Peter Kalkavage: Music and the Idea of a World. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024.

 

Although our contemporaries associate music with meaning, with lyrics, they typically deny it any intrinsic meaning, relegating it to the realm of aesthetic pleasure when they do not regard it as an adjunct to rhetoric, a sort of energy boost to some ‘message.’ There must be something wrong about that, given the complexity of so much music, especially ‘classical’ music. Why would Bach bother?

Peter Kalkavage shows how composers have in fact set their music in accordance with their “idea of a world,” a world that might be the cosmos, the soul, the course of events, the world music itself makes, or some (or all) of those things. Reserving consideration of symphonic composition, “instrumental music,” for another time, he mostly discusses music accompanied by words, which unquestionably make the meaning of music clearer. Beginning with the music of classical antiquity as understood by Pythagoras and Plato, he moves from the Christian music of Bach, the Enlightenment music of Mozart, the Schopenhauerian music of Wagner, the Nietzschean music of Schoenberg, and finally to return to Christian music in Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites.

The contrast between Plato and Schopenhauer, between “cosmological optimism” and “cosmological pessimism,” frames his account. Socrates calls philosophy “the greatest music” in the Phaedo, initially bans the lesser sorts of music from his City in Speech in the Republic, then readmits them with stipulated stern conditions. For Socrates, Plato, and the Greeks generally, ‘music’ encompasses both tunes and poetry; it is both promising and “dangerous” because it wields “the power to shape the soul for good or ill, to make the psychic regime orderly or disorderly.” So great is this power to pervade and persuade the soul that it “verges on the supernatural,” causing “the listener to be held and spellbound,” thanks to its “intense personal inwardness,” which can “form our character, opinions, and way of life,” shaping “our whole being.” “In music, there is no safe distance, as there is in sight, between perceiver and perceived, subject and object”; moreover, like the voice of God, musical tones “come to us when they want to,” as “we must wait for a moment to sound.” Although music acts upon the emotions of the listener, it does so “through the order and precision of its tones and rhythms.” Even when it “overwhelm[s] our reason and self-control,” it does so in accordance with a measure, indeed a mathematical measure, arranged by its composer. This is the “paradox” of music. In the Timaeus, Critias of Athens, claims the capacity to “harmonize the particulars of Socrates’ city in speech with those of an ancient unsung Athens,” a myth he’s made up. This comports with Critias’ childhood initiation during “a festival in honor of Dionysus, the god of intoxication,” in which “impressionable youths are officially rooted in the tribe and by extension their city.” Intoxicated by song, by songs composed by the eminently sober Athenian lawgiver, Solon, Critias and his fellow youths assimilate the Solonian regime and its laws. But rival poet-rhetorician Timaeus of Italy upstages Critias with a much more philosophically ambitious speech, a “long speech about the cosmos”—the ‘regime’ of nature,’ so to speak. 

Timaeus’ speech opposes both Socrates’ critique of poetry in the Republic and the theory of the Ideas propounded in that dialogue. “It is an apologia or defense of Becoming and body in response” to the Socratic presentation of nature as fundamentally stable. Whereas Socrates argues that “genuine education turns the soul away from Becoming or flux and toward the changeless realm of Being,” from the Cave of conventional opinion to the realm of the eternal Ideas, Timaeus’ “likely story…takes us in the opposite direction, from Being down to Becoming,” telling “how an ingenious craftsman-god, who is without envy and who gazed on archetypal Being, brought order to the primordial chaos through a combination of forethought and the beautiful structures of mathematics.” Socrates calls this story or mythos not an account of nature but a nomos, “which in Greek means both law and song, as well as custom and convention”—the sort of thing philosophy ascends from. And because, as the Greek musicologist Damon taught (and as both Critias, Socrates, and Timaeus all evidently hold), any change in music eventually cause a change in the “greatest political laws”—those that instantiate the regime of the city—Timaeus’ beautifully crafted myth threatens any particular city because it “makes us law-abiding citizens of the world—good cosmopolitans—instead of good citizens of Athens or any other polis and, moreover, that the world we are to love, whose laws we abide by, consists of matter in flux. 

The laws of the ever-shifting, material world or cosmos derive from mathematics. Mathematics is a kind of music, albeit “not music that one can hear but an intellectual, hermetic music that is inscribed in the nature of things.” It is, however, closely related to the music we hear, with ‘physical’ music. “The greatest musical moment in the story is the construction of the musical scale out of ratios of whole numbers,” a construction “based on the momentous Pythagorean discovery that the intervals that make up melody—octave, perfect fifth, perfect fourth, whole tone—are produced by string-lengths that are in the smallest whole-number ratios: 2:1 for the octave, 3:2 for the perfect fifth, 4:3 for the perfect fourth, and 9:8 for the whole tone.” Since music always moves, this means that mathematics animates the cosmic flux from the orbits of the planets to the human soul. “Musicality” in a human soul means “the adjustment and tuning of all our actions to the regular, periodic movements of the heavens”; to have achieved musicality is “to live a life that is in every respect well timed, symmetrical, and balanced—the life of a star.” The rhythmic cosmic flux causes souls that allow themselves to get out of tune, living “an acosmic, unmusical life,” “re-enter Becoming in an animal form suitable to their moral and intellectual degradation.” Even those who re-enter life as humans begin their material life as “mindless, inarticulate babies, incapable of controlling any of our movements.” This makes education necessary, “the most important part” of which is mathematical astronomy, a discipline that fixes our attention upon the stars, brings a soul back to the star from which it originated. Just as navigators steer a ship by looking up at the stars, so the study of mathematical astronomy can guide human beings in life, preventing them from devolution into lower animals after the death of their bodies. Music is “therapy.” As Timaeus puts it, music is “the means of “bringing the soul into arrangement and concord with herself.”

Socrates and Timaeus do agree on one thing, that music and poetry either are or should be rational. Not so, Schopenhauer, who asserts “the supremacy of will over intellect” in music and indeed in the cosmos. By “will” Schopenhauer means not the will of any person, including God (“for Schopenhauer there is no God”) but “the universal, cosmic force and infinite striving that underlies all things and rises to self-awareness in man.” Flux, to be sure, but not rational flux: genuine human self-awareness recognizes human beings as animated by “feeling and care.” “My living body reminds me that I am constantly in the condition of seeking to preserve my life and to stave off harm, pain, frustration, and death,” and “my being and life consist in striving to be and to live,” even when I sleep, since my dreams consist of “my hopes, fears, anxieties, and desires made into a private movie, often a surreal one.” As with moderns generally, this ineluctable self-focus supports individualism, seen (in different ways) in Machiavelli, Montaigne, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. Unlike those philosophers, however, Schopenhauer is a pessimist, conceiving of human life as tragic, forever in conflict with brute reality. The world is will/force objectified, but it objectifies itself “in a fourfold way: as inorganic nature, plant life, animal life, and human life.” 

Music fits into this because “music is unique among the arts” in “depict[ing] the inner world of care—pure subjective meaning apart from all objectivity,” not a “rational world soul but the passionate world heart.” The claim that the cosmic condition is one of perpetual change, perpetual becoming, comports with the claim that passion is the heart of the cosmos; passions surge, moods alter, as time goes by. Politically, the passionate character of the world heart and the music it depicts implies a certain egalitarianism. Music for Schopenhauer “is not an elitist Pythagorean who speaks only to her learned inner circle but rather the ‘universal language’ that is ‘instantly understood by everyone,’ intuitively and without the aid of concepts.” Attending to music scarcely ‘tunes’ the soul to a cosmic harmony, since there is no such thing. Life consists of “infinite striving,” the “insatiable desire” of the “egocentric individual,” who, as Hobbes already puts it, seeks power after power without any purpose or ‘end,’ and only ceases to do so when he dies. Thus, “to live is to suffer”; life “is an outright curse.” Schopenhauer likens human life to Ixion, whom Zeus punished by Zeus for daring to desire Hera, thrusting him on a wing of fire in Tartarus. Ixion’s only, temporary relief from eternal torture occurred when Orpheus “descended into the Underworld and charmed its inhabitants with his song,” distracting them from their agonies. Music preeminently, the other fine arts to lesser degrees, representing the will “as thing-in-itself,” divorced from physicality and even from psychic striving, allows selves to lose themselves, to “detach us from the objects of our care.” “To behold the sufferings of Oedipus or Lear is precisely to be taken away from our own,” if only for a while. Not the artist but the saint, who has “neutralized the will to be and to live through the gnosis of nothingness,” who has adopted a stance of thoroughgoing resignation towards all that is, including himself, no longer suffers and is “free to feel compassion for the suffering of other human beings and even for that of animals.” But music is an important step in the saintly direction. Listening to music, Schopenhauer writes, is “an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing.” Thus, it turns out that individualism, the characteristically modern claim, “applies only to the world of phenomena,” which is illusory. While he resembles Timaeus in claiming that music enables us to connect us with “will as process rather than with a stable mode of soul and character,” he regards music not as “sensed ratio” but as “the embodiment of tension or force.” Music’s core is not consonance or harmony but dissonance, “the tonal analogue of desire,” best heard in the appoggiatura, the “leaning tone,” the “perfect musical analogue of longing,” of eros. 

“Music as force flourishes in the tradition of modern tonal harmony,” from Bach to Wagner and to this day. In it, “there is a play of forces: tonal dynamism,” a music “friendly to the language of will, since will is tension, and force is will that has not yet attained self-consciousness.” Schopenhauer regards Wagner’s music as the supreme expression of the force that is longing, “the tonal analogue of eros as infinite longing,” with no telos, no rest. In Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, “the universal, undying truth of the story is not in the death-bound characters but in the tones.” Music, Schopenhauer writes, is “a copy of the will itself.” Whereas the other arts can only “present universality through the medium of things,” music “makes no such appeal and represents, imitates the world’s pure subjectivity” through “tones all by themselves.” The other arts are visual, and Socrates’ theory of the Ideas, requiring the sunlight of the Good, outside the Cave of convention, rejects the world of hearing, of opinion, oral poetry, rhetoric. Schopenhauer rejects sight for hearing, hearing of “the melody to which the world is the text.” “Tones all by themselves represent the indwelling, immortal spirit of the world.” Melody is “the ultimate mythos and symbol of human life” inasmuch as it portrays, as Schopenhauer puts it, “every agitation, every effort, every movement of the will, everything which the faculty of reason summarizes under the wide and negative concept of feeling, and which cannot be further taken up into the abstractions of reason.” “Nothing in the natural world or in the inner and outer life of man” does not “find its counterpart in the all-embracing realm of tones.” Music symbolizes “the whole of things.” 

There is still another music, apart from the ‘ancient’ music discussed in the Platonic dialogues or the ‘modern’ music Schopenhauer loves. It is the music of the Bible, the music of polyphony, the music of the Creator-God, who is neither “a craftsman who leaves the world after having made it, nor Aristotle’s indifferent prime mover.” And contra Schopenhauer and the moderns, the God of the Bible exists and, moreover, is a person “to whom one can pray.” With the God of the Bible, “salvation comes not from dialectic, or astronomy, or art, or the death of care based on the gnosis of cosmic nothingness, but from faith in God.” We hear it in the “unperturbed disposition” of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Sicut cervus, where “the music is a continually graceful gesture that transmutes the pain of longing into a serene order of voices that seem always to know and love their place.” In this choral music, “the voice that follows seems to be inspired to enter by the one that leads,” with each part moving “in happy obedience to the rules of good voice leading.” “They seem to delight in each other’s company and to be naturally social,” members of “a musical community that captures the sound and being of friendship.” Individual, yes; individualistic, no. “The voices of Sicut cervus…may be said to enact the contrapuntal play and gracious reciprocity that we find among souls in Dante’s Paradiso.“

Following the argument of the Austrian musicologist Victor Zuckerkandl, who preceded him at St. John’s College, Kalkavage understands music as “heard motion,” motion both in the outer world and the inner world of the soul or the body. Zuckerkandl “comes very close to positing, with Schopenhauer, a cosmic will,” while departing from the philosopher in refraining from “regard[ing] the external world as an illusion” and music as “the symbology of emotion, although it certainly arouses emotions.” Nor does he share Schopenhauer’s view of music as a “private momentary refuge from the wheel of Ixion” but, on the contrary, as “the frequently communal flourishing of our innately musical nature and a celebratory mode of being-in-the-world.” In this, he comes much closer not only to the world but to the God of the Bible, and the gods of the Greek poets, all of them persons acting in time, rather than the god of the philosophers, which exist “beyond place, time, and motion and therefore beyond music.” An eternal and temporal God acts in a time conceived in contradiction to Schopenhauer and Van Gogh, who thought of time “as Kronos, the giant who devoured his children.” Music ‘keeps time’ by moving rhythmically: “We hear the waltz-wave that comes to us, and we move with it.” This is not Schopenhauer, it is Bergson.

It is also modern, in the sense that tonal music breaks with the ‘modal’ music, as it is called, the Church music of the Middle Ages. “In the music of earlier times,” Zuckerkangl writes, tones were not free; they were bound to words, as in song, or to actions that call for regular bodily movement, as in dance, work, ceremonial. Thus the world of things, the spatial world, forced itself into the tonal world, mingled with it, and was able to prevent an insight into the very essence of music.” That essence finds its expression not in voices but in musical instruments. As Kalkavage paraphrases him, “Time, through tonal music, becomes the new medium for image-formation, the medium in which human beings can now find a paradigmatic meaning that is more faithful to the dynamic, forward-moving world in which they live and to the ever-developing freedom of the human spirit.” It is to be noted that Kalkavage has written extensively on Hegel, and he observes that Zuckerkangl “seems to rely on a Hegelian supposition of historical progress.” Modal music, by contrast, features not so much motion and struggle but constancy and peace. The monks who sing it sing with relaxed throats. They sing slowly, leaving space for reverent contemplation, a glowing solemnity. Modal music was held to be healing. It does not strive for God because in a sense the monks are already with Him. Nothing about it is rushed, worried, busy.

This is not to say that modern music abandons space and rest entirely. How could the tones of modern music sound separately “if space did not keep them apart?” And “how could polyphony, many voices at once, be possible without a space in which the many voices pursued their distinguishable linear careers?” Music moves from outside me to inside me. I am the “destination and addressee” of musical tones. Unlike thoughts, tones “always come from me from without,” surrounding me. But unlike color, which also comes from outside of me, it is not delimited in one space. The eye highlights the externality of Being, its externality. In its movement, music mimics life, the life that surrounds us and permeates us. (Again, Bergson.) This makes music “a window to nature.” “In music, we experience space as not empty but full. It is space that is alive.” As such (and now quoting Zuckerkandl again), tones “encounter not only me but one another.” He compares it to a magnetic force-field. Music isn’t simply a matter of “aesthetic beauty” but of “cognition and truth.” “Like philosophy, it is a mode of openness to the whole of all things, a cognitive attunement to the way things are, not conceptual but intuitive.” The life, the nature of tonal music centers in its polyphony, as in Verdi’s opera, Otello, in which Othello and Desdemona, Iago and Emilia, sing at the same time without cacophony. “Tones can do this because, as directed tensions in auditory space, they encounter one another, relate to one another in determinate ways,” as “the words ride, as it were, on the coattails of tones.” And, with anti-Schopenhauerian optimism, they ride ‘upward,’ toward crescendo. This is not the utopian, “better world” of Romanticism but “rather a mode of access to the world in which we live.” “Nature is seen to have through music an inner life, a kind of soul that animates and enchants the external world”; it is integral to nature. It would be a mistake to say that music has “a particular meaning or meanings”; rather, it has “meaningfulness.” “The external world is revealed as the material host and home of immaterial tending.” Unlike Zuckerkangl, who inclines to reject the rational aspect of music, Kalkavage concurs with Timaeus and his esteem for “the Pythagorean ratios. “Number is a bond between music and nature, and a cause of the world’s beautiful order.” Like the world, music is measurable. It is no chaos. It can partake in logos, marry words. To consider this marriage, Kalkavage turns to a couple of arias, both on love: “divine love” in the aria, “Out of love is my Savior willing to die” in Bach’s St Matthew Passion and “This image is enchantingly beautiful” in Mozart’s Magic Flute.

In Matthew 26-27, Jesus tells his disciples to take and eat the bread, representing his body, then to take and drink from the cup of wine, representing his blood. The Last Supper is last, spiritually considered, because acceptance of Christ’s covenant, integrating His sacrificial love into oneself, is the last meal anyone will ever need on earth. Breaking the bread, the body of Jesus, drinking the wine, the life-blood of Jesus, evokes His Passion, the supreme pain inflicted by God the Father upon His Son, for the sake of the salvation of His followers. “The arias of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion are the most stunning evocations of passion in the work.” “What role do our passions,” evoked by mingling words and tones, “play in the Passion as depicted by Bach?” And “What does Bach’s music contribute to our understanding of Christ’s suffering and death?”

Given the agony of the Passion as the supreme expression of divine love, the music is, must be, “relentless in its surge and complexity,” the “sound of a depth that continually rises to the heavens.” While the first two choruses lament, the third, the voices of the boys’ choir “float on high, as if from the heavens, down upon the surging tide of all the adult complexity and confusion.” They invite the listeners to become as little children. “Bach combines dark and bright, complex and simple, exotic and familiar, somber and joyous, bitter and sweet”—all impassioned. Yet, “as musical meditations they are also a means by which the events in Matthew’s story become objects of thought.” The overarching thought is, “Out of love is my Savior willing to die”—an innocent who takes the worst punishment to save me from “eternal damnation,” the just judgment of God, inasmuch as sins against an eternal Person might be considered to deserve eternal punishment. Bach accompanies the song of the voices with the song of a flute, whose “wordless song establishes a mood of sublime desolation,” a mood of longing, of eros; the soprano’s song that follows is a song not of eros but of agape, of divine love. “Eros, we might say, is summoned in order to be purified, purged of his self-seeking carnality.” Pan’s pipes will now be cleansed of lust. God needs nothing; His love isn’t erotic, like the love of the Greek gods. His love exists only for the sake of His creation. Nor is the aria willful, not in the desiring sense or even in the sense of willingness, of consent. “The song is not about the subjective state, the resolve or willingness, of the singer”; it is rather “the direct statement of a fact, the most wondrous fact the world has ever known, that Jesus, as the incarnation of divine love, submitted to an grossly unjust sentence (he ‘stood in’ for man) so that the jut sentence of eternal damnation would not fall upon us.” “Bach deputizes the soprano to reveal the doctrinal core of Jesus’s sacrifice,” that “God loves man and desires to save him from the fate he deserves.” The aria is a ‘solo.’ Like Jesus on the Cross, the singer is alone, singing a “bare, lonely sound [that] captures the terrifying vulnerability of Jesus,” a “sound of love as self-divestment, love as sacrifice.” “Nothing less than an eternal love was necessary if we were to be saved from eternal damnation.”

The “power of song” consists in inducing the listener “not just [to] register meaning but experience it,” “do[ing] for words what words cannot do for themselves,” giving them “new life,” even as God’s love give man new life. “When words and tones are wedded, words strike us, come home to us, in a most intimate and powerful way,” in the most loving way. “Conceptual meaning” is one thing, the “weight and power” of what we think of is quite another. “To be fully awake to faith, we must be struck, perhaps even shocked, by the objects of faith”—pierced as surely as Jesus was pierced by the centurion’s spear. In no way does Kalkavage intend to minimize, let alone denigrate, the conceptual meaning of words, including God’s Word. “Bach’s music offers the listener food for thought” by means of “the listener’s faculty for delight” and of “wonder at the sacrifice that is at the center of Christian faith and at the power of music that can bring about a more intimate union with that faith.” 

The question that philosophers, ancient and modern, raise about any such intimate union is, has the love whose bonds have been tightened bound you to the truth? Mozart is a man of the Enlightenment, indeed a Freemason, and he takes us “from Bach’s musicalized world of divine love to the love between man and woman and the secular religion of [his] Magic Flute.” The aria in question is, “This image is enchantingly beautiful.” A man of the Enlightenment wants to know if the image really depicts a nature that is as beautiful, as really enchanting; the man of the Bible suspects idolatry in either enchantment. When Prince Tamino looks longingly at the picture of Pamina, daughter of the Queen of the Night, is he looking at, longing for, the real thing? The Magic Flute is “filled with Masonic ideals, symbols, terms, rituals, and numerology,” but do they indicate anything real? if “in responding to music we perceive feelingly and feel perceptively,” with perception as “primary,” and if musical tones enable us to “gain entrance” to the “musical universe,” how does the musical universe bring listeners to the core of the universe? 

In the opera, the Queen of the Night intends “to use Tamino’s love for Pamino to seduce the hero into saving Pamina from Sarastro, the supposed villain who has abducted Pamina”—a ‘secular’ salvation. In seeing the image, Tamino doesn’t merely stare. He questions his feeling, identifying it as love, then wondering not at what he feels but what he would do if his beloved were really there. That is, he looks, he feels; Montaigne-like, he “beholds his inner state and makes it an object of reflection,” engaging in “inner dialogue and questioning,” then finally thinks again, not of his beloved, simply, nor of his now-clarified condition of soul, but of what action fits the apparent character of his beloved and the love that has taken perceived form in his mind and heart. The music of the aria itself has a character, Besonnenheit or “rational awareness, sensibleness, being in one’s right mind.” The love of the Biblical God, agape, expresses God’s nature as Logos; the love of the Enlightenment man is no less rational, but perhaps rational in a different way. The love of the Biblical God commands his followers to be as innocent as doves but as prudent as serpents. The love of the Enlightenment man also brings him to prudent action (if perhaps not so much to innocence). Musically, Mozart’s tonal harmony, with its “structured movement,” guides the souls of listeners to reasoning love, reasoning life. The orchestral finale to Tamino’s aria “capture the two complementary sides of Tamino’s nature: the first heroic and forte, the second ender and piano,” ending “with a hush,” because “what Tamino ultimately desires is not continued arousal or heroism for his own sake, but rest—the blissful repose and heart’s ease that comes from lasting union with the beloved.”

So is the lover’s reasoning, measured, balanced soul, a soul that does not wreck itself in its erotic longing. As Tamino’s beloved, “Pamina is the focal point of the opera.” Their names are nearly identical twins, differing finally in sex; they are well matched, if their sexual difference can be reconciled. Pamina, as a woman, is the vulnerable one, the one who “endures the greatest and most prolonged sufferings: her mother’s absence, the stern tutelage of Sarastro, the violent advances and blackmail of Monostatos, the revelation of the mother she loves as a demon bent on a murder Pamina herself is ordered to commit.” In her despair, she sings what has been called Mozart’s greatest aria. The ‘magic’ flute is music, magical in the sense that it enchants and enlightens at once—precisely the marriage philosophy doubts, when contemplating poetry, most immediately the sung poetry, the winged words, of Homer. Mozart would redeem secular, Enlightenment, rationalism from its prosaicness while saving music and poetry from delusion. “It is Pamina who reveals that the magical vocation of music is not to gain power over others—the Machiavellian passion—”or to court”—the seductive passion at the core of Romanticism—”or merely to amuse oneself”—the trivial life of what Nietzsche would later deride as that of the Last Man—but “to ward off the fear of death,” the Hobbesian passion that may undergird all of the other modern passions. At the end of the opera, Tamino, by now well tested by a series of trials, finally sees his beloved face to face—as the Bible promises those redeemed by Christ will see one another in Paradise. The lovers “now see each other clearly for the first time,” see one another not as images or as ideas or as ideals, in what Kalkavage (that student of Hegel) calls “mutual recognition.” They sing in “two halves of a little musical circle in F major,” a “wedding ceremony in tones.” “Passion, now perceptive, finds its purpose.” Love is no “mere feeling” but an “act,” an act taking in knowledge of the beloved “not as an eternal possession but as a partner in the trials of life.” Even more than music, Pamina is “the true magic of Mozart’s Magic Flute.” The lovers are Adam and Eve, “Man and Woman,” perfected in this world. This intimate order can then form the foundation of a just political order, “the marriage of marriage and politics, private and public, love and rule” in a reconciliation of opposites in which neither one of the pair loses his, her, identity or unique soul. The names become a nature. 

The Christian music of Bach, the Enlightenment music of Mozart, both intended to heal wounded human nature, no longer prevail in the atonal music of Schoenberg. Behind that composer sit the philosopher, Schopenhauer and the composer, Richard Wagner. The “musical universe” of Tristan and Isolde “consecrates a love that combines the human and the divine—not in Christ as mediator or in marriage and a perfected social order, but in eros and its bond with death as a sacred consummation.” Wagner had indeed read The World as Will and Representation while he composed his Ring cycle; the philosopher’s “cosmic gloom” resonated with him. With Schopenhauer, he considered Eros as a dangerous god who leads lovers not to joy but sorrow. “What the force of cosmic Eros does to the lover-acolytes, Wagner does to his listeners through tones,” deployed “violently, tyrannically, like love itself,” expressing “the raw subjectivity of feeling.” Unlike Schopenhauer, however, Wagner attempts to elevate love beyond the status of “a ruse that the noumenal will employs to propagate the species,” a delusion that suckers us into propagating our kind. For him, as for the ancients, Eros binds souls, not only bodies in its Dionysian frenzy, making it all the more fatal. Tristan commits what is effectively suicide in a sword fight; Isolde follows him in death, each experiencing the “highest bliss,” the condition of “unconsciousness achieved when love as Eros is pushed to its extreme point.” as each foregoes “the trivial transitory pleasures of sex for the final rush of self-immolation and metaphysical union.” “Death is the ultimate union,” the “union of the lovers with one another through union with the World Spirit,” whereby they achieve “freedom from bodily, worldly taint and from the principle and prison of individuation.” [1] When they sing, Eros “sings through them.” “Love, for Wagner, seeks the total merging of the lovers’ separate selves,” not in “mere being-with or even an eternal intertwining,” but “the total merging of the lovers’ separate selves, a union that spells the obliteration of the lovers as individual beings” that they can achieve only in death. “Love is the ultimate nihilist.” And so they “hurl themselves into Love’s abyss,” throwing “Schopenhaurian calm to the winds.” No “detached contemplation” for Wagner; to truly know is not to think but to feel. 

Kalkavage soberly intervenes to remark that “Wagner, as a Romantic, in both his music and his theoretical writings tends to overdo the role of feeling in music to the detriment of aesthetic contemplation.” But “in music, passion and perception always work together.” If “in music we are hearing tonal analogues, symbols, of that of which we ourselves are made,” then music occasions “insight and self-knowledge.” Music illuminates, “affirm[ing] that goodness consists in beautiful order, in a well-ordered cosmos like the one depicted in the Timaeus, rather than an abyss of indeterminacy.” Not Tristan and Isolde but Dante and Beatrice are good. “Listening to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is a ravishing, if dangerous, human experience,” one that invites its audience to “die to music,” to imbibe his all-too-effective tone-potion,” transforming us into “the voluptuous music of death-bound eros,” into sailors who do not plug their ears at the songs of the Sirens. Better to respond by searching for an antidote to that potion, to resist “the lovers’ death wish and the gnostic nihilism it embodies, to pursue without illusion a love that preserves rather than destroys, celebrates rather than abolishes individuality, and seeks life rather than death, clarity rather than warmth alone, wakefulness rather than sleep, and reconciliation with the external world, in which great evil is mixed with great good.” 

The preference for madness over sanity leads to the demonic, as seen in Dr. Faustus, Thomas Mann’s music-obsessed novel. Mann’s musical focus isn’t Wagner but Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone composition, which Mann considers a prelude to the madness of the Third Reich, in which the soul of Germans stood revealed. Schoenberg radicalized Wagner and the subsequent German composers (notably, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler), who had begun to distance themselves from tonal music. Schoenberg’s initial ‘atonal’ music “dispensed with the tonic but had no intrinsic principle of order.” It was a negation. His twelve-tone composition amounted an attempt to reconstitute music on a new foundation, namely, “tonal egalitarianism,” the rejection of the dissonances that bespeak hierarchy. Tones returned, but they were ‘democratized.’ The problem is that this democracy was not republican, not civic, self-governing, but a leveling that invites tyranny. After all, to achieve tonal egalitarianism, one needs a composer, a master who keeps all the tones equal beneath him. Twelve-tone music steps to the tune not of Tocqueville’s American democracy but to Tocqueville’s greatest fear, regimes of egalitarian despotism.

A music without cadences is a music that “no longer has a narrative structure but lives in the moment,” without a telos. It uses sounds to express moods, and that’s about it. In Mann’ s novel, the protagonist, the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, has been influenced decisively not only by Schoenberg but by Theodor Adorno and, behind both of them, Nietzsche. In a pact with a devil, Leverkühn exchanges his soul, specifically his “capacity for human love,” in exchange for “twenty-four years of inspired musical creativity.” The devil gives him “the Dionysian jolt” (commended, of course, by Nietzsche) to get him out of his uncreative rationalism. But in exchanging both love and reason for creativity, Leverkühn can only affirm self-interest as his animating motive. And like Nietzsche, who was said to have become infected with syphilis at a brothel, so too does Leverkühn. Like the death-fated lovers of Wagner, he will die, but without even the love that they had shared. His sin, like that of Faust in the Faust Book, is “not against God but against his own nature—his body, mind, and well-being, as the bacillus colonizes his brain. The devil assures him that he will become “an aesthetic Führer [who] will break through the age,” expressing “his will to power in the mystic realm of tones,” thereby “bring[ing] about a double barbarism, double because it comes after liberal humanitarianism,” Kantianism, the moral dimension of modern rationalism. Leverkühn has become the musical analogue to Hitler but, unlike Hitler, in the end he experiences remorse. “The Faustian cosmos…embodies mischief and monstrosity. Its intricate designs are demonic rather than divine.” As to Mann’s novel, “in its supremely ordered word-images of music [it] transcends devil, darkness, and despair.” Putting things in musical terms, if dissonance needs consonance to be dissonance and to be understood as dissonance, then consonance must come from the listener and his surroundings. But that means consonance exists. And if consonance exists, how can Being itself be nothing but dissonance, chaos? That is, atonal music and the philosophic nihilism behind it partake of the dilemma of modern philosophy itself, which inclines to dismiss nature as meaningless while asserting human rule over nature: Where, then, did man come from? 

With this, Kalkavage concludes three sets of paired chapters: two on musicology, two on the contrast between the tonal music of the Christian Bach and the tonal music of the Freemason Mozart, and two on the Schopenhauer-and-Nietzsche-driven ‘liberation’ from tonality, which amounts to a ‘liberation’ from both faith and reason, the prefiguration of what is usually called ‘postmodernism.’ In his seventh and final chapter, he considers Francis Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites, first produced in 1957. Born in Paris to a Roman Catholic family, Poulenc plunged into the avant-garde world of his city; he was ‘gay’ in both senses of the word, and his early music was light, witty, and popular. The sudden death of a fellow composer in 1936 turned him back to Catholicism; the Dialogues was one result of his newfound seriousness. The opera, based on a never-produced screen by the eminent French Catholic, Georges Bernanos, tells the story of sixteen Carmelite nuns who were guillotined by the atheist fanatics of Jacobinism in 1794. “Here we find no tale of romantic love or case of mistaken identity,” the staples of so much opera. The Dialogues “sweeps us up in a double terror: the French Reign of Terror in the external world and the internal error of Blanche de la Force,” a young aristocratic woman who recently joined the order, fearing of the increasing egalitarian chaos around her and her family. Initially anything but Blanche “of the Strength,” the opera show her on a “spiritual journey from crippling fear to liberating martyrdom.” As her story unfolds, we hear a musical world that is French-Catholic rather than German-nihilist, “a world in which grace triumphs over the satanic will to mock murder and desecrate,” a “tonic for the cosmic gloom and cold intellectualism of Mann’s Faustus novel.” And unlike Wagner’s Tristan, in which tones, “the incarnation of Schopenhauer’s cosmic will,” are “meant to engulf words and the illusory world to which words belong,” Poulenc orchestrates his work lightly, keeping his songs “close to real life and the free flow of dialogue,” doing “nothing to obscure Bernanos’s lucid text.” Among the words sung are those by the young and very aptly named Sister Constance: “We do not die each for ourselves, but each for another, or even each in place of another”—an imitatio Christi. Among Bernanos’s favorite saints was Joan of Arc. Bernanos and Poulenc nonetheless caution, in a song sung by the Prioress, “that martyrdom is a reward to be accepted,” like grace, and perhaps an instance of grace, “not an achievement to be sought out,” since “the striving for martyrdom remains a strong temptation for the heroic-minded,” who often lack the mesure of reason. “The vocation of music is to reveal, in tones and rhythms, the inner truth of all things,” a vocation reminiscent of Timaeus’ claim, but now Christian. It is by grace, Poulenc wrote, that “my Carmelites go to the scaffold with an extraordinary calm and faith,” which are “at the heart of all mystical experience.” Blanche sings her final song giving tribute to the execution, a tribute “not to human heroism but to the Triune God.” As Jesus tells his disciples, “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

Music, then, has meaning, even when its authors reject meaning. Those musical authors who do not (self-contradictorily) reject meaning partake of reason—especially of number and ratio—and also of life, bringing live people to sing and to listen to song. “Music in its greatest moments—especially moments in which tones take their cue from sacred words—is a life-celebrating point of contact with things that do not come to be and pass away but are.”

 

Note

1. This “lays bare the gnostic underpinning of the worldviews of Schopenhauer and Wagner,” inasmuch as Gnosticism “posits a strict dualism between good and evil,” with evil seen in “the world of determinate things, the realm of body,” the “arena of selfishness, greed, envy, love of wealth and honor, competition, hatred, war, and lies,” the world of “suffering, in particular erotic suffering”—all of it caused by “the principle of individuation,” the principle that binds all of us, and all things, into bodies. Not the light which enables us to see limits, including bodily limits, but night is good, “cancel[ing] all determinateness, eras[ing] all boundaries, and drown[ing] all distinctions in the warm sea of undifferentiated feeling.” Death is the ultimate night, the ultimate darkness, and therefore the ultimate good, the purpose of eros.

Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss: Primitive Classification. Rodney Needham translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. French original published in 1903.

 

Denying that logic is natural, by which they mean innate to human beings, the authors claim that their “methods of scientific thought [are] veritable social institutions whose origin sociology alone can retrace and explain.” How, then, does sociology explain itself? And how does it know that its self-explanation, if it has one, is accurate, and how does it know that its explanation of other phenomena, including the methods of scientific thought, are accurate?

The authors are historicists, offering an explanation of scientific method, and especially of scientific classification as “a history,” one moreover with “a considerable prehistory.” According to them, scientific classification is only as old as Aristotle, but before him there existed “primitive classification.” “It would be impossible to exaggerate, in fact, the state of indistinction from which the human mind developed,” and substantial elements of this fuzzy thinking persist, as seen “even today” in “a considerable portion of our popular literature, our myths, and our religions,” founded as they are “in a fundamental confusion of all images and ideas,” as seen in notions of metamorphosis and “the materialization of spirits and the spiritualization of material objects.” “The Christian dogma of transubstantiation is a consequence of this state of mind and may serve to prove its generality.” Other “cultures” still claim that transformation of one thing to another occurs; “the Bororo [for example] sincerely images himself to be a parrot.” In this, “culture” mirrors the development of the individual human mind, which begins with “only a continuous flow of representations which are lost one in another,” and even such distinctions as mature human beings make would remain “quite fragmentary” “if education did not inculcate ways of thinking which it could never have established by its own efforts and which are the result of an entire historical development,” since “every classification implies a hierarchical order for which neither the tangible world nor our mind gives us the model.” If so, if all is ‘social history, how does sociology help? How does it begin? And if classification systems are historically and socially determined, then why is ‘sociology’ not merely another game of thrones? If it is, why should it replace the existing ‘principalities and powers’? Why would that replacement do any good?

Durkheim and Mauss first consider the “primitive” classification systems seen among native Australian peoples. Each tribe has two sections, what the ancient Greeks called phratries and what the authors call “moieties.” Each moiety has clans within in it, and each also has two marriage classes within it. Crucially, “the classification of things reproduces this classification of men,” although it is assumed rather than argued that it isn’t the other way around. For example, alligators constitute one moiety, kangaroos another, although some moieties and some clans may encompass a variety of what we would call animal species. Human and animal moieties intersect, as the totems of a clan within a moiety often corresponds to the animal represented on a totem. “Things attributed to one moiety are clearly separated from those which are attributed to the other; those attributed to different clans of one and the same moiety are no less distinct. But all those which are included in one and the same clan are, in large measure, undifferentiated. They are of the same nature”—the latter being a term brought in from the Greeks, inasmuch as the Australian peoples do not take reality to be stable, predictable; an event such as death, for example, is always attributed to sorcery. Within the tribes, “the social divisions applied to the primitive mass of representations have indeed cut them into a certain number of delimited divisions, but the interior of these divisions has remained in a relatively amorphous state which testifies to the slowness and the difficulty with which the classificatory function has been established.” This leaves one to wonder how the moieties themselves were distinguished, if not by means of some natural human capacity. Indeed, the authors observe that when a group becomes too large it is divided, whether it is a moiety divided into clans and sub-clans or a non-human group. The authors describe this as “a completely logical process,” suggesting an underlying human nature beneath primitive classification. This notwithstanding, while for Western men “the essence of man is his humanity,” “the essence of the Australian is in his totem.” 

The totems are closely associated with sorcery, magic. Each totem “confers upon the individuals who belong to it various powers over different kinds of things.” Some of these powers correlate the totem with an animal species, but not necessarily. For example, the people whose totem is a drum may have powers associated with tortoises, but they also have “the right to conduct a ceremony which consists in imitating dogs.” 

The same kind of classification prevails in North America, where the Zuñi tribe of the Pueblo people classify tribes by regions but also by the system “we have seen already in Australia.” The phenomenon also may be seen among the Omaha tribe of the Sioux, hundreds of miles further to the north of the Pueblo. Space and totem are related. Two moieties will be seen to “have distinct personalities,” and “because each has a different role in the life of the tribe, they are spatially opposed; one is established on the one side, the other on the other side; one is oriented in one direction, the other in the opposite.” And this prevails not only among the Zuñi and the Omaha but throughout the continent, “among the Iroquois, the Wyandot, the disintegrated Seminole tribe of Florida, the Tlingit, and the Loucheux or Déné Dindjé, the most northern, the most bastardized, but also the most primitive of Indians.” (André Malraux recounts a story told by Carl Jung, who visited one of the North American Indian tribes. When the chief politely inquired what Jung’s totem was, the great social scientist answered that his people, the Swiss, had no totems. When they descended from the pole-supported room they had been meeting in, the chief descended the ladder as Westerners descend a staircase—facing out, while Jung descended as Westerners descend a ladder, facing the ladder. When Jung stood on the ground, the chief silently pointed to the Bear of Berne, embroidered on the back of Jung’s jacket. “The bear is the only animal that descends with its face to a tree trunk—or a ladder.”) What we would call nature is both fluid—susceptible to the manipulations of sorcery—and rigid—classified in accordance with “fixed relationships to equally fixed regions in space.” Moreover, the camp, the region the tribe inhabits, “is the center of the universe, and the whole universe is concentrated within it.” “Cosmic space and tribal space are thus only very imperfectly distinguished, and the mind passes from one to the other without difficulty, almost without being aware of doings so.”

And there is Asia. In China, too, the “classification of regions, seasons, things, and animal species dominates the whole of life.” “It is the very principle of the famous doctrine of gung-shui, and through this it determines the orientation of buildings, the foundation of towns and houses, the siting of toms and cemeteries; if certain tasks are undertaken here and others there, if certain affairs are conducted at such and such a time, this is due to reasons based on this traditional systematization.” “All these infinitely numerous elements are combined to determine the genus and the species of things in nature, the direction of movement of forces, and acts which must be performed, thus giving the impression of a philosophy which is at once subtle and naive, rudimentary and refined.” As for their own ‘philosophy,’ it has a subtlety and a naivete of its own, as the authors find “traces” of social origins of the Chinese classification system but nothing very impressive. They tend to ‘sociologize’ human life, including the life of human minds, without considering the infinite regress this entails, if one contemplates their own enterprise.

The authors do not exclude ancient Western societies from their inquiry. “One cannot but remark that the two principles of Heraclitean Ionism, viz. war and peace, and those of Empedocles, viz. love and strife, divide things between them in the same way as do yang and yin in the Chinese classification,” or that “the relationships established by the Pythagoreans between numbers, elements, sexes, and a certain number of other things are reminiscent of the correspondences of magico-religious origin which we have had occasion to discuss.” The notion of the world “as a vast system of classified and hierarchized sympathies” may be discerned among some characters in the Platonic dialogues. 

The authors conclude by noticing a certain continuity between “primitive classifications” and those classifications “employed by more civilized peoples.” The early classifications feature “all the essential characteristics” of those we now have: they are hierarchical, with groups “stand[ing] in fixed relationships to each other,” forming “a single whole”; they have “a purely speculative purpose,” namely “to advance understanding,” not (or at least not only) to “facilitate action.” “Such classifications are thus intended, above all, to connect ideas, to unify knowledge; as such, they may be said without inexactitude to be scientific, and to constitute a first philosophy of nature.” As sociologists, Durkheim and Mauss insist that primitive men were not “divided into clans by a pre-existing classification of things but, on the contrary, they classified things because they were divided by clans.” That is, they are social determinists, albeit social determinists who never explain how they were able to climb from the cave of convention to the bright sunlight of social science.

As proof, they observe that “the first logical categories were social categories; the first classes of things were classes of men, into which the things were integrated.” Really? What about the distinctions between the edible and the inedible, light and dark, hot and cold? “Moieties were the first genera; clans, the first species.” Male and female? They claim that it was “states of the collective soul which gave birth to these groupings,” but this sociocentric explanation of human cognition cannot be the whole account even of “primitive classification.” While it is often true that “the pressure exerted by the group on each of its members does not permit individuals to judge freely the notions which society itself has elaborated,” this would make sociology itself a dubious enterprise. An enterprise, moreover, that inclines to replace moral reasoning with scientific accounts of morality, thereby undermining the societies in which sociologists practice their craft, and indeed possibility of sociology’s intellectual self-immolation.

Adam Zagajewski:  A Defense of Ardor. Claire Cavanaugh translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004. First published in Poland in 2004.

 

A Pole who has lived in what was West Berlin (“a peculiar synthesis of the old Prussian capital” with a frivolous “fascination” with “Manhattan and the avant-garde”), Paris (“one of the few European metropolises to possess the secret of eternal youth,” although no longer the intellectual capital it had been in the previous generation), and Houston (“computers, highways, and crude oil but also wonderful libraries and a splendid symphony”), Adam Zagajewski likens himself to “a passenger on a small submarine that has not one periscope but four: Polish tradition, German literature, French culture (“with its penetrating intelligence and Jansenist moralism”), and the Anglo-American “literature of specifics passion, and conversation,” of Shakespeare, Keats, and Robert Lowell. He regrets to report that wherever he has lived, he has encountered a mood of cool irony, a refusal of the ardor with which literature, music, and painting are made. 

In an earlier generation, Thomas Mann’s irony made sense. “The author of Buddenbrooks saw Nazism and fascism as a return to the energies of the mythic world, to the destructive violence of archaic myths, and hoped to resist this great wave of terror with the soothing humanist irony.” Today’s irony “expresses rather a disillusionment with the collapse of utopian expectations, an ideological crisis provoked by the erosion and discrediting of those visions that hoped to replace the traditional metaphysics of religious faith with eschatological political theories,” most especially Marxism. But recurrence to the conservatism of T. S. Eliot, as some propose, will not suffice, “blind” as it is “to the phenomenal (and fragile) benefits we derive from liberal democracy.” Using irony as a weapon, some contemporary authors “flog consumerist society,” others religion, and “still others do battle with the bourgeoisie.” In doing so, however, they release the imp of the perverse, the all-too-perverse. “Too long a stay in the world of irony and doubt awakens in us a yearning for different, more nutritious fare.” 

What would that be? Zagajewski recommends Plato’s Symposium, with its speech by Diotima “on the vertical wanderings of love,” the eros or ardor by which the soul ascends toward what is worthy of the soul and its ardor: what is good, what is beautiful. Plato describes metaxu, the condition of “being ‘in-between’ our earth, our (so we suppose) comprehensible, concrete, material surroundings, and transcendence, mystery.” This in-betweenness’ “defines the situation of the human, a being who is incurably ‘en route.'” Incurably: in this life “we’ll never manage to settle permanently in transcendence once and for all.” We won’t “even fully learn its meaning,” here. We “always return to the quotidian: after experiencing an epiphany, writing a poem, we’ll go to the kitchen and decide what to have for dinner.” “And this is as it should be, since otherwise lunacy lies in wait above and boredom down below.” Because we live in-between, and must live in-between, “we must keep close guard on our own selves,” avoid the temptation to live as if permanently transported to some higher realm. That is, the opposite of inveterate irony is unthinking ardor. Still, “the real danger of our historical moment” is excess of irony, not excess of ardor. Properly exercised, irony fine tunes ardor. It should not corrode it, becoming itself “a rather perverse form of certainty.”

And it need not. “Uncertainty doesn’t contradict ardor,” as zetetic Socrates showed by his way of life. Nor does ardor preclude a sense of humor, as indeed Socrates again showed. Not only philosophy but poetry too can respond to ardor, “the earth’s fervent song,” with “our own, imperfect song.” The Polish essayist and poet, Czeslaw Milosz, himself an exile from the Communist regime, has lived in “a ceaseless wandering” between the goodness of moderation and moments of transcendence, “transform[ing] the condition of metaxu into an ongoing, vivifying pilgrimage, an occupation for the long-distance artist.” “True ardor” links earth and sky; it may yet “return to our bookstores, our intellects.” 

But is poetry not vulnerable to the Socratic critique—too lacking in reason, too arbitrary? Poet Zagajewski resists the claim. “Poetry, after all, involves precision and correctness,” not “through empirical, quantifiable observations” but “through existential preparedness, through experience, through our own lives, through reflection and moments of illumination. But they are verified.” In the time of Socrates and Diotima, and very often for centuries since then, poets put precision and correctness (and not only of language) at the service of the religious beliefs they often shared with their political communities. Just as often, philosophers questioned those claims. Zagajewski rejects the aestheticist defense of poetry (“the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen”) as “a sort of fainthearted appeasement, a policy of evasions and concessions as concerns the literary vocation” that has resulted “in the decline of high style and the overwhelming predominance of a low style, tepid, ironic, conversational.” Poets began to take the brutal realities of the First World War as a refutation of that style because those realities belied the elevated thoughts and sentiments that young soldiers took into battle, where artillery shells ground them up in the trenches. That is, in reaction to the war they took brutal realities as reality, simply; like soldiers in the trenches, they began to keep their heads low. But this isn’t the only response to brutality. “Neither Milosz, who survived the Nazi terror, nor [Osip] Mandelstam, who didn’t survive the Stalinist nightmare, ever fell prey to the lure of a false simplicity.” Longinus understood poetry in terms of the sublime; Edmund Burke, writing on poetics and politics, understood the sublime and the beautiful—which he distinguished, as between ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Athens,’ while firmly acknowledging prudence as the virtue of politics. “Surely we don’t go to poetry for sarcasm or irony, for critical distance, learned dialectics or clever jokes”; “from poetry we expect poetry,” that is, “the vision, the fire, the flame, that accompanies spiritual revelation.” (We might even go to it for prudence, as Shakespeare proves.)

But does that vision, that fire, that flame of spiritual revelation reveal truth—that is, truth beyond the honest expression of the sentiments of the poet? Does the spiritual revelation poets bring to their readers have a genuinely noetic character? “The sublime must be understood differently these days,” “stripped of its neoclassical pomp, its alpine stage set, its theatrical overkill” to reveal not dogmatic certitudes but “the world’s mystery.” That is, poetry must become zetetic, like Socrates. And for its part, philosophy must not preen itself as the authoritative expression of the ‘spirit of the times.’ Zagajewski quotes the German poet and philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz: “Philosophy is the epoch’s judge, but things go ill when it becomes the epoch’s mouthpiece,” even as politics goes wrong when it attempts to bring the sublime directly into practice. (Pannwitz, an admirer of Nietzsche, might have reflected on that. And not only Pannwitz, Zagajewski suggests, but Jünger, Drieu La Rochelle, Malraux, Hemingway, Benn, Mayakovsky, Montherlant, Brecht, Yeats, Eliot—critics not of (or, in Hemingway’s case, not only of) the brutality of modern war but of the banality of modern peace.)

Poetry has its own form of dialectics. “The high style grows from a ceaseless dialogue between two spheres, the spiritual realm whose guardians and creators are the dead (like Virgil in the Divine Comedy) and the domain of eternal praesens, our single, precious moment, the pocket of time in which we’ve chanced to live.” What, then, can mediate between the high and the down-to-earth, whether the down-to-earth is brutal or ‘bourgeois’? “A certain metaphysical modesty,” not lacking in humor, “learning to open up” to the sublime and the beautiful in a way precluded in minds overwhelmed by the brutality of war and the banality of peace. “Modernity can’t be fought (you won’t win), even if it needs chiding upon occasion”; it “must be improved, expanded, enhanced, enriched; we must speak to it” because it “resides within us; it’s too late to attack it from the sidelines.” At the same time, “while high style need no longer stem from a dislike of modernity,” the “low style—ironic, colloquial, flat, small, minimal—may arise precisely from ressentiment—from a rejection of our silver-tongued forebears.” 

Nietzsche, the poetic philosopher who inspired those forebears, “was a mysterious figure to me and my contemporaries back in the seventies” in Poland. The Communist regime dismissed him as a lunatic, attempting to steer impressionable youths away, with the predictable opposite effect, giving him “the glory of the poète maudit.” In reading him, young Poles in Krakow experienced “the same shiver of emotion that his first readers must have felt.” Nietzsche’s derision of the pure scholars, “who seem to know everything” by means of analysis, recognizes that such men “study the fire but can describe only its ashes.” “Nietzsche gleefully calls this principle that the scholars overlook none other than life itself.” Nor did Nietzsche neglect to scorn the political dimension of modern rationalism, the state, “Bismarck’s Reich.” This braced the young Zagajewski, “living as I did under the rule of the totalitarian, Khruschevian-Brezhnevian-Gomulkovian system and half consciously seeking allies in the challenging acrobatics act of liberating oneself from the ideological and administrative constraints of Marxism.” “Here was someone who came right out and proclaimed his intellectual independence,” who “spoke from within his own spirit,” with “such buoyancy and brilliance” in resistance to “the automatism of a specific historical reality.” Such “spiritual resources” have “no need for bureaucrats and political structures.”

At the same time, “I was put off by his jabs at Socrates. I liked and admired Socrates; I had a hard time believing that the decline of Greek and European culture began with him.” But as a young poet, Zagajewski read Nietzsche not for his (mis)judgments of Socrates and of Christianity but for the “charge of pure energy” Nietzsche puts into his writing, brings to his readers. As he read on, and as his own life went forward, he came to Nietzsche’s later works, “the bombastic Zarathustra, the insufferable, unpardonably narcissistic Ecce Homo, the grim, posthumously published Will to Power.” The older Nietzsche struck the older Zagajewski as taking “the tone of a cult’s founder, of a perverse moralist obsessed with settling scores with Christianity, socialism, morality.” The older Nietzsche “did not escape the dangers of solitude that he had pointed out in his youthful essay on ‘Schopenhauer as educator’—a certain embitterment, a callousness.” Nietzsche’s retinue of followers, including but not limited to the luminaries Zagajewski has already listed, animated a century of politics they lacked the spiritual resources adequately to resist; they resisted the banality but not so much the brutality. “Certain extravagances of modern French thought,” for example, “might never have seen the light of day,” had Nietzsche not ginned up the thinkers. Was not even the Marxist V. I. Lenin, not the author of his own “manifesto of the will to power,” What Is to Be Done?” written in 1902, “when Nietzsche mania had seized all of Europe”? “I’m not sure…that I wouldn’t prefer” a “hypothetical century without Nietzsche.” “Would it have been such a disaster if Nietzsche’s famous skepticism toward the notion of truth hadn’t given birth to so many eager imitators, even in the last few decades?” In Nietzsche, and in his followers, “irrationality finally wins the day” in “this unsuccessful, betrayed mediation” between the high and the low. [1]

As a result, today “we have a vast, positivist, scientific culture that has almost entirely been purged of curiosity about the dark and irrational, while on the other hand there is the New Age with its superstitious take on the cosmos, alongside mass culture, which either favors sentimentalism or else openly admits its fascination with force, blood, and the devil.” Nonetheless, it remains true that “Nietzsche can neither be acquitted nor convicted in the political courtroom to which he is dragged time after time by both his admirers and his enemies.” Better for poets to seek “suggestions, allusions, a net full of metaphors,” amidst the “energizing uncertainty” of being, rather than “a single, central metaphor” that attempts to find and enunciate a comprehensive systematic of being. “God may have died” in the minds of moderns; this means that Dante’s poetic universe will not be reimagined any time soon. But Nietzsche was right to see that the world the moderns have made for themselves “doesn’t cherish life,” lacking “generosity, spontaneity, nobility, and poetry.” 

For one who cherished life with the strengths of character a life lived humanly requires, Zagajewski turns to the example of Józef Czapski, whom he met while both men lived in Paris, both in exile from Communist Poland. Soldier, painter, poet, essayist, Czapski had survived his internment at Katyn after Soviet forces attacked Nazi Germany. He as transferred to another prison camp before some 22,000 Polish military officers, police officers, and intelligentsia were murdered by the Soviets in several of the NKVD prisons, then buried in mass graves in and around Katyn. At the Vologda camp, he delivered lectures on Proust to his fellow prisoners. His books were banned by the Polish Communist regime, complicit in the Soviet cover-up of its war crimes.

He descended from an aristocratic family, taking from the aristocracy “only his graciousness, his breeding.” A Catholic, “he was so profoundly antidogmatic that he didn’t even trust himself,” suspecting “that faith was taking the easy way” but knowing “that disbelief could be easy too.” He resembled Socrates in that “his ‘I don’t know’ was passionate, incandescent,” ardent. “This wasn’t an ‘I don’t know’ arising from amnesia, laziness, depression, negativity, agnosticism. This ‘I don’t know’ was positive, inspired, intelligent,” “the soul of his spiritual life, his long pilgrimage.” It was “accompanied by an equally decisive ethical ‘I do know,” whereby he did not hesitate “when it came to helping the suffering, bearing witness to historical truth” (he had investigated Soviet Russian atrocities during the Polish-Soviet War that followed the Great War and those committed during the second Great War), “opposing Stalinism or Nazism.” For his trouble, the “fanatical Parisian communists” of the late 1940s “murmured that he must be one of Goebbels’s agents.” He was “the master of my not-knowing. And what is not-knowing but thought?” What the ardent Socrates knew.

“He was curiosity personified, the perfect embodiment of curiosity.” In this, “he had an extraordinary gift for empathy,” listening intently to his visitors but resisting any final judgment on what he heard from them, always ready to renew the conversation. His “theodicy was meant to remain incomplete,” as “he was constantly testing to see if his experiences were real, if those great moments of illumination weren’t simply a diversionary ploy undertaken by his glands and hormones.” As an artist, he distrusted the iconoclastic mysticism of Simone Weil and as for the regnant historicisms of his time, he exclaimed, “What’s all this about the Zeitgeist, what counts is staying true to your own vision, end discussion!” [2] And if Nietzsche, with all his thunderous judgments, finally fell short of self-knowledge, “this judge, who was also a painter, above all a painter, judged and observed himself as well, unlike those other judges who judge others exclusively and lose sight of themselves as soon as they don the wigs that transform them into wax figures, bodiless and passionless so that they can’t see themselves.” [3] In Czapski, the investigator of Soviet massacres and poet, inner freedom and civil liberty achieved “something like harmony.” To Stalin’s police, who “knew perfectly well what had happened to the Polish officers” at Katyn, an atrocity he investigated after the war, he “personified an enemy class…doomed to extinction.” And it is true that Polish aristocrats are in short supply, these days, but the Soviet Union isn’t around anymore, either. 

In Milosz, “a poet of great intelligence and great ecstasy,” he finds an equally anti-historicist tenor. “Milosz courageously takes the field to test himself against his foes, as if he’d told himself, I’ll survive this age only by absorbing it.” His poems exude “the scent not of roses but of reason,” but not the reason of modern rationalists. He understands reason in the older sense, “a way that precedes the great schism which placed the intellect of the rationalists on one side of the divide, while the other was occupied by the imagination and intelligence of the arts, who not infrequently take refuge in irrationality.” Poetry has nothing necessarily to fear from that reason, as both poetry and classical reason can “raise us above the petty network of empirical circumstances that make up our everyday lot and confinement,” “so that we can scrutinize the world attentively and ardently.” Zagajewski finds poetry’s limit in its incapacity to scrutinize modern tyranny, in “a certain variety of evil…that is simultaneously both psychological and theological,” the evil of Hitler and Stalin. For understanding that, “reach rather for historians and philosophers” or for Dostoevsky’s novels. (But perhaps also for some epic poetry, Milton, Satan’s “Evil, be thou my good”? In saying “poetry,” Zagajewski seems to be thinking mostly of lyric poetry, however.) Poetry is better at the gentler but indispensable task of “defending the spiritual life, the inner voice that speaks to us, or perhaps only whispers…as the mainstay and foundation of our freedom,” guarding “the indispensable territory of reflection and independence” against “the mighty blows and temptations of modern life.” Lyric poetry lives between reasoning inquiry and the certitudes of revelation, “between Athens and Jerusalem,” the “rift” described by Lev Shestov and Leo Strauss. “I’m angered only by small poetry, mean-spirited, unintelligent, a lackey poetry, slavishly intent on the promptings of the spirit of the age, that lazy bureaucrat flitting just above the earth in a dirty cloud of illusion”—a cheap certitude that requires none of the demands of revelation. Given the temptation to write this way, “poetry needs doubt far more than doubt needs poetry,” a doubt that purges poetry of “rhetorical insincerity, senseless chatter, falsehood, youthful loquacity, empty (inauthentic) euphoria.” At the same time, poetry opposes the excess of doubt, the resigned giving up of the search for insight, the urge to drop off Diotima’s ladder.

But how can one live a life that inquires in the poetic manner? In his final chapters, Zagajewski considers the poet’s regime—not in the sense of the rulers and ruling institutions above him, but a right way of life for him. First, leisure—as the classics would agree. From the “Puritan workaholism” of the United States to the “almost Stakhanovite work ethic” that once animated Germany, to the really Stakhanovite work ethic propounded by the Soviets, and even to the frenzied pseudo-leisure of ‘travel’ (“which tears us from our favorite books”), the contemporary world is hard on leisure. Still, one having arrived at a trip’s destination, there is refreshment in getting away from books for a while and taking a look the outside world. Zagajewski even recommends a destination: Punto Bianca, Sicily, where the remains of Hitler’s bunkers dot a spectacular beach and nature preserve. And he recounts visits to his native Lvov (“a beautiful city, bright gold in the sharp sunlight”), Krakow, the place of his intellectual awakening, and Paris in “November’s sweet warmth,” no longer Europe’s intellectual capital (is there one?). 

Second, reading. “Young poets, please read everything.” Read for memory, be “curious about what our many precursors produced before our own minds were opened.” And “read for ecstasy,” for wisdom and information but also for “a kind of energy that comes close to dance and shamanistic drunkenness.” “Memory and ecstasy need each other desperately,” memory for sober grounding, ecstasy as one reward for ardor. 

Never forget your country—Poland for Zagajewski, with its “long, theatrical existence” of military defeat, partition, tyranny with occasional glimpses of freedom. “The present young generation, well versed in postmodern theory and the pitfalls of the text, has already forgotten [the] horror” of the Communist regime, but they might make the effort to read the books that can teach them. “Polish poets never accepted modernism’s ascetic dictates; they refused to retreat to a sanctuary of hermetic metaphors”; their increasingly unwitting successors would do well to refuse retreat into a sanctuary of hermetic ‘deconstruction.’ And given that, as La Rochefoucauld observed, “sun and death” are the “two forces we can’t look in the face,” they might consider “the now unfashionable (and essential) question of religion.” Plato’s eros is one form of ardor, Biblical agape another.

 

Note

1. It is fair to say that Zagajewski follows Nietzsche, the ‘young Nietzsche,’ as it were, in his protest against the positivist rationalism of German (and Euro-American) scholarship of the late nineteenth century. But he prefers Socrates, whose only professed knowledge is of eros (a not-inconsiderable knowledge, inasmuch as he presents it as the animating reality of all nature), to the Nietzsche who replaces Socratic eros with the will to power. For a sympathetic treatment of Nietzsche’s ‘turn,’ see Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024).
2. Of another poet he admires, Zbigniew Herbert, Zagajewski remarks, “Poetry by its nature is not an entirely faithful daughter of its age; unfaithful, since she commands a secret hideout known only to herself in which she can always take refuge.” 
3. Did Nietzsche really lack self-knowledge? The eminent Nietzsche scholar Laurence Lampert thinks not: see Lampert, op. cit.