Nietzsche, a
philologist by trade, testified to the importance of the study of Latin
and of Latin rhetoric:
“Of all the
things the German academic high school did, the most valuable was
its training in Latin style, for this was an artistic exercise,
while all the other activities were aimed solely at knowledge. To
put the German essay first is barbarism, for we have no classical
German style developed by a tradition of public eloquence; but if
one wants to use the German essay to further the practice of
thinking, it is certainly better if one ignores the style entirely
for the time being, thus distinguishing exercise in thinking and
in describing. The latter should be concerned with multiple
versions of a single content, and not with independent invention
of content. Description only, with the content given, was the
assignment of Latin style, for which the old teachers possessed a
long-since-lost refinement of hearing. Anyone who in the past
learned to write well in a modern language owed it to this
exercise, (now one is obliged to go to school under the older
French teachers); and still further: he gained a concept of the
majesty and difficulty of form, and was prepared for are in
general in the only possible right way: through practice.”
(“One
vanished preparation for art”, #203 in Menschliches
Allzumenschliches, vol. I, translation adapted from Faber’s
Human, All Too Human,
Nebraska, 1984.)
(See below "Appendix One: More On
Nietzsche".)
I think that extensive drill in the
imitation of the virtuoso Latin authors probably does account for the
extraordinary subtlety, quickness and vigor of Nietzsche’s writing.
Another nineteenth-century author of similar education was the poet
Arthur Rimbaud, Nietzsche’s younger French contemporary, who was a
student of one of those “older French teachers” and won a prize when he
was twelve for a
Latin poem (complete with epanalepsis and anantapodoton) on an obscure
set theme (Jugartha, the Numidian enemy of Rome):
Nascitur
Arabiis ingens in collibus infans
Et dixit levis aura: “Nepos est ille Jugarthae!.....”
Nietszche’s and Rimbaud’s virtuosity as
writers made it possible for them to write things that they could not
have said using a more straightforward style. Both had the power to
say many things at once, including contrary things, while still
maintaining the thread of the writing. Indeed, Rimbaud’s “derèglement de
tous les sens”, whatever else it may have been, was a new rhetoric, and
some of the Illuminations can be seen as simple exercises in a
new way of putting words together:
H
Toutes les monstruosités violent les gestes
atroces d'Hortense. Sa solitude est la mécanique érotique, sa
lassitude, la dynamique amoureuse. Sous la surveillance d'une
enfance elle a été, à des époques nombreuses, l'ardente hygiène
des races. Sa porte est ouverte à la misère. Là, la moralité des
êtres actuels se décorpore en sa passion ou en son action. - Ô
terrible frisson des amours novices, sur le sol sanglant et par
l'hydrogène clarteux ! trouvez Hortense.
Rimbaud, however,
whose severe mother monitored his studies strictly and demanded
extraordinary efforts from her son, hated Latin from the first:
“In spite
of all this, my father sent me to school when I was ten. “Why”, I
would say to myself, “learn Greek and Latin? I don’t know! There’s
no need of it, anyway! What does it matter to me if I pass my
exams? What’s the use of passing one’s exams? It is of no use at
all, is it? Yes it is, though: they say there is no employment
without a pass....Then take history: learning the lives of
Chinaldon, and Nabopolassar, of Darius, of Cyrus, and of
Alexander, and of their cronies, outstanding for their diabolical
names (remarquables par leurs noms diaboliques) is a torture. What
does it matter to me that Alexander was famous? What does it
matter?.....How does anyone know that the Latins ever existed?
Perhaps their Latin is some counterfeit language....What evil have
I done that they should put me to the torture?” (“Le
soleil etait encore chaude....”,
tr. Bernard, pp. 45-49; written in 1864 when Rimbaud was ten years
old.)
Rimbaud had ample
precedent for his resentment, which is apparently intrinsic to schooling
itself. The great church father St. Augustine, for example, had been
forced into the study of rhetoric by his ambitious parents:
I was too
small to understand what purpose it might serve and yet, if I was
idle at my studies, I was beaten for it, because beating was
favored by tradition. Countless boys long forgotten had built up
this stony path for us to tread and we were made to pass along it,
adding to the toil and sorrow of the sons of Adam.....
I was still a
boy when I began to pray to you, my Help and Refuge. I used to
prattle away to you, and though I was small, my devotion was great
when I begged you not to let me be beaten at school. ....
Oh Lord....O
Lord, throughout the world men beseach you to preserve them from
the rack and the hook and various similar torture which terrify
them. Some people are merely callous, but if a man clings to you
with great devotion, how can his piety to inspire him to make
light of these tortures, when he loves those who dread them so
fearfully? And yet this is how our parents scoffed at the
torments which we boys suffered at the hands of our masters. For
we feared the whip just as much as other feared the rack, and we,
no less than they, begged you to preserve us from it. But we
sinned by reading and writing less than was expected of us.”
(St. Augustine, Confessions, tr. Pine-Coffin, Book I, #9,
p. 30).
“If this was
so, why did I dislike Greek literature, which tells us these
tales, as much as the Greek language itself?.... I suppose that
Greek boys think the same about Virgil when they are forced to
study him as I felt about Homer.... For I understood not a single
word and I was constantly subjected to violent threats and cruel
punishments to make me learn..... This clearly shows that we learn
better in a free spirit of curiosity than under fear and
compulsion. But your law, O God, permits thje free flow of
curiosity to be stemmed by force. From the schoolmaster’s cane to
the ordeal of martyrdom, your law prescribes bitter medicine to
retrieve us from the noxious pleasures which cause us to desert
you.
(Book I, #9, p. 35).
In Augustine’s case, as in Nietzsche’s
and Rimbaud’s, the child was, to his own detriment, made the
standard-bearer for the worldly ambitions of a pious and respectable,
but rather marginal petty-bourgeois family, and Rimbaud’s triumphant
rhetorical set-piece on Jugartha had been preceded a millenium and a
half earlier by Augustine’s prize-winning but rather meaningless “speech
of Juno” (Book I, #17, p. 37).
It is generally understood that
Augustine’s feelings of personal guilt and doctrine of original sin can
be traced back to his loathing of the body and uneasiness with sex.
The truth is rather otherwise, however. According to the evidence he
gives, young Augustine was affectionate, sexy, and faithful. His guilt
was due to the fact that his long-term relationship was an unmarried
one, and this was because a marriage would have interfered with the
worldly ambitions of his parents -- including his pious mother:
My family
made no effort to save me from my fall by marriage. Their only
concern was that I should learn how to make a good speech and how
to persuade others by my words.....For even my mother, who by now
had escaped from the center of Babylon, though she still loitered
in its outskirts, did not act upon what she had heard from her
husband with the same earnestness as she had advised me about
chastity. She saw that I was already infected with a disease that
would become dangerous later on, but if the growth of my passions
could not be cut back to the quick, she did not think it right to
restrict it to the bonds of married love. This was because she
was afraid that the bonds of marriage might be a hindrance to my
hopes for the future – not of course the hope of the life to come,
but my hopes of success at my studies. Both my parents were
unduly eager for me to learn, my father because he gave no thought
to you and only shallow thought to me, and my mother because she
thought that the usual course of study would certainly not hinder
me, but even would help me, in my approach to you.
(Book II, #3, pp. 42-46).
Even as a Saint, Augustine remained
bitter:
And yet human
children are pitched into this hellish torrent, together with the
fees that are paid to have them taught lessons like these. Much
business is at stake, too, when these matters are publicly
debated, because the law decrees that teachers should be paid a
salary in addition to the fees paid by their pupils. And the roar
of the torrent beating upon its boulders seems to say: This is the
school where men are made masters of words. This is where they
learn the art of persuasion, so necessary in business and
debate....
(Book I, #16,
p.36).
Now, Kenneth
Rexroth has argued that St. Augustine invented the Oedipus Complex and
was responsible for the sexual guilt which he thought characteristic of
Western civilization:
There is
ample evidence that Western European civilization is specifically
the culture of the Oedipus Complex. Before Augustine there was
nothing really like it. There were forerunners and prototypes and
intimations, but there wasn’t the real thing. The Confessions
introduce a new sickness of the human mind, the most horrible
pandemic, and the most lethal, ever to afflict man. Augustine did
what silly literary boys in our day boast of doing. He invented a
new derangement.
Kenneth
Rexroth, “Introduction” to D.H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems
(New Directions, 1947; Viking, 1959); reprinted in Bird in the
Bush (New Directions, 1959) and in World Outside the
Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (New Directions,
1987).
However, Augustine only begins to mention sexual temptation (or his
rather minor Oedipal problems) in Book II. Book I is dominated by his
resentment of his teacher, who sometimes resembles an angry God and
sometimes a cruel demon. Augustine’s feelings in Book I are a confused
mess: resentment of the punitive teacher; partly-sublimated resentment
at his parents for having forced him into this “martyrdom” (his
comparison); guilt at his mild and childish slacker disobedences (a
guilt which seems to derive from the shame of physical punishment); and
Christian objections to the pagan and worldly content of the teachings.
And in the end his renunciation liberates him, not really from The
Father, but from the teachers:
“The
schoolteachers need not exclaim at my words, for I no longer go in
fear of them now that I confess my soul’s desires to you, my
lord,” (Book I, #13, p. 34).
Perhaps
we have a new theory of cultural history here. Western civilization is
based not on sexual repression per se, but on educational practices
which, in the interest of their parents’ ambitions, consign small,
helpless children from middling families to the hands of brutal
teachers, forbidding them to marry or to have fun until they have
achieved success and can find a properly respectable match -- perhaps
in early middle age. Often enough the “family” consists of a
strong mother and an absent or ineffectual father—and it is precisely
the father’s failure to establish the family properly which imposes the
terrible obligation to do so on the poor child. (In the case of
Augustine, as Bartin and Brown show, the context was the deflated state
of the decaying late Roman Empire, within which almost everyone found it
impossible to satisfy the financial obligations of respectability.)
So perhaps we can conclude that it was
the resentment felt against ambitious mothers who forced their sons to
study Latin or Greek (instead of marrying) which led to the decadent
practices, heterodox views, and brilliant writing which have been the
driving force of Western history: Augustine was only the beginning of a
long tradition. (As we know, Christianity was not the established church
during his lifetime, but rather a dissident group, and before his
conversion he had been a Manichaean heretic, and even an associate of an
decadent avant-garde group called “The Wreckers”: Book 3, #3, p. 58.) Or if this theory of cultural history
strikes us as a little far-fetched, at least we can say that ambitious
mothers who force their sons to study rhetoric often find themselves
immortalized, but with a posthumous reputation which might not be
entirely what they would have wished.
Appendix One: More on Nietzsche
Nietzsche is like a point guard or broken-field
runner. He can start out in one direction and then, in the course of
about 50 words, switch directions twice. It was his extensive training
in Latin rhetoric and composition that made it possible for him to be
smarter than anyone else: it enabled him to express more ideas quicker,
but without turning what he wrote into a jumble of nonsequitur
assertions or a long, tedious Kantian paragraph-sentence.
Nietzsche doesn't contradict himself right on the
spot. When he switches directions he always puts in enough traffic
markers ("even more than that", "but rather", "isn't it really instead",
etc.) to produce a meaningful sentence or paragraph. He picks up ideas
to toy with them, or to tease the reader, or deliberately for the
purpose of flinging them down later, or as mere introductions to better
ideas.
Comparing one of his books to another, or
comparing different sections from the same or different books, you will
find real contradictions too, but every author is like that. Sometimes
he's just changed his mind without being able to erase what he'd already
published -- Nietzsche wrote several new prefaces to his old books. Other times
he, like any author, just hasn't thought everything out, or isn't really
terribly interested in a certain topic.
Nietzsche's style and linguistic virtuosity are
the key to his work. He could not have said what he said at all if he'd
written more straightforwardly or if he'd been a less brilliant writer.
If Kant, Hegel, Marx, or Freud had been better writers, they would have been
better thinkers. Probably none of them is as bad as they seem in
translation, but none could compete with Nietzsche.
|
Topics for Future
Study
A. Henry David Thoreau, who has
been called the finest American classicist of his century. His
ambitious mother, his ineffectual father, and his failed love
affair. Thoreau: “Finding that my fellow citizens were not likely
to offer me any room in the court house, or any curacy or living
anywhere else, but I must shift for myself, I turned my face more
exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known.”
B. The significant sisters of
Rimbaud, St. Augustine, Thoreau, Nietzsche and Pascal.
The role of the parents in Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Words:
did Sartre study Latin? Pascal’s mother. Nietzsche’s apparent lack
of early resentment of his forced course of studies: was he
blocked or in denial?
Update:
"I did far too much when I was young" he sometimes said to me.
"As a student I sometimes studied all night, I always had a
bucket of cold water under the table; if I noticed that I
wanted to fall asleep, I put my feet in it, and then I felt
fresh again...." (Eugenie Gallie, quoting a landlord reporting
what Nietzsche said, in Sander Gilman, Conversations
with Nietzsche, Oxford, 1987, p. 171.)
C. Nietzsche's relationships with
women. Gilman's book indicates that Nietzsche was courtly and very
correct in his manners, and made a quite a good impression at
times, but that he apparently never made advances, formal or
otherwise. His known affairs of the heart are infatuations with
the wives of friends. His own writings display an extreme
fastidiousness about various issues that would have made serious
relationships difficult in the best of cases. Seemingly when
Nietzsche took medical leave his high standards and his damaged
status crossed, so that no woman who would have had him could
possibly have been good enough for him (as in the Groucho Marx joke).
D. The classicists of the early
modern age (Montaigne, Rabelais, More, Erasmus), who were as
subversive as the nineteenth century classicists, but for whom
Greek was liberating and not oppressive. The Latin scholastic theology that they had
been forced to study. St. Augustine’s early fondness for immoral
pagan tales in Latin (his native language, which he preferred to
Greek). Alcuin in Charlemagne’s court grumbling about the
novice monks continuing to recite pagan sagas.
E. Classicist education was
forced on helpless boys in traditional China too. Why did China
not also become a culture of ressentiment?
F.
God and Grammar:
“O
Lord my God, be patient, as you always are, with the men of this
world as you watch them and see how strictly they obey the rules
of grammar which have been handed down to them, and yet ignore the
eternal rules of everlasting salvation which they have received
from you”.
(Augustine, Book I, #18,
p.39)
“I
am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in
grammar”.
(Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, “Twilight of the
Idols”, Penguin,, 1982, p. 483.)
“What I want to stress here is a special correspondence between
the emergence of selfhood understood as a person and the emergence
of “the” text from the page.” (Ivan
Illych, p. 25). This
sounds like Derrida, but Derrida might equally well be the new
angry God / teacher, as Foucault warned when he spoke of "a
pedagogy that gives to the master's voice the limitless
sovereignty that allows it to restate the text indefinitely.“.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bartin, Carlin, The Sorrows of the
Ancient Romans, Princeton, 1993.
Brown, Peter,
The World of Late Antiquity, Norton, 1971.
Foucault, Michel,
The History of Sexuality, Vintage, 1980.
Gilman, Sander,
ed., Conversations with Nietzsche, Oxford, 1987.
Illych, Ivan, In
the Vineyard of the Text, Chicago, 1993.
Nietszche,
Friedrich, Menschliches Allzumenschliches, vol. I, translated by
Faber as Human, All
Too Human,
Nebraska, 1984.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good
and Evil, tr. Zimmern, Dover, 1997 (1909).
Kenneth Rexroth, “Introduction” to
D.H. Lawrence’s Selected Poems (New Directions, 1947; Viking,
1959); reprinted in Bird in the Bush (New Directions, 1959) and
in World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth
(New Directions, 1987). Online at
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/lawrence.htm
Rimbaud, Arthur,
Collected Poems, text and tr., Oliver Bernard, Penguin, 1997 rev.
ed.)