The Reversal of Values and other such nice ideas

Philo-Aesthetic Digest 2/15/25

Sometimes these digests are a bit like research notes for some long-gestating piece or other, and this week’s is especially so. Don’t be surprised if a fair amount of this material winds up recycled, but at the same time don’t miss out-it might not be, or some choice cut of thought may be buried within that which is ignored because it is merely a blog, only a musing. Cheers!

Anyway I’ve been reading a lot of Nietzsche in the last few weeks. I finished either reading or rereading Beyond Good and Evil, read The Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the Idols, and am currently rereading Ecce Homo. I have an interesting history with Friedric Nietzche, He is I think someone you're supposed to read quite young as a budding intellectual and buy into completely, essentially becoming a 13 year old Zarathustra’s Ape until you gain a little maturity and are mortified, but also recognize deeper truths that prevent one from dismissing him despite the many insufferabilities one finds in his writing. My experience was somewhat different-I was assigned him for a class, one the only two philosophy courses I ever attended as part of my undergraduate education.¹ My upbringing was not what you would really call “strict,” but it was such that I had been bestowed with what Allan Bloom, deploring a lack in the elite students of the 1980s would refer to as “prejudices.” Nietzsche seemed to me at 21 or so a straightforward teacher of evil, someone who was simply opposed to civilization as such and who appealed primarily to similarly inclined members of the intellectual community. In the years since I have encountered and indeed to a large degree surrounded myself with an intellectual community of writers I would describe as Nietzscheans in the sense that they rejected as will to power the sentimental pieties of our age and held with the young, romantic Nietzsche that life is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.² I confess that my impression of N. (I find having to write out “Nietzsche” uniquely tiresome) is heavily inflected by these thinkers-I tend to read into him sort of fin de seiecle decadence he’s nominally criticizing-what is the persistent rhetoric of the Great man, the Blond Beast, the cruel master, everything that makes him sound like Adolph Hitler but the yearning of an aesthete for life as a total spectacle, a Gesamtkunstwerk that would justify human existence as the early, romantic N. said only the aesthetic could.

Nietzsche is a very easy author to psychologize. Indeed it’s almost impossible to avoid doing so if you know that he was a sickly, scholarly individual, physically nothing at all like the blonde beast or übermensch he proclaimed, raised in a house full of women in an age dominated by a sentimental and steely if also somewhat agnostic and declining domestic Christianity.³ As

John Pistelli

pointed out in his recent episode on Aristophanes and Euripides, in some respects N. simply was the Alexandrian man he decried in The Birth of Tragedy. The professor under whom I read Ecce Homo had what I’ve since come to understand as a very midcentury, somewhat Walter Kaufmann-esque reading of N. as problematic by our standards but decidedly not the proto-Nazi one is often tempted to call him. I have mixed feelings on all this. There’s another book about Nietzsche I’ve been reading but didn’t finish this week, so perhaps these thoughts will have to wait until then.

We herd the flocks of this godless cyclops: an irrelevant political-literary musing on Joyce and Musil

Insofar as this can become visible to all eyes it had happened in Kakania, making Kakania, unbeknownst to the world, the most progressive state of all; a state just barely able to go along with itself. One enjoyed a negative freedom there, always with the sense of insufficient grounds for one's own existence, and lapped around by the great fantasy of all that had not happened or at least not yet happened irrevocably as by the breath of those oceans from which mankind had once emerged.

Events that might be regarded as momentous elsewhere were here introduced with a casual "Es ist passiert..."—a peculiar form of "it happened" unknown elsewhere in German or any other lan-guage, whose breath could transform facts and blows of fate into something as light as thistledown or thought. Perhaps, despite so much that can be said against it, Kakania was, after all, a country for geniuses; which is probably what brought it to its ruin.

During the years when he was writing the two books he is best remembered for, James Joyce was a resident of Trieste, at that time a city in Austria-Hungary. It is a loose contention of mine that the character of the dual monarchy memorialized by Robert Musil as kakania, deeply multifaceted and multilingual, dysfunctional and acrimonious and yet also cosmopolitan and worldy, backward in some ways and also a center of modernism in its early form, exerted a considerable influence on Joyce's depiction of turn-of the century Dublin in his 1922 masterpeice Ulysses. Finished and published in the years following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and amongst the various wars of ethnic cleansing and national purification fought among tbe peoples of the mediterranean, it seems to me no coincidence that the most brutal satire of the novel is reserved for the Irish nationalists in the Cyclops section. Certainly living under an imperial regime is bad for your health-a drunken Stephen is nearly taken in by British colonial authorities for breaking a chandelier in a brothel, and the state of Ireland as portrayed in the novel is not a positive one. Still, Joyce is remarkably open-eyed about what will follow empire. The characteristic of the National regime that will succeed empire is rule by the citizen, rule of national purification.

And says he:

—Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew.

Your God.

—He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead

—Whose God? says the citizen.

—Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew.

Christ was a jew like me.

Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.

—By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.

One might go from the Vienna of Freud and Wittgenstein to the Vienna of Austrofascism and Anschluss. The ideal instead lives on in Joyce’s book, the gospel of modernity, the image of an Kakania as the city in speech, de civitas dei, Dublin as world-city, as the universe in miniature. Perhaps the point of the discourse has always been that the city of speech cannot exist, that such a regime can only be an accident and will necessarily be unstable and deteriorating, undergoing revolutions of decay. Perhaps all of this was always inevitable, perhaps things really could not have gone on the way they were, should not have gone on the way they were. Still, one finds afterward that Kakania is missed. Musil’s great unfinished work while mocking and nihilist memorializes the vanished empire, while Joyce in his continental exile never took Irish citizenship, remaining until his death a British subject.

Notes on memes and crosses

I'm working on something right now in response more or less to a recent Tara Isabella Burton piece in which I absolutely loved, and some recent semi-dissenting posts made by

Mary Jane Eyre

, (In the process I exhumed what

BDM

described as an “ancient post” on trendy catholicism in our time.) I have a sense of what to say, but the difficulty is in part figuring out what to say and what thinkers to call upon. I think I'd call it something like “two cheers against mimetic Christianity.” On the one hand I'm very much with Burton and Barbara that

not to be like "Christianity involves a personal encounter with Jesus," but, well it does.

If I did not believe that Christianity was true I would not be going to church, I would not be taking the step I am taking in these next few weeks to formally become a Christian, something that for all my fascination with theology I have not been and am not today. I am at my most Nietzchean when I am asked to follow Christian morality without the substance of Christ. If none of this is real than everything every atheist has ever said is true and you are asking people to take up their cross and deny themselves for the good of your lawn, your stock portfolio and your HBO tragicomedies, and fundamentally this is not enough. Henry James and George elliot are great artists, but their moral vision of nobility as self crucifixion in an empty cosmos is for me totally unconvincing. I'm reading Brideshead Revisited at the moment, and I don't love it either, beautiful though it is, but I can accept as someone prone to similar "God wants me, specifically to be unhappy in Penance for my Evil" lines of thought what Waugh is doing in a way that I cannot in their work. On the other hand what are we without the Law? I am not a revolutionary, not really, contra the accusations that have been made occasionally and may be made again by some of my more distinguished readers.⁴ Watch this space for that essay.

1. The other, taught by the same professor but at the beginning rather than end was an Asian Philosophy 101 survey. I did relatively well in the class, although I’m not sure how much I retained from it. Something of Confucianism as an ideal, an incomprehension of no-self. Something

2. I have my own moments of sympathy with this aestheticism. At times in the last decade the choice has been presented to us as though it was “human rights or good art.” I think this is mostly a false dichotomy, and moreover I probably side with “human rights” whatever you want that to mean, but still as the Savior said with something rather different in mind, man shall not live by bread alone. Still I’m torn-

Naomi Kanakia

pointed out very well in her wonderful fictionalizing style the same piece I referenced last week the limits of that sort of thing.

3. In the process of writing this piece I discovered that I am taller than Friedrich Nietzche.

4. If anything I tend to think of my politics as “post-left” in an Alvin Gouldnerian sense, although I probably would not characterize myself as such publicly to an audience who didn’t know me and didn’t understand the nuance that is meant when I discuss these things. I am perfectly open to the critiques of the left along Nietzschean and Laschean lines, but I reject the credulity about right wing government and ideology that seems to be characteristic of those who accept them right now. When you look at the history, movement conservatism as an autonomous, distinctly modern force every much as its opposite tends to corrode and eat out from within whatever traditions align with it, be they Catholic, Straussian, or Nietzchean.