Cultures of the Muses

by Arno Böhler

University of Vienna

1.1 Disturbing effects of the enlightenment tradition

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature.(1)

By these gloomy thoughts Nietzsche famously opens his text On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense in which the human race appears as clever animals haunted by the manic delusion to be the center of the world—as if the world would pivot around man. The same hyper illusion a mosquito has when it “floats through the air […], feeling within itself the flying center of the world.”(2)

In this somber fable—emphasizing the delusional character of life and the human intellect in particular—Nietzsche posits himself in direct opposition to most philosophers of his time: to Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx and others, who all prized reason as a faculty, precisely capable of overcoming the illusionary nature of life. Therefore, all of them embraced enlightenment as “man's release from his self-incurred tutelage”(3) in asking us to use reason in order to overcome the irrational delusions of life. “Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own reason!”(4) This sentence was the famous motto of enlightenment formulated by Kant in his text “What is Enlightenment?” in 1784.—a slogan addressing itself to each one of us in asking us to get rid of the accidental nature in men.

To realize such a government of reason, each single member of human society is called to participate in the process of freeing us from irrational myths by the use of everyone’s mind. It is obvious that this general call is the birth of modern citizenship and civil societies. A call, directed not only towards society in general but towards each member of it personally: singular/plural, to quote the title of a book written by Jean-Luc Nancy.(5)

Since this very moment, wherever a crime against the dignity of man takes place, every mature member of such an “enlightened” society is called to denounce it, stand up against it in public and resist it independently of the cause of such a violation of human right; either it should be the act of an inhuman God, of an unjust state or the act of a citizen who violates the dignity of man while treating others inhumanly, in inappropriate ways.

Reflecting this wise definition of man, one starts to question—to be more precise—we “Good Europeans” start to question ourselves. “What should be wrong with this idea? Could one imagine even any nobler, more accurate, more advanced, more human picture of man, anything greater in dignity than this humanistic concept of man, brought forward and enforced most powerfully by enlightenment philosophers? Can there be anything greater than this?—: being addressed by others as a free person?—as someone being able to posit one’s own goals rationally in order to make them true and become a reality? What should be wrong with this modern picture of man? Is it not pure madness to call this “universal truth” a myth, a tragic moment in world history, like Nietzsche does in his gloomy fable, when he calls the invention of the human intellect “the highest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’?”

1.2 The restless being of modernity

Let us hear what Nietzsche himself has to say against these far reaching accusations. Does he actually have a strong counter argument against this picture of man, drawn by enlightenment philosophers?

I read the following passage, “On Modern restlessness,” in Human All Too Human. A Book For Free Spirits, as such a strong counter argument.

On modern restlessness.—The farther West one goes, the greater modern agitation becomes; so that to Americans the inhabitants of Europe appear on the whole to be peace-loving, contented beings, while in fact they too fly about pellmell, like bees and wasps. This agitation is becoming so great that the higher culture can no longer allow its fruits to ripen; it is as if the seasons were following each other too quickly. From lack of rest, our civilization is ending in a new barbarism. Never have the active, which is to say the restless, people been prized more. Therefore, one of the necessary correctives that must be applied to the character of humanity is a massive strengthening of the contemplative element. And every individual who is calm and steady in his heart and head, already has the right to believe that he possesses not only a good temperament, but also a generally useful virtue, and that in preserving this virtue, he is even fulfilling a higher duty.”(6) [emphasis added]

Nietzsche’s answer concerning the threat, inherently at work in the picture of man drawn by the myth of modernity, is clear and distinct at this point. As long as the dignity of man lies only in man’s capacity to make something out of his own life, this well-known picture of the self-made-man, the self-made-woman, will produce cultural conditions in which the value of the contemplative part of life will finally be ruined. The authority of this mystical “calling,” powerfully enforced by the enlightenment tradition, thus is not only an act that releases man from “self-incurred tutelage,” but will be the beginning of a tragic moment in world history as well to Nietzsche, in which the human race starts to be driven, captured, and damned precisely by this discourse of modernity to work all day long without having leisure and idleness anymore.—a new form of modern slavery, which finally will end up in an “enlightened” society inhabiting the human figure of “workers” only: subjects, apparently capable of producing themselves out of themselves, either in a solipsistic way, like in modern liberal societies, or in a communitarian way, like in modern socialistic societies, in which the entire human race assumes the form of a worldwide labor force capable of shaping the material world that surrounds it according to the rational needs of the human race.

Taking all this into consideration, Nietzsche’s critique of modernity obviously has nothing to do with pessimism, fatalism, or resignation(7) but with his appreciation of the contemplative, receptive aspects of life as virtues, generally more useful for the sake of a higher culture than the so called active parts of life, which, on the contrary, are always close to subtle forms of barbarism to him.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche repeats the argument that the human race needs leisure and idleness rather than a worldwide globalization of the figure of the “busy men” in order to survive in the literal German meaning of the word “survival”: über-leben.(8) Because überleben, survival, means more than just following one’s own “will to live” (conatus) to Nietzsche. It rather executes a “will to power,” a step beyond the status quo of ones life in order to stretch, extend and cultivate its limits virtually.(9)

Leisure and idleness.—There is an Indian savagery, a savagery peculiar to the Indian blood, in the manner in which the Americans strive after gold: and the breathless hurry of their work—the characteristic vice of the New World—already begins to infect old Europe, and makes it savage also, spreading over it a strange lack of intellectuality. One is now ashamed of repose: even long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience. Thinking is done with a stopwatch, as dining is done with the eyes fixed on the financial newspaper; we live like men who are continually ‘afraid of letting opportunities slip.’ ‘Better do anything whatever than nothing’—this principle also is a noose with which all culture and all higher taste may be strangled. And just as all form obviously disappears in this hurry of workers, so the sense for form itself, the ear and the eye for the melody of movement, also disappears.(10)

One is ashamed now of repose; long reflection almost causes remorse of conscience, we live like men who are continually afraid of letting opportunities slip. Better do anything whatever than nothing. Pertinent, if not prophetic sentences which presage by 130 years this contemporary dilemma.

Obviously Nietzsche himself still had enough time and idleness to develop the seismic sensibility that allowed him to anticipate and foresee, in a creative way, the lack Europe will factually experience in the centuries to come: the loss of leisure and idleness. He was the first one, probably, to clearly understand that a new specter haunts Europe to-day:(11) the silent, and therefore mostly unheard and displaced demand of a new politic of idleness which finally allows us, us other “Good Europeans,” to get and stay in touch with the muses again: the messengers of joy, pleasure and gay cheerfulness, producing life-affirming values in a soul whenever they touch it.(12)

1.3 Old Europe

At this point of my text it may be wise to remember that Nietzsche’s untimely call for a new culture of leisure and idleness, as the indispensable means to prepare somebody in such a way that one regenerates the capacity to be amused of life again, was, on the one hand, almost a one-man vigilance committee against the hype of enlightenment philosophies during his time. But, on the other hand—being a professor of classical ancient philology— Nietzsche knew better than anybody else that his call for a new politic of the muses was untimely only within the context of his times, while, on the other hand, it was a simple quote(13) of the most ancient Greek concepts of the political.

A fact that becomes obvious in particular whenever Greek philosophers speak about “amousia”: a status, in which a person or society in general has lost contact with the muses. The effects of such an unpleasant state are, at least in the view of ancient philosophers, absolutely predictable. What necessarily follows such a condition is a cultural decline towards barbarism, ignorance, corruption and decadence.—a “culture” of resentment, in which the muses, the sources of corporal amusement, creativity, and gayness have been replaced by the uncanny guest of (European) nihilism.(14)

In his Politeia Plato referred to this state of “a-mousia” in a passage in which Socrates expresses his concern that everybody who has failed to stay in contact with the muses will finally become weak, deaf, blind, and insensitive.(15) And in respect to somebody who really has lost any sense for the muses, Socrates even proclaims that such a person will become entirely irrational and incomprehensible in the end, since losing one’s sense for the rhythm of things would make a soul entirely tact- and graceless, out-of-tune and barbaric, until such a person, finally, will have lost any means to solve his/her problems other than by savageness and brutality.(16)

1.4. Nietzsche’s Politics of a New Dance Culture

What ancient philosophers called “amousia,” the barbaric lack of any sense for the rhythm of things, is precisely what Nietzsche had in mind when he developed his own concept of decadence as the condition of somebody who has been corrupted physiologically.—a theory deeply combined with Nietzsche’s critique of a certain Christian heritage that has separated man from his bodily instincts and finally taught us to misunderstand our bodies and reject our corporeal being while putting everything “natural,” “instinctive,” and “resolute” under quotation marks. After two thousand years of Christianity, modern man necessarily expresses a contradiction of values to Nietzsche. Not only discursively but even bio-physiologically, because the incorporation of the discourse of Christianity has poisoned and corrupted our corporeal status up to a point where everything “natural” and “corporal” has been replaced successively through discursive practices till this second, cultural nature has become a first one.

For since we are now the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, mistakes, and even crimes. It is impossible to loose oneself from this chain entirely. When we condemn that confusion and consider ourselves released from it, then we have not overcome the fact that we are derived from it. In the best case, we bring the matter to a conflict between our inherited customary nature and our knowledge, in fact, even to a war between a new strict discipline and how we have been brought up and what we have inherited from time immemorial. We cultivate a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that the first nature atrophies. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were, a past a posteriori, out of which we may be descended in opposition to the one from which we are descended.(17)

Even though Nietzsche vitally criticizes this process of replacing the powerful “natural”(18) instincts of our bodies by a discourse that treats bodies as if they would be the devil themselves, this weak, deaf, blind, to wit decadent status of our modern bodies does not just indicate a sad bio-cultural condition to him. It can notify the condition of somebody too who is able, to wit, actually on the way to transform this fate into a gift. Like Nietzsche did himself, when he supposed that his “sickness prevented him from conforming to the expectations placed upon him by his family, religion, profession, or society.”(19) He recovered from Christianity himself precisely because his sickness compelled him, autobiographically, to resist the expectations placed upon him by the Christian environment he was born in. The regular dysfunctions of his corporal condition were nothing else than the driving force that forced him to overcome the status quo of his corporal weakness to regain a health stronger and more powerful than the health of those who think that they have no need to resist expectations in order to overcome themselves.

Taking his own formula for greatness in human beings, amor fati,(20) autobiographically,(21) serious in applying it in his own life on his own life,(22) Nietzsche transfigured his bodily pain into a fate while embracing it. As Katja Brunkhorst expressed this issue in her book. Nietzsche’s “genius was at its strongest as when making a virtue of a necessity, turning his personal suffering into art.”(23)

From this one can learn that the decadent status of a body, denoted by ancient Greek philosophers by the word “a-mousia”—a body, which has lost any contact with the muses—is an ambivalent condition in itself, since “a-mousia,” “Un-bildung,” can indicate two things to Nietzsche. It can be the bodily expression of a corrupt and weak corporeal status. But it can, as well, denote the status of a body ready to revolt against its own unpleasant state in order to overcome it. “Today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a higher nature, […] than that of being divided in this sense and a genuine battleground of these opposed values.”(24)

Once, the revolt against the displacement of the muses factually takes place in a body, a Dionysian power has started to ex-scribe(25) and overrule its former condition in order to become somebody else: a Dionysian body, liberated from all kinds of bio-politics(26) which denounce Earth and the corporality of our human, all to human being-here.

In Nietzsche’s Dancers (2006) Kimerer L. LaMothe has shown that dance, dance as a bodily practice, is precisely the muse Nietzsche was longing for to induce this physiological transformation in modern (wo-)man in order to newly regenerate the corrupt status of our bodies that have been enslaved and suppressed by both cultural strains dominating Western Europe: Christianity as well as its secular arm, the enlightenment tradition which disciplines everybody to make one a decent member of a worldwide economic labor force: a homo oeconomicus.

To realize such a historical fate in which one begins to ex-scribe these traditional misunderstandings of the “natural” needs of our bodies, one has to become a free spirit first to Nietzsche. Someone “unbound by convention, tradition, or habit,” someone who has “the vitality and discernment needed to do what is necessary for her own health. One who finds in the death of God an occasion to love her bodily becoming.”(27) However, every artist per se is “a person who has not forgotten his bodily becoming, and who, in making art, speaks to the artist in each of us”(28)—what is special about a dancer is that the dancer communicates bodily movements, kinetic signs rather than semantic significance only.

A dancer works with the physiological aspects of a signifier rather than with its fixed semantic meaning, with tensions rather than with fixed extensions, with intensive corporal rhythms rather than with things located at a distinct place. Therefore Jean-Luc Nancy could simply call it a tension. “A body is therefore a tension. And the Greek root of this word is ‘tonos’, the ton. A body is a ton […] A body is a tonus.”(29)

Since bodies are capable of experiencing, intensively, the tensional aspect of ex-tensional things, they are the local tonos of worldwide strings (ex-tensions) in the precise ancient Greek sense of the word “mousikós.” Their seismic capacity puts them into a position in which they are able to detect the movements of corporal things so that a body, in itself, becomes a kind of “thoughtful,” fragile being, being exposed to the physical eruptions of others.(30)

Since dance is a praxis that weights the significance of a body while moving it from one place to another (Greek: metaphoréo), it finally becomes the most primordial means to Nietzsche to evaluate the “real” weight, significance and value of things, at least in the corpus of his latest works.

For one cannot subtract dancing in every form from a noble education—to be able to dance with one’s feet, with concepts, with words: need I still add that one must be able to do it with the pen too—that one must learn to write?(31)

From this point of view one can even read his Zarathustra as the story of somebody who wants to make his body dance. In teaching the human race to educate its senses, to believe in Earth and our bodies, Zarathustra invites everybody to resist ascetic ideals, at least in the priestly sense of this word, in order to learn to see, think, speak and write anew while performing an artistic kind of asceticism that does not denounce but refine the sensuality of our corporal existence in a noble way.

You have to learn to see, you have to learn to think, you have to learn to speak and write: in all three cases the goal is a noble culture.—Learning to see—accustoming the eye to rest, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to encircle and encompass the individual case on all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling for intellectuality: not to react immediately to a stimulus but to take in hand the inhibiting, isolating instincts. Learning to see as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language ‘strong will’: the most important thing about it is precisely not to ‘will’, to be able to defer decision. Every lack of intellectuality, every vulgarity is based on the inability to resist a stimulus—you must react, you follow every impulse.(32)

It is this artistic practice of a sensomotoric asceticism that makes the receptors of our bodily sensory noble ones because one has learned to resist stimuli already on a corporal level almost immediately when they take place. Such a noble mode of sensual perception therefore is always already a re-flected one. A corporal form of “thinking,” not in the sense of a conscious, rational judgment, as enlightenment philosophers interpreted thinking in an intellectualistic way, but as a passive, receptive way of cogitatio that widely takes place unconsciously: via passive synthesis rather than through intentional acts, according to the necessities of our corporal needs rather than according to intellectual needs. “There is more sagacity in your body than in your best wisdom. And who could know wherefore your body requires your best wisdom?”(33)

1.5 Aristocratic democracy

It was this promising “Ode to Joy,” devoted to the muses, that once moved Europe almost enthusiastically, in which somebody still has leisure and idleness enough to discover a receptive, joyful form of “thinking” that takes place in the seismic sensitivity of every body that has learned to resist, almost immediately, external stimuli in a contemplative way.

In fact, once there were times in which Europe indeed was amused by this aristocratic vision of a “great politic,” a politic of the muses, prizing the contemplative part of life more than the so called “active” one, represented by the unholy alliance of two figures in modern times: the figure of the “worker” and the “businessman” as the real proponents of a global, bourgeois labor force.(34)

If one considers these historical circumstances we are in right now, one may be compelled to ask oneself, at least in silence: “Isn’t it a shame what contemporary Europe has made out of this Old European dream that once laid at the bottom of ancient Greek philosophy and the most primordial myths of ancient Europe: Hesiod’s Theogony and Homer’s Hymn to the Muses. Hasn’t it been entirely replaced, meanwhile, by the dream of the self-made man and self-made woman? A modern dream that has started to occupy and ‘enlighten’ Europe in the very moment the values of idleness have been devaluated and the contemplative values, most prized in former Europe, have been replaced by the overvaluation of the active part of life?”

But if there should be any truth in Hegel’s and Heidegger’s concepts of historical origins: that the chronological beginning of something is the archeological opening of all possibilities which inherently constitute the form of the arriving guest—the political promise of ancient politics necessarily would still haunt Europe to-day.

It is clear that in postmodern times, the historical circumstances we are living under right now, such a vision has to sound foolish—at least totally sentimental—especially once one would start to believe in it politically. Since these ancient times, at least for postmodern times, have gone forever.

It is true. Within a postmodern world, globally installing the homo oeconomicus everywhere on Earth, an aristocratic form of democracy has no chance to become a real political force. Indeed one would have to get rid of these conditions and replace them by a better, namely a more aristocratic, form of democracy in order to make this alternative dream happen.

From this perspective another sentence of Nietzsche starts to make sense. “You don’t think that by leisure and idling I’m talking about you, do you, you lazybones?”(35)

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