Speculating on the Moment:
The Poetics of Time and Recurrence in Goethe, Leopardi, and Nietzsche
By Nicholas Rennie
Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005
Reviewed by Paul Bishop, Glasgow
In his final Untimely Meditation (Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung) Nietzsche pairs Goethe with Leopardi as “the last great followers of the Italian philologist-poets” (die letzten grossen Nachzügler der italienischen Philologen-Poeten) (cited p. 166; “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,” §10). According to Nicholas Rennie, in the preceding Meditation, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben), the thinking of Goethe and Leopardi “comes together in an exceptionally productive mutual engagement” and, in so doing, “forms the basis for Nietzsche’s elaboration of his theory of time and recurrence” (p. 270). In order to understand how this “double engagement” with Goethe and Leopardi in the essay on history is “explicit and central” to Nietzsche’s argument” (p. 14), we need first to examine the logic of Rennie’s own study.
In his autobiographical notes, Goethe records his response to a visit in 1801 to Bad Pyrmont. It was, he says, like being caught “in a magic circle”: one “identifies the past with the present,” and has “the impression of having rendered the unfathomable [das Unfaßlichste] an object of direct intuition [unmittelbaren Anschauung]” (cited p. 79). References to such moments occur elsewhere in Goethe’s writings (such as his recollection, in Dichtung und Wahrheit [Part III, Book 14], of “the sensation of past and present being one” when contemplating Cologne cathedral in 1774 [cited p. 80]), and the plot of his monumental work, Faust, turns on the relation between time and desire: “If ever to the moment I shall say:/Beautiful moment, do not pass away!” (ll. 1699-1700). Given all, it is appropriate that Rennie begins Speculating on the Moment with a discussion of the “Prologue in Heaven” which, as is well known, draws on motifs from the biblical Book of Job―a text which, in the twentieth century, aroused the interest of (among others) C.G. Jung, René Girard, and Hans Robert Jauss (pp. 17; 26-28). After examining the structural similarities between Goethe’s drama and Job, Rennie turns to the notion of the moment (or Augenblick) in Goethe’s thought as “a principle […] by which time appears to take on a particularly rich formal coherence” (p. 41). A footnote surveys some of the detailed work already undertaken in this area, and Rennie distinguishes between a negative conception of the Augenblick (the temporary trivia of la vie quotidienne) and its much more positive sense, used to refer to what Goethe called prägnante Pünkte or prägnante Momente―“‘pregnant’ in the sense of being both germinal, and rich in significance” (p. 45).
The latter (superior) sense is comparable, Rennie suggests, to what Goethe called the symbol, in which (in the words of the Maxims and Reflections) “the particular represents the general, not as shadow and dream, but as the living-momentary revelation of the unfathomable [lebendig-augenblickliche Offenbarung des Unerforschlichen]” (cited p. 60). And, drawing attention to the second wager speech towards the end of Faust II―
―Rennie highlights a further important distinction. The first Augenblick Faust addresses is, “as a temporal designation, the moment experienced as a presentiment or ‘pre-feeling’ (Vorgefühl)”, for it bears “a symbolic function, representing in the here and now a superlative moment that might (dürfte) be more authentically experienced in the future”; the second Augenblick is or “a secondary, mediating moment” that “is itself the ‘highest’ one,” although it, too, “anticipates another, more authentic moment” (pp. 60, 37). Thus, in Rennie’s words, “the signifier achieves primacy over any referent,” since this second moment “lends a diachronic structure to the semiotic divide between signifier and signified, where the latter can only ever be experienced by way of anticipation―by way of the signifier” (pp. 37, 60). And so, too, “the structure of the play invites us […] to recall the thematic parallels to the biblical story and read Faust’s apostrophe to the schöner Augenblick as referring to Job’s encounter” (p. 35; cf. p. 37).
More generally, it is argued, “the Goethean motif of the Augenblick recurrently presents itself in approximation to the divine totum simul, an all-encompassing gaze in which successive moments, temporally dispersed, appear simultaneously present”; (1) yet, at the same time, “Goethe’s writing just as systematically problematizes this harmomizing aspiration” (pp. 61-62). Or in structuralist terms, “Goethe’s ‘moment,’ inasmuch as it represents itself as always anticipating but never achieving such resolution,” operates according to the principle of metonymy (p. 61). Rennie is insistent on this point: “the ‘moment’ foregrounds its own metonymic incompletion, its failure to achieve the ideal closure of symbolic representation” (p. 62; cf. p. 63).
In short, “the myth of the Augenblick” is defined by Rennie as “that of a reconciliation between time and eternity” (p. 68). Such a myth has consequences for Goethe’s conception of history. Rennie notes that such poems as “Testament”’ (Vermächtnis) and “The Godlike” (Das Göttliche) demonstrate a triadic conception of the present, similar to St Augustine’s in his Confessions, Book 11 (pp. 68-71). In a brief historical overview, he highlights Goethe’s contribution to the discussion about the “moment” in sculpture and the pictorial arts that goes back, via Karl Philipp Moritz and Frans Hemsterhuis, to Lessing, Shaftesbury, and, ultimately, Aristotle (pp. 72-74). Drawing on a variety of texts, including Dichtung und Wahrheit, “A Grave near Cumae,” and the Italian Journey, Rennie shows how Goethe repeatedly uses a visual metaphor to highlight “the contrast between this world of historical incoherence and an aesthetic realm that promises to resolve the disorder of all time and space in the flash of a gaze” (p. 75).
This conception of the prägnanter Moment as “a principle of organization in the plastic arts” plays a role in Goethe’s historical imagination, and does so “according to his definition of the symbol” (p. 85). In the case of Faust, however, the moment-as-symbol is, in Rennie’s view, “crassly undermined by the absence of that ‘revelation’ that Goethe defines as constitutive of the symbolic mode” (p. 89), so that “not only does the play undercut what its structure anticipates as a religious epiphany”, but “the schöner Augenblick also undermines itself as a substitutive aesthetic (or ideology) of self-presence” (p. 91). This “instability that doggedly haunts the Augenblick-motif through Goethe’s writing” is explored further in a chapter entitled “The Aleatory Moment,” through the model reflected in another central motif of Faust―that of gambling (p. 93). Here Rennie discusses the Witch’s Kitchen in Faust I and Act 1 of Faust II in relation to Pascal’s famous wager and the motif of the dice-throw in Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, drawing on Karl Heinz Bohrer’s category of “suddenness” (Plötzlichkeit) and Friedrich Kittler’s description of “writing systems” (Aufschreibesysteme). In Goethe, Pascal, and Mallarmé alike, Rennie claims, “the poetic sign calls attention to its fluid relation to any stable, extra-textual referent” (p. 124).
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The second figure in Rennie’s study, Giacomo Leopardi, has, at first sight, little in common with Goethe, beyond the coincidence that he completed his Zibaldone in 1832, the same year in which Faust was finished. Yet both writers respond, in differing ways, to historical crises: in the case of Goethe, to the French Revolution; in the case of Leopardi, one might say, to history itself. Leopardi’s writing features two related concepts: noia (“tedium” or “boredom”) and fango (“wretchedness,” or just “mud”), reflected in such poems as “Infinity” (L’infinito) (1819) and “To Himself” (A se stesso) (1835). In “To Angelo Mai” (Ad Angelo Mai) (1820), Leopardi uses the westward journey of Christopher Columbus as a metaphor, Rennie suggests, for “the most unsettling―and most life-inhibiting―discovery we can make, namely that of the fundamental sameness of all existence” (p. 175).
Thus at first glance the contrast between Leopardi and Goethe could not be greater, for whereas the latter “celebrates the prägnanter Augenblick, the moment that, by its internal logic, sustains the idea of a universal theodicy,” the former “protests instead the moment’s indigence: the present, he suggests, is incapable of engendering life” (p. 195). Yet, Rennie believes, Goethe’s and Leopardi’s conceptions of the moment are marked by “a similar, if opposite, reversal,” for as, in Goethe’s case, “the conciliatory vision of the schöner Augenblick […] is consistently undermined by an opposite, ‘tragic’ insight,” so conversely, in Leopardi’s, “a tragic experience of time is sporadically illuminated by abrupt, eiphanic moments of visual synthesis” (p. 196).
Now, the conceptual background to such moments is Leopardi’s theory of pleasure, summarized in such propositions as “pleasure is either past or future, but never present” (cited pp. 176, 198); “pleasure in its fulfilment does not exist” (cited p. 199); and “pleasure, in fact, is only an abandonment, a forgetfulness of life, and a kind of sleep and death” (cited p. 211). Indeed, on a number of occasions (“Dialogue of Malambruno and Farfarello” [1824], “Dialogue of an Almanac-Pedlar and a Passer-by,” and Zibaldone [1817-1832]), Leopardi considers the thought that each instant, along with its inability to bring happiness, might be repeated indefinitely―an anticipation of the thought of eternal recurrence in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft) and one that inspires an almost equal horror (pp. 218-19). (2) Anticipatory of Nietzsche’s “heroic resignation” (p. 220), however, is the tone of amor fati in Leopardi’s “The Dominant Thought” (Il pensiero dominante), with its apostrophe to love as this “terrible, but dear / Gift of the gods” (Terribile, ma caro / Dono del ciel). Over against Leopardi’s notion of time as repetition, furthermore, one must set his conception of “the epiphanic (visual) moment” (p. 221).
In a note from 1820, Leopardi argues for a new kind of philosophy, an “ultra philosophy” or ultrafilosofia (cited p. 226). In contrast to previous (rational) philosophy, which is predominantly analytic in nature, ultrafilosofia is said to be essentially synthetic, grasping everything to be understood in “a blink of the eye” or colpo d’occhio (pp. 226-27; cf. 233, 253). Like Pascal’s esprit de finesse or Vico’s “eye of the ingenium”, Leopardi’s “intuitive thought […] has an eye-like facility for comprehension” (p. 228). Thus “the inspired poet, the philosopher of sublime speculation, the man of imagination […], or anyone in the grip of a strong passion,” is capable of “discovering in a single glance many more things than he is used to seeing at one time, discerning and beholding in the flash of an eye a multiplicity of things [d’un sol colpo d’occhio discernendo e mirando una moltitudine di oggetti]” (cited p. 229).
Mediating between fango and the colpo d’occhio, between “the endlessness of […] featureless temporality” and “the suspension of time in moments of enthusiastic comprehension” (p. 234) is a third mode of perception, which Rennie calls “aesthetic doubling.” According to Rennie, “Leopardi suggests that it is possible to affirm the present in the manner of an aesthetic representation, without thereby claiming that another moment has the status of an origin for this representation” (p. 236). In Leopardi’s own words, “for the sensitive and imaginative man […] the world and all objects are in a peculiar way double” (all’uomo sensibile e immaginoso … il monde e gli oggetti sono in certo modo doppi), and “in this second mode of perceiving objects resides all the beauty and pleasure of concrete things” (in questo secondo genere di obbietti sta tutto il bllo e il piacevole delle cose) (cited p. 243).
Such a mode of perception arises, in Rennie’s view, from “an ironic temporality, but one that as such does not resolve itself into pure negativity” (p. 237). Thus aesthetic doubling “mediates between an experience of pure successivity, and the illusion of temporal arrest,” implying “an acknowledgement of the mind’s engagement with itself, but a recognition as well that the medium of this activity―language―is perpetually unstable and surprising in its results” (p. 255). And, rightly, Rennie highlights the resonance of the thought that “the act of aesthetic representation itself bears an animating charge” (p. 245) in Nietzsche’s idea of the importance of “what is nearest to us, what is around us and in us” (das Nächste, das Um-uns und In-uns) (p. 255; cf. pp.159, 161).
Finally, Rennie turns to Nietzsche, whose introduction to the works of Leopardi may have come via Schopenhauer (see The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, §46) or Hans von Bülow. Despite his allegedly poor knowledge of Italian, Nietzsche lists Leopardi among the four “prose masters” of the nineteenth century (The Gay Science, §90) and, for Rennie, Leopardi stands as “a key―although initially unnamed―presence” behind “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (p. 283). In Leopardi’s “supra-historical” thinking, Rennie suggests, Nietzsche identifies “not just a series of varitions on an ancient vanitas motif, but rather a discourse of the ‘moment’ that has acquired particular urgency since early Romanticism” (p. 284). Not only does the “Night-Song of a Nomadic Shepherd of Asia” (Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia) (1829-1830) inform Nietzsche’s allegorical image of the timeless existence of animals, he also cites Leopardi’s “A se stesso” as an example of what he calls “historical sickness”―an instance of the attitude of “supra-historical men” whom he leaves to “their nausea and their wisdom” (cited pp. 279, 277; “On the Uses,” §1). And in contrast to the Leopardian abandonment of the individual to the infinite in which he must drown, Nietzsche calls for a return to land (cited p. 288; “On the Uses,” §10).
As far as Nietzsche’s comments on Goethe are concerned, Rennie detects in them a “double strategy,” according to which Nietzsche “generally ignores that part of the poet’s life and work that does not belong to the highly circumscribed world of Eckermann’s Conversations”; and, where he disagrees with Goethe, does so mainly in unpublished notes (p. 271). More precisely, there is “a life-long ambivalence” on Nietzsche’s part towards Goethe, that “only effaces itself when―and to the degree that―Nietzsche succeeds in making Goethe a wholly ‘classical’, anti-Romantic figure” (p. 290). On this account, Nietzsche thus “willingly adopts a notion, promulgated by Goethe, of the individual (and Goethe himself in particular) as a principle of redemptive historical synthesis” (p. 293). When, in his essay on history, Nietzsche expresses the hope that the value of history will lie in “its taking a familiar, perhaps commonplace theme, an everyday melody, and composing inspired variations on it” (cited p. 298; “On the Uses,” §6), Rennie detects an “emphatically Goethean motif: that the present, by a process of aesthetic heightening (Steigerung), might become a ‘comprehensive symbol’ [umfassendes Symbol] of existence, and that it might thereby come to embrace what Nietzsche calls ‘a whole world of profundity, power and beauty’ [eine ganze Welt von Tiefsinn, Macht und Schönheit]” (p. 298; “On the Uses,” §6; cf. Dawn, §44). Moreover, whereas Nietzsche elsewhere “seems to cite Goethe’s writings almost as an unconscious reflex”, here he focuses on “a Goethean motif as a central problem―and a central hope―of his text” (p. 299).
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Speculating on the Moment