Babette E.

Babich THE SCIENCE OF WORDS OR PHILOLOGY: MUSIC IN THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY AND THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE IN THE GAY SCIENCE1

The stylistic role of music in The Birth of Tragedy2 requires less a review of Nietzsches personal sensitivity to music (though this matters) or an account of his friendship with Richard Wagner (although this is a crucial element) than it
1 The English translations from Nietzsches works follow existing translations, corrected where necessary by the present author. References are not made to page numbers in particular translations or editions but rather to numbered paragraphs, where Nietzsche himself uses these, or else to section titles as he provides these. In the case of numbered prefaces (e.g., Nietzsches Attempt at a Self Criticism to his The Birth of Tragedy), references are made with lower case roman numerals, eg., BT ii. All German citations from Nietzsches unpublished works refer to the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) or to the Frhe Schriften (FS) listing volume and the volume number, followed by the page number. Abbreviations and Sources: German Texts (KSA ) Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, G. Colli and M. Montinari, eds., Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1980; (FS) Frhe Schriften, H.J. Mette, ed., Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1994; (KGB) Nietzsches Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1987; English Translations (BT) The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1967; (HH) Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986; (BGE) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967; (D) Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999; (EH) Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993; (GM) The Genealogy of Morals. trans. R.J. Hollingdale and W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, 1989; (GS) The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckho, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Also available in translation by W. Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1974; (TI) Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968; (TL or UWL) Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsches Notebooks of the Early 1870s, trans. D.J. Breazeale, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press, 1979. 2 See for a start my bibliography, B. Babich, 2000: pp. 171-191, in addition to more recent contributions in this same direction, some of which are cited in the notes to follow. The project proposed in the current essay is the all-too modest proposal that we might consider the consequences of a literal reading of Nietzsche. Thus Heidegger once suggested that we learn to read Nietzsche as might read Aristotle (Wir mssen auch dies erst lernen, nmlich ein Buch wie Nietzsches Also sprach Zarathustra in der selben strengen Weise zu lesen wie eine Abhandlung des Aristoteles, in M. Heidegger, 1984: p. 68). Beyond Heideggers useful reminder, what follows illustrates what can be gained for philosophy when we read Nietzsche seriously.

Rivista di estetica, n.s., 28 (1 / 2005), XLV, pp. 47-78 Rosenberg & Sellier

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fundamentally presupposes the question of the relation Nietzsche had uncovered between music and words in his theory of meter and rhythm in ancient Greek3. This question reects Nietzsches architectonically4 quantitative, measured and timed, theory of words and music for his courses on rhythm and meter as well as his discussion of tragedy and music in his rst book5. It will turn out that a recollection of the meaning of the spirit of music also reviews the logical questions of metaphor and truth, inviting a parallel with The Gay Science (with regard to language and the alchemical art of love in terms of both music and science)6. This inquiry entails the purely philosophical questions of knowledge and truth yet the discussion to follow takes its point of departure from classical philology, reviewing what Nietzsche himself held to have been his most scientic discovery on the terms of his own discipline: a discovery that was never disputed by Nietzsches arch-nemesis, the classicist to beat all classicists: Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mllendor. I wrote a book on Nietzsches Philosophy of Science7, to make the case, as Kantian as it was Heideggerian, for reading Nietzsches philosophy for the sake of a possible philosophy of science that might come forth as one worthy of the name and as analytic philosophies of science are not8. The idea of such a future philosophy of science is more than a little complex but Nietzsches philological discovery needs nothing like Nietzsches philosophy of science. In the most trivially Kuhnian fashion (a point Nietzsche assumed and almost in the same words), the test of a scientic discovery is that it withdraw from thematic notice or acknowledgment as such, becoming ordinary scientic (or scholarly) convention. In this way, although we have become accustomed to view Nietzsche as the perfect embodiment of the academic outsider, his discovery is now taken as the standard in his eld (so standard indeed as to be received without fanfare or routine acknowledgment as such)9. What was Nietzsches discovery?
3 See, for example, J. W. Halporn, 1967: pp. 233-243; F. Bornmann, 1989: pp. 472-489, V. Pschl, 1979: pp. 141-155, and James I. Porter, 2000: pp. 127-166. One reviewer notes in passing that Porter seems to have diculties with Nietzsches stress theory. See Sean Gurds review in Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2001). 4 In his study of Nietzsche and music, Bertram Schmidt points out that Nietzsches invocation of the architectonic form in music echoes an earlier use already to be found in Eduard Hanslick (Vom MusicalischSchnen, 1854) and suggests that this is indeed Nietzsches own reference when he invokes this same formulaic expression. See B. Schmidt, 1991: p. 15. 5 See Nietzsches letter to Rhode dated 23 November 1870, from 27 November, in Smtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe 3 April 1869 - Mai 1872, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986: p. 159. See also his public lectures of the time, beginning with his inaugural lecture, Homer und die klassische Philologie (1869; KSA 1), Das griechische Musikdrama (1870; KSA 1: pp. 513-532), Sokrates und die Tragdie (1870, KSA 1: pp. 533-549) as well as his unpublished Die dionysische Weltanschauung (1870, KSA 1: pp. 551-577), Wir Philologen (1874-75, KSA 8: pp. 11-130), and most crucially perhaps his university lecture courses on Die griechischen Lyrik (1869, FS 5; KGW II/2: pp. 105-182), Griechische Rhythmik (1870/71, KGW II/3, 199-201), and his Encyclopedie der klassischen Philologie (1871, KGW II/3: pp. 339-437). See B. von Reibnitz, 1992: Kapitel 1-12 for a comprehensive accounting of the philological background of this text and for a suggestive bibliography for further research. 6 Below we will see that as early as 1869 Nietzsche illustrates the musical practice of ancient tragedy by referring to the example of the troubadours. 7 See B. E. Babich, 1994 (also in Italian, 1996). 8 This is the point I make in B. E. Babich, 2002: pp. 67-78 and develop further in B. E. Babich, 2003: pp. 75-92. See too for a context immediately relevant to professional philosophy quite beyond the fashiobable or unfashionable modes of cultural criticism (B. E. Babich, 2003a: pp. 63-103). 9 Hence almost thirty years ago, Hugh Lloyd-Jones remarked on the dissonant state of interpretive aairs that led some of his interpreters to write as if Nietzsche had only drifted into classical philology by mistake

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1. Words, Music, Drama: The Fateful Consequences of Modern Culture 1.1 On Modern Stress and the Language of Ancient Greece Nietzsche had argued against the accent-based or stressed theory of Greek prosody that was the received view in 19th century philology. Recent assessments (Bornmann, Pschl, Fietz, Porter)10 consistently observe that the substance of Nietzsches claim has since been vindicated. But Nietzsches point contra the infamous ictus remains as dicult to understand (or to prove) as it is to criticize (or refute). Because we so deploy stress in modern Western languages (as we do in our music) that emphatic syncopation constitutes our very notion of metered rhythm (we need to keep time to use Shakespeares language: we need the aid of a metronome), we can hardly imagine alternatives in contemporary languages, so that the example of Japanese, as suggested by Devine and Stephens in their book, The Prosody of Greek Speech11, is still too exotic for most readers. Nor is Porters dierentiation between rhythm and meter in his discussion of the ictus12 much help. The stressed character of modern speech as Nietzsche complains of the decline into Latin vocalism (and Porter cites this same phrase)13, separates us by what Nietzsche also repeatedly underscores as an unbridgeable abyss from the measures of, that is, the sound of (or the music of ) ancient Greek. It is the unknowability of this gulf that Nietzsche never fails to emphasize, precisely as a philologist, i.e., for all too scholarly, exactly scientic reasons. It is the same unbridgeable gap (precisely named as unbridgeable) that alienates (or frustrates) other scholars who claim to know better (and who have told us so in authoritative publications on ancient Greek prosody/pronunciation)14. Already to say that ancient Greek
(H. Lloyd-Jones, 1976: pp. 1-15, here p. 3). Porter notes that Nietzsches ndings were quietly absorbed into the mainstream of classical philology (J. I. Porter, 2000: p. 129). Porter for his part notes that it was Paul Maas, Wilamowitzs student, who took over Nietzsches discovery in his Griechische Metrik rst published in 1923 and translated by H. Lloyd-Jones as Greek Metre (1962). 10 See B. Bornmann, 1989; R. Fietz, 1992; M. Gigante, 1984: pp. 5-46;. V. Pschl, 1979; as well as Porter, 2000. Porter observes here that the current authoritative study, namely A. Devine and L. Stephens, 1994, seems not to refute Nietzsches arguments. 11 See A. Devine and L. Stephens, 1994: p. 213. 12 See my note 2 above on J. I. Porters, 2000 noting Gurds comments inferring Porters ambivalence in this regard. 13 See, again, J. I. Porter, 2000: p. 135. See however, by contrast, W. Beare, 1953: pp. 29-40. And, because the question is a disputed, see for a counterargument, J. J. Schlicher, 1900. 14 There are books then that tell us how to pronounce ancient Greek and we have recently seen a wealth of realizations or reconstructions of ancient Greek music, in nicely modern musical form, on perfectly listenable, professionally marketed music CDs. Porter invokes Cage (who in turn invokes Satie and Webern) and Reich, and much of this resonates well with the sound of such reconstructions, and concludes his third chapter with a section entitled: Dionysian Music: A Modern Phenomenon? (Porter, 2000: pp. 160-166). The question of such comparisons is however a ticklish one and ineluctably circular. Are such musicians as John Cage and Steve Reich (never mind Igor Stravinksky or Schoenberg, both of whom were conscious of just such a resonance with reconstructions of ancient Greek musical performance practice) genuinely useful exemplars of a timeless sound in music itself or in a rather more likely if less Platonic alternative dicult to dismiss: do the musicians who interpret such ancient music recognize what look like modern serialist constructions [one is reminded of Nietzsches musing on the word Armbrust], thereby reproducing the style of the same in their recordings? It is for just this reason that Albrecht Riethmller paradoxically suggests that the more complex and subtle they are, the stronger becomes the impression that what we are dealing with here is a kind of paper creation (in A. Riethmller and F. Zaminer, 1989). If liner notes in the case of Ancient Greek music CDs duly invoke artistic freedom and the spontaneous dimension of feeling (in part to circumvent such questions)

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prose was uncontrivedly poetic, as Nietzsche emphasized, and to say that this poetry was articulated by a musical tact utterly unlike either that of modern poetry or indeed that of modern music (lacking stress but also lacking harmony as Nietzsche reminds us), is to say a great deal if it cannot tell us how it would have sounded for our own ineluctably stress-keyed ears, that is and this is the point here provided our stress attuned ears could have heard it at all. 1.2 Modernity and Music What does it mean to speak of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music? How does tragedy come into being out of music? Nietzsche uses the language of birth quite literally, assuming one has ears to hear that literality15. But how is anything born of music? How do the brothers Apollo and Dionysus play the role of co-progenitors? This question will be considered below (if I cannot promise a resolution here) but Nietzsches provocative language goes further as we recall Nietzsches youthful reection on the crossover of the metaphors for light and sound16, noting the poetic transference of the metaphors of vision the eyes to those of hearing the ears , a transfer that the Helmholtzian17 Nietzsche liked to note as operative on the level of the senses as well (cf. contemporary theories of synaesthesia). To give this another expression here: as poets speak, mixing the metaphors of one sense into those of another18, so our bodies transfer (or mix) the impulses from one sense, apprehending the one sensation on the terms of another. Nietzsches talk of hearing with ones eyes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra reects this same early emphasis. But what does it mean and how do metaphors work in this connection? This is the epistemological or philosophical connection Nietzsche heard between the spirit of music (poetry) and the science of words (philology). The Nietzsche who will come to teach us so much about genealogy, a tradition he had learnt in turn from his own teachers (such as Otto Jahn, who also used the language of genealogy, as well as Friedrich Ritschl, and as Nietzsche drew upon a general formation following the ideal [and inevitably idealized] example of Friedrich August Wolf ) begins The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music by articulating the natal genesis and perfect pedigree of an art form requiring the prudential judgment of two dierent creative impulses (indeed, and, as noted above, no less than two dierent fathers, recollecting Nietzsches language of a fraternal union [BT 21, 22, 24; cf. BT 4]). Its author intended to provide a contribution to the science or philosophical discipline of aesthetics (BT 1)19, which Nietzsche expressed in the terms of the school
the same realizations for the ear (in Keplers sense) are relevant as such references to modern minimalist music indicate. The annoyance of Nietzsches reections as these challenge such reconstructive endeavors is obvious and a sense of this disquiet qualies Porters otherwise sympathetic analysis. 15 Nietzsche speaks of tragedy in terms of marriage, sexual union, progeny, etc. 16 I have earlier invoked this metaphorical preoccupation in the context of Nietzsches engagement with Pindar (for whom such crossovers were also emblematic) in B. E. Babich, 2000a: pp. 267301. 17 In addition to Nietzsches own reading of Lange, see the background oered by the indispensable R. Small, 2001, as well as see S. Reuter, 2004: pp. 351-372 18 See for this discussion, Nietzsches examples quoted and discussed in B. E. Babich, 2000a. 19 Here Nietzsche invokes the aesthetic judgment of the third Critique. If the current author assumes that Nietzsche had read Kant not only as every other German academic of his day was able to do, but directly so

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tradition of the same, thus including Aristotle (BT 6, 7, 14, 22) and Plato (BT 12, 13, 14) as well as Lessing (BT 8, 11, 15), Schiller (BT 3, 5, 7, 8, 20), Schlegel (BT 4), in addition to Schopenhauer (BT 1, 5, 16, 19, 20) and Kant (BT 18, 19). The science of aesthetics, as Nietzsche named it, is the science of sensual judgment: the power of engendering (this creative dimension of the aesthetic will be Nietzsches special emphasis) and responding to artistic representation, Nietzsche invokes a context directed to an hermeneutic clarication of our tendency to theorize the subject matter of what he calls poesie. For a genuine poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical gure, but an image which stands in the place of something else, which it genuinely beholds in place of a concept. The character is for him not a whole composed out of particular components, but an intensely alive person, distinguished from the vision, otherwise identical, of a painter only by the fact that it (diachronically) goes on living and acting. How is it that Homers images are so much more vivid than those of any other poet? Because he visualizes so much more vividly. We speak of poetry as abstractly as we do, inasmuch as we incline to be such poor poets (BT 8). The reference to poetry and painting here shows that even where Nietzsche fails to invoke the aesthetic tradition by name, he makes allusion to it. Here he refers to Lessing as well as the tradition of classical criticism dating from antiquity addressed to the relation between depiction in words and images, painting and poetry. And in this same aesthetic reection, we can note Nietzsches emphasis on the working (the energeia in Wilhelm von Humboldts language) of metaphor. This same philologists hermeneutic account of metaphor recurs in Nietzsches genealogy of value terms, particularly of religious value and practice. Thus he explains in On the Genealogy of Morals, all the concepts of ancient man were incredibly crude, coarse, external, narrow, straightforward, and in particular unsymbolical in meaning to a degree that we can scarcely conceive (GM I, 6)20. The attributes of purity and impurity of spirit (and heart) were metaphorical attributions: terminological accretions taken in place of truth. The challenge of metaphor is the question of literality and that is to say, the question of truth and lie. From start to nish, Nietzsche approaches the question of metaphor on epistemological terms, exactly those terms (Cartesian certainty) that are determinative for modern theories of knowledge and this emphasis has inspired analytic readings of Nietzsche preoccupied by the question of metaphor in Nietzsche (comparable only to the preoccupations of literary scholars following Paul de Man and Lacoue-Labarthe)21. This metaphoric focus is evident in Nias a student of philology convinced of the importance of philosophy as he was and from the start (nor is it irrelevant to this point that Nietzsches prescribed educational program for classicists includes the reading of Kant by name). Yet Kantians (perhaps better said: neo-Kantians), horried by the critical spectre of Nietzsches Kant have asserted that Nietzsche could not have read Kant and after the limitations of source scholarship are taken to exhaustion (what would be needed to show that he could have done so?), scholarly literature is about to be deluged with studies seeking to prove an obvious point about 19th century scholarship. 20 By contrast, Nietzsche could say One should be warned against taking these concepts pure and impure too seriously or broadly, not to say symbolically [...]. The pure is from the beginning merely a man who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods that produce skin ailments, who does not sleep with the dirty women of the lower classes not much more, hardly any more! (GM I, 6). 21 A list of such readings would not be limited to German or literary studies but would also includes analytic approaches such as John Wilcox, Maudemarie Clark as as well Raymond Geuss, Rdiger Bittner, Gnther Abel, and a host of younger scholars.

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etzsches unpublished Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, where he remarks that given (as Nietzsche always assumed as given) the revolutionary advances of modernity in the wake of Kants critical philosophy, the psychologism of the Parmenidean vision (deriving absolute being from a subjective concept) is so unsustainable as to require reckless ignorance. Challenging the philosophical conceptualizations of those badly taught theologians who would like to play philosopher (his reference here is primarily to Hegel), Nietzsche declares
the concept of Being! As though it did not already reveal its poorest empirical origins in the etymology of the word! For esse means fundamentally merely to breathe: if man uses it of all other things, he consequently projects his own conviction that he breathes and lives, by means of a metaphor, that is by means of something un-logical, upon other things and conceives their existence as breathing in accord with an analogy to humanity. The original meaning of the word was quickly blurred: yet enough remains that by way of analogy with his own existence [Dasein], the human is able to represent the existence of other things [Dasein andrer Dinge], that is to say anthropomorphically and in any case by means of an unlogical transference. Yet even for the human himself, ergo apart from such transference, the proposition, I breathe, therefore there is a being [Sein] is wholly insucient: and the same objection holds against it as likewise holds against ambulo, ergo sum oder ergo est [I walk, therefore I am or therefore it is (being)] (Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, 11).

Bracketing the question of Nietzsches sympathy for Kant and his aversion to Hegel (both of which are evident in this section), note the dynamic role of metaphor. A Humboldtian preoccupation with energetic power characterizes Nietzsches thinking on metaphor (and scholars like Martin Heidegger and the late Jacques Derrida have followed his example in their reections on translation). The active leaping over that is the metaphor is the transfer from one sphere to another, all the while (and this subliminal perdurance is essential to Nietzsches theory of knowledge and his critique of the subject/self-consciousness) simultaneously forgetting (and this forgetfulness, as Nietzsche emphasizes, is key) that one has made any transfer at all. In a metaphor one searches in vain for any trace of comparison, explicit analogy, or positively critical as if . Thus we recall the locus classicus of Nietzsches discussion of truth and metaphor, On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense. It is here that Nietzsche asks the epistemological question relevant to language in general: do things match their designations? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? [decken sich die Bezeichnungen und die Dinge? Ist die Sprache der adquate Ausdruck aller Realitten?] (UWL 1, KSA 1, 879). The answer to this question is manifestly negative: If he will not content himself with truth in the form of tautology, i.e., with empty husks, he will always trade with illusions in place of truths [Wenn er sich nicht mit der Wahrheit in der Form der Tautologie d. h. mit leeren Hlsen begngen will, so wird er ewig Illusionen fr Wahrheiten einhandeln] (Ibid.). Apart from such empty shells, apart from the triumphant utility of knowing that A=A,22 one is condemned to deploy illusions in place of
22 Nietzsche, UWL 1, KSA 1, 879. Here with = A in this context, Nietzsche both refers to and explicitly departs from Fichtes Grundlehre der Wissenschaft.

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truths. And this is inevitably so because, for the philologist Nietzsche, metaphor starts at the level of the word. Language is, as it were, metaphor all the way down. Put all the languages together, Nietzsche suggests replaying the biblical account of the tower of Babel as a symbol for the Fall that was also a failure to attain to the fruit of the tree of knowledge itself and one sees that with regard to words what matters is never truth, never the adequate expression, for otherwise there would not be so many languages (Ibid.). For Nietzsche (as for Kant), the noumenon (and like Kant, Nietzsche, will always use the convention of an indeterminate X), the thing in itself, apart from its apparent, phenomenal relation to us, simply cannot be known:
We believe that we have knowledge of the things themselves [den Dingen selbst] when we speak of trees, colors, snow and owers, whereas we possess only metaphors of things which correspond in absolutely no way [ganz und gar nicht] to the original essences [Wesenheiten]. As the tone appears as a sand-gure, so the mysterious X of the thing in itself [des Dings an sich] now appears as a nervous stimulus, then as image, and nally as sound (UWL 1, KSA 1, S. 879).

For this reason, Nietzsche continued to emphasize the relevance of this insight for the entire cognitive enterprise: the entire material in and with which the man of truth, the researcher, the philosopher works and constructs, is drawn, if not from cloud-cuckoo-land, then certainly in no case from the essence of things [dem Wesen der Dinge] (Ibid.). If todays researchers have learned the trick of sidestepping the issue, leaving aside the question of the knowledge of truth as such, rather like Heideggers question of being or his talk of the history of metaphysics, it is because a reection on the nature of consciousness brackets the question of the knowledge of the world as such and in itself altogether. It seems to us that we are successful in this because our instruments can be turned on our own consciousness (or, better said, what we take to be the measurable locus of the same). But Nietzsches problem is not thereby solved: for what remains is the problem of metaphor and it is the veritable problem of analogy as such. Indeed and accordingly Nietzsche would use the terminus Analogieschlu to dene metaphor. Other theories of metaphor, especially cognitive theories depart from this physical, sensual understanding of the work of metaphor (as metaphora) but from a philosophical (as opposed to a linguistic point of view), it is essential to note that Nietzsche articulates the question of metaphor neither philologically nor psychologically (though he always draws upon the terms of both) but epistemologically, in the direct lineage of Aristotle and Kant. More in line with Hume and Kant than with Schopenhauer in this case, Nietzsche writes, A sensed stimulus and a glance at a movement, linked together, rst yield causality as an empirical principle: two things, namely a specic sensation and a specic visual image always appear together: that the one is the cause of the other is metaphor borrowed from will and act: an analogical inference (KSA 7, 19 [209]: p. 483). However much we may wish to abstract from metaphorical language, we can have no genuine knowing without metaphor. (Nietzsches emphasis, KSA 7, 19 [228]: p. 491). Nor is there an escape from this devils circle. Thus truth, as we have already noted for Nietzsche, is a forgotten metaphor, i.e., a metaphor, of
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which it has been forgotten that it is one. (KSA 7, 19 [229]: p. 492). At issue is the question of justication; what is at stake is knowledge. For Nietzsche, metaphor is above all an epistemological gure, here metonymically expressed in Kantian terms as a synthetic judgment (KSA 7, 19 [242]: p. 496). A synthetic judgment, as Nietzsche further details this same gure, describes a thing according to its consequences, which means essence and consequences are identied, which means a metonymy. [...] which means it is a false equation (Ibid.). This functions because of the nature of language itself: the is in the synthetic judgment is false, it contains a transference, two dierent spheres, between which there can never be an equation, are posed alongside one another. We live and think amidst nothing but sheer eects of the the unlogical, in non-knowing and in false-knowing [Nichtwissen und Falschwissen] (Ibid.). Raising the question of the genealogy of logic, as Nietzsche does in his essay on Philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks, and as he expresses the same query at the very beginning of his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, paralleling the point we have already noted above in his reections on the vivid literality of the ancient poet in The Birth of Tragedy, logic turns out to be derived from myth, born of the non-logical, the illogical. If Nietzsches observation diers not at all from standard accounts of the history of philosophy reconstructions tracing the history of intellection from mythic to rational thought Nietzsche undertakes to question just this generative account as a supposed evolution: Origin of the Logical. How did logic come into existence in the human head? Certainly out of illogic. (GS 111). And from beginning to end, Nietzsches question remains the same: how is it possible to derive rationality on the basis of myth? In other words: how do we arrive at truth when we begin with lie? How does logic evolve from myth? Thus question at the start of Nietzsches Human, All too Human recalls a Cartesian modality: how can something originate in its opposite, for example: rationality out of irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic out of illogic, disinterested contemplation out of covetous desire, living for others in egoism, truth out of errors? (HH I, 1) Nietzsches catalogue of opposites repeats the same epistemological concerns that would always intrigue him, along with his studies of the birth of the tragic work of art (poetry) in musical song (lyrical poetry). He continued to pursue these same questions throughout his work including The Genealogy of Morals, his famous critique of the subject (and thereby of subjectivity itself ), taking it still further as he mounts what is still today the most radically empirical (or scientic) critique of empirical knowledge (cf. KSA 13: p. 257)23. If these theoretical reections can seem tendentious in connection with the theme of classical philology and music in Nietzsche, they constitute only part of the full scope of Nietzsches own understanding of the connections relevant to his own explorations. Thus his reections on this question integrate the question of science (as a question as he emphasized in 1886) in addition to the physiological, psychological, and culture-theoretical ramications of his critique of the subject and of society. Here, these preliminary reections should permit us to pursue two related questions: the rst directed to Nietzsches philological
23

See B. E. Babich, 1994. But see also B. E. Babich, 2004: pp. 133-153.

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beginnings in his essay on the Birth of Tragedy including the question of ancient Greek music drama: lyric poetry and tragedy in terms of its aesthetic origins and the second reviewing what turns out to be a parallel allusion to the song tradition of the knightly poetic art, which I invoke as the alchemical art of the troubadours in The Gay Science. 1.3 The Origin of Music in Ancient Greek Musik To understand Nietzsches reections on the spirit of music in terms of the elusive aspects of his theory of quantitative or timed measure (rather than voice stress), Nietzsche emphasized that we dier from the ancients in our understanding of music and warned against the easy, because intuitive or instinctual, tendency to conate the modern with the ancient concept of music. If Nietzsche drew upon his own anity for the modern music of his own times for the sake of his studies of ancient music, he never let himself forget the dierences between modern and ancient conceptions of music24. The word music is seductively equivocal. On the one hand, music has its origins in the Greek mouskj. On the other hand, the original Greek term had a far broader meaning a breadth that makes Nietzsches question concerning the origin of tragedy more intriguing. For the ancient Greeks, mousk may be dened as any art over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry25. To call someone musical (mouskj) characterized that individual as skilled in music, that is to say and more generally, a votary of the Muses, a man of letters and accomplishment, a scholar26. Elaborating the broad meaning of mousk, Giovanni Comotti writes:
in the fourth and fth centuries B.C., the phrase mousikos aner would be used to indicate an educated man, able to comprehend poetic language in its entirety. The unity of poetry, melody, and gesture in archaic and classical culture made the rhythmic-melodic expression contingent on the demands of the verbal text. The simultaneous presence of music, dance, and word in almost all forms of communication suggests also the existence of a widespread musical culture among the Greek peoples from the remotest times27.

What the modern eye isolates as separable elements were thus inseparable parts of the tragic composition28. Ancient Greek tragedy exemplies the ideal of the Gesammtkunstwerk that inspired both Wagner and Nietzsche. In other words, both prose language and poetry derive from the exactly, comprehensively musical complex of musik, here using Thrasybulos Georgiades orthography for the sake of the Anglo-Saxon eye29. Georgiades is careful to emphasize that exactly in its grammatical form, musik is not substantive but much rather and prototypically adjectival, corresponding to
Seventh Edition of Liddell and Scotts Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1889: p. 520). 26 Ibid. 27 G. Comotti, 1977: p. 5. 28 Nietzsches early notes for this are cited in what follows from Nietzsche, Frhe Schriften, Munich: Beck, Vol. 5 (FS). 29 T. G. Georgiades, 1958: pp. 52-53.
24 What follows is treated at greater length in the chapter Mousike techne in B. E., Babich, 2005. 25 Denitions and source references quoted from An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Founded Upon the

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the muses: It means musist, corresponding to the Muses30. Because music articulates itself as an activity in play, music in its very primordial essence can never be a nished, objective, or xedly given work. Rather, a Greek musical education is only dynamically possible through musical activity31. This active dimensionality reects the unique character of the ancient Greek language. An intrinsically Western perspective presupposes the eld of tension which formed between the word and art, between language and music. By contrast, as Georgiades explains, the musik of antiquity [...] does not recognize this distinction32. To the extent that our contemporary understanding of music, like the modern concept of art, refers to a world apart from the everyday33, it is important to emphasize that musik cannot even be termed art in our sense of art34. Musik has a working ethical component not only because of its whole or totalized meaning but also (and this is the subtly literal point of Nietzsches self-described discovery contra the ictus with regard to ancient Greek verse) because of the eectively musical or acoustic dierence both Georgiades and Nietzsche constantly emphasize as separating archaic Greece and contemporary Western languages. The fundamental musicality of antique Greek resides in the tonic interval of xed time: long or short, that is also what Georgiades names its static character (its masked dimension, paralleling the xed expression of the masks of ancient Greek theatre). The very inexibility or rigor of archaic Greek compels the speaker as it also compels the hearers active or ethical engagement. We need all the resources of ethnomusicology to approach the ancient Greeks, whose practical musicality is not merely non-Western but whose very words are ineluctably silent for us, even taking Nietzsches suggestions to heart. Georgiades is helpful here as he explains that where the Western verse line is not a musical but rather a linguistic form. the musical-rhythmic structure of the ancient Greek verse line reected the music of the language as it was both a linguistic and simultaneously a musical reality35. Oering a musical illustration of this point, Georgiades invokes the succession of accents ordinarily heard in the language of the [German] phrase Das Wandern ist des Mllers Lust, marking the accents: des Mllers Das Wandern ist Lust
30 Es bedeutet musisch, auf die Musen bezogen (T. G. Georgiades, 1958: p. 45). 31 This is the ideal of Musische Erziehung durch musische Bettigung (T. G. Georgiades, 32 T. G. Georgiades, 1974: p. 134. 33

1958: p. 45).

It would be interesting to reect on the dierence this point might make for contemporary philosophy of art in its analytic modality and its concern with the question of demarcation. In the musicological context relevant here, The art of the Western World presupposes something which lies outside its own boundaries [...] Similarly, the poetry of the Western World presupposes simple prose as its ultimate source [...] (T. G. Georgiades, 1974: p. 134). 34 Ibid. Thus rigorously dened, Warren Anderson likewise explains that the modern word, music, should not be used to render mousik. The Greek term designates here the oral training in poetry sung to lyre accompaniment or recited without it that had for so long been the means of transmitting the values and precepts of Greek culture (W. D., Anderson, 1994: p. 143). 35 T. G. Georgiades, 1974: pp. 4-5. See also T. G. Georgiades, 1958: pp. 26 .

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Although in Western languages, the accents proceeding from language (indicated in the German text cited above) are binding for the music or musical setting of the text, this linguistic accenting does not determine all aspects of the musical rhyme and that means that the phrase can be set to music in various ways (Georgiades oers several examples to illustrate these possibilities). By contrast, the ancient Greek verse line behaved dierently. Here the musical rhythm was contained within the language itself. The musical rhythmic structure was completely determined by the language. There was no room for an independent musical-rhythmic setting: nothing could be added or changed.36 To illustrate this point, Georgiades compares the accented language of the aforementioned musical setting with the analogous accenting of the rst verse line of Pindars rst Olympian Ode: Ariston men dwr, de crusoj asqomenon pur Georgiades observes that the ancient Greek word comprised within itself a rm musical component. It had an intrinsic musical will. As he further explains, because individual syllables could be neither extended nor abbreviated37, the Greek language was expressed in consummate, completed time. The rhythmic principle of antiquity is based not on the distinction between the organization of time (the measure, system of accents) and its lling in (with various note values) but rather on intrinsically lled-in time38. For this reason, both Georgiades and Nietzsche can arm that in ancient Greek music was indistinguishable from speech, or to put it another way, as Nietzsche expressed it, ordinary, everyday language was the vehicle of poetry. Due to this same inextricably compound character, Georgiades contends that musik also had enormous edicatory powers. The speaking subject was engaged not only as a speaker but always also as active listener. The same double engagement is evident in Nietzsches discussion as well (see in particular his emphasis on the objectivity of Greek lyric poetry)39. Because of this doubly aspected engagement of attentive articulation, ancient Greek presupposed a community and possessed a community-building power nearly impossible to imagine today. The development of prose out of music separates music and text it is no accident that this begins with the institution of writing whereby the text is liberated from its originally poetic (and hence musical) expression in the full measure of time40. As Nietzsche argued in The Birth of Tragedy, the rule of Socratic reason presides over the death of tragedy. In his lectures notes, the rational predominance of the logical over the mythic reects the same shift: the more the sensibility for a natural causality took the place of magical causes, the more rhythm recedes.41
36 37

Ibid. Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 FS Vol. 5: p. 356. 40 In general terms, mousk functions only within the complex of ancient Greek culture. 41 FS vol. 5: p. 374.

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2. Learning to Hear With Ones Eyes: To the Words Themselves! Nietzsche teaches us the evanescent musicality of the speech culture of ancient Greek and its tragic artform. Thus and like Pierre Hadots very dierent but still related lesson concerning the special dialogical forms of philosophy (its variant confessions, methods and meditations), we have here to do with particular, timebound and so time-distant practices. If these practices are exactly not part of the text, they are its very articulation thus the importance of style for Nietzsche. No matter whether one adheres to the elusive ideals of the oral tradition or an observance of the rigor and law of the text itself, these same practices are those that matter most when it comes to Greek music drama and these are lost to us. The start of Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra invokes this loss, where he thunders in Zarathustras mouth: There they stand (he said to his heart), there they laugh: they do not understand me, I am not the mouth for these ears. Must one rst shatter their ears to teach them to hear with their eyes?42. How are we to take this kind of talk seriously let alone literally? We read Nietzsches language of hearing with ones eyes, like his talk of a musicians book like his expression of eye-persons43, as instances of gurative language, that is, mere metaphors: like the poets convention of holding discourse with ones heart. But as Gustave Gerber in The Art of Language44 expresses it (but also as the longer tradition of rhetoric would have already taught Nietzsche, as it had, of course, likewise taught Gerber)45, there is only metaphor. To take the word for the thing always demands more than language can give. What does this mean for us as we seek to read Nietzsche? Beyond the art of language, beyond sheer metaphoricity, the diachronic consistency of Nietzsches challenge to our eyes and our ears, if we limit our biographical conviction to the textual level, adumbrates his earliest insight as philologist. To this same degree, it is dangerous to speak of an early, or a middle or late period Nietzsche (as if Nietzsche overcame his early views or dallied with the positivism of his nineteenth century age in the middle interval before the later Nietzsche waged a war on values, only to collapse in madness). The problem isnt that Nietzsches thinking experienced nothing like development but such interpretations impose a particular narrative schema on Nietzsches person in order to rediscover such details in his work (in the process conveniently permitting the interpreter to dispense with irrelevant aspects of these same details)46. I elsewhere argue
42 F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue 5. Nietzsche here oers us an inversion of Aristotles reference to the use of proportional metaphor in his Rhetoric for helping ones hearers see (Rhet. Bk III: 10 and 11). 43 Eye person is how one might translate Augenmenschen, on the model of a people-person if one can forgive the awkward idiom in ordinary spoken English or a hands-on person or an ear-person. Nietzsche refers to a schizophrenia that is endemic to the very notion of absolute music, and speaks of our appreciation bald als Ohrenmenschen, bald als Augenmenschen in this same inevitably sundered modern context (KSA 1: p. 518. See further, T. Bning, 1986: pp. 72-106). 44 G. Gerber, 1871. 45 On my reading, the relevance of Nietzsches reading of Gerber, so much of which would nd its way into Nietzsches own (unpublished) Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense, represents something less than suppressed inuence than the eective relevance (or routine inuence) of a taken for granted handbook, especially in the then-age of non-mechanical (non-photocopiable) means of reproduction. 46 I refer to Ernst Behlers jesting account of the double authority of Heideggers lecture courses on Nietzsche as encountered in the Neske edition featuring both names, uncapitalized, as heidegger nietzsche.

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that Nietzsche had an unusual but undeniable manner of retaining his concerns from start to nish47. Here, I attempt to retrace the dense interconnections of Nietzsches enduring preoccupations in the complex whole that is Nietzsches thought, especially as we encounter it, that is: not as he conceived his work (in its psychological inception and ramications) but as expressed in his writing. In his rst academically disastrous book (savagely reviewed by a junior classman, rst shocking and then ignored by his teacher, Ritschl, and subsequently by everyone else in his own eld of classics), Nietzsche had argued that the written visual marks preserved from the past also preserve the reconstructable trace of sound the spirit of music and are thus an exactly archaeological record of ancient Greek music drama. In ancient Greek (written in a phonetically voiced alphabet and time-structured in meter and rhyme and without stress), we have nothing less signicant for Nietzsches conception of what he called the spirit of music than virtual recordings the texts of the past oer a readable repository of sound in the written word, given the tradition of folk song as it may be traced in lyric poetry. Of course, and obviously, patently enough, we have no aural recordings and so nothing like what might be unimpeachably taken to be empirical evidence of the sound of Greek or the music to be heard in ancient Greek tragedy, hence we have only the barest part of what would be needed to understand it. Yet exactly this point can be misunderstood. It is not Nietzsches claim (and if he is right, it is not the case) that what has gone missing are the corresponding musical notes to the tragic poems (like the vowels in Hebrew, these would be conventions added only for a later more decadent time, to use Nietzschean language). Instead what we lack is the speech culture of archaic Greece. Nietzsches early studies of Greek rhythm and meter and his convicted claim in his notes and in his letters that he had made a signal and radical discovery in this regard were oriented towards nothing less than reconstruction of just this possibility and to this extent must be accounted the fundamental antecedent schema of The Birth of Tragedy itself and constitute nothing less than the justication of the language of Nietzsches subtitle Out of the Spirit of Music. Nietzsches argument was that we needed to learn to read not as moderns read48, with our eyes, but rather with our ears (as the ancients did, as they also saw the measures of their music stamped out in the steps of the dance)49. Thus his rst book invites us to listen and attend to the measure and the rhythm of the tragic text, phonetically, literally (especially attending to its originations in the folk song). The spirit of this music is the music that can be heard as derived from the temporal measures, Nietzsche argued, evident in the song tradition of ancient lyric poetry and perceivable in its performance in dance.
47 Indeed Nietzsche often returned to such issues long after his teachers, friends and readers had lost the thread. See my discussion of Nietzsches (protracted) response to the critical comments his teacher, August Koberstein, made on his essay on Hlderlin in B. Babich, 2000, as well as my footnote glosses and editorial notes for his response to Wilamowitz-Mllendor, in U. von Wilamowitz-Mllendor, 2000: pp. 1-32. 48 Thus we hear Nietzsche invoke the formula at the start of his 1878/79 lecture, Griechische Lyriker Wir lesend mit den Augen as a contrast to the acoustic directionality of ancient Greek lyric poetry (FS, Vol. 5: p. 369). 49 Here Nietzsche is preceded by A. Boeckh, 1811 and von Humboldt.

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If all we have of the music of antiquity today are the rudiments preserved in lyric poetry, Nietzsche was correspondingly drastic about the limitations of the former. We stand in a eld of shards50, he wrote. What Nietzsche found in the metrical tradition of folk song and lyric poetry, was the musical key to the tragic dramas of antiquity. Once distinguished from its all-too-modern literary rendering as subjective expression a fatal solecism as Nietzsche regarded it the folk voice (the veritable mouth of the people: this is the song of language itself ) resonant in lyric poetry resounded further as the very music of tragedy, and its objective capacity was what allowed for mimetic transguration. However counterintuitive it is to us, this was a theatre without spectators, a chorus, and a poet composer that was not apart from the audience. And to comprehend this is to begin to grasp the ecstatic power of music in which there was fundamentally no opposition between public and chorus; the whole is just one sublime chorus (BT 8). But to see this, as Nietzsche noted, requires more than just one simile. By means of this same poetic, metered opposition referring to his original philological discovery, Nietzsche claimed that he had indicated the only possible relation between poetry and music, between word and tone (BT 6)51. Accordingly, he would argue that text itself constituted the music in question: anyone who today hears about or speaks of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides inevitably thinks of them most proximately as literary poets, for one has come to know them from books, whether in the original or in translation. But this is as if one were to speak of Tannhuser, intending and understanding the text and nothing more. These individuals should be called not librettists but much rather musical-operatic composers (KSA 7, I [1], 9). Tragedy was always conveyed via music the entire ancient art of poetry and music are born from the folksong (KSA 1, 529). And this was more than a matter of accompaniment but its very articulation (or spirit as Nietzsche expressed it)52. Traditionally, as Nietzsche emphasized and as most scholars likewise arm, ancient Greek music
FS, Vol. 5: p. 385. In as many words Nietzsche declared that he had discovered the art of hearing with ones eyes. Hiermit haben wir das einzig mgliche Verhltniss zwischen Poesie und Musik, Wort und Ton bezeichnet: das Wort, das Bild, der Begri sucht einen der Musik analogen Ausdruck und erleidet jetzt die Gewalt der Musik an sich. Nietzsche goes on even more explicitly: In diesem Sinne drfen wir in der Sprachgeschichte des griechischen Volkes zwei Hauptstrmungen unterscheiden, jenachdem die Sprache die Erscheinungs- und Bilderwelt oder die Musikwelt nachahmte. Man denke nur einmal tiefer ber die sprachliche Dierenz der Farbe, des syntaktischen Baus, des Wortmaterials bei Homer und Pindar nach, um die Bedeutung dieses Gegensatzes zu begreifen; ja es wird Einem dabei handgreiich deutlich, dass zwischen Homer und Pindar die orgiastischen Fltenweisen des Olympus erklungen sein mssen, die noch im Zeitalter des Aristoteles, inmitten einer unendlich entwickelteren Musik, zu trunkner Begeisterung hinrissen und gewiss in ihrer ursprnglichen Wirkung alle dichterischen Ausdrucksmittel der gleichzeitigen Menschen zur Nachahmung aufgereizt haben. (BT 6, KSA 1, 48. See further, Das griechische Musikdrama, KSA 1: pp. 515. Cf. The Birth of Tragedy: GT 17). 52 To put this in other words: we have the letter of antiquity, we lack its musical spirit. This contrasts oral and a written culture, corresponding to a point made explicitly by the late I. Illich and B. Sanders, 1968; see too W. Ong, 1982. Illichs important and beautiful In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hughs Didascalicon (1993), oers a way to mediate between the reections of contemporary culture and antiquity by way of Hugh of St Victor. But in the case of Nietzsche, it is important to emphasize the advances made by the signal discoveries of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the early part of the 20th century, see A. Lord, 1960 and A. Parry, 1928, as well as E. Havelock, 1963, etc. One can see further, in a dierent direction, the pioneering work of Alexander Luria to trace out the cognitive consequences of a literate culture: for as one writes, one apparently, and in a very Nietzschean way, writes oneself.
51 50

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was vocal. In this sense, those scholars who simply identify the Dionysian with the instrumental and the Apollonian with the vocal tend to overlook the very Nietzschean point of this text53. For the loss of that same musical spirit corresponds to nothing less than the transformation of the oral culture of Greece (an orality which goes hand in glove with the literal phonetic function of the letter as a means for preserving sound) to the culture of the text and takes its point of departure from nothing less than its independence from the resonant sound of the culture that it at rst preserves (as the spirit of the text) and then displaces (as the letter) of that same culture. Thus the tragic tone-drama could only suer its own death at its own hand, which subtext (the death of the tragic artform) was of course the explicit subject of The Birth of Tragedy (BT 1, BT 11)54, a death then that would have everything to do with the new domination of reason, the written word (logos) as opposed to the spoken word (mythos). Nietzsches dream, of course, beyond his recollection of the birth and death of the tragic art form was to see a rebirth of the same, possibly by way of Wagner (an association which has Nietzsche seeking to instruct Wagner, the virtuoso musician, by object lesson in his rst book an empty endeavor, given both Wagners need and his capacity for such instruction55 and vain too and in more than one sense on Nietzsches own part). It is the death of the spirit of tragic music that is consummate in our day. Thus when we read the texts of ancient tragedy, we are limited to what we see. We lack the ability to hear with our eyes, that is, to use the only metaphor that remains for us as a people of the book: we cannot sight-read Greek music-drama. To illustrate this point, Nietzsche has recourse to periods in the middle ages when taste and convention had fallen into such disparity that one composed music with visual aids, as it were, composing for the eye rather than for the ear. The consequently illuminated scores went to the color-book or power-point presentation extreme of matching notes to somethings color: like green in the case of plants, or purple for vineyard elds56. With regard to the spoken texts of ancient music drama, and like the medieval scholiast so charmingly absorbed by color, we are limited to the signs we scan rather than hear with our eyes. The point here may be compared to the dierence between a musicians reading of a musical score and a non-musician reader of the same score. Reading a score, the musically trained reader hears and can sing (and this emphasis is one Nietzsche
makes and it will be important for his later self-remonstration: it should have sung, this new soul) what the other only sees. Just to this degree and for this very reason, Nietzsche declared, we are condemned to misprision regarding Pindar, Aeschylus, and

53 Thus Raymond Geuss observes that Pure or absolute Dionysian music [...] would have to be purely instrumental music with no accompanying words in his introduction to Ronald Speirs translation of Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and other Writings (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999): p. xxi. If others have also made such claims, they nonetheless represent what Nietzsche regarded as a historical solecisms in the case of ancient Greek tragedy. 54 If commentators continue to nd this paradoxical, Nietzsche makes the point of his explication of the decadence of ancient tragedy in terms of its original genesis equally explicit: as tragedy goes to ground with the evanescence of the spirit of music, it is only from this spirit that it can be reborn (BT 16). 55 For a digest of the relevant qualities of Wagners scholarly (and even philological) endeavors, see M. Owen Lee, 2003. 56 KSA 1: p. 517.

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In addition to highlighting this literal musicality, Nietzsche also uses the same musical focus to oppose his study of tragedy to Aristotle on two counts: rst refusing the myth of the myth (and that means, of course, the plot) and, second, refusing the function and expression of anagnorisis in terms of the audiences cathartic response or edicational benet. Beyond the therapy of the theatre, the discharge or purication attributed to the experience of tragic sentiment, if also to illustrate the working dynamism of such a supposed and salutary benet, Nietzsche invoked the example of the profoundly sensible pleasure that is the eect of musical dissonance to explicate the artistic comforts or the aesthetic joy of tragedy. It is a parallel point that the philologists tools Nietzsche used to explore antiquity will be the same tools he brings to every problem. Where in his early writings he uses the tools of philology stylistic tools for reading in order to focus on the problem of the lyric artist to make this same point, his later writing will play upon the words themselves: using provocative etymologies, as a genealogy of terminological assessments to dierent eect. One may thus nd a parallel to his discussion of the lyric poet in The Birth of Tragedy in his discussion of the noble (or also of the slave) in On the Genealogy of Morals. Hence it is important, essentially so, that Nietzsches genealogy is anything but a literal retrieve of supposedly historical facts (there never was such an antique era) and even less an expression of Nietzsches own fantasies or personal desires57. Instead, Nietzsches rhetorical polemic on the origins of morality details the consequences of an etymological analysis taken word for word. Thus he writes, The signpost to the right road was for me the question: what was the real etymological signicance of the designation good coined in the various languages58. Accordingly, Nietzsche titles his beginning reections in On the Genealogy of Morals with the contrast of terminological pairs outlining the heritage or linguistic fortunes of what is called good: i.e., and of course, Good and Evil / Good and Bad59. Nietzsches musical (Apollinian-Dionysian) insight into the Birth of Tragedy opposing an empathically epistemic (Aristotelian) interpretation of the subliminally cathartic comfort of pure dissonance (tragic or musical drama) yielded a rst book that was eectively overlooked. And Nietzsche famously protested this lack of inuence. Thus he could complain, in reference to his rst book: every purely scientic book is condemned to live a lowly existence among the lowly, and nally to be crucied never to rise again (MMI 98). That esoteric texts are exoterically inaccessible is a point Nietzsche will repeat again and again. And as Nietzsches readers today, we do well to reect on the common conviction (enshrined in the conventions of the Strunk & White simplicities prized as clear in American English) that presumes that everything is communicable and that everything can be made accessible to everyone.
57 58

Sophocles. (KSA 1, 517). Our modern lack of the musical spirit of the text remains the fundamental obstacle to understanding ancient tragedy.

See Babich, 2004b. GM: Part I, 4. 59 The signicance of Nietzsche for A. MacIntyre, 1972 is obvious here.

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3. On Classical Texts: For Philological Regents and Philosophical Kings As educator, writing for his best readers, Nietzsche would again and again elaborate the limits of the rhetorical directionality of writing as the question of reading and the related necessity of learning to read. This didactic, writerly project was expressly, explicitly exoteric, related to the concern to communicate in general, and that is to say, as tailored to individual contexts. By contrast, the esoteric or internal problem of philology, would be the problem of writerlyreaderly reciprocity: the problem of right readers. For Nietzsche, always archaic in his sensibilities, like was required to know (or even to begin to recognize) like. And for his fellow philologists, Nietzsche remarks in a note in The Gay Science, the disciplinary project of philology as an enterprise, the conservation of great books no matter the currently disputed denomination of such underscores what Nietzsche confesses as philologys ultimate doctrine of faith. This is the conviction that there is no lack of those rare human beings (even if one does not see them) who really know how to use such valuable books presumably those who write, or could write, books of the same type. And using a handily emphatic trope, Nietzsche repeats his claim: I mean that philology presupposes a noble faith that for the sake of a few noble human beings, who always will come but are never there, a very large amount of fastidious and even dirty work needs to be done rst: all of it is work in usum Delphinorum (GS 102)60. The relevance of Nietzsches in usum Delphinorum a variation of ad usum Delphini has not received the attention it deserves, presuming (as one ought to presume) that one needs more than Kaufmanns gloss. Nietzsches allusion was, of course, to the archetypically paternalistic project of creating special editions of Greek or Roman classic texts destined for the use of the Dauphin61. What is important here is that the practical impetus and cultural character of the classicists philological guild remains indebted to this same solicitous project. This was Nietzsches point in inserting just this invocation here in his own text. The same solicitude continues to animate the high tone with which we today speak of the so-called great books. If the political connection between this standard philological convention and Nietzsches ideal educator has not, to my knowledge, been explored (even by those who discuss Nietzsche in this same context) it manifestly has everything to do with the class distinctions associated with a classical education. Nietzsches point is that the ultimate aim of philology is to generate tidied up source matter, undertaken in anticipation of a very valued, indeed noble reader, a particular reader who needs, in the sense that the Dauphin had needed, to be protected from the sullying (questionable, misleading, erroneous) aspects of this
Emphasis added. See P.D. Huet (dir.), Collection de classiques latins Ad usum Delphini (1674-1691), 67 volumes, dont 39 auteurs, 5 dictionnaires, as well as Puget de Saint-Pierre, Histoire de Charles de Sainte-Maure, duc de Montausier (Genve Paris, Guillot, 1784). See also: Bossuet, Politique tire des propres paroles de lEcriture sainte (Paris, P. Cot, 1709) and Graud de Cordemoy, De la ncessit de lhistoire, de son usage & de la manire dont il faut mler les autres sciences, en la faisant lire un prince, dans Divers traits de mtaphysique, dhistoire et de politique (Paris, 1691). Examples of the project include Jean Doujat, Abrg de lhistoire romaine et grecque, en partie traduit de Velleius Paterculus, et en partie tir des meilleurs auteurs de lAntiquit (Paris, 1671) and Esprit Flchier, Histoire de Thodose le Grand (Paris, S. Mabre-Cramoisy, 1679).
61 60

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62 It is for this reason that William Arrowsmith felt compelled to translate Nietzsches We Philologists in the old series of the journal, Arion. Arrowsmith regarded this as a kind of call to arms, and hopefully gadys inspiration for the future of the profession. Following Blooms The Closing of the American Mind and Martin Bernals Black Athena, and, more recently, the micro-tempest that was Viktor Davis Hansons and John Heaths Who Killed Homer?, one is lead to wonder whether it might be endemic to the discipline of classics that it imagine itself always in disastrous straits: a step away from total laxity or barbarism. 63 See C. Osborne, 1987. Osbornes study has been relatively unreceived, at least within philosophy, and the author has turned to other themes. Osbornes reections can be taken together with Nietzsches arguments regarding the so-called pre-socratics as calling for further critical reection on the sources. One contemporary locus for such reection is the Derveni Papyrus, rst transcribed anonymously, as Der orphische Papyrus von Derveni, Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 47 (1982). See for an English translation and commentary, G. Betegh, 2004. 64 Nietzsches most extreme exemplication of this manufactured or idealized representation of antiquity is evident in the citational methods he employed in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, with its notoriously creative variations on received the pre-platonic fragments. Beyond the reactionary or indeed the counter-reactionary moves of todays ethno-classicist cum literary studies/anti-philological classics experts, it is worth reecting upon the implications of Nietzsches project for ancient philosophy. In addition to scholars like Marcel Detienne and Luc Brisson (especially on Platos Timaeus), see, again the previous notes as well as the recent work of Pierre Hadot and indeed more traditionally, Charles Kahns seminal study of Anaximander. 65 One is reminded of Lewis Carrolls rueful Alice, that fantasy mouthpiece, like James Joyces Molly Bloom, of male cupidity. It is always said Alice to the Red Queen, jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today.

same source material. Regarded with all the presumption of a duly vested member of the philologists guild, the Dauphin now corresponds to future philologists: the scholars who are to come62. These are the precious future readers who are to be protected from the less edifying aspects of classical literature. But what Nietzsche does not forget (and what, oddly enough, todays classicists seem not to have fully grasped, ignoring, as classical historians, precisely what Nietzsche named a historical sensibility)63 is that the texts engendered for the scholars of the future are not (and never do become or turn into) original works. Conventionalized restorations, authoritative editions are prepared texts (and, so some critics will argue: expurgated or bowdlerized in the process, going in dierent directions depending upon whether the critic in question follows Vico or Dilthey, or even Buttereld). Such texts are produced, this is the hermeneutic point of Nietzsches philologists complaint, for very particular eyes. But whose eyes? If we no longer have the moral justication or imperative for such an edifying project if only because there are no Dauphins today and if only because fashions have changed and if only because the current balding Kings of France (to use Russells reference on reference) either do not exist (exoteric) or are unhonored as such (they are too young to have lost their hair as yet: this would be the esoteric point) the results continue to live on in the methods of todays classical philology and source scholarship64. Given the presuppositions of his philological assumptions, claiming his works as written for the future, Nietzsche oers us a painful rumination on the damnation of the author and thus a reection of what he senses as his own destiny. In this way, Nietzsche expresses the philologists labor as utterly pointless. In other words, Nietzsche perceived himself as writing in the hope of those who always will come but are never there. The ideal and best readers are always (permanently) in the future, he claims, and he claims that the presuppositions of the discipline require this conviction despite the recalcitrant fact that there are no (and that never have been) instances of such readers apart from the authors themselves, i.e., those who write, or could write, books of the same type (GS 102)65. But what writer does not write for such ideal readers, however

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imaginary they may be, and what writer does not fail to recognize their absence? Certainly not Hlderlin who wrote in his Brot und Wein with a passion only a poets voice could evoke, Ah, my friend! we have come too late [Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spt]. Like the philologist, for Nietzsche, the writers hope will turn out to be a matter of vanity: vain in more than one sense. As Nietzsche looks back on his own writing in Ecce Homo, he claims My time has not yet come, some are born posthumously (EH, Why I write such excellent books, 1). Nietzsches reection in this context is self-laceratingly consistent. It would have to be odd, self-contradictory, to expect that his works be understood. That his readers have ears (and here he claims the metaphor of having hands) for his writings is an expectation that would go against the constitutional requirements needed in order to understand a book at all or in the rst place (or even, but these are dierent things, to understand an author) as interpretive preconditions whose importance and indispensability he had always presupposed. 4. Scanning, Schemes, and Science: Nietzsches Troubadour Song We have noted that as early as 1869, in his notes for Die griechischen Lyriker, Nietzsche paralleled ancient Greek musical culture with the song culture of medieval Europe. For the Greeks, text and music were so intimately joined that without exception the very same artist created both, a genial versatility which was far from unusual, as Nietzsche continued to explain: consider the troubadours, the Minnesnger, and even the guild of Meistersingers66. Nietzsches The Birth of Tragedy thus calls for a specic comparison to The Gay Science. We recall that The Birth of Tragedy had been reissued in 1886 with a new subtitle and a self-critical preface emphasizing the preeminence of science as the veritable core or focus of the book. In the case of The Gay Science, the 1887 title page to the work substitutes a comic rhyme in place of the 1882 epigraph from Emerson and appends an additional, fth book (like the later added fourth book supplement to Thus Spoke Zarathustra), polished o in the latter case with a further cycle of songs, invoking at once the knightly as well as the chastely67 erotic character of the troubadour (and recurring in the arch allusions of Nietzsches Ecce Homo): Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei68.
FS 5: p. 308; cf.: p. 367. That one should take this chaste character lightly seems advisable. See P. Bec, 2003 as well as A. de la Croix, 1999. Nietzsche himself corroborates this erotic dimensionality in a note where he arms the Provenale as a highpoint in European culture just because they were not ashamed of their drives (KSA 10, 256). Despite the appeal of identifying Nietzsches immortal beloved with Lou (and the question of Nietzsches love aair with Lou is something else again) or else for tracing his passions for the boys of southern Italy (as Khler and Krell among others have speculated, see note 82 below), it is more likely that the addressee of the love songs of Nietzsches gay science would have been Cosima Wagner. I say this not because I am personally especially persuaded of Cosimas charms but because of the very nature of the gay science. The ambiguous coding of the troubadours message was for public display: a love song sung to the beloved in the direct presence of the beloveds husband, who, for good measure, would also be ones own patron. See for a study of this coding, P. Zumthor, 1975. 68 The title plays o many things, particularly Wagners Meistersinger but it also alludes to Walther von der Vogelweide, especially as Nietzsche had heard a course on his poetry during his time at the University of Bonn. I explore the issue to follow at greater length in B. E. Babich, 2005a, in Keith Ansell-Pearson, 2005.
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A good many readers have dutifully underscored the preeminence of the art of laughter in The Gay Science: apotheosizing Nietzsche as the philosopher who teaches us to laugh. But what was at issue in this art of laughter was nothing less than the meaning of existence itself, that is, the prime question of science and philosophy (GS 1). In the same way, Nietzsche invoked the vanity of then-contemporary scholars incensed by his use of the word science a pique that has not played itself out recalling their complaint: gay it may be but it is certainly not science69. It is worth noting that their objection unsettled Nietzsches ambition to have articulated a profoundly serious science (GS 382). Deeply serious, Nietzsches gay science wanted to be gay out of profundity70 as the ancient Greek had discovered the art of drawing his delight in the surfaces of things, his gay superciality, from the depths of tragic wisdom (GS iv). Alluding to the troubadours art of song71, The Gay Science might be regarded as a handbook to the art of poetry, as Nietzsche plays on the notion of vademecum/vadetecum in the series of short poems that made up his Joke, Cunning, and Revenge: Prelude in German Rhymes, a title alluding to Goethes Scherz, List, und Rache, via a musical setting72. In this sense, The Gay Science explicates the science of philology as much as it exemplies the musical art of poetic composition. But this will also mean that one might say, as Heidegger argued in a dierent tonality in his Nietzsche lectures, that The Gay Science could well be regarded as Nietzsches most scientic work. 5. Provenal Song, Mirth, and Poetic Language As we know from the quotation marks in the subtitle Nietzsche added to the second edition of Die frhliche Wissenschaft, the language of la gaya scienza is not Nietzsches. Indeed, in his notes, Nietzsche will reprove the blindness of his academic readers beyond their misunderstanding of cheerfulness [Heiterkeit]. Starting with the title itself, Nietzsche would complain that most scholars forgot its Provenal meaning73. From Provence to the Occitan, one of Nietzsches Nachlass drafts, Gai Saber, begins with an address to the mistral (KSA 11, 547; cf. GS, Songs of Prince Vogelfrei; EH, GS). This is the troubadours art (or technic) of poetic song, an art at once secret74, anonymous and thus non-subjective75, but also including
KSA 12: p. 149. The depths of which profundity Nietzsche left open as a question as he tells us in his Ecce Homo, Die Frhliche Wissenschaft. 71 In Nietzsches notes we nd the variant titling: Studies of every kind/to the gay science/(la gaya scienza) (KSA 9: p. 681). 72 Although Goethes Singspiel from 1784 was originally set to music by Goethe himself in collaboration with the composer Philipp Christoph Kayser in 1785, it was never performed in Goethes day. E. T. A. Homan wrote stage music for it in 1799 but Max Bruch had also composed the music for a comic opera of the same title in one act, using Ludwig Bischos abridged version of Goethe in 1858. Wagner too had composed music to Goethes Faust, which last detail may be relevant for an understanding of Nietzsches allusions to Faust in The Gay Science. Goethe himself was unsuccessful as librettist, if his poems inspired numerous musical ventures. 73 See BGE 260 and KSA 11: p. 547 and p. 551. 74 Cf. the discussion of trobar clos, in E. Aubrey, 1999: p. 263. For a Lacanian interpretation of this coding, see Alexandre Leupin, 1993: pp. 53-68. 75 Ibid.: p. 259. Due to its non-modern quality, this anti-lyrical (i.e., a-personal) lyricism absorbed Nietzsches interest in The Birth of Tragedy. See BT 5.
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disputation76 and comprising, perhaps above all, the important ideal of action (and pathos) at a distance: lamour lointain. Nietzsches exploration of the noble art of poetic song77 is intriguing enough to compel attention. Detailing these song forms in his notes as he does78, Nietzsche even seems to have framed some of his own poetic eorts in this tradition. To take an obvious instance, the 1887 appendix of songs to The Gay Science, includes a dance song entitled, To the Mistral, to be heard together with Nietzsches praise of the south and arming Nietzsches love of Dame Truth herself (Im Suden). Even more, as one literary scholar has reminded us in his reections on the origins of the gay saber, rather less than an earmark unique or specic to Nietzsche, the playful context of laughter hilarity and the joy of play exemplies the medieval tradition of vernacular song79. In this way, the reference to gaiety in the rst aphorism of The Gay Science recalls the focus of Nietzsches rst book on musical poetry, The Birth of Tragedy, Not only laughter and gay wisdom but the tragic too, with all its sublime unreason, belongs among the means and necessities of the preservation of the species (GS 1). As the art of contest in poetic song and given Nietzsches courtly allusions to Goethe as noted above or else, and more patently, to Wagner, it is important to explore the tradition of the troubadour. One might go still further a eld to an unattested (but likely) connection with Frdric Mistral, the Occitan poet who popularized the inventive Provenal tradition of poetry, and who was a contemporary of Nietzsches day80. But we should also move slowly here not just for reasons of philological care (Nietzsches lento). That is to say that if the clearly erotic undercurrent (along with the recurrent focus on shame in The Gay Science we note that Nietzsche concludes both books two and three on the note of shame: as long as you are in any way ashamed of yourselves, you do not yet belong to us. [GS 107] and, again, What is the seal of liberation? No longer
76 The tenso is regarded as the model for scholastic reasoning. See Aubrey, 1999: p. 335. Part of the justication for this association is Peter Abelards compositions, compositions which Helose recalls to him as seductively enchanting and which, as he tells us in his own reections on his calamities, were channeled into philosophy. Although apart from Heloises recollection of them to us and his own allusions, Abelards secular songs have been lost, his sacred songs have been transmitted. 77 The character of nobility is a primordial one for Nietzsche: as inventors of the ideal of love as passion, Europe almost owes its very being (BGE 260) to these knight-poets. 78 Albas Morningsongs; Serenas Evensong; Tenzoni Battlesongs; Sirventes Songs of praise and rebuke; Sontas Songs of Joy; Las Songs of Sorrow (KSA 9: p. 574). 79 Roger Dragonetti writes, Nous voulons dire par l que ce qui lanime depuis le XIIme sicle au moins cest lesprit de jonglerie qui fait de la langue potique linstrument agique de tous les miroirs qui rchissent sa propre fable (Wir wollen deshalb sagen, dass das, was mindestens seit dem 12. Jahrhundert ins Leben tritt, der Geist des Jonglierens ist, der aus der poetischen Sprache das Instrument macht, das in allen Spiegeln aufscheint, die seine eigene Fabel reektieren). For Dragonetti, this tradition has everything to do with the energy of the common peoples tongue: [...] le dveloppement de la langue vulgaire, dont lpanouissement saccomplit dans lelement du rhythme de la musique, saccompagne dune sorte de hilarit o le rire passe du badinage l bouonerie, au ricanement, voire au persiage, sans que jamais la langue ne perde ses droits la souverainet du jeu de la joie quil procure (R. Dragonetti, 1982: p. 13). Dragonetti reads the gai savoir (the orthography of which he continuously varies in his text) via an association with Nietzsche, explicitly invoking Dionysian revelry: Il est tout fait clair que le concept de gay saber, port par le fond dionysique du joy, que les potes courtois clbrent dans la liesse et le ravissement, suppose tout un cte foltre, factieux et plaisant, dont la posie courtoise fait preuve abondamment. Il nous a paru ncessaire dinsister sur ces aspects de la gaya sciensa qui gouverne pour deux sicles au moins toute une rhtorique de la littrature lyrique ou narrative dont la langue sarticule essentiellement dans le rythme du contredit (Ibid.: p. 15). There is much to be explored here with regard to Nietzsches conception of rhetoric and metaphor but also parodic form. 80 Marcel Decremps (1974) has traced this connection from Herder onwards..

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to be ashamed before oneself [GS 275, see also 273 and 274]) does not quite oer a demonstration of Nietzsches homosexuality81, a similar restraint is called for in this case as well. We will need much more than a recollection of the Provenal character and atmosphere of the troubadour to understand Nietzsches conception of a joyful science, even if, given the element of a complex and involuntary parody (GS 382), the spirit of the Occitan certainly helps, especially where Nietzsche adverts to dissonance throughout (betraying the disquiet of the mistral wind as well as its seasonal relief ). For nothing less than a critique of science is essential for an understanding of the ideal of Nietzsches gay science. As we have already seen, a reection on ancient Greek music drama had occupied Nietzsches rst concerns with the general question of what he called the problem of science in his 1886 reections on his rst book, The Birth of Tragedy. This object of Nietzsches scientic concern as we have already explored this above, was Nietzsches declared discovery of the birth of tragedy in the folk song, in lyric poetry in the music of the Greek lyric word (BT 5, 17, etc.). Seen from this perspective, The Gay Science tells us Nietzsches life work in terms of his scholarly achievements as well as his own deployment of the same. Thus we nd Nietzsche putting this science, this gay science, to work on his own behalf and taking this as far as the consummate promise of his troubadours (and even Catharist) ideal of self-overcoming. This is the context of impossible love, the condemnation never to love, as that intimate disappointment of unrequited love in which David B. Allison quotes Nietzsches resolution to eect his own healing transguration82. If the gay science is a handbook of song, it pregures what Allison has delicately analyzed in the context of Nietzsches fatal love aair with Lou Salom as what will become Nietzsches recipe for inventing the alchemical trick for transforming this muck [Kothe] into gold83. If Nietzsches self-therapy can work as it does for the love of a woman, for Lou, as Allison argues, it is because the alchemical transformation consummates what Nietzsche calls amor fati, that is, the love of life and fate itself, real life, not just warts and all, but exactly including, as intimately necessary to life, the whole gamut of illness and suering, mis-recognition and disappointment, as well as death, and so adumbrating the all-too real horrors of ancient tragedy. As a philosopher in the fashion of the gay science, you can play or experiment with yourself in your own thinking, you can be the phenomenologist of yourself, varying the eects of health, illness, convalescence or the persistence of illness and pain on thought itself. For neither science, nor scholarship, nor philosophy, Nietzsche tells us, has ever been about truth (Ibid.). Each of these occupations, as Nietzsche tells us, has always had some other motivation or aim
81 Joachim Khler has made the case for this claim, but it is complicated because, as David B. Allison and Marc Weiner have also shown, another argument for a similarly shameful eroticism, namely autoeroticism, can also be made, indeed Nietzsches couplet witticism regarding masculine physiology seems to allude to this (and it is not irrelevant that tales of Kants sex life play upon the same physical phenomenon): Steh ich erst auf Einem Beine/Steh ich balde auch auf zweien (KSA 9, 686). See J. Khler, 2002, D. B. Allison, 2001, M.A. Weiner, 1995: pp. 335-347). 82 See for the context here, D. B. Allison, 2001: p. 154, citing Nietzsches EH, Z, 7. 83 Nietzsches letter to Overbeck: Christmas Day, 1882 in Smtliche Briefe, Vol 6: p. 312. Cited in D. B. Allison, 2001: p. 115. For a bit more on Nietzsche and alchemy, see B. E. Babich, 2004c: pp. 264-283.

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in mind, e.g., health, future, growth, power, life... (Ibid.). Acknowledging the passions of knowledge heretofore, Nietzsche is at pains to argue that the ideal of objectivity is a delusion either of self-deceiving idealism or a calculated mendacity. Belief in such an ideal is the default of science altogether. In its place, Nietzsche argues against both the idea and the ideal of pure science, dedicated to sheer knowledge as if knowing should be its own end (GS 123), as he also argues against knowledge for gain and prot84. In every case, his reference point is the noble (cf., D 308 and BGE 212) ideal of la gaya scienza. Contra the idealistic convictions of the will to truth, to truth at any price, Nietzsche dares the proposition that truth once laid bare, no longer remains true (GS iv). A gay science will need to know itself as art. And such an artful knowledge needs to recognize its own truths as illusions85. The alchemical proof of Nietzsches joyful science, amor fati, nds its planned and executed exemplication in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as well as in the retrospective song cycle appended to the later written fth book of The Gay Science86. In this experimental fashion, in this scientic wise, the promise articulated on behalf of music in The Birth of Tragedy might nally be fullled, as his reections in Beyond Good and Evil and Ecce Homo suggest. If, as Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, the spirit of science (der Geist der Wissenschaft) and techno-mechanical progress could be shown to have had the power to vanquish myth (even if only with a scientic myth of its own) and poetry (even if only with a scientic poetry of its own)87, the spirit of music might be thought this remains Nietzsches nest hope, it will become his philosophical music of the future to have retained the power to give birth once again to tragedy. Such a rebirth compels us to seek out the spirit of science in terms of its antagonistic opposition to musics power of mythical creativity88. As preserved in written form, like Homers epic song, like Greek musical tragedy, la gaya scienza corresponds to the textual fusion of oral traditions composition, transmission, performance in the now frozen poems of the troubadours. For this reason it is important to recall that, as in the case of the ancient tradition of epic poetry, the knightly art of poetry, the gai saber as it was rst recorded in
84 Despite Nietzsches clear specication of the intrinsic desires and motivations of knowledge, it is hard to imagine a stronger denunciation of the usual nancial motivations of research scholarship than Nietzsches, although Weber and Heidegger come close. Gold in the The Gay Science, lightly and gaily enough, turns out to be a metaphor for the sun: shining rippling gold on the water (GS 337; GS 339) or else as the parodic and presaging image of Zarathustras morning song, as an overowing vessel: Bless the cup that wants to overow in order that the water may ow golden from it and everywhere carry the reection of your bliss. Behold, this cup wants to become empty again (GS 342). Readers intrigued by this imagery may wish to read Richard Perkins on the same. 85 I discuss this only seemingly paradoxical point in B. E. Babich, 2004 and B. E. Babich, 1999: pp. 1-24. 86 Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins with a dawn song (Albas) exemplifying another of Nietzsches master song cycles, in addition to the instantiation of, and ironic variation upon, the more typical troubadours dawn song (which was traditionally more a song sung less to greet the new day than to mourn the close of the alliances of the night, as the hours steal into the claims of the day) in the Songs of Prince Vogelfrei, Song of a Theocritical Goatherd. 87 Anyone who recalls the immediate eects produced by this restlessly advancing spirit of science will recognize how myth was destroyed by it, and how this destruction drove poetry from its natural, ideal soil, so that it became homeless from that point onwards (BT 17). 88 If we are correct in ascribing to music the power to give birth to myth once more, we must also expect to see the spirit of science advancing on a hostile course towards the myth-creating force of music (Ibid.).

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the 14th century89, preserved what had been a much older song-tradition dating back to the 12th or 11th century, or, indeed, earlier still90. As we have seen, the spirit of music gives birth to tragedy, the tragic art and knowledge that is ultimately the metaphysical comfort of the artist (BT 25)91. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche articulates this metaphysical comfort as the distance and light of art (GS 339). By contrast with such a metaphysical or musical comfort, the comfort of the spirit of science is a physical one: eine irdische Consonanz (BT 17). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche will analyze this saving grace, this working functionality as the reason we, too, remain still pious. (GS 344). Astonishing in its patent, empirical but insuperably contingent success, what holds up (GS 46) in science as the now modern (technological) scientic solution to life is the gift of a deus ex machina, as Nietzsche claries the vision of Prometheus for us (GS 300), the God of the machines and the foundries (BT 17), put to work on behalf of a higher egoism, condent in the worlds correction through knowing, and of the viability of a life guided by science (Ibid.) but above all, capable of concentrating the individual within the most restrictive sphere of problem solving (the scientic method). For Nietzsche, as for the rest of us, the method at work stipulation, mechanism, and above all delimitation, i.e., method as such is the key to the modern scientic age. The same methodication is also the means whereby science becomes art, but to say this is also to say that science departs from theory alone, i.e., from its metaphysical heaven or perfection, to become practicable and livable, viable, as such92. However eective they are (and they are very eective as Nietzsche underscores), the expression of natural laws in human relations or numerical formulae (GS 246) remains a metaphorical convention: a Protagorean conventionalism Nietzsche famously compares to a deaf persons visually metaphorical judgment of the acoustic quality of music on the basis of Chladni sand/sound gures (GS 373) an image which gave Nietzsche proof of the veritably metaphorical convertibility of sound and light in wave forms or vibrations, or Schwingungen, as Nietzsche triumphantly declared (KSA 7, 19 [140]: p. 164) and today we might reimagine the Chaldni metaphor as the music of a digital music le printed as binary character text or else, and more obliquely, as the dancing play of light, the purely visual music of the gleaming refraction surface of a music CD hung as a light catcher93.
89 This refers to the Leys dAmor laws of love a work compiled in Toulouse by seven troubadours who established the Acadmie littraire de Toulouse ou Consistoire du Gai Savoir, a group that transmitted the poetic code of the Gay Saber. See Olivier Cullens entry in Ferrand, La Musique du Moyen ge: p. 279. On the relation to law, see P. Goodrich, 2001: pp. 95-125. 90 See above noted references regarding the troubadours as well as, more broadly, L. Treitler, 2003. See too E. Aubrey, 1996 and for a discussion of the distinction between vocal and unaccompanied song in the context of the tradition of musical accompaniment, C. Page, 1976, as well as, again, P. Zumthor, 1975. 91 E. Fink, 2003, oers one overview of Nietzsches artists metaphysics. See for further discussion in English as well as additional references, B. E. Babich, 2005b. 92 Nietzsche attempts several articulations of this, for example, where he writes one variation upon the same expression in The Birth of Tragedy. Logic as artistic conception: it bites itself in its own tail and so opens a portal to the world of myth. Mechanism, the way science turns into art 1, at the periphery of knowledge, 2, beyond the pale of logic (KSA 7: p. 224; cf. BT 15). 93 The full context here is as follows The human being as the measure of things is similarly the basic concept of science. Every law of nature is ultimately a sum of anthropological relations. Especially number: the

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In this way, when Nietzsche rst sets up the opposition between art and science in terms of music and myth in distinction to logic and calculative advantage what is at issue is a proportionate achievement. As Nietzsche had argued in his rst book, both art and science are ordered to life. Art seeks to harmonize dissonance, resolving it by transguration not by elimination but by way of musical incorporation: a becoming-human of dissonance. (BT 25, cf. 24) By contrast, especially in the guise of the technological science of modernity, as it begins with Socrates and the promise of logic and truth, mechanical or physical science very eectively corrects or improves the world. In this way, science substitutes an earthly consonance in place of the elusive promise of the tragic art, or music, which for its part oers no solutions to mortal problems (this is tragedy) only beautiful concinnities94 or harmonies (this is the art of music). For Nietzsche, a focus on science may not be distinguished from aesthetics (art) as we have already seen nor indeed from ethics (morality). Thus he contends on the ethical level, that when modern scientic rationality (GS 358) turns its eye on suering, it conceives (and thereby reduces) suering to a problem needing a solution (KSA 1, 394). There is a whole skein of diculties here for Nietzsche, beginning with the question of the nature and extent of suering (psychic or physical, cultural or historical) and including the quality and character of comfort and relief. The compassionate and tragic element will always be important for Nietzsche, a sensitive pathos he shared with Schopenhauer. But beyond Schopenhauer, Nietzsche would also argue that the problem of suering eludes ameliorating reduction for the very reason that a solution to the problem of suering also and inevitably elides the whole fateful range of what belongs to suering (GS 338, 318). This is a complex point and it does not mean that Nietzsche was in favor of passively enduring much less inicting suering. Rather: to strip o the multilayered, complex covering of truth (that is its illusions) is also to dissolve what is true (GS iv, cf. TI, How the Real World at Last Became a Myth), in the same way that Rome as an empire came to dominate its world, to use Nietzsches example of cultural supremacy (and for a contemporary example, we can think of what we call globalism). Imperial Rome blithely obliterated the traces of its past (better said, of course, the past of its predecessors) without the slightest inkling of bad conscience: brushing o the dust on the wings of the moment of the historical buttery [GS 83]). In ones own life, this layered and interwoven complexity is the inscrutability and that is exactly to say the meaning of suering (GS 318). More critically, this is also the problem of the meaning and signicance of suering for another person (we might call this the philosophical problem of other pains [GS 338]). In this reection, so crucial to the notion of the eternal return, Nietzsche touches upon the deep relation of suering to happiness as well as everything that suering necessitates and makes possible (Ibid.).
quantitative reduction of every law, their expression in numerical formulas is a mousk as someone one who lacks the ability to hear judges music and tonality according to the Chladni sound patterns (KSA 7: p. 494 cf. p. 445). 94 Concinnity is the term I invoke to describe the working eect of Nietzsches philosophical style of writing. See B. E. Babich, 1990: pp. 5980 as well as more extensively in B. E. Babich, 2002a: pp. 171210; notes: pp. 200-205.

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The complex problem of suering and pain is at the foundation of Nietzsches great challenge to contemporary expressions of care ethics. Beyond this we can attend to the ethics of compassion as Nietzsche would speak of the higher ethic of friendship (KSA 8, 19 [9], 333). This higher ethic is Nietzsches intriguing and still untapped contribution to understanding Heideggers notion of care in the elusive reection contra pity (Mitleid) that would teach what Nietzsche names Mitfreude (Ibid., cf. GS 338). As the terms of Nietzsches gay science can now tell us, Nietzsches thinking on morality is as complex and often as counter-intuitive as it is because he is interested less in promulgating a moral theory than in questioning the presumptions of the same. The same critical spirit of questioning endures as the key to science for Nietzsche (as it is the same for Heidegger)95 and what Nietzsche confesses as his personal injustice is his very scientic conviction that everyone must somehow, ultimately have to have this Lust des Fragens (GS 2). In other words, Nietzsche permitted himself to believe that everyone was in some measure possessed by a passion for questioning at any price (GS 344). 6. Gay Science: Passion, Vocation, Music For Nietzsche, we explain (or as he takes care to specify, we describe [GS 112]) everything with reference to ourselves and our own motivational intentionality, consequently and inevitably, here Nietzsche goes beyond both Kant and Schopenhauer, we fashion (or invent) the very concept of a cause (GS 112; cf. 357) and thereby misconstrue both the world and ourselves in a single blow96. As a critique of science, Nietzsches critical reections on science move his rst attempt to raise the question of science, the critical reexive question of science in terms of the conditions of any possibility of knowing, summarized, in his attempt at a self-criticism, as looking at science itself as a problem, regarded scientically and that is to say, from the perspective of art and life. Nietzsche is thus able to outline a critical revision of the standard genealogy of science out of the spirit of myth and magic and alchemy as he also nds science modeled on the occluded paradigm of religion (GS 300; GM III: 25). Nietzsche does not merely parallel science and religion in terms of both faith and ultimate goals, that is, piety and metaphysics (GS 344) but earlier, in a rarely remarked upon aphoristic tour de force, Nietzsche plays on the dynamic between science and religion and the prejudices proper to both. In this fashion, Nietzsche tells a parable to explain (and not quite to denounce)97 an earlier eras wholly scientic (one thinks of the Jesuit scholar, Robert Bellarmines) resistance to the astronomical claims of Galileo and to Copernicus and so on to the then current resistance to the geological claims of evolution. In the very way that the
See GS 2, 375, as well as see M. Heidegger, 1961. I explore this point further in B. Babich, 2005c. Nietzsche argues that The sole causality of which we are conscious is that between willing and doing we transfer this to all things and signify for ourselves the relationship of two alterations that always happen simultaneously. The noun is the resultant of the intention or will, the verb of the doing. The animal as the creature that wills that is its essence (KSA 7: p. 482. See also GS 112). 97 Nietzsches sensibility here approaches Paul Feyerabends reection on Galileo and his historical context. See P. K. Feyerabend, 1987: pp. 247-264.
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noble passion of love (the purity of the lover, the same purity that forgives even the visceral vigor of lust itself, as Nietzsche notes [GS 62]) would be disinclined to image (or to be asked to imagine) the inner guts of the beloved, the whole network of tissue and blood and nerves in all their glistening truth, so the believer had, in times gone by, a similar lovers horror with respect to the very idea of the divine sensorium. In earlier, more religiously (as opposed to more scientically) pious times, one recoiled from the viewpoint that would reveal the beloved: the cosmos and thus God himself, laid bare by the incursions of telescopes and astronomical theory. In everything that was said about nature by astronomers, geologists, physiologists, and doctors, he saw an intrusion on his choicest property and thus an assault and a shameless one on the part of the attacker (GS 59). We see here the sensitivity of Nietzsches rhetorical style at work: beginning where all the world knows its way around and knows all about (that is, as every male philosopher knows all about love and love aairs)98, Nietzsches parable takes the reader to a more esoteric insight (into scientic cosmology and the trajectories of its historical contextuality and thence to philosophy). For the sake of the philosophical question of truth and logical rationality, Nietzsche raises the question of science as the question of the measure of the world of real not ideal (GS 57) things. For Nietzsche, just as one cuts away the metaphysical domain of the noumenal, real/ideal world and loses the phenomenal world in the same process, the clarication of the human being in modern scientic, evolutionary and physiological terms also works to eliminate the pure possibility of knowledge as such. If what works in us are tissues and cells, genes and evolutionary history, associations and habits, then we cannot speak of knowledge, and certainly not reality. The problem is worse than a Kantian conceptual scheme, space-time, causality, etc., the problem is in the mixture of ecology, physiology, and electro-chemical processes. Thus Nietzsche can conclude: There is for us no reality... (GS 57). When, in the following section, Nietzsche goes on to detail his radical nominalism he is not merely invoking the sovereignty of human invention but its impotence. Thus he declares his conviction, that unspeakably more lies in what things are called than in what they are (GS 58). This is complicated as it begins in arbitrary convention, but ends in something even more durable than habit as there is also, and there are entire sciences like philology but also, like anthropology and the other human sciences that seek to adumbrate Nietzsches insight here, a natural history of conventions or habits. Thus he reects that appearance from the very start almost becomes essence and works as such. But cutting through all of this is itself a proof of its ecacy and origin and above all, it is, we should not forget, enough to create new names and estimates and probabilities in order to create new things in the long run (GS 58)99. For Nietzsche, all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error (BT v). Nietzsche saw that the critical self-immolation of knowledge (the truth that one is eternally condemned
term, meaning invention but also related to tropes and their variations) as a science (GS 335): it is the heart of what Nietzsche called la gai saber. For this etymology, see pp. 12-13 in P. Zumthor, 1995: pp. 11-18.
98 For a discussion of this scholarly conviction, see B. E. Babich, 2000b: pp. 1555. 99 This poetic creativity is the ultimate meaning of the troubadours art (trobar, an etymologically disputed

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to untruth [KSA 1, 760]) at the limit of the critical philosophic enterprise is to be combined with the sober notion that insight into illusion does not abrogate it and, above all, such insight does not mean that illusion lacks eective or operative power. To the contrary, from every point of view, Nietzsche argued, the erroneousness of the world in which we live is the surest and the rmest thing we can get our eyes on (BGE 34; cf. GS 111, 112). Nor is this visual metaphor an incidental one here100. For Nietzsche, to regard the body as a complexly knowing instrumentarium, widely keyed to all its senses and not restricted to sight alone, oers an understanding of the body itself as mind, that is, not opposed to the mind, and not imagined as a Cartesian or Lockean adjunct to the mind, but, writ large and veritably Hobbesian (if beyond Hobbes), a grand reason, a plurality with one sensibility, a war and a peace101. As physician of culture, the philosopher is to be an artist of science, a composer of reective thought, refusing the calculations of science as the thickness deadly to the music of life (GS 372, 373). Refusing such calculations, the gay science promotes a more musical, more passionate science. In this way, the only help for science turns out to be not more science or better scientic understanding but the therapeutic resources and risks of art102. The goal is not a more charming, comic or light science but, much rather and much more a science worthy of the name, if perhaps for the rst time: a gay science with the courage truly to question (GS 345, 346, 351) resisting what Nietzsche analyses as the always latent tendency of degraded and ordinary science to rigidify into either dogma (GS 25) or empty and mindless problem solving (GS 373). It is for this reason that one misses the point when one maintains that Nietzsche is either for or against science. Instead, Nietzsches interpretive touchstone contrasts what arms mortal life on this earth with what denies that life. But because mortal life includes sickness, decay, and death, this tragic perspective opposes the nihilism (be it mystico-religious or rational-scientic) which would seek, as does religion, to redeem or else, as does science, to improve life because both perspectives turn out to deny mortality (suering, frustration, death an emphasis common to the troubadours as well as ancient Greek music drama or tragedy and, indeed, opera).
100 See also Nietzsches note: We speak as if there were existent things and our science speaks only of such things. But an existing thing exists only in terms of the human perspective: which we cannot dispense with. Something becoming, movement as such is utterly incomprehensible for us. We move only existent things out of this our world view is formed in the mirror. If we think the things away, the movement goes too. A moved force makes no sense for us (KSA 9, 309; cf. GS 110). 101 The body is a great reason, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace. Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra (KSA 4, 39). Thomas Common has recourse to sagacity to render Vernunft, while R. J. Hollingdale speaks of intelligence and Walter Kaufmann, perfectly correctly in this case, translates Vernunft as reason in its exactly philosophical sense, where Nietzsche continues: The tool of your body is also your little reason, my brother, which you call spirit, a little tool and play toy of your great reason. With even more Kantian clarity, we hear: There is more reason in your body than in your reason (KSA 10, 4[240]). Nietzsche thus sets the body in contrast to the intellect, our four-square little human reason [viereckigen kleinen Menschenvernunft] in the materialist context of empirical science (GS 373). 102 Thus and exactly where Nietzsche speaks of a joyful science he is also careful to avoid the simple opposition between science and art, by insisting on a new kind of art: another kind of art a mocking, light, eeting, divinely untroubled, divinely articial art, that like a bright ame, blazes into an unclouded sky! Above all: an art for artists, only for artists! (GS iv).

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Like the problem of suering, Nietzsches philosophy of science addresses the problem of mortal life without seeking to solve it. For Nietzsche, knowledge and becoming (truth and life) mutually and incorrigibly exclude each other (KSA 12, 9[89]; cf. 7[54]). Thus to say that our art is the reection of desperate knowledge (KSA 7, 19[181]), is to set art and knowledge on the same level and for this same reason, both art and knowledge can be used either against life or in the service of life (and we recall that life is the woman of Nietzsches troubadour song in Thus Spoke Zarathustra [see too GS 229]). But when Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science that science can serve either goal (GS 12), he cannot be articulating a traditionally nave expression of sciences celebrated neutrality, as we have seen. Instead, and precisely as a logical or theoretical project, science is the kind of art or illusion (or convention) that remains inherently nihilistic. Because science (as such) is not objectively neutral, science must always be critically reviewed not on its own basis (we have noted that science is not in a position to do this) but rather on the ground of what makes science possible, and that is what Nietzsche originally named the light of art. Art gives us perspective on things (GS 339), which is also to say that it teaches us how to take them from the right distance (GS 107). This is the perspectival knowledge proper to the science of rhetoric. That same optic or perspective prism, to allude to a Goethean metaphor for Nietzsches own approach to science focuses on life in its complexity, considered in such a way that it can be seen in all its shifting complexity. At times we need to have a rest from ourselves by looking at and down at ourselves and from an artistic distance, laughing at ourselves or crying at ourselves; we have to discover the hero no less than the fool in our passion for knowledge; we must now and then be pleased about our folly in order to be able to stay pleased about our wisdom (GS 107). This joyfulness (or gaiety) is what Nietzsche encourages us to learn from the artists, and in the same manner as we learn from physicians how best to down a bitter drink: by thinning it, to diuse or veil it, or by mixing sugar and wine into the potion (GS 299). Art has at its disposal a variety of means for making things beautiful, alluring, and desirable, precisely when they arent for in themselves, they never are (Ibid.). Here Nietzsche calls upon us to be wiser, to be more poetic, and thus to go further than the artist who forgets his magic at the point where his art leaves o: We however want to be the poets of our lives, and rst of all in the smallest and most everyday way (Ibid.). As the actual poets and authors of life, this poetizing would extend to a benediction of life as it is. Promising to bless life, Nietzsche made this his own Saint January resolution of the great year of eternity, I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful (GS 276). As Hadot has detailed this same philosophical art, Nietzsches alliance of science (necessity) and art (creativity) is the achievement of the ancient, musical art of philosophy. This is the music of the gay science, as Nietzsche sought to realize this art as the eternal perfection of a way of life: amor fati.

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