Angeln, Blatt, Constellation: Plural Forms in Nietzsche's Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne

Krumm kommen alle guten Dinge ihrem Ziele nahe.

—Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra

In irgend einem abgelegenen Winkel des in zahllosen Sonnensystemen flimmernd ausgegossenen Weltalls gab es einmal ein Gestirn, auf dem kluge Thiere das Erkennen erfanden. The well-known opening fable of Nietzsche's essay Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne¹ emerges from a corner—a Winkel—though no particular one.² It relies upon the multitude of points in space and moments in time, a region defined as much by number as by form, to set the stage for the intellect's fleeting and purposeless existence. This fable is often read in the context of an analogous narrative found in Schopenhauer's Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. The sense of endless space, of being one among many, and the uselessness of a flickering, fleeting knowledge are the same in Nietzsche's corner and Schopenhauer's innumerable orbs, whose crusts of mold nourish living beings whirling disoriented through time and space.³ Yet the angular figure of the corner from which the essay opens, however remote it might appear, returns in the same paragraph, mobilized under the sign of a human fallacy regarding the worth of the intellect: "nur sein Besitzer und Erzeuger nimmt ihn so pathetisch, als ob die Angeln der Welt sich in ihm drehten" (WL 369). The arc from the remote, unspecified corner of the universe to the internalized Angeln der Welt is an anthropocentric trajectory, one which Nietzsche's translators have rendered in the singular: thus the Angeln der Welt become the world's axis (Breazeale, Geuss and Speirs) or even the center of the world (Kaufmann).⁴ In either case, the translation is a distortion which reduces the number and simplifies the form of the Angeln.

Translating the Angeln as axis also denies them an essential connectivity, which becomes apparent when the textual history of the Angeln der Welt is taken into consideration, a history which connects Nietzsche's essay to a tradition reaching from Pliny the Elder's Natural History through German Romanticism. The context in Pliny is a northern land of Hyperborea, located beyond the cold and wind of the Riphaean mountains and snowladen Pterophoros. There one finds the cardines mundi—which German translations prior to Nietzsche's time rendered as the Weltangeln and the Pole der Welt⁵—and the limits of the revolutions of the stars.⁶ Whereas Nietzsche's English translators understand the Angeln der Welt as axis, Pliny's original metaphor, from the fourth book of the Natural History, was that of a door hinge. The Latin word cardo literally denotes the pivot and socket around which a door was hinged or the point around which something turns; its figurative meanings include the transition of seasons or epochs in time as well as the "critical moment" upon which everything turns.⁷ The physical exceptionalism of the cardines mundi correlates to the way of being of the people who live there. The Hyperboreans are blessed with happiness and extreme longevity, being the race whose members choose their own endpoints by deciding the moments of their deaths. Unlike the creatures in Wahrheit und Lüge's opening fable, everything about their situation in place and time is definitive. They are of interest to both Pliny, for whom they are the "subject of marvelous stories," and Nietzsche, who claims the name Hyperborean for the philosopher in notes designated for The Will to Power.⁸

Other references to the Angeln der Welt more contemporary to Nietzsche divest them of their geographical location and define them abstractly. Schleiermacher, who is more concerned with the spark of religious faith than with the ephemeral nature of knowledge itself, attributes to faith the same sense of fleetingness: who can hold on to such a spark when all forces are recruited for worldly, temporal things—"um dasjenige festzuhalten, was sie für die Angeln der Welt und der Gesellschaft, der Kunst und der Wissenschaft ansehen"?⁹ Pliny may have envisioned his cardines mundi as absolute geographical coordinates, but in the...