Roberto Calasso - Literature and the Gods

Nietzsche’s feelings were divided: on the one hand, he saw European civilization as being on the threshold of a radical regeneration led by Germany; on the other, he saw the modern state in its most advanced form — which is to say the German state — as involved in a systematic project of barbarization, whose first enemy and victim could only be culture itself. But the Germanic infatuation would soon fade. Ahead of Nietzsche lay a life of wandering, a life without a homeland. “Among today’s Europeans,” he would write, “there are those few who have the right to claim, in the sense of a distinction and an honor, that they are without a homeland.” It was to these few that he intended to transmit the gay science , a science that would include some of the most precise and ferocious observations ever made against Germany, the most vicious being those scattered across the pages of Ecce Homo . The only other person who would prove able to wound Germany and German culture so deeply was Gottfried Benn.

The trap Nietzsche had almost fallen into when he was writing The Birth of Tragedy was that of fantasizing a future national community behind the variegated surface of the myths: “Knowledge and music allow us to foresee a German rebirth of classical Greece — it is toward this rebirth that we shall work,” he wrote in his notebooks at the time. But his mind was too lucid not to foresee something else as well: “All that is required of us now is that we be slaves of the mass, and in particular slaves of a party.” When the sonorous Wagnerian cloud dissolves, even the word “myth” all but disappears from Nietzsche’s writing and Dionysus retreats to the wings. But he would be back, with a great clanging of sistra and tambourines: first when he creeps into the voice of that “Dionysiac demon called Zarathustra,” and later when from the shadows he maneuvers the enthralling drama that was the last phase of Nietzsche’s life. This really did look like an example of a renewed Dionysiac spirit; certainly it was a far cry from the arrogant productive fervor of an imperial Germany. But to be understood, that drama needed a prelude, a sort of summary in shorthand, at once impudent and allusive, of what Nietzsche had come to believe had happened over the course of civilization from the Greeks down to his own time. This is the section “How the ‘real world’ ended up as a fable” in Twilight of the Idols:

1. The real world accessible to the wise man, the pious man, the virtuous man — he lives in it, he is this world .

(The oldest form of the idea, relatively shrewd, simple, persuasive. Transcription of the principle “I, Plato, am the truth.”)

2. The real world, for the moment inaccessible, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous (“to the sinner who does penance”).

(The idea progresses: grows subtler, more menacing, less easy to grasp— becomes woman , becomes Christian …)

3. The real world, inaccessible, indemonstrable. unpromissable, but just having thought of it is a consolation, an obligation, a binding imperative.

(In the background the ancient sun, but seen through a fog of skepticism; the idea become sublime, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)

4. The real world — inaccessible? In any event not acceded to. And, in so far as not acceded to, unknown . Hence, what’s more, not a consolation, not a salvation, not binding: what could something unknown bind us to? …

(Gray morning. First yawn of reason. Cock’s crow of positivism.)

5. The “real world”—an idea of no use to anyone, and not even binding on us — an idea that has become useless, superfluous, and consequently an idea refuted: let’s be rid of it!

(Bright daylight; breakfast time; return of good sense and serenity; Plato blushing for shame; demonic uproar of all free spirits.)

6. We have got rid of the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps? … But no! Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well!

(Noon; when the shadows are shortest; end of the longest error of all; zenith of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

This page — which according to an outline drawn up in the spring of 1888 was to be the first of the unfinished Will to Power , an opening clash of the cymbals, as it were — should be read together with Hölderlin’s prophecies vis-à-vis the “turning back to nativeness.” There too we have an attempt to identify the obscure movement that guides history and is such that with the mere passing of time the color of events and the very consistency of the material world is altered. But what a difference in tone! Where Hölderlin is elliptical and solemn, Nietzsche is as brazen as a circus presenter. The jerky rhythm is shot through with an alarming euphoria — and a certain sarcasm too. Yet the process described is grandiose: nothing less than the successive phases of the history of the world, six of them, like the six days of Creation. And it’s as though, instead of advancing with dash and confidence, the world were gradually regressing toward its indecipherable origins, a place where, because these categories have yet to split apart, the distinctions “real world” and “apparent world” no longer hold. Here we are , announces Nietzsche, and it would be hard not to hear a mocking ring in his voice. We thought we were living in a world where the fog had lifted, a disenchanted, ascertainable, verifiable world. And instead we find that everything has gone back to being a “fable” again. How are we to get our bearings? To which fable should we abandon ourselves, knowing as we do that the next one to come along might overwhelm it? This is the paralysis, the peculiar uncertainty of modern times, a paralysis that all since have experienced. Nietzsche presents it as an ordeal we have to go through: we have been condemned, or elected, to pass through a world without substance, pure specter, where it is true of course that “many new gods are still possible,” their feet falling in with a new step, a new dance, “many gods endlessly fleeing each other, searching out each other, blessedly contradicting each other, many gods hearing each other once again, once again belonging to each other,” yet at the same time a subtle, indomitable mockery embraces everything and renders it all uncertain, ephemeral: parody. It is a frightening development, and Nietzsche had tried to prepare us for it when, at the end of The Gay Science , he drew the picture of a “spirit who ingenuously, without wanting to, that is, and out of an overflowing fullness and strength, begins to play with everything hitherto considered sacred, good, untouchable, divine,” thus giving rise to the “ideal of a human-superhuman well-being and kindness, that may often seem inhuman , if set, for example, beside all the terrestrial seriousness that came before it, or indeed beside any sort of solemnity of gesture, speech, expression, gaze, morality, duty, as if this new ideal were their living and involuntary parody.” There it is, the bow twangs, the word “parody” is let fly — and at once one senses that this light, reckless, composite, and sparkling intermezzo serves above all to announce the moment when once again “the destiny of the soul is at a turning point, the hand on the clock face shifts, the tragedy begins …”

Dazzled by this shiny and deceptive theatre, this boundless, merry, sinister stage where — the words are Nietzsche’s again—“something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut,” because, as we said, incipit parodia , we suddenly realize that too many beginnings are going on at the same time. Incipit tragoedia, incipit parodia, incipit Zarathustra (inspired by Dionysus). And all at once the answer, the obvious answer, comes to us: they’re all the same beginning, at the same moment — and that doesn’t just hold for Nietzsche; on the contrary, it sets its seal on the whole world ever since. At this point, what more could Nietzsche do but entrust a last note to the symbolic hands of Jacob Burckhardt? “Actually, I would far rather be a professor at Basle University than God: but I didn’t dare push my private selfishness so far as to neglect, just for myself, the creation of the world.”