Tradition & Historical Consciousness: A Few Random Observations: Part Two

The question now becomes: Is it possible to revive a tradition and build something of lasting value while avoiding anachronism? If so, how? These have become ever more pressing questions since the 19th century, when the rise of modern historiography threatened to turn all fields of study into relativism.

A brief examination of two thinkers’ struggle with this problem will help us grasp it better. The first thinker is Friedrich Nietzsche. By education and training, Nietzsche was a classicist who concentrated on Greek history and literature. However, as he embarked on his professional career, he began to grapple with the problem that would occupy the rest of his troubled life: The modern rationalistic and scientific mind (which he ultimately traced back to Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy) had destroyed any kind of absolute value in the world by eliminating God. But, now that God was out of the picture, what point was there in living? What value could man find in life? What value could Nietzsche find in life? Nietzsche did not think that modern reason could tell man why he should want to live. This is the point of his famous aphorism in The Gay Science, in which the madman runs onto the marketplace in broad daylight holding a lantern, asking the burghers where God is now that they have killed Him. The death of God was not an occasion for joy but a reason for despair—unless man could find another source of value in this life. Nietzsche’s early dilemma, then, was that he had rejected the transcendent God of Christianity, the prior source of all value, as simply a form of “slave morality,” but had not yet found anything with which to replace Him.

Nietzsche’s solution to his dilemma—to be found even in his earlier, less iconoclastic and less stridently atheistic texts—is to make man into a creator of value. This was the Umwertung aller Werte he sought to bring about. The Dionysian ideal of The Birth of Tragedy is an early version of this idea of man as creator of value. In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, he examines different viewpoints from which to write history, and he finds that the proper viewpoint is from the view of the great man who is capable of creating value. “You can only explain the past by what is highest in the present” (§ 6). “Thus, history is to be written by the man of experience and character. He who has not lived through something greater and nobler than others, will riot be able to explain anything great and noble in the past. The language of the past is always oracular: you will only understand if as builders of the future who know the present” (§ 6). These quotations, of course, can be read as meaning merely that the historian must himself possess a certain greatness of soul in order to understand the past; he must be on the same level as the men he is trying to interpret for the present. However, Nietzsche emphasizes less the traditional moral and intellectual virtues than the nebulous quality of creativeness; virtue is excellence in accord with a recognized standard, whereas creativity consists of creating that standard for oneself. It is in great part a rejection of the study of history.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, though, Nietzsche takes the concept of the great man who can create values even further. In that book’s prologue, Nietzsche portrays Zarathustra as a mythical figure who during his time of solitude on the mountain has become so full of wisdom that he must now descend to his fellow man and unburden himself of the values he has created. (The idea of a man spending time on a mountain to grow in wisdom is a common trope in myths.) Most tellingly, among the people he meets, he recognizes a kindred spirit in the dying tightrope-walker, in the man who could dance above the abyss—one of Nietzsche’s favorite images of how the great man should live, as opposed to the “last men” Zarathustra meets down below. The tightrope-walker knows that he has nothing solid under his feet (no Grund) but a flimsy wire and through his own virtuosity and daring he turns something pointless like walking between two buildings into a work of art. He mocks death and the ultimate meaninglessness of his own act: his own creativity is the source of value. The myths handed down by the gods have no place in Nietzsche’s thought.

Nietzsche saw the problems created by the death of God and traditional values and by the rise of relativism, but ultimately decided to bury those values even deeper by turning the Dionysian self into the creator of value. History would no longer be a real standard for Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s respect for the Greek tradition, paradoxically, led him to reject tradition as a standard for behavior—the individual would judge history through his own creativity.

Our second thinker would agree with Nietzsche that there must be a standard by which to judge history and tradition, but his own position would be more humble. Rather than looking for the standard within himself, this thinker sought it in the teachings, in the tradition, of the Catholic Church. This second thinker is J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien shared with Nietzsche an intense passion for language and literature, though they worked in different fields. Instead of concentrating in Greek and Latin (which he had already mastered before university), Tolkien chose to dedicate his studies to Old and Middle English as well as several other medieval languages, such as Old Norse and Old Finnish. While he was a historical scholar of the first rank in his chosen field, he was also a tremendously imaginative author. Many of his works arose from his desire to fuse his literature and language studies with his studies of myth. As mentioned yesterday, it was Tolkien’s discussions of myth with C.S. Lewis that led the latter to convert to Christianity. In his incomplete poem The Fall of Arthur (which was only published in 2013), Tolkien tried give these legends a more English feel by adapting the alliterative system of Old English verse. The young Tolkien started on the myths that were published after his death as The Silmarillion as a way of practicing his invented languages. Even in his invented languages, he strove for historical verisimilitude. He developed different dialects of the same language and even extensive histories of each dialect, which he described in the appendices to The Return of the King. In his myths too he strove for historical verisimilitude. In The Lord of the Rings every story has a back story and every song has a legend behind it. In all his works Tolkien intertwines history and myth in every detail. He created a mythical world by means of historical consciousness in such a way that myth and historical consciousness were not in conflict inside that world.

It is this intertwining of myth and history in a common origin that is the essence of tradition for Tolkien. Tolkien depicts the very first act in the creation of Middle Earth, in The Silmarillion, as a series of harmonious melodies springing forth from the mind of the Creator. Soon, however, an evil spirit introduces dissonance into the melodies, which the Creator nevertheless finds a way to incorporate into his own music. The harmonious melodies are the basis of all our traditions; anything we can create is a reflection of this ideal, which, as Niggle finds out (in Leaf by Niggle), can only be realized with the help of God in the next life. However, in this life, in history, the artist must be fundamentally humble. His task is to reclaim the beauty of the original melodies, but his powers are limited: he can only engage in “sub-creation,” to use Tolkien’s term. God creates history; our task in history is to reclaim our principles: the Creator’s harmonies. At the beginning of history stands a myth, and in history we must reclaim this myth.

For Tolkien, then, any tradition—whether in art, literature, language—is a historical means by which we return to our origins. History by itself is not as important. Indeed, Tolkien called this life “a long defeat.” What matters is how we shape our tradition is to lead us to God, the foundation, the Grund, that Nietzsche tried to do without, but neither successfully nor happily.

Tolkien does not give us a blueprint for how to integrate tradition and historical consciousness. There just is no easy way to synthesize historical scholarship with a distinct literary sensibility. It takes a genius like Tolkien to achieve what he did. However, Tolkien did prove in his work that it was possible to use history to re-establish a connection to myth and tradition in the modern world and he showed us what such a synthesis could look like.

The Enduring Interest of Germany

In his previous post, Aaron touches on one of the most fundamental points in our discussion: modern German history is a compression of all of modern Western history. But, there is one point I must add which makes German history even richer than its dramatic events already are by themselves: Germans not only made history, but they have also written history.

On the one hand, Germans have excelled at researching the minutiae of history. Although textual criticism had been around for some time (the Renaissance, for example, witnessed an upsurge in interest), it really took off in 19th-century Germany, particularly in the field of Biblical studies. But classical philology of all sorts in the 19th-century was dominated by Germans; the texts we use for reading the ancient Greek and Latin authors are in large part the texts we have inherited from German philologists. Without their painstaking scholarship, we would lack basic knowledge about many basic aspects of the ancient world. Of course, this focus on the minutiae of ancient texts, as necessary as it may be to produce an accurate text, led to a kind of scientific myopia in the German academy. Professors did not necessarily read ancient authors for their inherent interest or historical importance, but rather so they could resolve technical questions of text criticism. As a result, German professors were caricatured as pedants writing preposterously impenetrable prose both at home (e.g., Heine’s dream professor in Die Harzreise) and abroad (e.g., Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh and Henry Adams in Democracy).

But, there are other voices in the 19th-century German academic tradition. For instance, Nietzsche, whose essay on the Use and Abuse of History we have cited before, rebelled against this academic tradition by focusing on the literary and philosophical problems posed by the Greek authors he was ready. The Birth of Tragedy was an audacious essay for a young professor to write—instead of writing a technically correct but boring essay for specialists, he dared to reinterpret the Greek spirit. On a more theoretical level, Wilhelm Dilthey initiated much of German philosophy’s interest in hermeneutics.

Outside of the academy (at least partly so), German Romanticism brought a sense of history—and a sense of historical loss—to the common people. The work of Clemens Brentanto and Achim von Arnim in compiling the folk songs contained in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, or the Grimm Brothers’ collection of folk tales—following Herder’s and Goethe’s lead—highlighted to the German people that their medieval past was still alive, yet in danger of being lost. Indeed, German Romanticism is one of the reasons for the widespread neo-medievalism throughout 19th-century Europe.

Most importantly, Germans have loved to theorize about history more than any other nation, and they have loved to apply their grand theories to the writing of history. They are the ones who taught us how to theorize about history at all. Some of the first great historians of the modern era came from the German lands, such as Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt (who was Swiss but studied in Germany). No matter what one’s opinion of Hegel is, no one can deny that his focus on history led us to look at historical processes and their “world-historical” meaning more carefully.

But the mention of Hegel inevitably leads to the dark side of German theorizing. Germany is the heartland of modern ideology. Marxism and Nazism in particular inflicted immense suffering on the 20th century. In Germany, ideology was more than just the occupation of a small coterie of fanatical professors and revolutionaries; it spread to the educated classes as a whole. Eric Voegelin, in one of his autobiographical notes, recalls how the students he taught in Munich in the 1950’s, were usually much better academically prepared for university students than the Americans he had met in the 1940’s (e.g., they read more languages), but they were also far more ideological than American students; because they were already exposed to competing theories of history, they could not keep an open mind when studying history.

Yet, in the end, Voegelin, who reacted against the German tradition, was in so many ways the finest product of that very tradition. He was an immensely learned man in many fields, who did not shrink from dirtying his hands with detailed textual criticism, but was also intimately familiar with philosophy throughout the ages. He combined the love of minutiae with the love of theory.

The enduring interest of Germany for the modern American, then, lies not necessarily in the lessons its recent history can teach us. Dictatorships of the masses are a danger even in America. But, Germany has not only given us exciting history to learn about and extremely relevant history to learn from, but it has also given us the lenses through which to view history.

Pi, etc.

We recently lost the internet at my house for several days. One realizes just how much it has become a part of everyday life when it is gone. Rather than listing all the things I could not do, suffice it to say I found something I could: watch movies. So I did.

Darren Aronofsky’s Pi is a story about the search for meaning in the universe. It tells the tale of Max Cohen, a mathematician obsessed with finding patterns to explain phenomena around him. More to the point, he is interested in finding the pattern which will explain, well, everything. In the course of the story we encounter Wall Street types who are interested in such patterns primarily for the ability to predict the stock market, but we also meet kabbalists who seek to decode the Torah and find the long-lost name of God which will help usher in the messianic age.



The film reminded me of Eric Foner’s Story of American Freedom, a text I had to teach this past semester. Foner’s objective seems simple enough: to explain the changing definition of freedom from the time of the American Founding to the present day. However, as I tried to point out to my students, implicit in his presentation was another message. To help them tease that out, I gave a (very, very, very!) quick-and-dirty history of western philosophy, since such courses are not required at A&M.

Plato argued that there were such things as forms, things in heaven which embody ideas. Or rather, more to the point, are ideas, which are imperfectly embodied in particular occurrences. There is the form of the Tree, in which all trees participate, and by that participation they have something in common. There is the form of the Cat as well, along with abstract – but no less real – concepts such as Justice, Truth and Freedom.

Aristotle, though he spoke of substance and accidents, rather than forms, broadly agreed with Plato that there are fundamental categories at work in the cosmos, categories which transcend physical characteristics and abide in the very fiber of a thing’s being. But in the Middle Ages a fellow named William of Ockham denied that there were categories at all. Yes, he said, we can point to this fuzzy thing with whiskers and that fuzzy thing with whiskers, and we can call them both cats, because that would be a very useful thing to say. But in the end, Ockham argued, each is a unique object without anything fundamentally in common with the other. We apply labels for our convenience, but they do not correspond to any deeper meaning in reality.

Some centuries later Immanuel Kant tried to steer a middle course between these two positions, contending that there may be categories to the cosmos, but we cannot know them. Thus, in practice, he was an Ockhamite, arguing that the labels we affix may be handy, but may not actually correspond to the fundamental being of things. Finally, the nihilists – most famous among them being Friedrich Nietzsche – contended that there is no meaning to the cosmos at all, categorical or otherwise, a far cry from the ancients.

How did all this connect to Eric Foner and American history? While charting the changing meanings of “freedom” over the years, I would submit that Foner assumes – and implicitly argues – that there is no meaning to the term “freedom”; it does not really exist. Yes, Foner is willing to talk about it as a label we place on things, even a very convenient label, but in the end, does it correspond to anything in reality? Is there a right answer to the question, “What is freedom?” Foner demurs and – I would argue – ultimately denies.

Returning then to Mr. Aronofsky’s film and the pressing question it asks: Is there meaning to the cosmos? And if there is, what is it, and what does that meaning demand of me?

Agnosticism, exceedingly vogue in the ivory tower of academia, seeks to avoid these questions. Perhaps the answers simply are unknowable, though I doubt most have ever truly sought them. And if the point of all our academic endeavors is to know the truth, what does it say about us that we have abdicated any responsibility for knowing the highest truths?

This post first appeared yesterday on True. Good. Beautiful., a forum about entertainment and the film industry.

Mothers' Day with Nietzsche

Yesterday I had to take an exam rather early in the morning, so I decided to get a cup of coffee at a Starbucks near school. After I finished drinking the coffee, I looked at the cup and found this rather Nietzschean “inspirational” message, evidently left over from Mothers’ Day:

“Mother-love is not inevitable. The good mother is a great artist ever creating beauty out of chaos.” --Alice Randall, Novelist, The Wind Done Gone, and first black woman to write a No. 1 country song.

Now, I know I’m not supposed to take inspirational messages on coffee cups too seriously, so I just laughed at first. But the cup left me with a few questions: Would Nietzsche have approved of Mothers’ Day? Can there really be such a thing as a black-feminist-Nietzschean? And if so, would Nietzsche have approved of them writing country songs?

I'm still laughing trying to imagine Nietzsche listening to country music.