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The Birth of Theory
By Andrew Cole The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-13556-4
CHAPTER 1
The Untimely Dialectic
The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring, Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself, The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes. WALLACE STEVENS
It's easy to say that Nietzsche, not Hegel, marks the beginning of what can be called "theory" as a mode of thought distinct from philosophy. He critiques the subject as an a priori construction or Ego set over and against objects, and he vigorously questions systems of knowledge production and the value of values expressed in ethics, morality, theology, and indeed philosophy. That's the Nietzsche we all know and love, whose stance on the institutions of criticism, history, and thought resembles the best of twentieth-century minds, like Foucault or Deleuze, who modeled their work after his. But we have, thanks in part to Foucault and especially Deleuze, lost Nietzsche, especially the Nietzsche who was deeply and imaginatively dialectical without ever worrying how Hegelian he may have sounded. We have lost the Nietzsche who while philosophizing with a hammer also wielded a keen pick and horsehair brush, excavating valuable ideas from the hardened philosophical clichés that have accumulated over the centuries around him. This is the Nietzsche I care to recover in this chapter, because he models a method by which to rethink the dialectic as an intense and complicated abstraction that is deeply historical—embedded in a past that is obscured by the (then) current philosophical fashions. He lays the groundwork for our discussion in chapter 2 of the Hegelian dialectic of identity/difference whose own history has yet to be acknowledged by theorists and philosophers today.
So who is this Nietzsche? Recall that Nietzsche believed that his erudition in classical studies could enhance the discipline of philosophy. In the Untimely Meditations, he writes: "The learned history of the past has never been the business of a true philosopher.... If a professor of philosophy involves himself in such work he must at best be content to have it said of him: he is a fine classical scholar, antiquary, linguist, historian—but never: he is a philosopher. And that, as remarked, is only at best: for most of the learned work done by university philosophers seems to a classicist to be done badly." For all the variety of Nietzsche's body of writing—from its Wagnerian juvenilia to its later blistering aphoristic and self-aggrandizing style—these words, I believe, describe at least one consistent theme within his work: to combine his erudition in classical studies with his fervent critique of philosophical fashion, all in the effort to make philology and historical scholarship "philosophical" in his new sense of the term.
Nary a philosophical cliché escapes Nietzsche's careful attention to pollute his prose, so how could I claim, as I plan to do, that Nietzsche wishes to think deeply about dialectic—that "d" word we know (despite centuries of worry about it) to have most everything to do with Hegel, a man who himself desperately tried to work his way into academic philosophy, and who (according to almost everyone you ask) is Nietzsche's personal punching bag? At least when talking about The Birth of Tragedy—the text I will discuss here—Deleuze was supposed to have settled the matter of Nietzsche's Hegelianism a while ago, saying that "it is quite clear that Nietzsche wrote [this work] not as a dialectician." Perhaps this claim is true from the point of view of Deleuze's own clichés about Hegel in Nietzsche and Philosophy. This is a brilliant work, but too often Deleuze caricaturizes the Hegelian dialectic, citing the usual canard of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: "It is not surprising that the dialectic proceeds by opposition, development of the opposition or contradiction and solution of the contradiction." If this is the sort of dialectic we're after in Nietzsche, then we will have a very hard time finding it, thus deciding with Deleuze that he so despises dialectic in The Birth of Tragedy as to construct an "absolute anti-dialectics" as an aggressive response to Hegel. One can extend the argument about Nietzsche's dislike of Hegel and dialectics, just in the way Nietzsche seems to do in various places. But for every time one finds a critic citing that hilarious line in Ecce Homo about The Birth of Tragedy smelling "offensively Hegelian"—as if to say that the latter is not properly "Nietzschean"—one should counter with Nietzsche's words from Twilight of the Idols, published in the same year as Ecce Homo. Here, Nietzsche expresses the need to "come back to the place that once served as my point of departure—the 'Birth of Tragedy' was my first revaluation of all values: and now I am back on that soil where my wants, my abilities grow—I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysius,—I, the teacher of eternal return." My claim in this chapter is that what makes The Birth of Tragedy Nietzschean is what makes it dialectical—a view that should become clear once a more sophisticated notion of dialectics is brought to bear in our interpretation than hitherto done. We'll resume this conversation with Deleuze in chapter 6, asking whether—after all—Deleuzianism and dialectics can be reconciled.
Meanwhile, to acquire a sense of what it means to be Nietzschean and dialectical all at once, we must disentangle the critique of Hegel from the critique of Socratic, ancient dialectic—the two are so often confused today—and only then try to interpret The Birth of Tragedy anew. This disambiguation of dialectics (Hegelian, Platonic, Socratic) anticipates my effort in chapter 2, which shows how Hegel partitions his dialectic from the ancient kinds, favoring instead what I call "medieval dialectic." Here, however, I wish to make a methodological exhibit of Nietzsche, who also distinguishes between kinds of dialectic and forms of dialectical abstraction. I begin by showing how Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy explores some rather abstruse dialectical problems—what now goes by the name of "abstract determination." We recognize this phrase as Hegel's. While Hegel was not the first to ponder "abstract determination," not by a dozen centuries (as I will show here), he did label it in a way that allows us to observe this specialized process at work in Nietzsche: it is the logical and temporal step before the dialectic of real determination, determinate negation, or identity and difference. It is, in other words, the way in which difference enters into the heart of identity but lingers there as a distinction without difference. Nietzsche, I suggest, involves this kind of predialectical logic within his decidedly contemplative history of tragedy by, namely, imputing the process of abstract determination to the birth of tragedy itself—that is, to the emergence of Greek dramatic practice before Socratic dialectic appeared on the historical timeline and consequently, as the story goes, ruined tragedy.
Nietzsche, in sum, is doing things with the dialectic—chiefly, historical things. His placement of different kinds of dialectic at various moments in the history of art, drama, and philosophy is an argument about which sort of dialectical thinking is worth maintaining or reviving, such as identity/difference, and which kinds of dialectic sustain, in Nietzsche's view, the "knowledge-lusting Socratism of today." What Nietzsche gives us in The Birth of Tragedy, then, is an "untimely dialectic," which (after his definition of untimely classical scholarship) acts "counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come." What we ourselves discover, in turn, is the "untimely Nietzsche," a philosopher who can be productively grouped not only with Hegel but with Plotinus, who (as I argue in this and the next chapter) stands at the beginning of a lasting premodern dialectical tradition with abstract determination and identity/difference operating at its very center.
Predialectic as History
The content of the drama is a becoming or a passing away. NOVALIS
Nietzsche puts the question of the origins of Greek tragedy this way: "Where in the Hellenic world did that new germ first become evidenced which later evolved into tragedy and the dramatic dithyramb?" He offers two answers, the first, a rather concrete one, noting that in the "ancient world" there was a continuous "placing [of] Homer and Archilochus side by side on brooches and other works of art as being the progenitors and torch-bearers of Greek poetry." He surmises that these "two equally and entirely original natures deserve to be considered" in something like a dramatic encounter: "Homer ... the archetypically Apolline, naive artist, now gazes with astonishment at the passionate head of Archilochus." Nietzsche decides, however, that "this interpretation is of little help to us" and smacks of the conclusions of "recent aesthetics," which are mesmerized by distinctions between "subjective" and "objective" art, passionate and dispassionate artistry.
So Nietzsche hazards a second answer even more "aesthetic" and metaphysical than the first—an answer that seeks to explain the "mysterious unity" of the "Dionysiac-Apolline genius and its work in art": "We are in a position to explain the lyric poet, on the basis of ... aesthetic metaphysics." Building on Schiller's idea that lyrical composition is inspired by a "musical mood," Nietzsche suggests that the lyric poet imagines the world in a way never imagined before, representing "the primal contradiction and pain" of the inner, musical landscape. By the lyric imagination, which envisions the pain and ecstasy of this inner world, tragedy is realized, lived, and felt for the first time. Born are Dionysian (dithyrambic) hymns sung by the chorus of this dramatic form.
To embellish this already complicated point, Nietzsche writes an even more complicated passage about "the most important phenomenon in the whole of ancient lyric poetry, the combination, indeed identity [Identität], of the lyric poet with the musician." This combination, for Nietzsche, produces the tragic artist, so it is no small moment in his aesthetic history. I would say it is the moment. Here is how he explains the identity between these two different persons, lyric poet and musician:
In the first instance the lyric poet, a Dionysiac artist, has become entirely at one with primordial unity, with its pain and contradiction, and he produces a copy of this primordial unity as music, which has been described elsewhere, quite rightly, as a repetition of the world and a second copy of it [eine Wiederholung der Welt und ein zweiter Abguss derselben]; now, however, under the influence of Apolline dream, this music in turn becomes visible to him as in a symbolic dream-image. The image-less and concept-less reflection [bildund begrifflose Wiederschein] of the original pain in music, with its release and redemption in semblance, now generates a second reflection, as a single symbolic likeness (Gleichnis) or exemplum [Exempel].
To run through this one more time, by dint of paraphrase: the Dionysiac artist (not as yet a lyric poet) is identical with, "entirely at one with," the "primordial unity." First things first: unity. Then, through music, this artist offers a "repetition of the world" or a "second copy of it," of that unity. This copy soon "becomes visible," however. What was once unseen and only heard takes on form; the "image-less and concept-less reflection of the original pain in music ... now generates a second reflection [zweite Spiegelung]," a third copy, which is here a "single symbolic likeness" that is lyric poetry. Nietzsche states the result of this process: "The Dionysiac-musical enchantment of the sleeper now pours forth sparks of imagery, as it were, lyric poems which ... are called tragedies."
So what to make of this? I suggest we not read this process as the "eternal return" of Nietzsche's later works, an idea (as I understand it) that expresses the horror of the same, shocking one to accept, nay love fate (amor fati). If "you do not want anything to be different," as the maxim goes, then there's no use in talking about the difference between kinds of artist, is there? I also propose that we hold off on finding here only Schopenhauer's scheme of the arts or desire in the World as Will and Representation to move from personality to the "subject of pure knowing," that is, from difference to unity, which runs in a direction opposite to what Nietzsche describes here. Rather, I believe it is right to say that Nietzsche experiments with the idea that difference arises from successive attempts to produce the same—the repeated attempts to copy identity whereby the copy itself finally emerges as a "difference" that is eventually discernible and knowable. This passage, in short, is a dialectical explanation of the production of "likeness" and ultimately difference out of "unity." As such, it partakes of the earliest, most lofty ambitions within premodern dialectic (above all) to think through seemingly insurmountable philosophical problems, such as, How do you get being from nothing? How do you get difference from identity, plurality from unity? And how do you narrate the transition from one to the other without projecting one term into the other?
Nietzsche, I suggest, patterns his narrative about the "birth" of tragedy after these longstanding dialectical questions, only here he seeks to explain the emergence of the tragic artist from the "one-ness [Ur-Eine]" of the world. We can best appreciate Nietzsche's dialectical narrative in this passage by comparing it to two examples named at the outset, Plotinus and Hegel, the former who improves the already ancient discipline of dialectic, the latter who practices dialectical philosophy in a curiously premodern fashion, as I will show later.
Yet now we leave Nietzsche for a bit to focus on Plotinus, who puts a twist on what we know as the dialectical image or, better, dialectical imaging when seeking to explain the transition from unity to plurality, from identity to difference. Plotinus's explanation involves two mysterious deities or supremes, what is called the One, which is beyond being and quite close to nothing, and what is called the Intellectual Principle, which flows from the One as a cosmic consciousness and archetypal Being with a capital B. For Plotinus, the One stands for unity and identity; the Intellectual Principle, for difference and plurality, and he wants to know how the latter follows from the former, how from the One there can be many. Here's his exposition, written from the point of view of the Intellectual Principle as it rubs its eyes to behold the One for the first time:
Thus the Intellectual-Principle, in the act of knowing the Transcendent [One], is a manifold. It knows the Transcendent [One] in very essence [sic] but, with all its effort to grasp that prior as a pure unity, it goes forth amassing successive impressions, so that, to it, the object becomes multiple: thus in its outgoing to its object it is not (fully realized) Intellectual-Principle; it is an eye that has not yet seen; in its return it is an eye possessed of multiplicity which it has itself conferred: it sought something of which it found the vague presentment within itself; it returned with something else, the manifold quality with which it has of its own act invested the simplex. If it had not possessed a previous impression of the Transcendent [One] it could never have grasped it, but this impression, originally of unity, becomes an impression of multiplicity; and the Intellectual-Principle in taking cognizance of that multiplicity knows the Transcendent [One] and so is realized as an eye possessed of its vision.
For Plotinus, the Intellectual Principle attempts to realize itself by "successive impressions" of the One, here named the Transcendent. The inchoate Intellectual Principle takes a first impression of the Transcendent, but because this impression cannot be visualized—for pure unity cannot be seen or thought, lacking (as it does), determination—the Intellectual Principle returns to take a second impression, and in this accumulation of impressions, it finally "sees the One." In the "amassing successive impressions," it moves from identity with the One to difference from it, from unity with the One to multiplicity: "this impression, originally of unity, becomes an impression of multiplicity." And by this, the Intellectual Principle becomes conscious.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Birth of Theory by Andrew Cole. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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