Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger Babette E. Babich State University of New York Press Words in Blood, Like Flowers SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy Dennis J. Schmidt, editor Words in Blood, Like Flowers Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (cid:2) Babette E. Babich S U N Y P TATE NIVERSITY OF EW ORK RESS Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2006 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. Cover illustration: Dionysus detail. Attic red-figured amphora, 490 BCE. Kleophrades Painter (500–490 BCE). Staatliche Antikensammlung, Munich. For information, address State University of New York Press 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210-2384 Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Susan M. Petrie Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Babich, Babette E., 1956– Words in blood, like flowers : philosophy and poetry, music and eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger / Babette E. Babich. p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-6835-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. 2. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. 3. Hölderlin, Friedrich, 1770–1843. I. Title. II. Series. B3317.B22 2006 193—dc22 2005029298 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xvii Illustrations xix PHILOSOPHY, PHILOLOGY, POETRY 1. Philosophy and the Poetic Eros of Thought 3 2. Philology and Aphoristic Style: Rhetoric, Sources, and Writing in Blood 19 3. The Birth of Tragedy: Lyric Poetry and the Music of Words 37 4. Nietzsche’s “Gay Science”: Poetry and Love, Science and Music 55 5. Pindar’s Becoming: Translating the Imperatives of Praise 75 MUSIC, PAIN, EROS 6. Philosophy as Music 97 7. Songs of the Sun: Hölderlin in Venice 117 8. On Pain and Tragic Joy: Nietzsche and Hölderlin 135 9. Nietzsche’s Erotic Artist as Actor/Jew/Woman 147 ART, NATURE, CALCULATION 10. Chaos and Culture 171 11. The Ethos of Nature and Art: Hölderlin’s Ecological Politics 185 12. The Work of Art and the Museum: Heidegger, Schapiro, Gadamer 199 13. The Ethical Alpha and Heidegger’s Linguistic Omega: On the Inner Affinity Between Germany and Greece 227 14. Heidegger’s Beiträge as Will to Power 243 Notes 265 Bibliography 343 Name Index 373 Subject Index 381 Preface The title of this book, Words in Blood, Like Flowers, repeats the language and the passions of Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Nietzsche. For it was Nietzsche who wrote of living with ideas as one lives with compan- ions—as real as flesh and blood—and he spoke more forcefully of writing in blood, telling us that of everything written, his Zarathustra “loves” only “what one has written with one’s blood. Write with blood and you will learn that blood is spirit” (Z, “Of Reading and Writing”). Hölderlin, in his poem Bread and Wine, uses the language of “words, like flowers” and writes variously, as only a poet can, of the “flowers” of the mouth and “the flowers of the heart.” Written, as we say, with one’s heart, words in blood express the passion that for Heidegger belongs to philosophy at its inception as thaumazein, as pathos itself, which Heidegger understood as the key to the attunement [Stimmung] of philosophic astonishment, the sustained wonder or amazement that things are, that what is is as it is—and not otherwise. One can keep this wonder only in “authentic questioning,” a questioning “that opens up its own source” (I, 6). In this self-rending tension, philosophy “never makes things easier but only more difficult” (I, 11). This same difficulty is the reason Heidegger thinks that philoso- phy might, indeed, “if we concern ourselves with it, do something with us” (I, 12). Using the language of writing in blood, Nietzsche does not fail to underscore its Faustian implications, on the one hand in teasing, as Nietzsche liked to tease Goethe, on the other hand in all seriousness. If one writes in blood, one surrenders one’s soul. But if these authors put themselves into what they write, we will see that they claim the same from the reader. The conjunction between philosophy and poetry, not to mention music and eros, is a complicated one. And this limits, if it also consti- tutes, its appeal. For if the reading I propose between the poet Hölderlin and the philosophers Nietzsche and Heidegger will speak to some read- ers, it is just as obvious that this approach will not appeal to others. Here vii viii Preface I can have little to say as these other readers will be unlikely to have read even this far or if they do read further, will likely dip and pick, leaving out context and sidestepping all such complications as inherently belong to the themes of philosophy and poetry, music and eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger and so constitute the substance of this book. To summarize the chapters to follow, I begin with a discussion of Heidegger and Nietzsche on philosophy, poetry, and love, including some everyday reflections on philosophical affairs. I then note Nietzsche’s aphoristic style and the role of rhetoric in order to raise the question of how the spirit of music would account not only for the heart of Nietzsche’s first book on tragedy but also for his singular insight into the sound of ancient Greek itself and his emphasis on language with respect to the sounds of its words, its meters and its rhythms, likewise articulated and exemplified (this similarity is no accident) in the beauty of Hölderlin’s poetry. For Nietzsche had discovered nothing less than the “breath” or spirit of music in the words of Greek tragedy, which was also his testa- ment to oral culture in antiquity. Yet this discovery, particularly as Nietzsche chose to illustrate its consequences for modern culture (a very classical, indeed classicist’s programme, precisely in the spirit of Erwin Rohde, and contra Wilamowitz, as Karl Reinhardt would also attest, the same Reinhardt whose father had studied with Nietzsche in Basel and who had even urged his son to take up Nietzsche’s cause precisely as a “classicist”), drew little resonance from his readers (be they specialists or not). This may have been the reason Nietzsche began with the same focus in The Gay Science, drawing on the example of the troubadour and yet another oral tradition of poetic or song composition. I particularly attend to Nietzsche’s life-long preoccupation with Pindar’s poetic word: Become the one you are! Nietzsche hears this word in the enigmatic voice of conscience (GS §270), a creator’s con- science, spoken with the utter innocence of the creator. “That one be- comes what one is presupposes that one does not have the remotest idea what one is” (EH, “Why I am so Clever,” §9). The philosophically reflexive point here, taken in connection with the resonant influence of poetry (that is: the heart “of what is music in it” [GS §373], to use Nietzsche’s own language), underscores the inevitable limits of a reading that would reduce everything in Nietzsche (or in the Greeks) to prior sources, a project which not only disregards the transformations of style but excludes the same spirit of “music” as well as what Nietzsche re- garded as historical reflection—a judgment on the critical sense of history Nietzsche had in common with Herbert Butterfield, a scientific historian in almost the same sense that Nietzsche was. Preface ix When Nietzsche reflects on his writing, he reflects on the Greek convention of the poetic muse or inspiration,“the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece” (EH, Z §3), as this idea inheres in the ecstatic essence of Dichtung. This is what works in or through him quite apart from his own will: “One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with neces- sity, unfalteringly formed—I have never had any choice” (ibid.). In this fashion, the same Nietzsche who celebrates the primacy of the active artist above the passive spectator and who assumes the determining su- periority of the wealthy (for Nietzsche, the rich are not merely consum- ers but those who impose their standards as “taste”) is also careful to set the unconscious dynamic of poetic invention in place of the creative subject and contra the ideal of artistic genius. Reflecting on the “phoenix of music” where he also tells us that “the whole of Zarathustra may perhaps be reckoned as music” (EH, Z §1), Nietzsche adverts to the singular achievements of his style: the “aphorism trembling with passion; eloquence become music” (EH, Z §6). For my part, I consider the metaphorical and literal expression of philosophy as music as this has come down to us from Heraclitus and Plato. A musical resonance works through Hölderlin’s poetry where it is taken up in Nietzsche’s most personal poem to the city of bridges and music: Venice itself. The same resonance works, so Theodor Adorno reads this resonance, as Hölderlin’s voice recurs in Heidegger’s paratactic expression. From the problem of the artist, Nietzsche turns to the ques- tion of the actor, thence to the question of the Jew, and ultimately to the question of woman. For Nietzsche, who always felt himself to have “the soul of a lover,” the question of woman takes us to the eros of art as the illusion of the actor and thus the artist. The concluding section of this book turns to Nietzsche’s archaic reflections on chaos as well as Hölderlin’s poetic call to a mindful con- sideration of the relation between nature and art (adumbrated, for the poet, in technological terms). This also includes a review of the judg- ments rendered by the advocates of art history and hermeneutic aesthet- ics regarding Heidegger on the origin of the work of art, which I consider with reference to contemporary sensibilities, with respect to the locus of the museum (I discuss Christo and New York’s Central Park) and the question of conservation (the preservation of antiquities in Greek Arcadia as in Athens). The penultimate chapter offers a reading of Heidegger’s politicizing of language between Germany and Greece and the last chap- ter considers Heidegger’s intended legacy as he crafts his own self-oriented Nachlaß in his Beiträge, which he composes, so I argue, on the model