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Cioran on Style (Why Nietzsche is not a German philosopher)

Cioran, interviewed by Jason Weiss in Grand Street 5.3 (Spring, 1986), pp. 105–40:

Well, first I’ll tell you that when I was quite young I myself was affected by this German jargon. I thought that philosophy wasn’t supposed to be accessible to others, that the circle was closed, and that at all costs one had to employ this scholarly, laborious, complicated terminology. It was only little by little that I understood the impostor side of philosophical language.
 [J]argon gives you a sense of superiority over everybody. And philosophical pride is the worst that exists, it’s very contagious. At any rate, the German influence in France was disastrous on that whole level. The French can’t say things simply anymore.

So the frequent and reasonable complaints about French “theory” are really complaints about the German corruption of French style.

[T]he danger of philosophical style is that one loses complete contact with reality. Philosophical language leads to megalomania. One creates an artificial world where one is God. I was very proud and pleased when I was young to know this jargon. But my stay in France totally cured me of that. I’m not a philosopher by profession, I’m not a philosopher at all, but my path was the reverse of Sartre’s. That’s why I turned to the French writers known as the moralists, such as La Rochefoucauld or Chamfort, who wrote for society ladies and whose style was simple, but who said very profound things.

Nietzsche also turned to the aphorists Chamfort and La Rochefoucauld and benefited stylistically. Merely stylistically? But le style est l’homme.

Grønbech on the Teutons

An historical picture, from Vilhelm Grønbech’s Introduction to his Culture of the Teutons (vol. 1), of the culture-makers that began the cycle at the end of which we find ourselves. Recall Nietzsche’s evocation of the “herd of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its war-like organisation and all its organising power pounces with its terrible claws on a population” (GM II 17), which “hidden core needed an outlet from time to time, the beast must get loose again, must return into the wilderness—the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need” (GM I 11).

The Northmen, too, have been portrayed by strangers, from without, and the picture has marked points of similarity to that left by their anterior kinsmen in the records of the Roman historians. […] The barbarians of classical times answer to the demons of mediaeval Christianity.
 This time, however, the picture does not stand alone, without a foil. Here in the North, a people of Germanic race have set up their own monument to later times, showing themselves as they wished to be seen in history, revealing themselves, not with any thought of being seen by strangers, but yet urged by an impulse toward self-revelation.

A strange fact of European culture: those who arrived at the end of one cycle as the forces of its destruction—the Teutons that bore down on the Western Empire—were exactly those who assimilated and reconstructed it at new heights with the rekindling of the Imperial flame in 800.

In externals, the Northmen seem to have something of the same elemental, unreflecting violence, the same uneasy restlessness that led the cultured world to stamp their southern kinsmen as barbarians. Reckless and impulsive, not to say obstinate, in their self-assertion, acting on the spur of the moment, shifting from one plan to another—the cool political mind might find considerable resemblance between the German brigands and the pirates of the North. But our more intimate knowledge enables us to discern the presence of a controlling and uniting will beneath the restless exterior. […]
 The old idea of the Vikings as sweeping like a storm across the lands they touched, destroying the wealth they found, and leaving themselves as poor as ever, has, in our time, had to give way to a breathless wonder at their craving for enrichment.
 The gold they found has disappeared. But we have learned now, that there was gathered together in the North a treasury of knowledge and thought, poetry and dreams, that must have been brought home from abroad, despite the fact that such spiritual values are far more difficult to find and steal and carry safely home than precious stones or precious metals. The Northmen seem to have been insatiable in the matter of such spiritual treasures. They have even, in the present day, been accused of having annexed the entire sum of pagan and Christian knowledge possessed by the Middle Ages; and looking at the Norse literature of the Viking age, we find some difficulty in refuting this charge, […].

Not only did they impose, as Nietzsche stresses but they assimilated.

Even this thirst for knowledge, however, is not the most surprising thing about them. That they did learn and copy to a great extent is plain to see; but even now we may speculate without result, or hope of any result, upon what it was they learned and how much they may have added thereto of their own. There exists no magic formula whereby the culture of viking times, as a whole, can be resolved into its original component parts. So thoroughly have they re-fashioned what they took, until its thought and spirit are their own.
 The two sides must throughout be seen together. The Northman has not only a powerful tendency to extend and enrich his mental sphere, but this craving for expansion is counterpoised by a spiritual self-assertion no less marked, that holds him stubbornly faithful to the half-unconscious ideal that constitutes his character. […]

Things get very fanciful here; but there are good lines to be found.

He has that firmness that depends upon a structure in the soul, and that elasticity which, comes from the structure’s perfect harmony with its surroundings, enabling him spiritually to conform to the need of his environment. He is master of the world about him, by virtue of a self-control more deeply rooted even than the will, identical with the soul-structure itself. In the innermost of his being there is a central will, passing judgement upon all that penetrates from without; a purpose that seizes upon every new acquisition, seals and enslaves it to one particular service, forcing it to work in the spirit of its new master, and stamping it with his image; where this cannot be done, the alien matter is rejected and ignored. All that it takes to itself is transmuted into power, all power subjected to discipline, and flung out then as a collective force.
 Thus violence, here, is not a mere extravagance of power. […]
 The violence is organised from the depths of the soul. […] A man fixes himself in the past, by firm attachment to past generations. Such an attachment is found more or less among all peoples; but the Northman makes the past a living and guiding force by constant historic remembrance and historic speculation in which he traces out his connection with former generations and his dependence on their deeds.

I’m not sure Grønbech is describing anything particular to the Teutons, but rather the necessary qualities of culture-makers. The portrait he paints of the Teuton of old is one of a conservative revolutionary:

His future is linked up with the present by aim and honour and the judgement of posterity. And he fixes himself in the present by reproducing himself in an ideal type, such a type for instance as that of the chieftain, generous, brave, fearless, quick-witted, stern towards his enemies. faithful to his friends, and frank with all. The type is built up out of life and poetry together; first lived, and then transfused into poetry.
 This firmness of spiritual organization which characterises the Northman as a personality is no less evident in his social life. Wherever he goes, he carries within himself a social structure which manifests itself in definite political forms as soon as he is thrown together with a crowd of others speaking the same tongue. […]
 Culture, in the truest sense of the word, means an elastic harmony between man’s inner self and his surroundings, so that he is able not only to make his environment serve his material ends, but also to transfigure the impulses of the surrounding world into spiritual ideals and aspirations. The cultured man possesses an instinctive dignity, which springs from fearlessness and self-reliance, and manifests itself in sureness of aims and means alike in matters of formal behaviour and in undertakings of far-reaching consequence. In this sense these Vikings are men of character; they possess themselves and their world in lordly right of determination. Their harmony may be poor in the measure of its actual content, but it is none the less powerful and deep.

Nietzsche on the Origin of the State

Nietzsche (GM II 17, transl. H. B. Samuel):

I used the word “State”; my meaning is self-evident: namely, a herd of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its war-like organisation and all its organising power pounces with its terrible claws on a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless, as yet nomad. Such is the origin of the “State.”

We heard of these “blond beasts” in GM I 11:

It is impossible not to recognise at the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of prey; the magnificent blond beast, avidly rampant for spoil and victory; this hidden core needed an outlet from time to time, the beast must get loose again, must return into the wilderness—the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need. It is the aristocratic races who have left the idea “Barbarian” on all the tracks in which they have marched; nay, a consciousness of this very barbarianism, and even a pride in it, manifests itself even in their highest civilisation (for example, when Pericles says to his Athenians in that celebrated funeral oration, “Our audacity has forced a way over every land and sea, rearing everywhere imperishable memorials of itself for good and for evil”).

The “barbarians” that so endangered the Western Empire in its last days, the pressure of whose bearing down hastened the Empire’s collapse, were the same blond beasts that reached a cultural pinnacle in the Middle Ages and revived the Empire in December 800.

GM II 17 continues:

That fantastic theory that makes it begin with a contract is, I think, disposed of. He who can command, he who is a master by “nature,” he who comes on the scene forceful in deed and gesture—what has he to do with contracts? Such beings defy calculation, they come like fate, without cause, reason, notice, excuse, they are there as the lightning is there, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too “different,” to be personally even hated. Their work is an instinctive creating and impressing of forms, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists that there are […].

This “instinctive creating and impressing” is utterly different from the laboured inauthenticity of the theatrical totalitarian state, discussed by Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism” (NYRB, 6 Feb., 1975). This instinctiveness is the hallmark of the self-regarding master; but the camp staginess of twentieth-century fascism only reveals, with their deep and manifest ressentiment, its distance from the thinker whose memory it presumes to invoke.

GM II 17 continues:

[T]heir appearance produces instantaneously a scheme of sovereignty which is live, in which the functions are partitioned and apportioned, in which above all no part is received or finds a place, until pregnant with a “meaning” in regard to the whole.

Douglas Smith (Penguin, 1996) translates “scheme of sovereignty” as “structure of domination”: a sort of emblem of how Nietzsche’s readers have changed in these last decades—and how they in turn have changed Nietzsche.

Addendum, Jan. 2020: https://ferguscullen.blogspot.com/2020/01/herrschafts-gebilde-schemes-of.html. On Herrschafts-Gebilde.

The impact of this line of thinking on the conservative revolution in Germany is discussed in Mohler’s book (transl. Devlin, Radix, 2018), pp. 179–81.

Susan Sontag on Aestheticised Politics

Susan Sontag in “Fascinating Fascism”, NYRB (6 Feb., 1975):

Although Triumph of the Will has no narrative voice it does open with a written text that heralds the rally as the redemptive culmination of German history. But this opening commentary is the least original of the ways in which the film is tendentious. Triumph of the Will represents an already achieved and radical transformation of reality: history become theater. In her book published in 1935, Riefenstahl had told the truth. The Nuremberg Rally “was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting—but as a spectacular propaganda film […]. The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras.” How the Party convention was staged was determined by the decision to produce Triumph of the Will. The event, instead of being an end in itself, served as the set of a film which was then to assume the character of an authentic documentary. Anyone who defends Riefenstahl’s films as documentaries, if documentary is to be distinguished from propaganda, is being ingenuous. In Triumph of the Will, the document (the image) is no longer simply the record of reality; “reality” has been constructed to serve the image.

The ceremonies that are the subject of TW are themselves the “transformation of reality: history become theater [sic]”; “‘reality has been constructed to serve the image.” This is politics as total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), or “politics in the grand style”. Aestheticized politics is inauthentic because enacted with its sense-reception in mind, guiding that enactment. It’s misleading; or it contains a lie.

Bear in mind David B. Hinton’s response to Sontag (NYRB, 18 Sept., 1975) re. her claim that “the Party convention was staged was determined by the decision to produce Triumph of the Will”:

Riefenstahl filmed just one Rally in entirety; the buildings were designed to stand for centuries. As can be seen in Speer’s memoirs or in any objective appraisal of Nazi art and architecture, the raison d’être of that architecture existed quite independently of its cinematic possibilities.

And:

Riefenstahl has stated in later interviews that planning for the film did not commence until she arrived in Nuremberg a week before the Rally started.

And on what Sontag seems to wish to pass off as Riefenstahl’s letting something slip in a pre-denazification text (“In her book published in 1935, Riefenstahl had told the truth. The Nuremberg Rally “was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting—but as a spectacular propaganda film […]. The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras”), but which Hinton discovers is an unattributed paraphrase (not the first in Sontag’s essay…) of Kracauer:

Even more astonishing, however, is Ms. Sontag’s use of a purported quote from Riefenstahl’s 1935 book, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag Films. Sontag uses the quote in an attempt to use Riefenstahl’s own words to disprove some of her later statements. […] I can personally attest to having studied the book from cover to cover in a vain attempt to find this statement. The quote was familiar, however, and I finally did find it, though not in Riefenstahl’s book. In his famous book, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer makes this statement (his own, quoting no one): “The Convention was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting, but as spectacular film propaganda” (Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Princeton University Press, p. 301).

The “Nominalism” of Mohler and de Benoist

(Just a collection of citations and suggestions. Not even notes.)

Thomas Sheehan:

What is new about de Benoist’s theories can be found primarily in the realm of metaphysical or ontological principles and not in the lack of them. Whereas Evola, adapting the tradition of neo-Idealism, saw the world as grounded in an archeological spirit that gives form, meaning, and hierarchy to everything, de Benoist, who prefers Nietzsche and Heidegger to the Hegelians and who declares himself a nominalist and an existentialist, sees the world as fundamentally chaotic and void of meaning (“…we find no ‘sense’ in the organization and configuration of the world. We refuse all determinism, be it ‘spatial’ or ‘temporal’”) [“Myth and Violence”, Social Research, Vol. 48, No. 1, p. 63].

De Benoist’s thinking is indebted to the work of German post-fascist and “neoconservative”—but not in the familiar sense—Armin Mohler. Consider the following from Thorsten Hinz:

Dans un chapitre, intitulé “Du nominalisme”, le Dr. Karlheinz Weissmann explicite les tentatives de Mohler, qui ne furent pas toujours probantes, de systématiser ses idées et ses vues. Il est clair que Mohler rejette toute forme d’universalisme car tout universalisme déduit le particulier d’un ordre spirituel sous-jacent et identitque pour tous, et noie les réalités dans une “mer morte d’abstractions”. Pour le nominaliste Mohler, les concepts avancés par les universalismes ne sont que des dénominations abstraites et arbitraires, inventées a poteriori, et qui n’ont pour effets que de répandre la confusion. Pour Mohler, seuls le concret et le particulier avaient de l’importance, soit le “réel”, qu’il cherchait à saisir par le biais d’images fortes, puissantes et organiques. Par conséquent, ses sympathies personnelles n’étaient pas déterminées par les idées politiques dont se réclamaient ses interlocuteurs mais tenaient d’abord compte de la valeur de l’esprit et du caractère qu’il percevait chez l’autre [“Armin Mohler, l’homme qui nous désignait l’ennemi!” translated from Junge Freiheit, No. 31/32 (2011)].

Mohler rejects all universalisms: for they “drown” realities in “a flood of dead abstractions”. Universalism’s concepts are really arbitrary and obfuscatory a posteriori inventions. Only the concrete and particular is important. These are best captured by images.

Or in de Benoist’s own words:

I seem to recall that it was Niekisch who called Ernst Jünger “the eye man” (der Augenmensch). For me, the eye man was Armin Mohler. […] In fact, it is my conviction that Armin Mohler looked at political life and the unfolding of political ideologies in the manner of an artist, more precisely of a painter. A system of thought was for him above all a landscape opening up, a panorama offered to the eyes. Thus, when he considered the Conservative Revolution, it is first of all in order to identify its Leitbilder, its “leading images.” And in this predilection for painting, at the expense, for example, of music, I also see the source of his “nominalism”—a landscape as an artist represents it always refers to a particular scene, a determinate context. There is no pictographic representation of “general reality” any more than a science of the total object.
 “Only a monster can permit himself the luxury of seeing things as they are,” wrote Emil Cioran. Armin Mohler is such a “monster.” Here as well we discover his nominalism, that is, the look that can only proceed from particular situations, from what we are hic et nunc. Ideas themselves to not escape being put into perspective this way: they are only valid in relation to concrete situations—and the best of them can become crazy or sick [“Afterword to the English Edition”, in Mohler and Weissmann, The Conservative Revolution in Germany (Radix, 2018), pp. 133–5].

Sheehan continues:

Correspondingly, whereas Evola’s ontological archeology comported a “transcendent virility” shaped by the primacy of spiritual intuition and called to the fidelity of anamnesis, de Benoist’s ontology of chaos comports an anthropology based on the primacy of the will—a voluntarism or “heroic subjectivism.” If God is dead, he says, there are in fact no norms, and a fortiori no hierarchy, except those which man creates for himself by the force of his own will. “The world is a chaos—but we can give it a form. What we do has no other meaning than the one we give it.” “The ‘order’ that we establish around us is, in effect, nothing other than what we put there.”
 The chasm between Evola and de Benoist is definitive: “Either there is an order in the universe, and man’s task is to conform to it (and thus the restoration of public order is the same as reseeking the truth…) or the universe is a chaos, and the task that man can undertake is to give it a form.” And it is clear where de Benoist stands: “Order is created, not received”.
 De Benoist’s existentialism, we should note, is not an abdication of ontology or metaphysics but a recasting of it in terms of voluntarism. In place of Evola’s “Being of origins,” de Benoist posits man as will-to-power—and this is a decision about the essence of reality (ousia). He affirms that “man is the quintessence of everything” and that his “aspiration to order [that is, his will] is an essence.” The idea of will-to-power is still an ontology (“In the beginning was action,” he writes), and from that voluntaristic metaphysics there follow his ethical imperatives: man must become the “cause and creator of himself,” he must “become what he can be” and “construct heroically.” Thus fidelity is no longer, as it was for Evola, a commitment to the archeological nature and cosmological function of an a priori spiritual realm which determines everything. Rather, fidelity is simply fidelity to—oneself. “Fix your own norm—and stick to it.” There is no justification for any act, other than one’s choice of it.
 What then of Evola’s other metaphysical principle, that of hierarchy? It too is not preordained but to be constructed, in effect by a kind of Platonic “noble lie.” “If norms are conventions, and if no society can do without norms, then in fact the only possible avenue is to assume and institute a certain collective subjectivity with enough power that it may be perceived in turn as a ‘natural’ norm that functions as an ‘absolute’ in the social structure” [pp. 63–4].

This is an interesting current within the broader “conservative revolutionary” tradition. Considering Nietzsche’s importance on that tradition, one wonders if his rediscovery of the nose is relevant here. As he wrote on the eve of his decline:

Revaluation of all values: this is my formula for a supreme coming-to-oneself on the part of mankind which in me has become flesh and genius. It is my fate to have to be the first decent human being, to know myself in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia… I was the first to discover the truth, in that I was the first to sense—smell—the lie as lie… My genius is in my nostrils… I contradict as has never been contradicted and am none the less the opposite of a negative spirit [Ecce Homo, transl. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin, 2004), p. 96].

The eyes may see the rotten fruit as fresh; but the nose knows. The nose finds the fetid stuff, the truth, beneath the surface whose glitter captures the eyes (or moral sense…).

What follows the Ecce Homo passage is telling: his prophecy of an age of war and “great politics”. When the delirium of self-possessed culture exhausts itself, those with the most finely-tuned senses, who are not reliant on the order that has just crumbled, who can comprehend that crumbling, are best placed.

Relevant: Adam Westra, “Nietzsche’s Nose”.

Connolly's Last Comment

[From the last issue (pp. 361–2) of Horizon (Dec., 1949)—the magazine whose tone Waugh brutally characterised as “R.A.F. Pansy”.]

This study in misunderstood genius leads us easily on to Bacon’s horror-fretted canvases and to Dallapiccola’s Songs for Prisoners, to the criticism made of him “a few, a very few musicians, have an intense awareness, heightened by their intellect, of the tragedy within our time—of the religious struggle which is carried on to the last drop of blood-between the spiritual ideal of liberty and the tyrranous brutality of matter and its inexorable determinism.”

One can perceive the inner trend of the Forties as maintaining this desperate struggle of the modem movement, between man, betrayed by science, bereft of religion, deserted by the pleasant imaginings of humanism against the blind fate of which he is now so expertly conscious that if we were to close this last Comment with the suggestion that every one who now is reading it may in ten years’ time, or even five, look back to this moment as the happiest in their lives, there would be few who would gainsay us. “Nothing dreadful is ever done with, no bad thing gets any better; you can’t be too serious.” This is the message of the Forties from which, alas, there seems no escape, for it is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.