On the Sublime in Dawn

by Keith Ansell-Pearson

Endnotes

1. Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology, tr. Robert E. Norton (Urbana & Chicago:
   University of Illinois Press, 2008): 232-3.


2. Jean-Marie Guyau, Sketch of Morality without Obligation and Sanction, tr Gertrude Kapteyn
   (London: Watts & Co: 1898): 43.
   
   
3. The sublime is employed in the following aphorisms of the text, with a concentration in book
   five: §§ 33, 45, 169, 210, 423, 427, 435, 449, 459, 461, 542, 553, 570.
   
   
4. For further insight see Keith Ansell-Pearson, “ ‘Holding on to the Sublime’: Nietzsche on Philosophy’s
   Perception and Search for Greatness’ ” in Herman Siemens and Vasti Roodt (eds.), Nietzsche,
   Power, and Politics (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009).
   
   
5. The link between the sublime and terror is, of course, the one made by Burke. See Edmund
   Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford:
   Oxford University Press, 1998): part 1, section VII and part II, section II.
   
   
6. The idea of a new purification and consecration appears in Nietzsche as early as his untimely
   meditation on Wagner in Bayreuth.
   
   
7. For further insight, see Duncan Large, “Nietzsche and the Figure of Columbus” in Nietzsche-
   Studien, 24 (1995): 162-183.
   
   
8. Longinus, On the Sublime, tr T.S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965): ch. 35.
   
   
9. Burke 1998, part II, section II.
   
   
10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett,
    1987): §28.
    
    
11. I thus disagree with Large who sees the emergence of the overhuman in Nietzsche’s utilization of
    the Columbus figure in 1881-2 but who reads Nietzsche as largely concerned with the depths of the
    inside. See Large 1995, 172: The “open sea” represents a reorientation of the infinite, which is no
    longer to be sought in the metaphysical world above, for its immensity lies within.’ In his lecture on
    Heraclitus in the course on the pre-Platonic philosophers Nietzsche notes that, ‘Nature is just as infinite inwardly as it is outwardly…’
    
    
12. The adjectival grossartig has the sense of the ‘sublime’ and should not be lost on the reader.
    
    
13. See also on this GM: II §7, in which Nietzsche notes that life has always known how to play tricks
    so as to justify itself, including its ‘evil,’ and today, for us moderns and free spirits, this takes the form of ‘life as a riddle, life as a problem of knowledge.’
    
    
14. ‘There have always been many sickly people among those who invent fables and long for God: they
    have a raging hate for the enlightened human being and for that youngest of virtues which is called
    honesty’ (Redlichkeit), Z: I, “Of the Afterworldsmen.”
    
    
15. Since the fourteenth century Catholic churches sounded a bell at morning, noon, and evening as
    reminder to recite Ave Maria, the prayer that celebrates the annunciation of the both of Christ to Mary by the angel Gabriel. Note by translator Brittain Smith. Friedrich Nietzsche, Dawn: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, tr. Brittain Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming).
    
    
16. See Z: II “The Dance Song”: “ ‘Into your eye I looked of late, O Life! And into the unfathomable I
    seemed them to be sinking. But you pulled me out with a golden fishing-rod; mockingly you laughed when I called you unfathomable. ‘So runs the talk of all fishes,’ you said: ‘What they do not fathom is unfathomable. But changeable am I only and wild in all things, a woman and not a virtuous one.’ ”
    
    
17. See D §117 entitled ‘In prison,’ which ends: ‘We sit within our net, we spiders, and whatever we
    may catch in it, we catch nothing at all except that which allows itself to be caught precisely in our
    net.’
    
    
18. Nietzsche may have been inspired in these reflections by Schopenhauer: ‘For the morning is the
    youth of the day; everything is bright, fresh, and easy; we feel strong and have at our complete disposal all our faculties . . . Evening, on the other hand, is the day’s old age; at such a time we are dull, garrulous, and frivolous . . . For night imparts to everything its black color.’ See Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (in two volumes), tr. E.F.J. Payne (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1974): vol. one, 434-35.
    
    
19. As Duncan Large points out, these aeronauts are flying an ‘air-ship’ and he suggests that their flying
    out over the sea indicates ‘how close is their kinship to their more earthbound, or at least sea-bound mariner-cousins’ (1995, 171).
    
    
20. For further insight see Large 1995 and Bertram 2008, 237: “The moment of this extreme, unsettled
    inner “Or?” finds its classical expression perhaps in the last sentences of Daybreak, which are also,
    simultaneously, a classic example of his mastery of the end . . . no matter from which direction we approach him, even Nietzsche’s mighty torso always rounds out his intellectual silhouette with a final “Or?” just as all of his works from the Birth to Ecce finish in the doubling of such an Or. Hardly any of them, however, do so with such calm pride, such regal surrender, such masterly confidence in the face of all “Beyonds” as Daybreak.’
    
    
21. Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, tr. J. Harvey Lomax
    (Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1997): 113.
    
    
22. See also KSA 11, 35 [82]; WP §1055: ‘A pessimistic teaching and way of thinking, an ecstatic
    nihilism, can under certain conditions be indispensable precisely to the philosopher—as a mighty
    pressure and hammer with which he breaks and removes degenerate and decaying races to make way for a new order of life, or to implant into that which is degenerate and desires to die a longing for the end.’
    
    
23. See also Z: I, “Of War and Warriors”: “Are you ugly? Very well, my brothers! Take the sublime (das
    Erhabene) about you, the mantle of the ugly!”
    
    
24. On Rousseau’s creation of a new and original emotion compare Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of
    Morality and Religion, tr. R. Ashley Audra & Cloudesley Brereton (Notre Dame: University of Notre
    Dame Press, 1979): 41-2.
    
    
25. On Schopenhauer compare Wittgenstein: ‘Schopenhauer is quite a crude mind, one might say. I.e.
    though he has refinement, this suddenly becomes exhausted at a certain level and the he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his comes to an end. One could say of Schopenhauer: he never searches his conscience.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980): 36e.
    
    
26. See also Z: I, “Of the Tree of the Mountainside”: “‘The free human of the spirit, too, must purify
    himself. Much of the prison the rottenness still remains within him: his eye still has to become pure.’” Ironically perhaps, Schopenhauer’s own insight into Goethe seems to anticipate Nietzsche: “Such a life, therefore, exalts the man and sets him above fate and its fluctuations. It consists in constant thinking, learning, experimenting, and practising, and gradually becomes the chief existence to which the personal is subordinated as the mere means to an end. An example of the independent and separate nature of this intellectual life is furnished by Goethe” (Schopenhauer 1974: volume two, 75).
    
    
27. Nietzsche’s conception of the genius surely has affinities with Schopenhauer who defines genius as
    ‘the highest degree of the objectivity of knowledge (this knowledge is a synthesis of perception and
    imagination and found in a rare state and abnormal individuals). See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (in two volumes), trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York, Dover, 1966): vol. two, 292; see also chapter XXXI.
    
    
28. See Lowith 1997, 41.
    
    
29. Bertram 2008, 225. See also Z: I, “On the Bestowing Virtue”: “And this is the Great Midday, when
    the human stands in the middle of its path between beast and superhuman and celebrates its way to evening as its highest hope, for it is the way to a new morning.”
    
    
30. In Z: II, “Of the Sublime Human Beings” Nietzsche addresses the ‘penitent of the spirit’ that are
    ‘decked out with ugly truths’ and who have not yet learned of laughter, beauty, and gracefulness and who need to grow weary of their sublimity in order to allow beauty to rise up: ‘ . . . he should be an exalted one (Gehobener) and not only a sublime one (Erhabener)—the ether should raise him up (heben), the will-less one!’ The identity of the sublime ones is unclear: are they Stoic sages, as one commentator has suggested (T. K. Seung, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Wagner: Their Spinozan Epics of Love and Power (Lanham & New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006): 191.), or the modern seekers of knowledge Nietzsche refers to in more explicit terms of the first essay of the Genealogy of Morality? It is important to appreciate that in this discourse Nietzsche is addressing a quite specific clothing of the sublime in which he is indicating that without the purifying knowledge those who are sublime remain too tied to that which needs to be overcome, namely, the old sources of the sublime and which he has opened up in HH and D. We are not to be huntsmen and women who return from the forest of knowledge gloomy and despondent. See also BGE §45 on the nature of the ‘lover of the “great hunt.” ’
    
    
31. For Burke ugliness is consistent with the idea of the sublime but must be united ‘with such qualities
    as excite a strong terror’ (Burke 1998, 109). Nietzsche’s thinking of the ugly and its transfiguration is quite different and linked to more general concerns about human becoming through continual aesthetic sublimation and transfiguration.
    
    
32. See also Nietzsche’s letter to Heinrich von Stein of the beginning of December 1882: “I would like
    to take away from human existence some of its heartbreaking and cruel character.”
    
    
33. Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Fear, tr. John Irons (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). Svendsen’s
    book sets itself a laudable aim: to ‘break down the climate of fear that surrounds us today’ and that has colonised our life-world (8). The ‘fear’ at work here is what he calls ‘low-intensity fear’ (75).
    
    
34. In a note of 1872-3 Nietzsche writes, ‘Fright (Das Erschrecken) is the best part of humanity’ (KSA
    7, 19 [80]). The context in which he states this is a consideration of the conditions under which we
    venerate what is rare and great, including what we imagine them to be and including the miraculous. Nietzsche’s preoccupation with ‘greatness’ in the Untimelies has to be understood in the context of his attack on a complacent and philistine bourgeois culture. The context of his reflections on the fate of fear and reverence in Dawn is quite different and these reflections are part of the philosophy of the free spirit and European wanderer.
    
    
35. This is not to deny that there is not at work in Nietzsche a will to the terrifying and questionable
    character of existence since this is one of the distinguishing features of the strong type as he conceives it (KSA 12, 10 [168]; WP §852); and cheerfulness in Nietzsche is always a complicated matter and comes from deep sources. The point to be stressed, however, is that Nietzsche always appeals to ‘courage’ as the best destroyer and to a courageous humanity, not a fearful one. If it is legitimate to construe Nietzsche’s entire philosophy as a training in ‘the hard school of life’ (affirmation of the tragic conditions of existence), it is clear that he holds that such a training must conquer the fear of life. The Birth of Tragedy can profitably be read along these lines: ‘…we are forced to gaze into the terrors (die Schrecken) of individual existence—and yet we are not to freeze in fear (und sollen doch nicht erstarren)’ (BT §17).
    
    
36. See the note of March-June 1888 entitled ‘Religion as decadence’ on this where Nietzsche
    distinguishes between the fool and the fanatic and the ‘two sources’ of intoxication: KSA 13, 14 [68]; WP §48.