5/11/07 - English Literature - Romanticism and Anti-Humanism

Nietzsche wrote about modern culture and art. His work radicalises issues that were commonly thought to be common sense, such as What is thought for? What are values? Is morality innate or historical?

Nietzsche discusses 'nihilism', in which he thought modern society was fraught. Nihilism is the sense of emptiness or nothingness in a culture which has lost faith in its values, but which cannot find new values to replace them. This is a western cultural problem. Post-Christianity, people lacked the creativity to make a new moral system.

"They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more to Christian morality."
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 80]

This links to his statement about the death of God.

"The greatest recent event - that "God is dead," that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable - is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes - the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, "older." But in the main one may say: The event itself is far too great, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means - and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown in it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending - who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?"
[Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 279]

Nietzsche here uses overwrought rhetoric. There is the same sense of gloom in Marlon's thoughts about London at the beginning of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Reactiveness is a nostalgic reference back to a transient system of moral value by which to live. So by losing faith in Christianity, people go back and live by it even more closely. Ideas raised above life which are transcendental are looked to, and made to become the new moral system. So by looking back, we also look up.

"Morality is merely sign-language, merely symptomatology; one must already know what it is about to derive profit from it.”
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 66]

But morality is a mode of translation. It is a collection of symptoms, referring back and judging present behaviour according to past values. Activeness is just such imposing of a strong interpretation on others.

Nietzsche divulges how we might respond to nihilism.

"What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of “aim,” the concept of “unity,” or the concept of “truth.” Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking; the character of existence is not “true,” is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories “aim,” “unity,” “being” which we used to project some value into this world – we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.”
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 13]

He says that when people perceive the death of the moral system, they question the meaning of morality, and even of life. People struggle for success of authority over their own perception of the world. One perception is that of the priests: that Jews and Christians took those values that were anti-aristocracy and made them into a new vision of life that was about passiveness, charity, meekness and introspection. In a word, everything that the aristocracy was not. Nihilism arises when we consider moral perceptions to be historical and mere interpretations. Perceptions of life are only strong or weak, but all are false because they derive from only one point of view. People soon realised that all judgement can be challenged. Think how perception in Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner is conveyed: all belief systems are shown to be false. Hogg forces the reader to take responsibility for the meaning of his own novel. We must determine the truth of the novel. As Nietzsche says,

"'Truth' is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered – but something that must be created and that gives a name to the process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end – introducing truth, as a process in infinitum, an active determining – not a becoming-conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined. It is a word for the 'will-to-power'."
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 298]

So one's creative view cannot be subtracted. There must be an 'active determining' on each individual's part.

Blake talked of something similar to Nietzsche's 'will-to-power' in his poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

"Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason; Evil is the active springing from energy.
Good is Heaven; Evil is Hell."
[William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 105]

Blake thinks that love and hate, good and evil, are both necessary to life. All life is a universal struggle. Blake picks up this struggle and makes it reactively codified.

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or geniuses, calling them by the names, and Adorning them with the Properties, of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslaved the weak by attempting to realise or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began priesthood – choosing forms of worship from poetic titles.
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things.
Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast."
[William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 111]

Here he expresses proto-Nietzschean sentiments. He believes in a premoral and prereligious perception of life. He says that people named the gods; the gods did not name the people. The ancient poets had seen strong human capacities and exteriorised them by giving them name and calling then divinities. They created the world for themselves. So morality is the radical forgetting of human and inhuman potential.

Virginia Woolf gives the reaction of one person to the loss of truth and reality, which is like a blank space in a picture.

"With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time she did it – a third time. And so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out at her) a space. Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering higher and higher above her. For what could be more formidable than that space? Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers – this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention.”
[Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 148]