Wissen.cchrlfr in "v'ietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesarntatlsgabe, ed. G. Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin, 1968). part 5, # 370; The Ga.y Science (GS ), tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974).

' See Robert Gooding-Williams, "Zarathustra's Three Metamorphoses" in h'ietzsche as Postmodernist: Essavs Pro and Contra ed. Clayton Koelb (Albany, 1990), and Heinrich von Staden, "Nietzsche and Marx on Greek Art," Daedalus (Winter, 1976); also Julian Young, Nietzsche k Philosophy of Art (New York, 1992), 140-47.

Copyright 2002 by Journal of the History of Ideas. Inc.

502 Judith Norman

Greeks reflected contemporary fantasies more than historical reality), they had no cult of the genius, and they did not valorize emotion above reason.That was central to their movement was profound skepticism about the viability of traditional attitudes towards truth, an intellectually rigorous theory of art that gave particular weight to playfulness, fragmented writing, the notion of liter- ary irony, a sense that the philosopher ought to be or become more of an artist (though not a genius)-and, correlatively, that philosophy is or ought to be- come more artistic. All of which sounds decidedly Nietzschean.

Romanticizing Nietzsche

While Nietzsche himself never makes the connection, he never explicitly distances himself from the authors of Jena romanticism in the way he does from later romantic figure^.^ Indeed, he barely mentions the Jena romantics by name and probably never read Friedrich Schlegel, the figure most closely asso- ciated with this romantic m ~ v e m e n t . ~ As such, there is certainly space for com- mentators to argue for a close if tacit intellectual connection between Nietzsche and Jena romanticism; indeed, one commentator speaks of a fundamental af- finity,' another calls Nietzsche the last romanticist, and yet another claims that "[Nietzsche's] story makes sense only when read in the larger context of his Romantic predecessors' hi~tory."~

It is undeniable that Nietzsche came out of a philological tradition inaugu- rated by the Schlegels (and developed by Schelling) which juxtaposed the Dionysian and the Apollinian in Greek tragedy. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, "an entire tradition of academic philosophy (which, on his own initiative, Nietzsche had joined) revolved around precisely this oppo~ition."~ At least in

Triedrich Schlegel, Kritische Fragmente, ed. E. Behler, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe (Darmstadt, 1958-), 11, 5 7. The English translations of Schlegel's "Critical Fragments" CF, "Athenaeum Fragments" AF and "Ideas" I , in Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, tr. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, 197 1).

See Young, Nietzsche 's Philosophy ofArt, 140. Nietzsche carefully considers August Schlegel's ideas on the function of the tragic chorus

in The Birth of Tragedv-but in his capacity as a classical philologist. not specifically as a member of Jena Romanticism. Novalis is quoted in Humatt, All Too Human, 142 (but not after that) and Friedrich Schlegel is never mentioned. Emst Behler suggests that Nietzsche never read Friedrich Schlegel in "Nietzsche's Auffassung der Ironie" in Nietzsche Studien, 4 (1975), 10 as does Adrian del Caro in Nietzsche contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic (Baton Rouge, 1989), 56.

' Heinrich von Staden, "Nietzsche and Marx on Greek Art," Daedalus (1976), 86; cf., M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1973), 316-18.

Del Caro, Nietzsche contra Nietzsche, 5-6, and Azade Seyhan, Representation and its Discontents (Berkeley, 1992), 19.

'Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, "Apocryphal Nietzsche," tr. Timothy D. Bent, from The Sub- ject of Philosophy (Minneapolis, 1993), 253; M. S. Silk and J. P. Stem, Nietzsche on Tragedv

503 Nietzsche and Early Romanticism

his earlier works Nietzsche's view of the Greeks was influenced by (if not predicated on) the scholarly research and interpretative theories of figures as- sociated with Jena romanticism. How profound and enduring this influence might have been is an interesting question, but not one I will explore at present. I will not discuss the influence of the Jena romantics in their scholarly capacity as classical philologists, but rather focus on any impact they may have had as philosophically minded literary critics during the 1790s. Similarly, I will not look at The Birth of Tragedy but rather focus on claims made concerning the romantic tendencies of Nietzsche's later work. A body of scholarship has been building which claims that the critical theories of Jena romanticism impor- tantly anticipated many of the great ideas from Nietzsche's mature philosophy, and I would like to see if this is true.I0

The basic point of contact that commentators indicate between Nietzsche and Jena romanticism is surprisingly easy to summarize. Both are supposedly motivated by a post-Kantian skepticism as to the validity of traditional philoso- phy and traditional philosophical notions of truth; that is, they believe that the search for truth is no longer a viable project and look to literary methods that indicate, without baldly claiming, the illusory nature of reality. A version of this claim centers on problems posed by language; Nietzsche and the romantics supposedly agree that we cannot use language to indicate anything beyond language, and so the project of representing some sort of extra-linguistic real- ity is doomed to failure. Irony and fragmented writing in particular are apt artistic vehicles for suggesting that truth is an illusion and our attempt to grasp something like objective reality doomed to failure. To be sure, this new sort of art takes up the mantle of philosophy and thus will be different from an older, naively unselfconscious art. It will encompass the project of philosophy and so represents a sort of synthesis between traditional art and traditional philoso- phy. Thus, both Nietzsche and the romantics are pioneers of new forms of artistry or creativity specifically appropriate for a post-philosophical age.

One critic describes this project as follows:

Like Schlegel, for whom "the absolute" [das Hochste] can only be expressed allegorically because it is inutterable ...., Nietzsche looks beyond the categories of time, space, and causality into the impen- etrable zone of essences only intuitable as an aesthetic phenomenon ....

(New York, 198 I), 2 11;Ernst Behler, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge, 1993), 130; and Heinrich von Staden, op. cit., 95, n. 33; and c.f. Walter K a u h a m , Nietzsche: Philoso- pher, Psychologist, Antichrist (New York, 1974), 380, n. 27.

'O I will be refemng to the scholarship of Ernst Behler, Azade Seyhan, Phillipe Lacoue- Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adrian del Caro, Maurice Blanchot, Richard Rorty, and Andrew Bowie.

504 Judith Norman

Nietzsche views art as a self-conscious illusion which excites an optic desire to look beyond appearance to the abyss where comprehension faces total resistance and eventually comes to terms with the tragic vision of existence. Since art is always alerted to the non-conclusive nature of reality, it is redeemed by its self-reflexive and ironic sensi- bility, whereas reason and logic are trapped in what Nietzsche calls "metaphysical delusion" [metaphysischer Wahnsinn]. The persistent irony and mobility with which Nietzsche invests art aligns his thought unmistakably with that of the early Romantics."

Philosophy becomes art, or at least artistic. Hence one commentator writes: "[Wlithout doubt, after Schelling we find the most pregnant expression of this [Romantic] aestheticization of worldview in the philosophy of Nietzsche."" Similarly, in their seminal work on the literary theories of Jena romanticism, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write, "One sees all that Nietzsche could have taken from romanticism ...,but it is surely the theme of the philosopher-artist that is most fundamentally romantic in his work."13 Like the romantics, Nietzsche envisions a form of philosophy which becomes conscious artistry, creative rather than descriptive, and oriented to aesthetic rather than epistemological criteria. Nietzsche frequently describes himself as an artist, and wrote in poetic or fictional form. Similarly, the romantics conceived of and tried to raise philosophy to the level of art; both their theoretical and properly artistic products reflect this ambition. According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Nietzsche and the romantics have in common the fact that they would point to Plato, the great literary philosopher -in spite of himself-as a great precursor in this endeavor.'' Writing about Friedrich Schlegel, Adrian del Caro says, "Poesie, unlike philosophy ...would liberate modern man from his labyrinth of cognitive experimentation by using creativity as its primary guiding force. Here we find ourselves directly in the neighborhood of Nietzsche's non-traditional philosophizing.""

Blanchot, too, credits Nietzsche and the romantics both with raising literary form as a philosophical problem, writing: ''[Lliterature, beginning to become manifest to itself through the romantic declaration, will from now on bear in itself this question of discontinuity or difference as a question of form-a

'I Seyhan, Representation, 19, 138. l 2 Jos de Mul, Romantic Desire in (Post)Modern Arr & Philosoph~~(Albany, N.Y., 1999). 8,

75. "Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literal? ilbsolute. tr. Philip Barnard

and Cheryl Lester (Albany, N.Y., 1988). 148. n. 25. "Lacoue-Labarthe, "Apocryphal Nietzsche."

Adrian Del Caro, Nietzsche contra Nietzsche, 5 , and cf. Seyhan. Represerztution, 140, "The understanding that joins Nietzsche with his Romantic forebears is the realization that there is no minotaur of dictatorial truth at the center of the labyrinth."

505 Nietzsche and Early Romanticism

question and a task German romanticism, and in particular that of the Athenaeum, not only sensed but already clearly proposed-before consigning them to Nietzsche and, beyond Nietzsche, to the f ~ t u r e . " ' ~ Even Rorty points to Nietzsche's implicit romanticism in describing how, given the breakdown of traditional epistemologies, truth needs to be creatively willed, in a poetic manner-a manner, Rorty argues, which has everything to do with irony."

There is some debate among those sympathetic to the Nietzsche I Jena connection as to whether Nietzsche develops or falls short of the insights of romanticism. Andrew Bowie, while agreeing that "it was the work ofNietzsche ...which most obviously carried on some of the romantic themes," argues that the romantics did a better job than Nietzsche would later do. Nietzsche is a pale reflection of romantic insights, and his propensity to question the viability of truth reduces to certain paradoxes (fundamentally, the Cretan Liar's paradox) that the romantics more deftly avoided.18 On the other hand, the majority of commentators argue for a more positive assessment of Nietzsche's romanticism, for instance: "The seeds of the Romantic discontent about philosophical certainty come to full fruition in Nietzsche who embodies the textual interlinkage between early German Romanticism and late m~dernity."'~ This last statement expresses another theme often found in authors making positive comparisons between Nietzsche and the romantics: the idea that the legacy continues into "late modernity"-in other words, primarily, Derrida (this is evident in the quote from Blanchot above as well). Bowie agrees that "Nietzsche's questioning has had a decisive influence on subsequent discussions of the end of metaphysics in contemporary literary theory," but he feels that the credit really belongs to Nietzsche's superior romantic precursors.20 Ernst Behler has argued at length for the three-way connection, writing that "A self-critical awareness of our linguistic embeddedness has indeed been a characteristic mark of modernity since the romantic age and reached a new intensity with Nietzsche. The three authors chosen as representatives of this discourse, Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida, thematize the self-referential implications of their irony in their own text...."21

Efforts earlier in the century to argue for the Nietzsche I Jena romanticism connection were vigorously opposed by Walter Kaufmann. Despite certain superficial similarities, Kaufmann writes, Nietzsche and the Jena romantics

l 6 Maurice Blanchot, The Itz$nite Conversation, tr. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis, 1993), 359.

"Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidariy (Cambridge, 1989), 4 1 . "Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Gernzatz Liter-

ary Theoty (New York, 1997), 136. l9 Seyhan, Representation, 17- 18. 20 Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, 73. "Emst Behler, Iron?; and the Discourse of Modernih' (Seattle, 1990), 112. See also del

Caro, Nietzsche contra Nietzsche, 199: Heidegger "stands in relation to Nietzsche as Nietzsche stood in relation to the romanticists."

506 Judith Norman

"are basically quite different, and the context usually reveals the superficiality of such parallels."22 As Kaufmann indicates, the romantic progressive notion of history is not particularly Nietzschean, and the characteristic romantic notion of longing is at odds with the Nietzschean affirmation of the pre~ent.'~ Kaufmann further notes that Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel became devout Christians, as well as the fact that Nietzsche's great hero, Goethe, distanced himself from romanticism, and, in the 1830s, wrote some harsh indictments of the Schlegels that Nietzsche apparently quoted. Kaufmann thinks that the correlative romantic rejection of Goethe confirms the romantic antipathy to the classicism Nietzsche championed.

1think that Kaufmann is basically right in his contention that there are no important intellectual affinities between the philosophical and literary theories of Nietzsche and those of the Jena romantics (although there might be with regard to their theories on classical Greece), but that he is right for the wrong reasons. For one thing, some of his claims seem frankly ad hominem: the romantics were Christians and Goethe did not like them. In fact, neither of these claims are quite true: although Schelling and the Schlegels became rather conventional Christians, this only happened decades after the heyday of the movement, after their ideas had altered considerably. In general, much of Kaufmann's evidence for un-Nietzschean remarks made by Jena romantics are culled from sources dated well past 1800, when the movement came to an end and many of the principal figures associated with romanticism began changing their views considerably. In the 1790s they were enormously irreverent: Goethe had to be called in (by August Schlegel) to persuade Friedrich Schlegel not to publish a sharply anti-religious, satirical poem by Schelling in the Athenaeum. They were indeed on friendly terms with Goethe, who had an amused and decidedly avuncular attitude towards this group of what he regarded as brilliant young men; he felt "grateful to know he [was] honored by them" in the words of B l a n ~ h o t . ~ ~ Goethe premiered Friedrich Schlegel's tragedy, Alarcos (and stopped the audience from jeering). The romantics (mainly the Schlegels) were likewise enthusiastic about Goethe and Wilhelm Meister above all else; they wrote repeatedly that it was the pinnacle and emblematic achievement of the age. Kaufmann is disingenuous in claiming that they eventually decided that they wanted to supplant Goethe. The Schlegels, at least, simply thought that there will be a new historical age, with new emblematic achievements.

Moreover, the sickness that Goethe claimed to find in (some strains of) romanticism is described more specifically by Nietzsche as a form of impoverishment, a lack of will, strength or force as opposed to a Dionysian

"Kaufmann, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 38 1 , n. 29. 23 Kaufrnann, ibid., 321-22; and J . Hillis Miller's review of Abrarns's Natural Supernatu-

ralism, "Tradition and Difference," Diacritics ( I 972), 6-13. 24Blanchot,The Infinite Conversation, 352.

507 Nietzsche and Early Romanticism

overfulness. But the arch-romantic Novalis describes some of Friedrich Schle- gel's writings as a dithyrambic intoxication, expressing "an over-saturated form of life."25 Although Kaufmann is certain that attention to context will de- romanticize some of Nietzsche's contentions (and "de-Nietzsche-cize" ro-manticism into the bargain), he fails to provide enough of the necessary groundwork to do so. In light of the more sophisticated, recent literary theoretical attempts of the authors I have been discussing (Behler, Blanchot, Lacoue- Labarthe, Seyhan, etc.) to find affinities between Nietzsche and Jena roman- ticism, I believe such groundwork is needed. In the remainder of this paper, I will attempt to provide it.

Jena Romanticism

A critique of conventional philosophical treatment of the notion of truth is common to Nietzsche and the romantics, and as commentators indicate, this is a striking similarity. It is tied to the theme of aestheticization, since doubts as to the continued viability of the notion of truth lead to the idea that philosophy ought to be replaced by art, or become itself artistic. Moreover, both Nietzsche and the romantics employ the familiar story of the disciples at Sai's as an allegory for seeking truth: a story portraying the search for a truth behind appearances as lifting the veils of a goddess. Friedrich Schlegel writes "mysteries are female; they like to veil themselves but still want to be seen and d i sco~ered . "~~ In one of his Logological Fragments, Novalis writes, "One person succeeded -he lifted the veil of the goddess at Says-But what did he see? he saw-wonder of wonders-him~elf."~' This is not simply an injunction to "know thyself." Examining several (logological) fragments from the same time suggests a more metaphysically precise reading involving an epistemology of reflexivity. Novalis writes "self equals nonself-the highest principle of all learning and art" followed by the even more bald statement. "I am This is no de- familiarizing Rimbaudian "je est un autre" but rather its reassuring, proto- Hegelian opposite, the other is me. This frankly endogamous relation with the world is derived from Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, which Novalis had studied closely and written about it in detail. According to Fichte, the I as absolute, transcendental first principle (a successor notion to Kant's transcendental unity

"Novalis, Novalis Schrzjien, ed. Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mahl and Gerhad Schulz (Stuttgart, 1965-68), 11,111.English translations of Novalis's "Miscellaneous Observations" 1210, "Logological Fragments I" (LF, I), "Logological Fragments 11" (LF, 11) and "Last Fragments" (LF) in Novalis: Philosophical Writings, tr. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany, N.Y., 1997); MO, 105.

'6 Schlegel, I, 128 and 137. '' Novalis, LF 11, 29

Novalis, LF I, 59, and Philosophical Writings, 173, n. 14.

Judith Norman

of apperception) posits a not-I (world). This act is responsible for the production of the empirical ego and the empirical world. The I is no longer absolute, being limited by the not-I, so it then begins the infinite task of assimilating this not-I, trying to know itself by recognizing itself in the not-I. The structure, in short, is that of thesis (I), antithesis (not-I), and projected synthesis (I = not-I).

Despite the apparent success of Novalis's novice at Sais, the romantics generally stressed the infinite and ultimately impossible (for reasons specific to Fichte's philosophy) task of synthesis or self-knowledge. It is the goal of an infinite striving or becoming. For this reason, the vocabulary of becoming and growth occurs frequently in romantic writings. In perhaps the most famous romantic self-declaration, Friedrich Schlegel writes: "Romantic poetry is progressive, universal poet ry.... The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected ...."29 Novalis expresses the notion of dynamic growth through his frequent use of the imagery of seeds, germination, and vegetable growth. Even his assumed name "novalis" is derived from the Latin for one who opens up new land; and he calls some of his fragments "pollen" (Bluten- staub). This vegetable vocabulary allows Novalis to suggest that even nature is implicated in this progressive, poetical longing for the absolute.

The themes of Fichtean reflexivity and pollination are brought (albeit somewhat awkwardly) into contact in another one of Novalis's fragments: "We shall understand the world when we understand ourselves, because we and it are integral halves. We are God's children, divine seeds. One day we shall be what our Father is."'O Here, Novalis makes it clear that recognition is the key to knowledge, and it will be gradually (and here, as least, he indicates eventually) attained through progressive growth. What is perhaps most striking about this fragment, however, is the ease with which he refers it to theological vocabulary. Schlegel does the same in a fragment where he writes, "Every good human being is always progressively becoming God. To become God, to be human, to cultivate oneself are all expressions that mean the same thing."3' Fichte's early philosophy (certainly before 1800) was not directly or conventionally trans- latable into Christian theology, indeed, he was somewhat scandalously expelled from his position at the University of Jena on the accusation of atheism, and it must be remembered that Novalis also wrote that "Spinozism is a supersaturation with the divine," which would indicate a tendency on his part to over- theologize.'* But Novalis is correct to point to the genuinely theological affinities implicit in Fichte's I, a self-causing, world-creating, ideal transcendental subject

L9 Schlegel, AF, 1 16. ' O Schlegel, L F I, 7 1.

Schlegel, A F , 262. 32 Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theon,,73

509 Nietzsche and Early Romanticism

in which we live and breathe, whose project of self-knowledge is carried out through our own progressive endeavor.

Perhaps most tellingly theological is our relation to this I. Fichte struggled for many years with the epistemological issues of how to characterize our cognitive relation to the I. In 1795 he admitted that the I

has no name, never occurs in consciousness, and cannot be grasped by means of concepts .... One enters my philosophy by means of what is absolutely incomprehensible .... Everything that is comprehensible presupposes a higher sphere in which it is comprehended and is therefore not the highest thing, precisely because it is c~mprehensible.~'

In 1800, he referred the problem away from knowledge to the notion of "faith." Novalis was dead by 1800; but he had anticipated Fichte's move. Novalis, it should be said was attracted primarily by the mystical aspects of religion, and in particular the notion of the via negativa. In his Fichte-Studien he makes clear that this is how he believes Fichte's I should be approached, through a sort of negative theology.34 This can be understood as a meditation on the inability of the finite mind and its language to express the absolute and perhaps, an attempt to craft new resources to do so. Novalis and, in fact, the Jena romantics generally devoted themselves to the project of doing just this, using the resources of art.

We can note in passing that the notion of an artistic expression of the absolute was not exclusive to romanticism during this time: the German idealists, too, toyed with this idea, although Schelling was the only one to stick to it. The fragmentary "Earliest System-Program of German Idealism" of 1796, authored, ambiguously, by Hegel, Schelling or Holderlin-or perhaps all three- proclaims: "Last of all, the Idea that unites all the rest [is] the Idea of beauty, taking the word in its higher Platonic sense. I am now convinced that the highest act of Reason ... is an aesthetic act ... [and so] the philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet .... The philosophy ofthe spirit is an aesthetic phi l~sophy."~~

"J. G. Fichtes Briefiechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgahe. ed. Hans Schulz (Leipzig, 1930), no. 246; translation in earl,^ Philosophical Writings, tr. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, 1988), 399.

34 See Geza von Molnar, iVovalis: "Fichte Studies ":The Foundations ofhis Aesthetics (The Hague, 1970), 26.

'j "Das alteste Systemprogramm" in Hegel-Studien, Beiheii 9, ed. Riidiger Bubner (Bonn, 1973), 263-65.

510 Judith Norman

Ironic Philosophies

Friedrich Schlegel writes, "The whole history of modem poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one."36 Here we see a clear statement of the romantic will to aestheticize philosophy. It is passages like this that inspire commentators to see the romantics as precursors to Nietzsche's attempts to infuse an element of artistic creativity into the enterprise of philosophy. But what is Schlegel really talking about? Which philosophers, and how are they to be poeticized?

The main examples he has in mind are Plato and Fichte (although there are allusions to the musicality of Kant).37 Plato already represents a poetical philosophy, mainly because of his irony and dialogical form, but the project of poeticizing Fichte had yet to be accomplished, and the romantics enjoyed speculating about what it might entail. "Wonderful works of art could come into being in this way" writes Novalis, "as soon as we have learnt to Fichtecize ar t i~t ica l ly ."~~What this means can be gleaned from both the theoretical pronouncements of the romantics and their attempts to combine philosophy and poetry in their own works. The aestheticization pretty much exclusively concerns aesthetic form-so it is not a matter of writing beautiful literature with philosophical morals (like Rousseau, for instance, although with Fichtean content)-but rather of formally modulating a philosophical presentation in an aesthetically valid manner. The formal structures that the romantics themselves thought the most significant, which are at the same time the ones that commentators have thought presaged Nietzsche the most strikingly, are irony and the fragment. Both of these are prominent features of Plato's dialogues- provided, of course, that we accept Friedrich Schlegel's definition of a dialogue as a "chain or garland of fragment^."^^

The meaning of the notion of irony in romantic thought is a much debated issue, but for the purposes of setting up a comparison with Nietzsche I will discuss what is generally agreed upon. Schlegel defines irony as "logical beauty" and "transcendental b~f foonery . "~~ This last definition in particular is quite suggestive; irony can be seen as a sort of playful, artistic self-consciousness; the text reflecting on itself. We can see how in the proper circumstances irony can effect a unity of philosophy and art: it adds a philosophical element to a work of art (by providing a moment of self-consciousness) or an artistic element to a work of philosophy (fictionalizing the text by calling into question the veracity of what is being stated).

36 Schlegel, CF, 115; see also I, 108 j7 Schlegel, AF, 220, 322. j8 Novalis, L F I, 11. j9Schlegel, AF, 77. 40 Schlegel, CF, 42.

Nietzsche and Early Romanticism 51 1

Schlegel's definition of irony in terms of transcendental conditions is particularly telling. By reflecting on the conditions for the possibility of experience, Kant's transcendental philosophy showed the (merely) phenomenal nature of the empirical world. And by reflecting critically on the conditions for experience themselves, Fichte's philosophy was a reflection on Kant at an even higher level, according to the romantics. The main reason Friedrich Schlegel thought so highly of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister was that, as a Bildungsroman, it presented a story of one man's educational development, and yet it simul- taneously reflects philosophically on the conditions of educational develop- ment.4' At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that the aspect of Fichte's philosophy that the romantics thought so compelling was the impossibility of achieving any ultimate ground or absolute perspective. So although we can know experience to be merely phenomenal (illusory, subjective), we cannot achieve some decisive, epistemologically satisfactory standpoint. We are caught between a reality we know as illusory and an ultimate ground which is absolute but unknowable.

The idea of rising to ever higher levels of reflection is a favorite theme among the romantics (remember, Novalis uses the vocabulary of vegetable growth to express a more organic version of this thought). In his most famous statement on the nature of romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel writes that romantic poetry hovers "on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors...." And irony, which Friedrich Schlegel defines in terms of rising in- finitely, to higher and higher levels of reflection, is a key ingredient in this

We can now understand the basic philosophical context of romantic irony. It is a way in which a text indicates its illusory, provisional, limited character, while gesturing towards an unreachable, higher ground. As such, and appealing to the theological character of this argument that I discussed earlier, it is related to a sort ofnegative theology." Aquinas's via negativa is an attempt to articulate the ineffable nature of God, not by attributing positive qualities to him, but rather by systematically denying that any such attribution could ever convey the transcendent nature of the divine. Another useful way of understanding romantic irony is as a form of dialectics; even Hegel remarks on the similarity: irony negates one concept for the sake of pointing to a more adequate successor, although it can do no more than point.?? Friedrich Schlegel brings some of these themes together in his Dialogue on Poetq~ where he writes:

"Friedrich Schlegel,"Gesprach iiber die Poesie," Kritisclze Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe. 11. 42 Schlegel, CF, 42. " See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literal? Absol~rte. 84.

Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Geschichte der Philosophie in Jubilaumsa~tsgabe.XVIII, 62; "Alle Dialektik 1aDt das gelten, was gelten soll, als ob es gelte, IaDt die innere Zerstorung selbst sich daran entwickeh-allgemeine Ironie der Welt."

5 12 Judith Normarl

Antonio: ...Every poem should be genuinely romantic, and every [poem] should be didactic in that broader sense of the word that designates the tendency toward a deep and infinite meaning. Additionally, we make this demand everywhere, without necessarily using this name. Even in very popular genres-the theater, for example-we demand irony; we demand that the events, the people, in short, the whole game of life be taken up and presented as really a game. This seems to us to be the most essential point and doesn't everything depend on it? We are only concerned with the meaning of the whole; anything that individually stirs, touches, engages or delights the senses, the heart, the understanding or the imagination seems to us to be only a sign, way of intuiting the whole, at the moment when we raise ourselves to it. Lothario: All the sacred games of art are only distant imitations of the infinite game of the world, the work of art that eternally produces itself. Ludovico: In other words: all beauty is allegory. Precisely because it is inexpressible, the highest can only be expressed a l l eg~r i ca l ly .~~

This passage neatly expresses a number of the characteristic romantic ideas. For one thing, remember that Friedrich Schlegel defined a dialogue as a "chain or garland of fragmentsx-like irony, the fragment is an aesthetic form that self-consciously proclaims its own partiality, thus obliquely indicating an (absent) totality and is therefore itself a form of negative theology, as commentators have pointed The passage indicates that beauty and art with its "holy games" (presumably irony-but allegory is also cited) are significant as means of indicating in some way the whole, the "highest" or, as Lothario says, "the world." As de Man argues in his famous discussion of allegory and irony, both are literary figures which hover between the inauthenticity of the empirical and the impossibility of presenting some transcendental fo~ndat ion .~ ' And so, as in the case in the passage from the dialogue, irony and allegory call into question the reality of what is presented empirically and refer it to some infinitely delayed point of closure. Schlegel's dialogue goes on to tie these themes explicitly to mysticism and the theosophy of the (negative) theologian, Jacob Bohme, as well as to Plato (viewed in this context as a mystic-and whose discussion of beauty in the Symposium must be one of the inspirations behind Ludovico's remark), and even Spinoza.

" Friedrich Schlegel, "Gesprach iiber die Poesie." The dialogue is a purely fictional work written by Friedrich Schlegel; Antonio is Friedrich Schlegel. Ludovico is Schelling, and Lothario is Novalis (see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy. The Litera? Absolute, 89).

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 47. "Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," Blindness and Insight: Essu?s irz the Rheto-

ric o f Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis, Minn., 1983), 222.

513 Nietzsche and Early Romanticism

Nietzsche contra Jena

The final, and what for my purposes is perhaps the most striking aspect of the passage fiom the Dialogue is that Lothario's statement, the world is a "work of art that eternally produces itself" (ewig sich selbst bildenden Kunstwerk) has an almost direct correlate in Nietzsche's Nachlass. In a note (fragment?) from 1885-85, Nietzsche writes, "The world as a work of art that gives birth to itself."48 This remarkable convergence raises the question more urgently; how much was Nietzsche influenced by romantic thought? Or more generally (without implying direct influence), to what extent is his project in sympathy with theirs? There are important prima facie reasons for thinking that the tendency of Nietzsche's thought is fundamentally hostile to that of Jena romanticism. Romanticism derived its principle philosophical inspiration from Fichte's idealism, as I have shown, and from the notions of transcendental subjectivity and the productive imagination in Kant's first critique. Accordingly, art functioned within an essentially idealist epistemological project of rep- resenting or somehow indicating a transcendental ground. Of course, this philosophical project provided no more than a general and sometimes quite loose framework in which the romantics developed a rich and variegated set of aesthetic theories and techniques. All the same this project lies at the heart of Jena romanticism and its signature technique of irony.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, comes out of a different line of descent from Kant, one that went through Schopenhauer rather than Fichte. Rather than focusing on the idealist problem of transcendental subjectivity, Schopenhauer was much more interested in things-in-themselves, namely, the will as an immanent, energetic ground and was little bothered (or at least unimpeded) by epistemological questions of access to this will. Nietzsche modified the Schopenhauerian lineage further away from Fichte, he subjected both the notion of subjectivity and the project of epistemology to devastating critique. Nietzsche's conception of the self is naturalistic and desubjectivized, writing: "the body and physiology [are] the starting point."49 Although both Nietzsche and Fichte critiqued the notion that the ego is a doer rather than a deed, it was for almost opposite reasons. Fichte thought that substantiating the I would imply that it is enmeshed in the empirical realm; that is, it would fail to do justice to the transcendent, originary quality of the I. On the other hand, Nietzsche thought that positing a substantial doer (behind the deed) would wrongly imply that there is an ego at some metaphysical remove from the material world of material forces-that is, it would fail to do justice to the immanent nature of the body and the will. Finally, in his discussions of art Nietzsche concentrates primarily

48 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York. 1968) # 796.

49 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, # 492.

514 Judith Norman

on the expressive or affective aspects of art, its effect on the body, rather than its representational or allegorical capacity (which, given his critique of the efficacy of consciousness, would hardly be of any significance for him).50

These differences are brought strongly into focus when we compare the romantic treatment of the story of the disciples at Sais with that of Nietzsche in the Gay Science, a passage that he liked well enough to import into Nietzsche contra Wagner:

... one will hardly find us again on the paths of those Egyptian youths who endanger temples by night, embrace statues, and want by all means to unveil, uncover, and put into a bright light whatever is kept concealed for good reasons. No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to truth at any price, this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too gay, too burned, too deep. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn. ...

The passage ends with Nietzsche's famous manifesto:

What is required ... is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. And is not this precisely what we are again coming back to, we daredevils of the spirit who have climbed the highest and most dangerous peak of present thought and looked around from up there-we who have looked down from there? Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore car ti st^?^'

Probably the most important difference between Nietzsche's treatment of the story and that of the romantics is not what they think lies behind the veil but rather what they take to be the interest of the story. Novalis identifies with the disciple approaching the goddess and wanting to push back the veil; for him, the disciple's motives require no explanation-who wouldn't want a peek? Nietzsche on the other hand, does not particularly care about the goddess; the epistemological striptease has lost its charm for him, and he has more refined interests. In the famous preface to Beyond Good and Evil where Nietzsche discusses the attitude of philosophers to the coy, feminized figure of truth, he directs his analysis at the philosopher, which is to say the disciple himself. That is, Nietzsche makes clear from the very start that it is not the truth but rather the will to truth that interests him. In the passage quoted above from the

See Young, Nietzsche 5 Philosophy ofArt, 145. 5' GS; Preface, #4.

515 Nietzsche and Early Romanticism

Gay Science, by contrast, he is more interested in diagnosing his own artistic will to appearances. Truth for Nietzsche is not itself the object of analysis; rather, he is interested in the precise nature of our increasingly refined attitude (or will) to the truth, and how it finally overcomes itself and becomes a will to artistic appearance.

It is interesting to note that, as in the first paragraph quoted above, the notion of immaturity often arises on those occasions when Nietzsche mentions the figures of Jena romanticism. He called Schelling youthful in Beyond Good and Evil (11) and Novalis naive in Human, All Too Human (142). Nietzsche believes that thinkers (like the romantics) are immature because they represent a naive phase of the will to truth; that is, they still took it quite seriously even if like the romantics, they thought that the truth was ultimately unachievable. Nietzsche is more mature because he has reached the stage where the will to truth overcomes itself, and so he finds it more interesting to pose the question: why not untruth instead? Which is to say, although perhaps not this directly, why not art? This points to the crux of the difference: for Nietzsche, the ascendancy of art is the result of the irrelevance of truth-it has overcome itself-while for the romantics, art develops as an expression of and com- pensation for the inaccessibility of truth-it has withdrawn.

This difference is crucial, because the resulting philosophical art will be fundamentally different, even when it occasionally sounds the same. The philosophical burden of romantic art will be to somehow indicate transcendence, while Nietzsche will use artistic devises to emphasize a philosophy that embraces full immanence. In other words romantic art functions within the terms of a sort of negative theology, and Nietzsche is no sort of theologian. I will elaborate this point with two examples, Nietzsche's Wagner critique and Nietzsche's alleged use of irony.

Nietzsche's Wagner Critique

Nietzsche is often compared to the romantics on a different but related issue: both were favorable to a renewed effort at myth-making. But Wagner tried to revivify mythology, too, and Nietzsche shied away from Wagner's mythological music-dramas; indeed, we see in several elements of Nietzsche's critique of Wagner an implicit critique of the sort of artistic vision championed by the Jena Romantics. I have been arguing that the philosophy of the German idealists was expressed artistically by the Jena romantics; Nietzsche, on the other hand, thinks that Wagner provided an artistic rendering of idealistic philosophy. Wagner, he writes, "merely applied [Hegel and Schelling] to music- he invented a style for himself charged with 'infinite meaning'-he became the heir of Hegel."52 Wagner uses both musical syntax and operatic semantics

52 The Case of Wagner (CW), tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1967) # l o

516 Judith Norman

to suggest this quasi-Hegelian notion of infinite meaning. Syntactically, he uses the devise of the "infinite melody," a musical line which fails to resolve but rather stretches endlessly on, modulating so as to avoid resolution, "harang[ing] the infinite" as Nietzsche says.53 It is odd to see Nietzsche associating this musical device with Hegel rather than with Schopenhauer-Wagner used the devise of the infinite melody to greatest and most sustained effect in Tristan und Isolde, where it apparently serves to suggest a Schopenhauerian But Nietzsche's association is entirely appropriate; he thinks that Wagner has an affinity with the transcendent aspects of Hegel's metaphysics, the fact that the dialectic has an infinite destination in the Absolute. For Schopenhauer both music and the will are strictly immanent: "we might just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will," Schopenhauer states. For the Hegelian Wagner, however, music suggests something beyond itself. Wagner's music does not serve to portray an infinite drive so much as in infinite idea, heavy with inexpressible meaning.

There is an operatically semantic aspect to Wagner's "infinite meaning" as well. Theodor Adorno points to the crux of what Nietzsche found offensive here when he writes that "in Wagner everything, every sentence, every gesture, every motif and the overall interconnections-all are charged with meaning" which is to say, overburdened by deep s ign i f i can~e .~~ Nietzsche objects to the omnipresence of the symbol in Wagner; Wagner's music is never mere music, Nietzsche says and adds "no musician would think that way" which is to say no musician would give music this inferior It is not just the subordinate role of music in the Gesamtkunstwerk that Nietzsche objects to (his objection applies even to Tristan, which elevates the role of music above drama); rather, it is the symbolic character that each musical figure must assume; they are not free to be a beautiful presence but, like the infinite melody, always point outside the work itself to some ultimate point of signification.

Although many aspects of Nietzsche's Wagner critique cannot be applied to the romantics, Nietzsche's objection to the idealist notion of infinite meaning can be. Nietzsche's description of "the enigmatic character of his [Wagner's] art, its playing hide-and-seek behind a hundred symbols ..." can be said just as well about the works of the Jena romantic^.^' Again, the distinction between transcendence and immanence is key; one of the principle reasons why Nietzsche objected to Wagner was that, in pointing to a meaning beyond itself, music loses its attraction as a beautiful surface, an affirmation of the immanent here

53 CW, #6. 54 For an excellent discussion of this see Brian Magee, "Schopenhauer and Wagner" in The

Philosophy of Schopenhauer (New York, 1983). 55 "Fantasia sopra Carmen" in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, tr. R.

Livingstone (London, 1994), 62. 56Cw,#lo. 5'CW. #lo.

517 Nietzsche and Early Romanticism

and now. So Nietzsche compares this conception of art (unfavorably) to the opera Carmen;Bizet himself called the opera "all clarity and ~ivacity."'~ Carmen has none of the Olympian significance of Wagnerian destiny, but rather has the blithe irresponsibility of a burlesque refrain. Adorno elucidates the funda- mentally Nietzschean point:

In Bizet the inhumanity and hardness, even the violence of the form, has been used to obliterate the last token of meaning, so as to forestall any illusion that anything in life could have any meaning over and above its obvious one.59

Artistically (and not just on the level of the plot), Carmen embraces full immanence. This is why Nietzsche is concerned to champion this type of art over the apparently more substantial and profound music dramas of Wagner, or indeed over any art, such as that of the Jena romantics, that is not content to be art but tries to point beyond itself to some ulterior meaning. Carmen, on the other hand, does not use its musical surface to indicate some unspoken depth. Its profundity lies in the fact that it remains a beautiful surface.

We artists ...

Nietzsche's idea that something might be superficial out of profundity is attractively paradoxical. But is it ironic? Naturally it depends on what we take irony to mean. As I have argued, there is no connection to the specific and famous notion of romantic irony, since Nietzsche is not trying to get art to indicate higher and inexpressible meanings-he is not using the surface to point to some unspeakable depth. But can we look past the technical notion of romantic irony and attribute any sort of irony to Nietzsche? Perhaps the thought that there is no meaning beyond the surface is itself ironic ("What gods will rescue us from all these ironies?" Friedrich Schlegel once asked).60 It is becoming increasingly fashionable to attribute this type of irony to Nietzsche. Babich, for instance, writes, "The ironic trope is nothing less than what Nietzsche named the artistic truth of illusion in its subsistent unsaying of what it says."61 Behler and Pippin make substantially the same claim, with Behler arguing that it is ultimately derived from rornant i~ism.~~ In a nutshell, irony is the way Nietzsche

Quoted in Lesley Wright, "A Musical Commentary," Carmen: Opera Guide (London, 1982), 19.

59 Adomo, "Fantasia sopra Carmen," 62. Schlegel, "On Incomprehensibility," Lucinde and the Fragments, 267.

"Babich, "Post-Nietzschean Postmodemism," Nietzsche as Postmodernist, ed. Koelb, 253. " Pippin, "Irony and Affirmation" in Nietzsche k New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy,

Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Michael A. Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong (London, 1988), 56-57, 65; also Behler, "Nietzsche's Auffassung der Ironie," 11.

518 Judith Norman

allows his apparently paradoxical truth-claims to self-consciously signify their illusory (or, linguistic, perspectival, historically situated, non-ultimate) status, and deny that there is anything more solid on which they can be founded.

Although within the scope of this paper I will not have time to engage to any great extent in the heated debate about rhetorical strategies in Nietzsche, I will indicate briefly why in general, irony is not a proper way of understanding Nietzsche's texts. Nietzsche never called the playhlness of his style "irony," nor did he evince any discomfort with the potential paradoxes resulting from his challenge to the traditional philosophical notion of truth despite the fact that he hardly shied from discussing either his style or his various discomforts. Despite Behler's contention that "Nietzsche seems to have avoided the term because of its connotations of 'romantic subjectivity,' "63 Nietzsche appears to associate irony mostly with Socrates. In contrast to his characterization of the Jena Romantics as young and naive, he thinks that irony belongs to a decadent thought that has grown weary and cynical.65 Certainly, the man who wrote Ecce Homo had no sympathy for the excessive modesty that Socratic irony was made to serve; indeed, in Beyond Good and Evil (2 12), Nietzsche diagnoses Socratic irony as a form of ressentiment.

Most significantly, the dialectical quality of irony, the fact that, as Babich points out, it unsays what it says while saying it, seems quite out of keeping with the general tenor of Nietzsche's thought. Nietzsche thinks that the philosophical concern for truth has been overcome, but operating in a post- truth environment is not simply a matter of saying and unsaying each statement. Indeed, far from overcoming the problem of truth in any meaningful way, this shows an abiding, almost obsessional concern with that very problem, with the absence of any Truth. And we do not find this sort of concern in Nietzsche, who, unlike the romantics, thinks that truth is irrelevant rather than missing (in theological terms dead rather than hidden). Accordingly, Nietzsche wants philosophy to move on to something else, and one of the things he suggests it should move on to is art. But if we see art as simply a set of rhetorical strategies for dwelling on the simultaneously insurmountable and unavoidable problem of truth, then this hardly counts as moving on.66

Nietzsche cannot be relied upon to cite the various sources and influences for his texts. He was notoriously under-appreciative of not only the enormous positive roles Schopenhauer and Wagner would play all his life but also of less Oedipally invested figures: Spinoza, Lange, Emerson, for instance, are

"Behler, "Nietzsche's Auffassung der Ironie," 5 See, for instance, Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, # 2 12, trans. J. Norman (Cambridge,

2002). h5Nietzsche,On the Advantage and Disadvantage ofHistory for L!fe, # 7, trans. Peter

Preuss (Indianapolis, Ind., 1988). 6h See for instance Clayton Koelb's "Reading as a Philosophical Strategy," Nietzsche as

Postmodernist, ed. Koelb, 144-45.

519 Nietzsche and Early Romanticism

mentioned with disproportionate infrequency, given their enormous influence. But, as I have argued, Nietzsche's relation to German romanticism cannot be put into the category of the repressed or occluded (or intellectually dishonest, if we believe Bowie). In this case at least the influence simply is not there. If he did adopt phrases and ideas current in romanticism (itself not evidence of influence, since these ideas might have had some third source), he altered them so considerably, put them to work in such a different context, that they can hardly be considered the same. The Jena romantics were in intellectual proximity to German idealism, and their ideas are fundamentally anchored in the project of exploring or giving expression to an a priori transcendental ground of all knowing and being. They do so in an interesting and intellectually provocative fashion, and one with considerable significance for contemporary thought; in particularly, they can be (and have often been) inserted into a historical lineage that culminates in Heidegger or decon~truction.~' This is appropriate since both Heideggerians and deconstructionists concern themselves with the residually idealist problem of ontological or transcendental difference.

But Nietzsche does not belong to this historical lineage. The idea of an a priori transcendental ground is foreign to him, as is (a fortiori) any epistemo- logical concern of how to access it for thought, or interest (no matter how playful) in the fact of its absence or inaccessibility. This is why he gives little mention to Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling or Fichte, and rarely engages with their ideas. His history (and future) lie elsewhere.

Trinity University.

67 See Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's The Literaty Absolute, as well as David Farrell Krells's works.