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.

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.

Nietzsche: “Our Belief in the Virilising of Europe”

[The Joyful Wisdom, 362. Adapted from Thomas Common’s 1910 translation with reference to R. Kevin Hill’s 2018 Penguin Classics translation—which itself seems to make extensive reference to Common’s.]

We owe it to Napoleon (and not at all to the French Revolution, which had in view the “brotherhood” of the nations, and the florid interchange of hearts and flowers among people generally) that a few warlike centuries, which have not had their like in past history, may now follow one another—in short, that we have entered upon the classical age of war, war at once scientific and popular, war on the grandest scale (as regards means, talents and discipline), to which all coming millenniums will look back with envy and awe as a work of perfection:—for the national movement out of which this martial glory springs is only the counter-shock against Napoleon, and would not exist without him. To him, consequently, one will one day be able to attribute the fact that man in Europe has again got the upper hand of the merchant and the Philistine; perhaps even of “woman” also, who has been pampered by Christianity and the extravagant spirit of the eighteenth century, and still more by “modern ideas.” Napoleon, who saw in modern ideas, and accordingly in civilisation, something like a personal enemy, has by this hostility proved himself one of the greatest continuators of the Renaissance: he has brought to the surface a whole layer of the ancient character, the decisive layer perhaps—a layer of granite. And who knows but that this layer of ancient character will in the end get the upper hand of the national movement, and will have to make itself in a positive sense the heir and continuator of Napoleon,—who, as one knows, wanted one Europe, and this the mistress of the world.

The Problem of Europe in Emil Cioran

(Notes towards an essay. Concerning Cioran's pessimism and its place in world history, with a tenuous but promising connection to Spengler, and all coming down to Nietzsche and the problem of Europe. Comments would be very helpful.)

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 [Cyril Connolly].

And how to believe that history—a procession of delusions—can drag on much longer? Soon it will be closing-time in the gardens of everywhere [Emil Cioran].

Two Truths and the Tragic View of History

In “The Two Truths” (Drawn and Quartered, transl. Richard Howard [2012], pp. 3–15), Cioran offers a tragic view of history. He begins with “[t]he theory of a double truth” (p. 4). There is “ordinary truth or samrviti, ‘veiled truth’ or more exactly ‘truth of error,’ privilege or curse of the nonliberated”, and “real truth or paramartha, attribute of the delivered” (ibid.).

Liberation or deliverance is “sarvakarmaphalatyāga”, a “spellbinding word” meaning “detachment from the fruit of action” (p. 5; cf. Bhagavad Gītā, 12:11). This is the “real truth that annihilates all the others,” that is, ordinary truths of error, “and exposes their emptiness” (Cioran, loc. cit.). For the liberated and disillusioned it’s “[i]mpossible to concede that the tragic is the individual’s lot, and not that of history” (p. 12).

But a man or culture that achieves this liberation “excludes itself,” in so doing, “from becoming” (p. 9): because attachment to ordinary truths of error, to action and its fruit, is “that motor, no, that cause of history” (ibid.). The delivered withdraw from history, “can no longer endure the burden” of attachment (p. 6); but for as long as some remain nonliberated, history will continue.

The liberated and excluded “cut a wretched figure in history” (p. 5); and Europe, in awaking from history—becoming disillusioned, no longer believing her own motive truths of error—“[h]aving governed two hemispheres […] is now becoming their laughingstock” (p. 9).

The “delirium” (p. 7) of participation in history, this “galloping obnubilation” (pp. 4–5), wears a culture out. It awakens. Disillusioned, it’s “the ex-fanatic par excellence” (p. 6); it becomes as the primitive societies were that “wallowed for millennia in magnificent sclerosis […] before contact with the West” (p. 7; emphasis added).

Which is the nub of the issue. Sclerotic, “liberated” former powers are sitting ducks. Delirium is necessary for life. “The prerequisites of Buddhism,” says Nietzsche, acidly, “are a mild climate, great gentleness and liberality in the customs of the people and no militarism” (Antichrist, 21). The exemplum of a healthy delirium is Judaism “in the period of the kings,” when “Israel’s attitude to all things was the right one—that is to say, the natural one” (25). Its god was “the expression of its consciousness of power, of its joy over itself” (ibid.).

Connolly perceives Europe’s decline, a decline which makes the art of old—founded on truths of error, but positive and self-affirmatory—impossible, leaving to the modern European artist only “the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.” Cioran realises it and embodies it; and thus losing the particularity of his vision, the self-regard of a healthy “good European”, universalises the diagnosis—dwells on the generality of moribundity.

The tragic view of history, the “real truth”, is an expression of European decline. Justly the Washington Post dubs Cioran the “final philosopher of the Western world.”

The Problem of Europe

How is Europe become a laughingstock? “How is she become as a widow?” (Lamentations, 1:1).

“[L]ittle by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the ‘natives,’ too anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a ‘territory’” (Cioran, p. 8). Of whom do these natives remind us with their “distinction” but Nietzsche’s slave, “the inevitability of [whose] being made to wait” he transforms, through the jaundiced magic of ressentiment become creative, into “patience” (On the Genealogy of Morals, 14).

Manners, civility: the sign of civilisation. But civilisation for Spengler is only “the inevitable destiny of the Culture” (Decline of the West, vol. 1, transl. C. F. Atkinson [1926], p. 31), and a sorry one. “Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming…” (ibid.). (Consider Cioran on the liberated: “it excludes itself from becoming” [p. 9].)

Furthermore, millennia of delirium, “long rivalries”, have exhausted European cultures, “weakening one another” (Cioran, p. 8). This is the kleine Politik (petty politics) embodied in Bismarck that Nietzsche despises, the wasteful expenditure of European vitality quarrelling with itself along old nation-state divides.

Nietzsche’s vision of grosse Politik (great politics) involves the forging of a new “virilised” Europe. Europe must “[get] the upper hand of the merchant and the Philistine”, overcome “Christianity and the extravagant spirit of the eighteenth century” and the “modern ideas” of 1789, in order to “unearth a whole block of the ancient character, the decisive block perhaps, the block of granite,” thereby to establish “one Europe, which [is] to be mistress of the world” (Gay Science, 362).