Nietzsche and "Poet's Vanity": Cramming Sense into Nonsense
Friedrich Nietzsche occasionally delved into the realm of the autobiographical in his short poems, as can be seen in “Poet’s Vanity” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ‘Joke, Cunning and Revenge’: Prelude in German Rhymes, No. 56):
56. Poet’s Vanity
I’ll find wood, just give me substance
strong enough to bind like glue!
Cramming sense in rhyme is nonsense
worthy of a boast — or two!
Little philosophical attention has been given to Nietzsche’s short poems, but in “Poet’s Vanity” Nietzsche is boasting about his ability to use the medium of poetry to cram the bulk of his philosophy—”sense,” as he calls it—into a few short lines that appear, on the surface, to be merely poetic and rhetorical “nonsense.” The fundamental insight that I had about Nietzsche’s poetry, particularly the short poems of ‘Joke, Cunning and Revenge’: A Prelude in German Rhymes (cf. The Gay Science) is that a great many of these short poems are actually cleverly conceived microcosms of Nietzsche’s overall philosophy packed into just a few short lines—thus cramming sense into nonsense as he implies in “Poet’s Vanity.”
The first two lines of “Poet’s Vanity” are harder to make sense of—to pull Nietzsche’s sense from his nonsense, so to speak. The reference to wood may be seen as a reference to construction, as wood is a commonly used building material, in Nietzsche’s time as well as our own. It’s important to note that, despite all the popular talk of Nietzsche’s being a nihilist, a label he himself rejected, Nietzsche thinks of his philosophical activity not merely as destructive (to religion, to western morality, to philosophy, etc.) but as constructive in the sense of laying the groundwork for future philosophers and what he calls the “transvaluation of values”—a philosophy based on subjectivity, perspectives, individual strength, artistic creation, intellectual courageousness, and so on. Thus Nietzsche is in search of a building material with enough substance to “bind like glue” to create more than a philosophical house of cards, which is all he thinks the bulk of western philosophy from Socrates and Plato onward, and German philosophy and German culture, ever were.
Nietzsche was a fierce critic of the shallowness of German culture, despite its supposed intellectualism of the 19th century. In his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche, from the outset, has nothing kind to say about the state of German culture in his own time. My apologies in advance for this lengthy quote, but immerse yourself for a moment in the harshness of Nietzsche’s critique of German culture in the following passage:
If it were possible to take that calm and tenacious bravery which the German demonstrated against the emotional and shortlived impetuosity of the French and turn it against the enemy within, against that highly ambiguous and in any case alien ‘cultivatedness’ which is nowadays dangerously misunderstood to constitute culture, then all hope for the creation of a genuine German culture, the antithesis of this cultivatedness, would not be lost: for the Germans have never lacked clear-sighted and courageous leaders and generals – though these have frequently lacked Germans. But whether it is in fact possible to redirect German bravery in this way seems to me more and more doubtful and, after the late war, daily more improbable; for I see how everyone is convinced that struggle and bravery are no longer required, but that, on the contrary, most things are regulated in the finest possible way and that in any case everything that needed doing has long since been done – in short, that the finest seeds of culture have everywhere been sown and are in places bursting into leaf and even into luxuriant blossom. In this realm it is not mere complacency, but joy and jubilation which reign. I sense this joy and jubilation in the incomparable self-assurance of our German journalists and manufacturers of novels, tragedies, songs and histories: for these types patently belong together in a single guild which seems to have entered into a conspiracy to take charge of the leisure and ruminative hours of modern man – that is to say, his ‘cultural moments’ – and in these to stun him with printed paper. Since the war, all is happiness, dignity and self-awareness in this guild: after such ‘successes of German culture’ it feels itself not merely confirmed and sanctioned, but almost sacrosanct; and it therefore speaks more solemnly, takes pleasure in addressing itself to the German people, publishes collected editions in the manner of the classics, and goes so far as to employ those international journals which stand at its service to proclaim certain individuals from its midst as the new German classics and model writers. One might perhaps have expected that the more thoughtful and learned among cultivated Germans would have recognized the dangers inherent in such a misuse of success, or at least have felt this spectacle as painful: for what could be more painful than the sight of a deformed man pluming himself before the mirror like a cockerel and exchanging admiring glances with his reflection? But the learned classes are happy to let happen what is happening, and have in any case quite enough to do in maintaining themselves without the additional burden of looking after the welfare of the German spirit. Its members are, moreover, supremely convinced that their own culture is the ripest and fairest fruit of the age, indeed of all the ages, and cannot comprehend why anyone should need to look after the welfare of German culture in general, since they themselves and countless numbers like them have already gone far, far beyond all such considerations. The more cautious observer, however, especially if he is a foreigner, cannot help noticing that what the German scholar now calls his culture and that jubilant culture of the new German classics differ from one another only in the extent of their knowledge: wherever the question is one not of knowledge and information, but of art and ability-wherever, that is to say, life bears witness to the culture – there is now only one German culture: and is it this that is supposed to have triumphed over France?
Such an assertion seems completely incomprehensible: all impartial judges, and finally the French themselves, have seen Germany’s decisive advantage to have lain in the more extensive knowledge possessed by its officers, in the superior training of its troops, and in the greater science of its conduct of the war. In what sense, then, can German culture be said to have triumphed, if one thinks to deduct from it German erudition? In no sense: for the moral qualities of stricter discipline and readier obedience have nothing to do with culture – though they distinguished the Macedonian soldiery from the Greek, for example, the latter were incomparably more cultured. It can only be the result of confusion if one speaks of the victory of German culture, a confusion originating in the fact that in Germany there no longer exists any clear conception of what culture is.
Culture is, above all, unity of artistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people. Much knowledge and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a sign of it, and if needs be can get along very well with the opposite of culture, barbarism, which is lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles.
It is in such a chaotic jumble of styles that the German of our day dwells: and one seriously wonders how, with all his erudition, he can possibly fail to notice it, but, on the contrary, rejoices from the very heart at the ‘culture’ he at present possesses.
(Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations)
It is in the context of this scathing critique of so-called German culture that Nietzsche is in search of enough cultural, philosophical, literary, and historical substance to be genuinely constructive instead of merely critical. This cultural substance must be strong enough to “bind like glue” and create a culture worthy of the name, not an amalgam of other cultures pasted together haphazardly or adopted by appropriation, but culture in its own right with its own unique values that distinguish one culture from another in a definitive and authentic way.
Nietzsche sees himself as the antidote—or at least an antibody test—for the shallowness of German culture, and arguably of Western philosophical and religious culture in general. We have become cultured but have no culture. We have become religious and moralizing but have no spiritual depth. We have art, but we are not artists. We have philosophers but no genuine thinkers or intellectual architects and builders. So we are not merely lacking in cultural building materials—wood and glue, as Nietzsche calls them in “Poet’s Vanity”—but also in cultural creators: cultural architects, artisans, builders, and construction workers. At best we have become cultural middle-managers who neither command nor create, taking credit for another man’s, country’s, or tradition’s cultural labors and genuine creativity.
Nietzsche’s tools, of course, his “wood” and “glue,” are words, sentences, poems, aphorisms, even his lesser-known musical compositions. With enough paper and glue, Nietzsche’s writings themselves become cultural building blocks to rebuild a German and Western culture in decline. Paper is, after all, merely wood pulp. Perhaps the process can metaphorically, by writing seeming nonsense with enough substance and depth, be reversed, so paper once again becomes wood—that is, genuinely constructive, to complete Nietzsche’s unfinished metaphor. Every bit of Nietzsche’s work must be seen as an attempt to re-inject genuine depth into the cultural shallowness he perceived all around him, a situation strangely similar to the cultural shallowness all men and women of genuine depth—and sometimes especially children and students with their acute perceptiveness that comes with innocence—perceive around themselves in Western culture today. We have become modern and cosmopolitan, except perhaps in the cultural regression seen in much of America today, but we 21st-century are just as undiscriminating and lacking in real culture as Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century Germans ever were! The term “American culture” is as much an oxymoron today as “German culture” was for Nietzsche.
Perhaps my writings here have become my own way of cramming philosophical sense into nonsense, into a new medium that traditional philosophers, academics, and publishers don’t find respectable or entirely trustworthy. Heaven forbid that real thought occur outside the columbarium of university culture, outside the hallowed halls and ivory towers of their own crumbling institutions. I aim to breathe new life into philosophy, to make it soar once again where recently it has only crawled, to drag readers and fellow philosophers out of their dank and shallow caves into the counterintuitive depths to be found above, outside the confines of their own crumbling walls.
Nietzsche may have rightly titled his poem “Poet’s Vanity,” but I’d do just as well to title this very article “Blogger’s Vanity,” or perhaps “Philosopher’s Vanity”—for my own vanity is the same is Nietzsche’s: I, too, cram sense into nonsense—in search of genuine depth.
