On Friedrich and Britney, part II

How does the art of which Nietzsche writes reveal the existence of something beyond foreground, the existence of texture? For that we must leave Freddy N for a moment and read a Briton who was somewhere on the continent some six decades earlier: Percy Shelley wrote that “poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” in his 1821 Defense of Poesy.

The following discussion of this quotation from Shelley is drawn from a paper I wrote at McMaster University, for the same course that introduced me to the work of Nietzsche through his essay, “Truth and lies in a non-moral sense.”

Shelley is not going so far as to attribute supernatural clairvoyance to poets. Rather, he is saying that poets, by way of their greater sensibilities, hear a breeze delicately rustling the leaves of rustic words. That breeze will become the wind of change, if the poet obey the breeze, and he will enable an insurrection among those leaves, letting them rearrange themselves and then observing, documenting, their new interconnectedness. How does the poet, by listening to a breeze blowing leaves around, become the prime motivator of a wind that will rearrange them? The poet imagines a different possible arrangement of the leaves, and in so imagining, effects the change.

Even Shelley would concede, however, that imagination by itself, which leads to gnosis, cannot entirely effect change. Praxis is required; the poet must then use this rearrangement in his writing, thus churning the cauldron of language.

What does this have to do with art and “vulgar” pleasures, foreground vs. texture, and the whole “meaning” and “examined life” issue?

Nietzsche himself provides the link in “Truth and lies…”

With that, I’ll get back to law for a post or two and be back to this soon. Don’t forget to post comments and thoughts!