"The sky of … European culture, its evening sky is burning now – perhaps burning itself out. We artists among the spectators and philosophers are grateful for this to the Jews."[1]
A drafted book and my recent essays examine the dynamics and identity of Western culture as a "cult of aesthetics," a culture with a singular drive to idealize and 'fix' its identity in images and to export and impose idealized images for worship, a strong form of recognition, validation and submission. "Entertainments" are deadly serious types of self-identification and assertion for the psycho-aesthetic impulse is expressed in all forms of culture, not least in sports, politics and geopolitics; in the last-named it often expresses its conflicted Hellenic-Hebraic origin with great clarity. Even imagery which invites criticism or disdain is a means for expanding the West's circle of enchantment. The dazzling images disgorged by the mass media project the West's deep Hellenic source in magike tekne, a culture of image-weaving and metamorphosis.
The cult of aesthetics has a trajectory that moves from an imagined idyll of new identity, to apocalypse as the image detaches from and consumes its host to elegy that mourns the death of the host (culture) and petrifaction of the image. Originally a Greek pattern born of erotic trauma and impulse to metamorphosis and displacement (see the myths of Philomela, Medusa, Aphrodite and Dionysos among many examples) this trajectory and its underlying unease was greatly accelerated by the incorporation of Jewish material into the basis of the West. The mix is inherently unstable and the irritation and splitting of the hybrid increase; the audacious, improbable graft of Judaism into Greco-roman culture has been and continues to come undone. An essentially adulterate body rejects a root based on purity and precise definition. Clarity of aesthetic form, the Greek excellence obscures the impulse to boundary- erasure it seeks to idealize; a transgression or dissolution that many cultures define as "pollution." [2] In contrast, the essence of Judaism is integrity, including the integrity of all boundaries which demands a rejection of magic, not least magical self-transformation and an integration of science, reason and faith. Against pessimism, fatalism, the self-immolations of tragedy and, the rejection of the world epitomized in the cult of birth control and population management is "the reason and optimism of Judaism…its promise of numberless offspring"[3] and its sense of providence, of history that is purposeful and good.
The epigraph to this essay reflects Nietzsche's profound sense of these hybrid strains; of the apocalypse to which they conduce amid "the damned Anglomania of modern ideas"[4] and the role of the Jews in this historical threshold and change. His multi-faceted and provocative insights on the roots and modern aspects of the West, of art, language and identity make his works an excellent medium for advancing cultural analyses.
In developing a critique German anti-Semitism ("it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic screamers from the country"), Nietzsche writes of the lack of a strong German identity. By contrast, he asserts that "the Jews, however, are beyond doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race now living in Europe."[5] He sees in them a primary impulse to "change, when they change…as slowly as possible." Their refusal to measure their worth by modern ideas, he writes is a sign of strength that yet coheres with a desire "to be absorbed and assimilated by Europe." This is the quality that more obviously distinguishes most Jews in the West in the hundred and twenty years since he wrote.
Jewish vigor, purity and conservatism could lead to "preponderance and… mastery over Europe" he wrote, adding, "that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain," a point vital to emphasize in the decade when a German gave familiar form to what became "the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."[6]
Central to this essay and my ongoing analysis of the cult of aesthetics is Nietzsche's opposition of vigor to representation, acting and "artistry." Yet, he is not completely consistent in developing this distinction. In the midst of his critique of Wagner, particularly his subordination of music and drama to gesture and to the actor's iconic "pose" he deconstructs "the man of letters who really is nothing but 'represents' almost everything."[7] This quality, the distinguishing feature of the West fits the Greeks and their "inner craving for a role and mask, for appearance," for "falseness with a good conscience" and a "delight in simulation that pushes aside one's own character."[8] This fits the definition of image-work with the drive of the eidolon to displace the original, for the reflection or identical (idemptitas) to absorb and displace identity (identitas), an impulse embedded in the Latin words both of which derive from id which also is the source of the Greek idein, "to see patterns of images." The cognates suggest a culture that senses or desires a tendency of the original to merge with its image or reflection, one might call it a Narcissus impulse,[9] with uncertain if proud individualism as a fleeting phenomenon.
Elaborating this contrast between Hebraic vigor, sublimity and majesty and Greek representation, Nietzsche identifies the Greeks as principal among the peoples who want to give form, who "prefer to be fertilized and give birth. In this regard he contrasts them, and the French, to the Jews and the Romans "who must fertilize and become the causes of new orders of life."[10] These two types of genius "seek and misunderstand each other like man and woman" he writes, alluding to the way the 'Greek genius' entrapped and deformed the integral vigor of Judaism into a new form of polytheism and cult of the eidolon, the antithesis of Judaism, the core of what it proscribes, alienation and magic.
As typical in Nietzsche's dialectic and wide-ranging thought, he associates both Greeks and Jews with women, the latter in their gift as artists and "men of letters" and both with role-playing. After arguing that all diplomats, with their gift for representation and appearances would be good stage actors, he proceeds to add that the Jews seem part of "a world-historical arrangement for the production of actors, a veritable breeding ground of actors… A man of letters is essentially an actor" he writes, elaborating his critique of actors and modulating his acknowledgment of Jewish eminence in the press and on the stage. Then he notes that women "have to be first of all and above all else actresses...they put on something even when they take off everything"[11] This mildly risqué figure hides the insight about imagery whose mystery both exposes and conceals.
Similarly, he defines the essence of representation as a self-reflexive and erotic impulse he identifies as "the literary female," a code he defines in French, language of a people whom, like the Greeks want to be inseminated: "I will see myself, I will read myself, I will give myself ecstasies."[12] Note how the idiom emphasizes the reflexive nature of image work. Erotic frenzy which he associates with art's Dionysian core and with Plato's philosophy of "erotic contest" whose agon produced the "new art of dialectics" becomes a trope of image-work and the subordination of art to gestures, egotism and self-reflexive activity. His praise of frenzy, "above all the frenzy of sexual excitement" as necessary to art[13] shows that his main focus was not consistency in metaphor or method.
He praises the faculty of assimilation and appropriation which I posit as the essence of the West and its core myth and eidolon, the formation of Aphrodite as told by Hesiod[14] and the image of a female ideal within the self (as Faust sees Margareta, his Helen, within a mirror) as a "commanding spirit." This myth has emerged in our times as feminism and this is the essence of the West's Hellenic root. A will that "would harness and be master" has a "power of the spirit to appropriate what is foreign and assimilate the new to the old."[15] This is a 'female' kind of capture or appropriation of energies to transfigure them; here, the female which Nietzsche often criticizes by associating with Christianity and its "castrative" impulse of "excision and extirpation"[16] is seen as a spiritual power, the power of the West whose "evening sky" yet is "burning up" in masks and shadows. He associates idealization, a center of which was Conrad's Kurtz, the last knight, a nexus of idealism and lies not with aesthetic perfection in the simple sense but with transfiguration which dissolves secondary features; it is a power that "represents, imitates, transforms" and includes "every kind of mimicking and acting, the fundamental insincerity of a heart of darkness. The essential feature here remains "the ease of metamorphosis," close kin to confusion.[17] Elaborating the idea, he closes a critique of Darwin's theory ("asserted but unproved") by defining spirit as "cunning, simulation and mimicry," qualities of the actor-artist and, he writes in this context, of the weak, who seek it more desperately, not the strong who have it.[18] So the impulse to simulate, appropriate and represent contrasts with Judaic strength and purity and is kin to the sin-obsessed "nihilistic" Christianity, "the greatest psychological counterfeit in history." that the West is sloughing off since "belief in the Christian god has ceased to be believable."[19] For "counterfeit" one could read "representation," "simulation" or "mimicry," the masks of art and the stage, the prototype of the passion play, a form central to Dionysian Greece and alien to the Hebrews whose Temple service was integral to the facts of daily life; in which roles were not masks but subordinate to work, social relations and the facts of the seasons and history.
But as a first principle, he exalts metamorphosis and becoming over integrity, being and borders. (It is an error to reduce Judaism to the duality of "being and becoming" because it includes the latter in the former which is its source). Nietzsche's discourse often rejects wholeness and integrity (though he may praise it). As a first principle He was, after all, a pan-European and proponent of a united Europe, albeit in opposition to militarism, what Benda later call the "ideological organization of political hatreds."[20] "Trade and industry, books and letters," travel, technology and "intermarriage" conduce inevitably to a new race, "European man" in which "the Jew is just as indispensable an element as any other national group." This supra-national Europe needs "the accumulated capital of will and spirit…Jews acquire[d] through long schooling in suffering" for "they have had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of us all."[21] This is an unusual confession for a 19th century European.
So his praise of Dionysian assimilative powers is not consistent. Related to his critique of art's "good conscience about falsehood" and a desire for masks he ties to acting, that is, to lying (as by diplomats) is a stinging description of the "replacement" aspect of Christianity, its attempts to claim the Hebrew Scriptures as proof of its own claims. This appropriation, this imperial cultural displacement he terms a unique "philological farce …this attempt to pull the Old Testament" away from the Jews "with the claim that it contains nothing but Christian doctrines and belongs to the Christians as the true Israel." This attempted displacement, a cultural murder that requires and promotes physical murders is a "rage of interpretation and interpolation," which has produced numerous heresies, crises of faith as well as anti-Semitism and heightened the identity conflict, dynamism and unease of the West he terms an education in dishonesty and injustice. "Has anybody who ever claimed this believed it" he asks regarding the replacement and pre-figuration doctrine.[22] His assessment is akin to his remarks on the "guilty conscience" of modern artists and the ancient Greeks notwithstanding his many praises of the latter.[23] "These Greeks have a lot on their conscience – falsification was their true trade. The whole of European psychology is sick with Greek superficiality"[24] and, one might add, its impulse to hypostasis, to creating facts from abstraction or cultural theft.
The confession of unique European guilt for both appropriating and afflicting the Jews, for persecuting the host culture and the countervailing welcome to them to join in a new European "race" are remarkable as are the praises of Jewish strength and qualities of spirit. Perhaps even more notable than his praise of Jews for producing "the most remarkable book" and "most effective moral law in the world" are his comments that the Jews are responsible for keeping the West western, keeping its link to "Greco-Roman antiquity" when the Arabs and Turks, might have changed its identity.[25] In my essays on image work I have sought to focus on this role, its ambivalence and animus more than Nietzsche did. So his frequent observations on the Greek and Hebrew national characters, which he sees more as complementary than as oppositions enhance his acknowledging that the Jews are vital to the formation and continuity of the West in their "natural, rational and certainly non-mythical explanation" of the world thus providing a vehicle for Greek rationalism.[26] This perspective supports his thesis that the Jews are essential to formation of a new pan-European culture ("Europe wants to become one")[27] though Judaism is at variance with the core mythic-magical impulse in Greek culture, its drive to appropriate and transform he elsewhere celebrates. It also sheds ironic light on the various modern and postmodern attempts to annihilate the Jews, an obverse of attempts to assimilate what is essentially different. He himself however calls often for a transformation of values, culture and the nature of Europe, a State that, presumably would give up the diplomatic-military deceits of the "peace process." The persistence of the animus he decries would not surprise him, perhaps since he sees modernism as a mix of pessimism and decadence, a weak Epicureanism that is intellectually, spiritually and physically intolerant, a "thickly – padded" egoism that above all wants protection for its inner-dramas; that wants 'security.' He thus describes the postmodern world of spectacles, collapsing consumerism and State control, an age of "bribery and treason" when the rotting of enlightenment is expressed in private passions disguised as "progress" and "corruption." It is a time "when there hardly is any secure future left" and "Caesar appears" in multinational as well as national forms.[28]
He perhaps did not realize that Caesarism could and does characterize the oligarchy and huge bureaucracy of emerging super-States like the EU. His hope for "a new synthesis" that would generate, as by an experiment, "the European of the future" is in progress but it has not changed the animus of Europe and Europeans toward Jews. Jews, and Israel, their embodiment are the other to whom Europeans were wed by Greco-Roman 'artistic' appropriation. Nietzsche recognizes the god invented by Paul as an alien god, "a negation" and not native to Europe. He apparently did not understand that nationhood, which he saw through European eyes as "the insanity of nationality" and its ostensible "pathological estrangement,"[29] of peoples was an intrinsic value to Hebraic thought and deeds as an integral (shaleim) "nation that shall dwell apart." The prime value of nation in Judaism is part of the centrality to it of distinctions and discrimination as opposed to the Greek urge to dissolution and metamorphosis, an impulse that on social and inter-nation levels is coercive and imperial. He does recognize Christianity as "a hybrid product" and even "a psychological self-misunderstanding" in its attempts to Hellenize Judaism and to negate life.[30] These views remain in tension with his hopes for a new synthesis of what probably is incommensurable; that can be achieved only by the decay or transformation of one of the main ingredients: the assimilation or annihilation alternatives which Enlightenment and Modern-postmodern Europe has offered Jews.
Nietzsche notes that the concept of sin, which he sees as linked to this decadence, is derived from Judaism but that in Christianity it obtains an obsessive prominence he hates as the epitome of a pessimistic, anti-life impulse. "Christianity has exploited the weakness of the dying for a rape of the conscience" and "to associate the procreation of man [sex] with a bad conscience."[31] Albeit, this deformation of the concept of sin is part of the transformative and assimilative power he at other times ascribes to a master spirit. When he prescribes "negating [a painful life] by will and representation," by choosing death he is remote from the Jewish and Christain ideas of self-sacrifice and ennobling hardship he himself often praises as the school of Jewish strength, noted above. Death as the conquest of pain and ugliness becomes a willed transformation, a genuine art that is the presumably honest version of the theatric posing he finds offensive in Wagner and most theatre of his day.
Pursuing the varied facets of own criticism, Nietzsche validates or at least provides complementary language for my discussion of the West as a cult of aesthetics. The Dionysian impulse that he describes above, the antinomian urge to metamorphosis, transfiguration and representation is his touchstone for art. The language and idioms of his criticism retain ambiguity about Hebraic and Hellenic traits even as his surface arguments make many specific points about their relation and about the singular role of the Jew in the West. A proponent of tragedy who strives to give it a purely Dionysian definition as recognized by the Greeks who dedicated their drama to Dionysos he yet critiques many social aspects of acting and drama, particularly but not only as displayed by the anti-Semitic Wagner. Decrying the weakness of anti-Semitism, he denotes a positive and apocalyptic role for the Jews in the hybrid culture of Europe whose evening fires he clearly and vividly recognized. He was and remains one of the most perceptive critics of the ambiguities in European character and its drive to exhaust itself as he ultimately did. The instability of the West, its "burning evening sky; its generation of movements and trends results from its appropriation and displacement of Jewish cultural matter. It is a fruitful hybrid that cannot cohere, a blending of seminal and 'female' cultures in a cult of imager-weaving that refuses to honor fully or even admit to sovereignty its rational, optimistic source.
Thus he writes prophetically that "among the spectacles to which the next century invites us is the decision on the fate of the European Jews." He elaborates his discussion to clarify that Jews will not be passive in this denouement for "they have in their history composure, steadfastness in terrible situations…and their calling to the highest things." Although Christianity has attempted to prove its own constructed truth "by treating [Jews] contemptibly" Jewish history contains a "wealth of passions, virtues, fights, renunciations and victories of all kinds…that shall flow into great spiritual men and works…such that the European peoples cannot produce and never could."[32] Acknowledging the intrinsic antipathy and bad faith of Europe, he concludes the section with the hope of a blessing that will transform the relation of these mismatched roots of the West.
Nietzsche epitomizes as well as understands much of the hybrid nature of the West. Despite his critical views of art he praises the artist who "says yes to everything questionable…he is Dionysian";[33] this joy in metamorphosis and using it as a test of greatness is Greek not Hebraic. Still, he recognizes that this is a characteristic of hysteria, a female power uneasy with its identity as suggested by the 'transgender' aspects of the formation of Aphrodite, "a male within a female hid" to use an intriguing phrase of Blake about the spectral or image-making qualities of "guilty conscience."[34] Also revealing the Greek aspect of his values, Nietzsche asserts that "the physiological condition indispensable to art is frenzy"[35] the force, usually sexual, he notes, the Greeks deified as Lyssa[36] who drives Bacchant violence and destroys Heracles. It is because they repudiate these aspects of Greece and the priests of Baal that Judaism produces "the majesty of the sublime and infinite" whose difference, having been taken in by Greece to make the West accelerates its Dionysian apocalypse and its image and pose-maddened postmodern epilog, an end game less amusing and more terrifying everyday, as befits a culture of masks and shadows, a Culture of Terror.
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