Tragically Speaking: On the Use and Abuse of Theory for Life

1. Orient/Occident, Ancients/Moderns: The Tyranny of Theory over Greece

3 I Orient/Occident, Ancients/Moderns The Tyranny of Theory over Greece Τῆς Ἀσίας ἂν ἀγγίζει ἀπὸ τὴ μιὰ · τῆς Εὐρώπης λίγο ἂν ἀκουμπᾶ στὸν αἰθέρα στέκει νὰ · καὶ στὴ θάλασσα μόνη της! • Though touching Asia on one side · and brushing Europe on the other it stands there all alone · in aether and in sea! Odysseus Elytis, The Axion Esti Hölderlin A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Greece—the ancient Greece of European desire and the modern Greece of philosophical scorn, the Greece we have yet to complete and the Greece we have always already surpassed. No other topos, geographical or cultural, has been as contested in modern European thought as this one, since in serving as the origin of the West, Greece emerged as Western civilization’s own Oedipus: a figure both powerful and beleaguered at once, a giver of blessings and a polluter from whom one needs to be cleansed. Ultimately, however, to ask whether we should continue to be “Greeks” or to break with them—the question that structured the classicism/ romanticism debate—is to ask an Oedipal, thus inescapably Greek, question. Contemplating the nature and task of modern thought in relation to the Greeks, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) drew a temporal distinction between antiquity and modernity that amounted to an ontological shift: the terms “ancients” and “moderns” now designate not only two distant chronological epochs but also two radically different modalities of being, and thus 4 Old Quarrels of thinking and creating. Hölderlin articulated this temporal distinction most concisely in a letter to the German philhellene Casimir Urlich Böhlendorff,1 by using geographical terms. Indeed, we could call them cosmological terms, since their geography involves the solar trajectory: the Greeks are for Hölderlin Orientals in that they are associated with a beginning, with the dawn of thinking . The Germans (and, ostensibly, some other modern European peoples) are called Hesperians, referring to the time of the sunset, of the vesper. The poet’s unusual gesture of separating the Greeks from the Occident, which they were traditionally thought to have founded, relies on a chiasmatic relationship he draws around the issue of the nature/culture divide between ancients and moderns. To summarize Hölderlin: the Greeks’ nature (holy pathos, sacred fire) is our culture, whereas our nature (measure, reflection, and the capacity for clear representation) was their culture. Since for Hölderlin it is harder to “freely use” one’s own nature (das Eigene) than to excel in the foreign (das Fremde) (149), it follows that the Greeks were better masters of representation than of sacred fire. We moderns, on the other hand, must gain mastery of the foreign (sacred fire) before excelling eventually in our native trait (measure), thus learning from the failure of the Greeks, who, having lost touch with their native powers, were ruined as a result of their excessive preoccupation with the acquired—namely, with form. This mirroring schema is also drawn by Peter Szondi in “Überwindung des Klassizismus” (“The Overcoming of Classicism”), his dialectical reading of this letter that turned the Hölderlin reception in postwar Germany, distancing the poet from his recent nationalist appropriations by the Stefan George circle and Martin Heidegger.2 However, this orderly schematization is anything but easy to decode once we consider closely each of its related terms. Perhaps the hardest term to be unlocked and, not surprisingly, the one around which all interpretation founders—both Hölderlin’s interpretation of the Greeks and the later interpretations of Hölderlin—is that of “nature.” On the most primary level, the term “nature” imposes a distinction between outer nature (which, for the sake of concision, I will capitalize as Nature for the next few pages) and human nature. Thus, Nature refers to the external world, and nature to the inner predilection or talent that drives an individual (or a people, as it seems more fit to Hölderlin’s epochal vision) to be the way it is in the world. The spontaneity of this latter, inner tendency Hölderlin associates with freedom. The turn toward one’s own natural tendency after the pursuit of the foreign he 5 orient/occident, ancients/moderns calls the “patriotic turn,” also translated as “native reversal” (die vaterländische Umkehr). Subsequently, what preoccupies his thought and his poetry is the search for this freedom that results from inhabiting properly our spontaneity (our nature), from existing in a harmonious correspondence with what constitutes our surrounding reality (Nature). At this juncture, we should emphasize the significance...