Julie Kuhlken (jvkuhlken@aol.com)
Nietzsche Conference: Nietzsche, Art and Aesthetics
Proposal for ‘Taking Wagner Seriously:
Nietzsche’s dabbling in the political’
To say that someone dabbles in something is very often a thinly veiled critique. To
dabble is amateurish, not serious. It is guilty of a certain conceit, an unwillingness to
cede to those better qualified and more committed to what they are doing. So what
does it mean, then, to say that someone dabbles in the political? This would seem a
hobby especially fraught with pitfalls. Doesn’t the political in particular demand
serious engagement and concentrated attention? Moreover, doesn’t Nietzsche himself
imply more or less the same? For example, in the context of The Birth of Tragedy,
Nietzsche does not simply trace the origin of tragedy, but also relates it to the political
concerns of his day, saying that one cannot grasp the significance of tragedy unless
one also comprehends the ‘seriously German problem’ at work in it.1 And later, even
though he has changed his political views, isn’t he still equally earnest, when he asks
in Ecce Homo, ‘What have I never forgiven Wagner? That he condescended to the
Germans—that he became reichsdeutsch…As far as Germany extends it ruins
culture’?2 It would seem, then, that rather than dabbling in the political, Nietzsche is
fully engaged, intent, serious.
At the same time, however, isn’t there something about dabbling that suits Nietzsche?
Isn’t its primary meaning as a ‘splashing about’ strikingly resonant with his
denunciation of the ‘spirit of gravity’ in favour of ‘light feet’? In fact, if we revisit the
two passages cited above, we might recognise in the latter of them not simply
seriousness, but also and simultaneously a critique of seriousness. In other words, it
may just be that Nietzsche’s dabbling in the political is his way of taking the political
seriously precisely by not taking it too seriously.
To understand how this could be so, we must start with Nietzsche’s initial, and
subsequently repudiated, engagement with the political. This engagement dates from
the early essay entitled Socrates und die griechische Tragödie, which precedes and
forms the basis of The Birth of Tragedy, and hinges on the key notion that the
seriousness of the political depends on how seriously we take art, and in particular the
art of Wagner. Early on such seriousness revolves around the figure of the artist as a
tragic hero who can bring about a ‘German rebirth of the Hellenic spirit’,3 that is, a
national revival steeped in the spirit of artistic genius. However, what Nietzsche
subsequently realises is that such a rebirth is much less serious than it seems: that it
more nearly has the pompous gravity of a changing of the guard than the earnest
vitality of profound change. Rather than ask whether or how much we take art
seriously, therefore, Nietzsche comes to ask what this seriousness itself could mean.
Such a questioning leads him to reject Wagner in such a way that this rejection itself
becomes part of the seriousness of Wagner. Revolutionary seriousness—political and
artistic—for the later Nietzsche is a seriousness that remains serious precisely by not
taking itself entirely seriously, a seriousness that can dabble.
.
1
2
3
Nietzsche, F. The Birth of Tragedy, p.13.
Nietzsche, F. Ecce Homo, p. 30.
Nietzsche, F. Socrates und die griechische Tragödie, p. 7.
Taking Wagner Seriously: Nietzsche’s dabbling in the political
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