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Truth and Lie in Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche
To be alive – is Power –
Existence – in itself –
Without a further function –
Omnipotence – Enough –
To be alive – and Will!
'Tis able as a God –
The Maker – of Ourselves – be what –
Such being Finitude! (J 677 / Fr 876) 1
Friedrich Nietzsche was an avid reader of Emerson. But the ruptures
he opens in Western philosophical culture find surprising echo in another of
his contemporaries, Emily Dickinson,. There are strong contrasts between
Dickinson and Nietzsche: in place although not in time; in language; in
religious context – Dickinson lived in the intense period of Protestant religious
revival of the Second Great Awakening and its wrestling match with
Calvinism, in which Amherst passionately participated; while Nietzsche's
background is Lutheran in a period of increasing positivism to which his
university experience exposed him. Not least, there is a contrast of gender
and attitudes towards it, with Dickinson's work a major voice articulating
senses of women's identities as these were being reshaped in postRevolutionary America, while in Nietzsche, "woman" remains a complex and
highly equivocal figuration.
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Yet there are likenesses. Neither married, although in Dickinson's case
this is seen as eccentric deviation and in Nietzsche as philosophical selfaffirmation.2 Dickinson from the age of 30 reclused herself in her home in
Amherst with her sister, mother, and father. Nietzsche at the age of 35 left his
teaching position at Basel to withdraw into a life of increasing isolation until his
collapse into mental breakdown in 1889, living out the last decade of his life in
seclusion under the care of his sister and mother. In both cases, the
posthumous writings (for Dickinson almost all of her poetry) went into the care
of the sisters with whom each lived, with the works of each suffering
disjunctive publication, Dickinson's in the context of family feuds and
Nietzsche's due to his sister's ignoble interferences.
Above all, the two shared certain premises, or perhaps sensibilities,
regarding the nature of the world: that ours is a world in continual flux,
foundationally a scene of change and multiplicity. Transition, transformation,
instability, rupture is the fundamental condition in which, for each, human
beings find themselves. Each fiercely, rigorously records and reiterates that
their immanent experience is one of profound temporality and inconstancy.
"Of this is Day composed," Dickinson writes: "of morning and a noon" that
"dower and deprive" (J 1675/ Fr 1692). One of the first aphorisms in Will to
Power declares man's "smallness and accidental occurrence in the flux of
becoming and passing away" (WP 4).3
The world for each, then, is firstly a world of becoming. As to the world
of metaphysical Being that traditionally served as stable anchor and ground
for earthly existence, this other "true" world both Dickinson and Nietzsche see
as failing adequately to account for, address, or interpret the flux of
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phenomena. The traditional orders, grounded in metaphysics, for explaining
the world's endless transformations seemed flawed and problematic in its
claims as well as in its failure to deliver on them. Both Dickinson and
Nietzsche thus balance on a volatile edge of metaphysics. Although neither
wrote in philosophically systematic ways – Nietzsche's poetic and in particular
his aphoristic style is another tie linking him to Dickinson4 – each offers what
emerges as a steadfast critique of traditional metaphysical premises, and a
dizzying confrontation with the consequences of such critique.
Dickinson's responses to the rupture of metaphysical certainty are
more ambivalent, more alarmed than are Nietzsche's. What had seemed
foundational had, as through a torn veil, suddenly shown empty; while what
stance might take its place remained uncertain. The tearing apart of the two
worlds – the tearing away of earthly life from, in Nietzsche's words, the
metaphysical "unity, Being, aim" (WP 12) that had purported to govern
phenomena – at times causes Dickinson to fall into an abyss. In complex
negations such as Nietzsche deploys, she calls metaphysical collapse "The
Crash of nothing but of All," and cries: "I cling to nowhere till I fall" (J 1503 / Fr
1532). But at other times Dickinson reaches out to embrace the world of
phenomena as her true and exhilarating arena. In, for example, the poem "To
be Alive is Power" (cited above as epigraph) Dickinson goes far towards a
Nietzschean declaration of allegiance not to any "further" world beyond this
one, but to "Existence – in itself – / Without a further function." This world
becomes a scene of "Power" which, as a way of being alive, is imminent, and
therefore limited and conditional: an "Omnipotence – Enough." Such yoking
together the absolute term "Omnipotence" with the limiting "Enough" verges
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on oxymoron, breaking open metaphysical meaning in ways Nietzsche
persistently does. "Omnipotence" rather than marking the divine is both
granted and sized to the human. We are alive in the world as the arena of our
"will." Within this inherent and immanent life and will, the human is "able as a
God."
As almost always happens in a Dickinson text, the concluding lines
complicate rather than clarify.
To be alive – and Will!
'Tis able as a God –
The Maker – of Ourselves – be what –
Such being Finitude! (J 677 / Fr 876)
Truncated, with incomplete phrasing and unclear references, the poem leaves
obscure who is the "Maker" of "what" and in what sphere. It seems, though,
that Dickinson here celebrates a creative power which displaces, even as it
imitates, God's. It is we who are the "Maker – of Ourselves." "Such being
Finitude" again approaches philosophical oxymoron. "Finitude" and "being"
are in traditional metaphysics contradictory terms. But here they are linked.
Being is being in and as "Finitude" in this poem. The conditional, finite world
is the arena in which we are "alive" and "will," the realm of "power" as selfdefinition and creativity.
Dickinson's work, like Nietzsche's, stares into the maelstrom of
metaphysical collapse and its consequences. Her work, like his, pursues a
critique in which metaphysical premises are shown to be wanting. Her work,
like his, provides an anatomy of the implications of such critique, of the
kaleidoscopic and assaultive and also transformative and generative energies
released by it. Given the world's multiplicity, the problem becomes for
Dickinson, as for Nietzsche, how to account for experience as meaningful in
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human terms, given its endless transfigurations. And this, for both,
increasingly turns on language and interpretation itself. For each, reality in its
multiplicity and transfiguration ultimately becomes constituted not by
metaphysical principles but by representation, interpretation, and the words
we use in their undertaking.
I. Linguistic Perspective
Despite the dispersions of her language both within texts and in her
opus as a whole, Dickinson's work pursues systematic steps of metaphysical
critique, tracing the reasons or impulses behind her often regretful inability to
accept other-worldly accounts of the earth.
For Death – or rather
For the Things ‘twould buy –
This – put away
Life’s Opportunity—
The Things that Death will buy
Are Room –
Escape from Circumstances –
And a Name
With Gifts of Life
How Death’s Gifts may compare –
We know not –
For the Rates – lie Here – (J 382 / Fr 644)5
"Death" here is entry into traditional immortality. As such it offers a series of
metaphysical promises: "Room" evokes eternal and infinite place; "Escape
from Circumstances" suggests essence as against accident, absolute design
as against conditions; and a "Name" promises fixed identity. But, as
Nietzsche summarizes in Twilight of the Idols, in a passage that Heidegger
cites as encapsulating Nietzsche's metaphysical critique, so here such
promises offered by the afterworld reflect not a metaphysical reality but simply
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the reverse and antidote to temporality, mutability and mortality – that is, the
conditions that we find painful in the world we inhabit. Thus writes Nietzsche:
The true world has een constructed out of contradiction to the actual
world. To invent fables about a world "other" than this one has no
meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion
against life has gained the upper hand in us. We avenge ourselves
against life with a phantasmagoria of "another" a "better" life. Twilight
484 6
"Room," "Escape from Circumstances" and "A Name" grant us the absolute
time and space that we lack in our earthly lives. But the attraction of this
compensatory fantasy does not guarantee its truthfulness. Indeed, Nietzsche
says that the contrary is the case:
The reasons for which this world has been characterized as "apparent"
are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality
is indemonstrable. . .
The true world – unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable. . .
The true world – unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being
unattained, also unknown. Consequently not consoling, redeeming, or
obligating. . .
The true world – we have abolished. What world has remained? The
apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have abolished
the apparent one.7
There is a fatal weakness to metaphysical design. Our position, viewpoint,
understanding and experience remain earthly. Any notion of another world is
thus based upon and ultimately situated in this one, not the other way around.
As Dickinson writes, "The Rates – lie here." The other world in fact
suspiciously looks like an inversion, as Nietzsche insists, of the conditions
most dreaded in this one. Yet these form our only direct experience. As
against these immanent conditions, the other world remains "unattainable,
indemonstrable, unpromisable." This world is not the shadow of a higher one,
but rather the reverse is true. It is the other world that is a shadow, a lie,
projected out of our dark fears. "The Rates lie here" unmasks this lie. The
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pun on "Rates" invokes both temporality, pacing in time, and value judgment.
The measure of value in actuality is "here," not in some other world posited
against this one. Such reference to an other world is, then, not truth, but
fiction. It is constructed out of what is most disliked in this one world,
reflecting this dislike rather than some higher insight, and serving to deny the
actual world we inhabit. And what metaphysics calls lie is in fact truth, the
only truth we directly experience. The world of phenemena is then not mere
appearance, but is as actual as human experience gets, the only actual world.
Thus, to deny metaphysical reality is to accept the reality of the earthly world:
"With the true world we have abolished the apparent one."
Nietzsche raises such questions of truth and lie in Twilight of the Idols
and the nachlass variously collected as The Will to Power;8 but they occupied
him from the beginning of his philosophical writings, as seen in his earlier
essay "Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense." This essay opens by
framing truth and lie in terms that he later calls "perspectivism" – the sense,
as he writes in a Will to Power aphorism, that reality "has no meaning behind
it, but countless meanings: Perspectivism" (WP § 481). 9 The variability and
partiality of perspective is the chastisement with which he opens "Truth and
Lying:"
If we and the gnat could understand each other we should learn that
even the gnat swims through the air with the same pathos, and feels
within itself the flying center of the world. . . So too the proudest man of
all, the philosopher, believes he sees the eyes of the universe focused
telescopically from all directions upon his actions and thoughts.10
Nietzsche's intuition of the variousness of perspective, and of how
perspective inevitably frames what we see and understand, is firmly shared by
Dickinson, who devotes many poems to how "We see – Comparatively" (J
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534 / Fr 580). But the greatest distortion of perspective is denying that that is
all it is. The biggest delusion, that is, is for a perspective to mistake itself to
be more than that, to be absolute comprehension or general truth. Thus in
the poem "Who Giants Know, with lesser men," (and Dickinson's terms of
measure are notoriously tricky), the "Giants" are those who in fact know that
they know less, the "lesser men" those who do not know that they do not
know. They mistake their own viewpoint for the whole world's, paradoxically
thinking their vision is larger, while the "Giants" see in ways that are more
penetrating because they know their understanding is limited. The "lesser"
are thus compared to, displayed by, "the Summer Gnat:"
The Summer Gnat displays –
Unconscious that his single Fleet
Do not comprise the skies – (J 796 / Fr 848)
Like Nietzsche's "gnat" in "Truth and Lie" who "feels within itself the flying
center of the world," so Dickinson's "Summer Gnat" (here almost an anagram
for "Giant") wrongly takes "his single Fleet" – that is, either his own group or
his own flight, or his own temporal fleetingness – as if he comprised the whole
"skies" at large.
But perspectivism in Dickinson and Nietzsche ultimately takes shape
not in terms of vision, but of language. At issue is not so much how people
see but what and how they say. Wallace Stevens writes in one of his
aphorisms, "The Tongue is an Eye." This move from eye to speech is
pronounced in Nietzsche, and it is deeply consequential. As Richard Rorty
anatomizes in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the very act of positing
knowledge in visual terms is itself metaphysical, assuming the mind to have
some reflective power through which sense perception conforms to ideal
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structures man can perceive as the true Form to which phenomena refer. 11
Yet this vision-model also raises problems of communication and solipsism,
problems that become severe once the metaphysical Forms are questioned.
The trope of seeing situates comprehension within each individual mind, in
ways that can never be fully verified by others, since their interior experience
remains inaccessible to anyone outside themselves.12 Implying that
understanding is like visual apprehension places it inside each private mind in
ways no one else can share, check, or have access to. Perspective becomes
a self-enclosed subjectivity to which there is no exit. But language is by
definition social. It takes place between people.13 Moving our model of
apprehension from a visual grasp to a linguistic exchange relocates
formulation from interior space to an interconnecting web or network in which
humans are constitutively placed.14
The Nietzschean turn to language has been long recognized as the
decisive plunge forward into a post-metaphysical era. It projects the world as
something we formulate, indeed reformulate continuously. The formative and
indeed originary power of language is, however, already recognized in
Emerson and Dickinson. Emerson's "Nature" vigilantly equivocates between
giving nature priority or language. When he writes that "we are assisted by
natural objects in the expression of particular meanings" meanings seem to
be located in the mind, preceding the objects that become instruments of their
expression. But he also asserts that "Words are signs of natural facts" and
that nature in turn "is the symbol of spirit." This is to place nature as prior to
words, and spirit as prior to nature, in a metaphysically traditional semiotic.
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Or again, he seems to be imagining a back and forth, a back and forth where
nature and mind "corresponds" to each other because it is only through mind
that nature is known, but also vice versa: "Every appearance in nature
corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be
described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture." Yet even this
reciprocity is a linguistic one, the mind only able to be "described" through
"natural appearance" and vice versa.15
The sense of linguistic activism, of the role of language in shaping
representation, is a substratum of Dickinson's poetics. Her work
demonstrates the forms of language itself to have a primary role and impact in
experience. Thus, in the poem "Talk not to me of Summer Trees," nature
does not direct and command "Talk," which instead is linked to "Foliage of the
mind:"
Talk not to me of Summer Trees
The Foliage of the mind
A Tabernacle is for Birds
Of no corporeal kind
And winds do go that way at noon
To their Ethereal Homes
Whose Bugles call the least of us
To undepicted Realms (J 1634 / Fr 1655)
Nietzsche writes in "Truth and Lie":
When we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers, we believe we
know something about the things themselves, although what we have
are just metaphors of things which do not correspond to the original
entities. (TL 249)
In Dickinson's text, the "Foliage of the mind" rivals, indeed precedes, that of
"Summer Trees," which emerge as its reflection. The world is made in the
image of mind, not mind of the world. But the imaging is deeply rhetorical, a
matter of language and its arrangements. The "Foliage" becomes
Wolosky EDFN 11
"Tabernacle," an invocation of religious language pursued through the text,
but one in which other-worldly meanings are re-cast into immanent ones.
Thus "Birds" are of "no corporeal kind," winds are "Ethereal," and "Bugles,"
resonant of Biblical trumpets, "call" to "undepicted Realms." But in each case,
not spiritual, but rather imaginary realms are intended. The "undepicted
Realms" are not apocalyptic ones but further poetic ventures.
Or, even more precisely, what is invoked is not simply imagination, but
the paradigms that govern it along with other human relations to the world,
and which are above all linguistic ones. The poem not only transforms
language, conducting it from the religious sphere to the imaginary, but also
concerns language. It deflects "talk" of "Summer Trees" to the "Foliage of the
Mind" – where leaves are themselves a traditional trope for pages or texts. In
a continuing linguistic imagery the bugles "call," a personification granting to
them linguistic action. "Undepicted Realms" is a complex trope. Instead of
apocalyptic realms, poetic and linguistic ventures are proposed. Undepicted
Realms" suggest a sublime tradition, which points beyond any given depiction
– a term connoting both visual image and word description. But in another
sense, they point to ever further and renewed depictions. They are
"undepicted" as yet, not as an absolute state that exists beyond human
achievement or expression, but rather as an ever mobile, ever advancing
linguistic pathway, tracing an ever receding, because never final description.
For, such finality does not exist. Rather, language marks a limit delineating
the world that humans inhabit. It is within linguistic realms that we depict, and
then depict again. Not least, the poem is cast as dialogue. The speaker
Wolosky EDFN 12
addresses an auditor concerning what can and cannot be talked of, about
forms of language and their powers.
II. Personification and Negation
In the most famous passage from "Truth and Lie," Nietzsche calls the
linguistic forms that are decisive in shaping human understanding of the world
"anthropomorphisms, "
"What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies,
anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which were
poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned" (TL
250).
Nietzsche is supremely aware of the question of viewpoint: how each person
sees from within a context and according to a perspective that locates him or
her. But Nietzsche probes how viewpoint is itself a figure – a visual image for
what is also, indeed firstly, a linguistic praxis. It is the forms of language –
grammatical, rhetorical, philological – that articulate categories of
understanding, which thus prove to be projected from and within human
experience, not perceived or received by us. These categories, whatever
form they take, reside in the human. Therefore they can be grouped together
under the rubric of anthropomorphism, or, in traditional rhetorical terms, of
personification.
Personification is often treated as a sub-category of metaphor or simile.
It seems to be a kind of comparison, in which something – one term of the
comparison – happens to be human, and is compared to something that is
not. As metaphor, personification transfers a human attribute to a non-human
one. These transfers can register a range or variety of degree, across and
respecting a kind of chain of being. Human qualities can be transferred to
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animals, but also to vegetables or minerals. Or, animate life rather than
specifically human attributes can be transferred down to plant or rock. Human
attributions can also be extended beyond specific metaphoric comparisons to
larger topoi, as in the micro-macrocosmic correspondences that deeply inform
not only literary, but religious and also scientific thought. 16
But Nietzsche's analysis of anthropomorphism extends beyond the
specific rhetoric and topoi of personification. Rather, he sees it as
fundamental to all human language. (Human) language as such is a mode of
personification or anthropomorphism. Far from being a discrete trope, a
subset of metaphor and simile as a certain kind of comparison, personification
is the norm characterizing all language. For language, as spoken by
humans, necessarily and ineradicably humanizes. The categories of
language are human categories. This is the case not just when there is a
clear ascription of human attributes to something non-human, as in
personifying metaphors. Our very grammar, our very linguistic structures,
which is to say every verb, every adjective, every noun, reflects human
interests and orderings. Thus Nietzsche in "Truth and Lying" states that every
definition is
anthropomorphic through and through and does not contain one single
point which is 'true in itself" real and universally valid apart from man.
The investigator into such truths is basically seeking just the
metamorphosis of the world in man; he is struggling to understand the
world as a human-like thing and acquires at best a feeling of an
assimilation. . . Such an investigator observes the whole world as
linked to man, as the infinitely refracted echo of a primeaval sound, as
the reproduction and copy of an archetype, man. (TL 251)
The world to humans is a humanized world. The world is a "human-like
thing," human seekers experience the world "as linked to man," in relationship
to human interests and orders.
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Thus, if the world seems to correspond to human understanding, this is
because humans find in the world what we ourselves have put there. What
has been taken to be correlation is in effect tautology:
What is the situation of these conventions of language? Are they
perhaps products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do terms
coincide with things? Is language the adequate expression of all
realities? Only by forgetfulness can man ever come to believe that he
has truth to the above-designated degree. Unless he wants to settle
for truth in the form of tautology. (TL 248)
Nietzsche here challenges the notion that "terms coincide with things," that
language matches a reality predetermined outside it. Language as "adequate
expression" presumes that there is a pre-existent external reality that
language merely re-presents, as if expression were a secondary effect of a
prior determination. This correspondence theory of language posits that
language correlates with and repeats an external reality established in itself.
Instead, Nietzsche insists that the reason the world seems to match human
formulations is because our formulations set up our understanding of the
world. This is tautology, not causality. It is, Nietzsche goes on to say, like
someone who "hides an object behind a bush and then seeks and finds it
there” (TL 251). The world conforms to human understanding not because
we grasp it in itself, but because we arrange it, always in relation to our own
categories. Reality is not correlated to language; rather it is "language which
has worked originally at the construction of ideas."
The "thing in itself"(which would be pure, disinterested truth) is also
absolutely incomprehensible to the creator of language and not worth
seeking. He designates only the relations of things to men, and to
express these relations he uses the boldest metaphors. (TL 248)
In "Truth and Lie," then, language is formative. Personifying human
categories foundationally structure what they represent. But this is a concern
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of Emily Dickinson's poetry as well. Yet this need not mean that there is utter
collapse of meaning: that if there is no absolute truth, all is mere lie. To deny
correspondence theory is not to reduce all experience and expression to
arbitrary or solipsistic expression. Tautology in this sense is not simply
circular. It rather defines the parameters within which human experience
takes place as conditioned and finite, as partial and even fragmented.17
If there is no world pre-existing its linguistic formulation, no world of
"truth" that language merely reiterates, does that mean there is no world and
no meaning? In contemporary terms, the critique of correspondence theory
has posited instead a sign-theory in which no signified precedes a signifier.
The signifier is not merely the result, effect, vehicle, expression of a prior
meaning constituted without language. References do not subsist external to
the linguistic forms through which we experience them. Rather, our language
formulates our experience. This does mean that experience is never final or
absolute, is always represented, is always beckoning to reformulation. But
what then regulates the production of language so that it is not merely
arbitrary or imposed, both on nature and, crucially, on other human beings?
Dickinson suggests that it is exactly the insistence on the limits of claims, on
the sense of a space beyond what humans can know or represent absolutely,
curtails but also generates particular formulations. Therefore the negative –
what is not expressed, attained, granted – emerges as a central site, defining
even as – or rather, in that – it limits what is properly human.
The poem "The Tint I cannot take – is best –" examines and represents
such a dialectic of limitation. Written in the mode of Romantic imaginative
Wolosky EDFN 16
power, it nonetheless crosses into this discourse a counter one that resituates
imaginative claims.
The Tint I cannot take – is best –
The Color too remote
That I could show it in Bazaar –
A Guinea at the sight—
The fine – impalpable Array –
That swaggers on the eye
Like Cleopatra's Company –
Repeated -- in the sky –
The Moments of Dominion
That happen on the Soul
And leave it with a Discontent
Too exquisite – to tell –
The eager look – on Landscapes –
As if they just repressed
Some Secret – that was pushing
Like Chariots – in the Vest –
The Pleading of the Summer –
That other Prank – of Snow –
That Cushions Mystery with Tulle,
For fear the Squirrels – know.
Their Graspless manners – mock us –
Until the Cheated Eye
Shuts arrogantly – in the Grave –
Another way – to see – (J 627 / Fr 696)
Harold Bloom calls this a "poem besieged by perspectivism" within the
context of a Nietzschean affirmation in "our faith [in] the existing world" (WP
1046). As an "authentic American Sublime," the poem opens with a
characteristic Dickinsonian gesture towards the sublime as standing beyond
any actuality – a romance structure where what is not always exceeds what
is, with the ideal ever hovering before and beyond whatever concretely
exists.18 This is to recognize the realm of imagination as always surpassing
what is actual. Yet, as Harold Bloom has theorized, such surpassing entails
Wolosky EDFN 17
an element of negation. The imagination doesn't simply fuse or reciprocate
with nature, but must counter it in order to open space for its own ventures.
Negation is thus imaginatively liberating and positive. But negation also has
a limiting function that works across the sublime. The sublime can imply
some endless reach of mind into ever greater extents. But it also signals, as
in Kant, a confrontation with the unbounded in which the imagination
experiences its own limits.19 This sense of negation points to what is beyond
as something unreachable, never to be attained. It recognizes
transcendence, but not as a second, eternal metaphysical world into which
one hopes to enter or reach. Transcendence instead acts as a barrier,
resending energy back into a beckoning temporality as the ever receding,
ever summoning next moment which ever remains our framework and
condition. Transcendence in this sense marks a limit that we, as humans,
never cross: a negative transcendence not to be grasped, but instead to stand
as guard against our attempts to claim and exceed what ever remains for us
finite positions and understanding.
Perspectivism in Nietzsche involves not only viewpoint but, more
radically, linguistic formulation. But this also resituates perspectivism away
from solipsistic subjectivism. Linguistic formulation is necessarily shared.
Language, as Saussure underscored, is itself a social institution into which
individuals enter and by which they are shaped. Its constructions are
common ones, with creativity working through and with common
constructions. Each individual version still assumes and depends on shared
language usage, as both a limiting function and also a power. "The Tint I
cannot Take" interestingly works between visual and linguistic construction
Wolosky EDFN 18
and the implications of each. "Tint," "Color," and "sight" all underscore the
question of vision and perspective as situating the speaker. But the next
stanza's "impalpable Array -- / That swaggers on the eye" at once asserts and
cancels the visual dimension: an "Array" can be seen by the "eye," but the
"impalpable" cannot. And this second stanza already moves into a sense of
language rather than vision as the structure of experience. "Swaggers on the
eye" is a personification, granting to "Array" an intentional and human action –
indeed, a braggadocio, of overclaiming. At issue is not only seeing but
saying. "Like Cleopatra's Company" is a likeness that is not perceptual, but
conceptual, made possible and indeed invented through the rhetorical
structure of simile itself. The verse then evokes a directly linguistic image:
"Repeated – in the sky." Like Nietzsche 's "echo," the act of the seeker as he
[she] "contemplates the whole world as related to man, as the infinitely
protracted echo of an original sound," the sky repeats the poet, not the poet
the sky. Indeed, this second stanza is followed by a quite Nietzschean
gesture involving, as in the poem "To be alive – is power" the question of
domination and will, again as linguistic phenomena. "The Moments of
Dominion" are those when the "soul" experiences creative surge.
But "Dominion" here is deeply paradoxical. It involves not expression,
but its limit; not possession but its evasion. It happens to "happen" on the
soul, rather than being directly willed by it. As an experience of power, it lasts
but a "Moment." As Dickinson writes in another poem, "Dominion lasts until
obtained" (J 1257 / Fr 1299). And it involves not command of nature, but
"Discontent" as nature never in fact corresponds with human desire. A
second negation then follows. "Too exquisite – to tell" makes the experience
Wolosky EDFN 19
at once linguistic and not so. As with all tropes of inexpressibility, there is a
complex paradoxicality of language that declares the inability to name
something beyond language.20 Dickinson is balanced on a boundary she
thereby defines or marks out, of the extent of linguistic power, and also its
borders and limits.
The poem continues its rhetoric of personification. "Landscapes" are
said to "look" – i.e. to see, not be seen; "Snow" to play a "Prank," "Squirrels"
to "know." These transferences of the human again move into linguistic
tropes, which again delimit as well as affirming subjectivity. The landscape's
"eager Look" turns out to signal something not seen: a "Secret" that is
"repressed." The "Summer" is described as "Pleading," a beckoning rather
than commanding speech act.
The conclusion of the poem again invokes an "Eye," but as "Cheated"
and finally as shutting. The desire to see absolutely is rebuked as arrogant.
Instead, its mortality is confirmed. The eye's vista shrinks to the "Grave." If
there is "Another way – to see," this is left ambiguous between further vision
and irony at the desire to gain it. Alongside this chastened visual imagery
persists an imagery of language, which is similarly bounded. Our efforts to
know what the summer pleads and what snow conceals "mock" us. Our
knowledge is not directly of nature but always through linguistic acts that
inevitably entail ourselves.21 Against the desire to grasp the world-in- itself,
nature remains "Graspless," beyond our comprehension and our possession.
In this poem, language does not reflect, nor simply echo external
reality. Rather, experience is itself inextricably and at once structured as and
through language. Speaking forms the world through words. A prior signified
Wolosky EDFN 20
does not determine language as referring or corresponding to it. Yet neither
does this leave signifiers arbitrarily unanchored or coercively imposed, as
Nietzsche's Will to Power is often taken to imply. Instead, what is traced here
is an immersion in or experience of signifiers as the realm of human meaning,
the only meaning we finally have, which is also one that is never final. This is
not to say that meaning is merely relativist or arbitrary or dominating.
Signifiers are not simply, freely, and independently posited. They are instead
fundamentally, one might say foundationally linked to each other in chains or
networks or, as Nietzsche repeatedly insists in "Truth and Lie," in
relationships. Man knows nothing of the "thing-in-itself" but only designates
"the relations of things to men and for their expression he calls to his help the
most daring metaphors" (TL 248). Such "relations" may seem only
expressions of personal human will. But Nietzsche continues:
What, then, is for us a law of nature? It is not known to us as such, but
only in its effects, i.e. in its relations to other laws of nature, which in
turn are known to us only as relations. All these relations thus always
refer back only to one another and are absolutely incomprehensible to
us in their essence; what we add to them --- time, space, hence
relations of succession and numbers, is all we know about them. . . .
But we produce these perceptions within ourselves and out of
ourselves with the same necessity as a spider spins its web. . we are
compelled to grasp all things only under these forms. (TL 253)
The fact that we do not know nature "in-itself" does not mean we don't
know it at all, or that we just make up what and as we please. While "reality"
remains in Dickinson's terms "Graspless" in-itself – as Nietzsche writes, "we
are compelled to grasp all things only under these forms" – there are other
"manners" in which we do know. These are exactly the patterns that we
weave in and through our language, articulating what Nietzsche calls "sums of
relations." "These relations," Nietzsche writes, "refer only to one another and
Wolosky EDFN 21
are absolutely incomprehensible to us in their essence." That is, they mean
only to and for us, not in themselves as some absolute noumena. Yet to and
for us they do mean. We conceive them in "relations of sequence," of "time"
and "space," which Nietzsche treats, as human categories, as personifications
or anthropomorphisms. Whether or not they subsist without us, they are
known to us only as we designate them, making out of them, in one of
Nietzsche's powerful images in "Truth and Lying," a "new world of laws" in a
"sky of ideas." Nor is there any unity or whole. Relations remain multiple.
Yet this very multiplicity also prevents them from being merely willful. As
Saussure wrote about linguistic signs, despite their lack of essential relation to
things outside themselves, their very multiplicity stabilizes a system which, in
order to operate at all, cannot shift terms and usages randomly or at will.22
This multiplicity and its regulatory force applies as well to Nietzsche's
language theory. Denying any tie to a signified exterior and prior to linguistic
formulation does not release the signifier into wanton assertion. While the
signifier is untied to a signified independent of it, the signifier is retied to other
signifiers. In this net of relationships humans live and mean, in relations to
each other that are regulated and not simply assertive or wayward.
In Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks Nietzsche posits the
"essential character of primal being as coming-to-be." Being is not fixed and
eternal, but everchanging and "indefinite."
This "indefinite," the womb of all things, can, it is true, be designated by
human speech only as a negative, as something to which the existent
world of coming-to-be can give no predicate. We may look upon it as
the equal of the Kantian Ding an sich."23
The "indefinite" is a "negative" designation. It is not a "signified." It can be
given "no predicate." But this negation is in many ways a defining act. It
Wolosky EDFN 22
marks a transcendence as exactly what is beyond grasp. It thus defines our
experience as within phenomenal reality, at once limiting and delineating it.
Transcendence then is not a failed goal but a regulatory limit.
In this light, the opening "Tint I cannot take," which suggests an image
of point of view as a kind of coloring of how we see and promising some
further viewpoint as yet unattained, comes also to signal, in its negative
formulation, the impossibility of any final or absolute vision. Further, "tint" is
also a form of engraving, and "tint block" is a term in printing for a "lightly
colored background upon which an illustration or the like is to be printed."
Visual imagery verges into imagery of printing. But this moves the poem's
formulations from interior perception toward a shared world of exchange.
Signifiers link together in a network of language that different selves
participate in. The move from vision to language redirects the poem from
subjectivism to negotiated, mutual and common understanding. Such
understanding is never absolute. Rather, intrinsic reality remains "Graspless,"
resisting our attempts to comprehend it. This is a limitation the poem insists
on, concluding in the defeat of any "Eye" which "arrogantly" tries to see
absolutely. Instead, the poem declares the world to be a "Mystery" beyond
our reach, whose "Graspless manners" – a near oxymoron suggesting a
mode of modelessness – demand that we acknowledge and respect what
cannot be grasped.
III. Veils and Circles: Modest Reflections
The linguistic world is one of mutability and participation, not of final
command. It remains bounded by limitation and ontological "Mystery." Such
Wolosky EDFN 23
"Mystery" is interestingly figured in the poem "The Tint I cannot take" as
"Tulle." Tulle in Dickinson is a highly gendered image, closely associated with
veils, with the female body itself, and also with language as material event in
the imminent world. Feminized senses of "Veil" have been a topic in
Dickinson, and also in Nietzsche studies. Regarding Dickinson, the veil has
been associated with a problematic of the Gaze, of seeing while not being
seen, within a nineteenth century discourse of gendered norms and
commodification. 24 Veils and associated images appear in such well-known
poems as "Because I could not stop for Death," where "Tulle" represents the
speaker's body (J 712 / Fr 479). In "A Charm invests a face," it an emblem of
the sublime which warns against exposure as lifting "her Veil / For fear it be
dispelled." (J 421/ Fr 430)25 Veil is also expressly a linguistic trope. In "A
Single Screw of Flesh" "Veil" figures both as body and as writing – the two in
fact as fundamental tropes for each other. In this poem, the poet remains on
her "side" of "the Veil" as body, separating the speaker from God – a side she
however clutches at, reluctant to let go to pass into another world. But veil is
also language, associated with "name" and the danger of losing it in erasure,
with the self itself figured as "printed" language (J 263/ Fr 293).26
The topic of Nietzsche's imagery of woman is too vast even to broach
here. But, as Derrida has particularly noted, there is a striking figure in
Nietzsche of the "veil" as feminine image, associated in complex layers with
both truth and lie.27 On the one hand, Nietzsche associates women with
"appearance" – "her supreme concern is appearance and beauty" (BGE 232)
Here she is an emblem of the world of becoming –in fact, a quite traditional
assignment. Woman's place within metaphysical system has persistently
Wolosky EDFN 24
been to mark what is not essence, what is not real, what is merely sensual
and apparent.28 But in his reassignments of truth and falsehood, Nietzsche
can also write: "Suppose truth is a woman" (BGE Preface). Here he implies
that "truth" has been through the history of philosophy in fact a fiction, which
calling it "woman" exposes. As Derrida writes, "There is no such thing as the
truth of woman, but it is because . . . "untruth" is "truth" (51). Nietzsche wrote
in the Gay Science: "perhaps this is the greatest charm of life: it puts a
golden-embroidered veil of lovely potentialities over itself, promising, resisting,
modest, mocking, sympathetic, seductive. Yes. Life is a woman" (GS 339).
Derrida comments: "For him, truth is like a woman. It resembles the veiled
movement of feminine modesty. . . [a] complicity between woman, life,
seduction, modesty, all the veiled and veiling effects."
As Derrida's remarks reflect, the veil in both theoretical and historical
terms is an icon of modesty, invoking what remains concealed. In women's
history, this has persistently involved imposed constraint: a repression in the
Foucauldian sense that also activates, conjuring a female sexuality defined
from the standpoint of men and denying women's own subjectivity. Nietzsche
has been aligned with these as with other Foucauldian trends. His position
regarding modesty in any case will differ from Dickinson's. As Derrida writes,
Nietzsche may not fall into mere anti-feminism or feminism (57), but Nietzsche
generally regards woman from outside, as spectacle.29 Dickinson, in contrast,
inhabits her womanhood and speaks from it. Modesty in fact is among
Dickinson's most complex tropes, enacted, in both her life and work, as both
defiance and embrace. 30 Dickinson gazes not only at, but through the veil: of
Wolosky EDFN 25
body, of language, of limitation itself. At issue is the whole question of
boundedness and boundaries.
This is a question intrinsic to another core Dickinson figure,
circumference. Circumference has been largely interpreted in Dickinson as
ultimately transcending boundaries into infinity. Jane Donahue Eberwein,
who treats the trope extensively, sees it rightly as an aspect of Dickinson's
"Strategies of Limitation" but ultimately in order to "explode beyond them."31
Albert Gelpi sees it as an emblem of the absolute self, "more infinite than
infinity."32 In his discussion of Dickinson and Nietzsche in terms of "The Rites
of Dionysus," Dwight Eddins focuses on "the dialectic between boundlessness
and limitation" which circumference evokes. And he, too, ultimately sees
Dickinson's as a drive to a Dionysian boundlessness, tracing an "all inclusive
circle with the ultimate unity of Dionysian affirmation. There is nothing left
outside the circle, no "otherness" anywhere in nature. . . in an ecstasy of
omnipotence."33
Yet many of Dickinson's images of "circumference" are highly
equivocal. Rather than affirming the transcendence of boundaries, they
question that possibility. In the poem "I Saw No Way, the Heavens were
Stitched," the self is figured as deeply disoriented. Going out "upon
Circumference / Beyond the Dip of Bell" leaves the self precariously
suspended. (J 378 / Fr 633). Gelpi cites the poem "Time feels so vast" as
affirming continuity between the smaller circle of the self and an infinite
circumference (J 802 / Fr 858).34 But the poem registers tension, contest, and
discontinuity between smaller and larger, as Time's vastness presents a
"Circumference" that threatens to exclude "Eternity." In yet another poem,
Wolosky EDFN 26
"Circumference" is trope for "Ignorance," as inspired by the "Sunset" in a
vision of "Omnipotence" glimpsed by "Our inferior face" (J 552 / Fr 669).
Circumference then is not only a verge into the beyond, but also marks a limit
needed to sustain selfhood at all. This is strongly registered in the poem "His
mind of man, a secret makes." There Dickinson describes each self as a
"circumference / In which I have no part . . . Impregnable to inquest." (J 1663 /
Fr 1730). As she also writes, "The Suburbs of a secret / A strategist should
keep." (J 1245 / Fr ).
Circumference thus stretches on an edge between boundlessness and
boundary, but ultimately draws back into the world of limitation. In this it acts
like a veil and like negation itself, refusing the desire to exceed into absolute
realms. In the poem "Circumference thou Bride of Awe" the figure is clearly
feminized (J 1620 / Fr 1636). This poem is most often read as urging
possession; but there is also a suspicion against it. 35 The romance desire of
the "hallowed Knights" to possess this "Bride of Awe" is suspected, not
lauded, as coveting. The phrase "Possessing thou shalt be/ Possessed"
makes unclear who possesses whom. Perhaps "Possessing" itself will be
"Possessed;" or perhaps there is a mutual implication rather than command of
ownership. Above all, "Awe," like "Mystery," projects a powerful boundary in
Dickinson, pointing towards a relation to the world as transcending her: not in
the sense of a metaphysical other world, but as the immanent world that
remains beyond her ownership and command. In this she affirms both
selfhood and its limits. 36
Dickinson's circumference may be compared to the core circle image in
Nietzsche, the Eternal Return. Just what and how Nietzsche means by
Wolosky EDFN 27
Eternal Return has continued to be debated. But one clear implication is that
it brings back into phenomena and becoming the value that metaphysics,
according to Nietzsche, drained from them. Eternal Return affirms the world
of time and change, to the point of embracing their eternal enactment. 37 It
draws a circle within this world of time and language, not as mere restriction
but as power-generating embrace.
In one of Dickinson's most famous texts, it is as language that circle
imagery emerges in, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant / Success in circuit lies"
(J 1129 / 1150). Is "Truth" here a pre-established Idea that resists expression
into partial and inadequate language? An in-itself that, as the poem goes on
to say, "must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind," requiring
circumlocution to mediate its overwhelming presence? Or is "Circuit" here not
a detour but the only path for telling a "Truth" which only emerges within the
tropes and images of its representation? "Success in Circuit lies" itself plays
on lie and truth, making them difficult to tell apart: does linguistic circuit lie, or
is it the only form of truth we ever experience? Does circuit mark a boundary
to be protested and transcended, or a limit to be embraced as both necessary
and generative? Yet in the poem, truth only appears, only happens in the
world, as slant, as figure. Indeed, the pull of the poem brings truth into the
process of language and the language of process. Any attempt to strip away
figuration is to try to penetrate to what is "Too bright for our Infirm Delight" –
where "Delight" itself inheres in our infirmity, our human imperfection. As
Wallace Stevens writes: "The imperfect is our paradise."
There are readings of Nietzsche's "Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral
Sense" that see it, in its denial of a signified truth outside of language, as
Wolosky EDFN 28
tracing a collapse of all meaning. Nietzsche appears then to be digging out
the very ground on which he stands, in a self-undoing of language that
undermines meaning itself.38 What then remains, notably in the
interpretations of Nietzsche in Foucault and Deleuze, is language as an
unanchored proliferation of signs, functioning within exercises of power that
emerge as the only continuing principle – indeed, a power that seems to act
as a itself a metaphysical principle, the substratum of all that is or occurs.39
In such interpretations, Nietzsche prefigures post-modernism in the sense
summarized by Cornel West as anti-foundationalist, anti-realist, as
detranscendentalizing the subject, and relativist. But there are other
possibilities. West himself suggests that "Nietzsche believed such moves
lead to a paralyzing nihilism and skepticism unless they are supplemented
with a new world view, a new "countermovement" to overcome such nihilism
and skepticism," although West sees contemporary philosophy as having
failed as yet to achieve such a countermovement. 40 Some indication of a
constructive deconstruction in Nietzsche can be seen in the work of Jean
Granier, who argues that "Perspectivism" projects not solipsism but, rather,
multiple interpretations. These are generative rather than nihilistic or merely
relativistic, exactly in that Nietzsche resists dogmatic insistence on one
version as alone true. Nietzsche instead insists on "the impossibility of a
definitive interpretation that would exhaust the richness of reality."41 This
possible constructive deconstructivism sees the Will to Power not as a selfaggrandizing imposition on others but rather, in accordance with
perspectivism, as a partiality of any power. Multiple versions may compete,
but, especially when cast in terms of language rather than vision, they would
Wolosky EDFN 29
do so in forms and forums of mutual negotiation. The denial of a single truth
would become the ground for new interpretive creation, while paying homage
to the limitation of each before the versions of others and the greater mystery
of the world. Limitation remains pivotal. In the Will to Power, Nietzsche
describes nihilism as caused by metaphysics itself, in its faulty and
devaluating accounts of experience. "The "meaninglessness of events" he
calls the "consequence of an insight into the falsity of previous interpretations,
a generalization of discouragement and weakness." But it is not, he goes on,
"a necessary belief." Indeed, Nietzsche goes on to describe nihilism as a
form of hubris, of "the immodesty of man: to deny meaning where he sees
none" (WP 599). Nietzsche urges instead a "plurality of interpretations [as] a
sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the world of its disturbing and
enigmatic character! (WP 600).42 Here, like Dickinson, Nietzsche
acknowledges a mystery beyond possession in any final form. Beyond any
account man gives, the world retains its "disturbing and enigmatic character"
– a removal that yet generates our linguistic energy, as both a creative and a
conditional force.
Thus, Nietzsche's critique of traditional metaphysics does dismiss
claims to ground language in a signified truth that exists outside language.
Nonetheless, this dismissal of metaphysical truth need not entail either willful
imposition of subjective versions or chaotic collapse of all meaning. It may
instead point to newly directed structures or modes of signification. These
would deny originary forms of "Truth" and would claim that the only shape our
world has for us is that of figuration, conducted in language. Language and
Wolosky EDFN 30
its figures would then no longer be "lie," since there would be no "truth" to
which they need or fail to refer.
Towards the conclusion of "Truth and Lie" Nietzsche names the
"impulse towards the formation of metaphors" as the "fundamental impulse of
man," in which "new figures of speech, metaphors, metonymies. . .constantly
show [the] passionate longing for shaping the existing world of waking man. .
This impulse seeks for itself a new realm of action . . . in Art" (TL 254). The
figures of language impel and conduct the endless human making of "new"
realms to inhabit, as the very action of "Art." Art emerges as Nietzsche's focal
and defining activity, caught or taut between the drive to form and the everaltering energy that he named in The Birth of Tragedy (written shortly before
"Truth and Lie") Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Dickinson's verse traces
this shaping power of trope in both its impulse to order and its refusal of final
shape or absolute claim. The world emerges in one sense as an aesthetic
venture. In another sense, its mystery, marked as negation, prevents the
aesthetic from reducing the world to its own terms, while also generating new
forms. In "Truth and Lie," Nietzsche declares: "Nature knows of no forms or
concepts. . . but only an X that is inaccessible and indefinable for us." (TL
250). Nietzsche here is unmasking a delusion, the delusion that reality can
ever be unmasked. He does so in both disappointment and defiance.
Dickinson is never as adamant as Nietzsche. Hers ever remains a "Sweet
Skepticism of the Heart / That knows – and does not – know" (J 1413 /
Fr1438). As poet, her task is to negotiate the space abandoned by
metaphysical certainty with the language forms that never resolve, respecting
their own limits, but that venture and create.
Wolosky EDFN 31
This aesthetic and indeed specifically linguistic power, as well as the
limitations that at once restrict and yet also launch creativity, is traced in one
of a series of Dickinson poems of dawn, through the arc of presence and then
disappearance of bird's song:
At Half past Three, a single Bird
Unto a silent sky
Propounded but a single term
Of cautious melody
At Half past Four, Experiment
Had subjugated test
And lo, Her silver principle
Supplanted all the rest.
At Half past Seven, Element
Nor Implement, be seen –
And Place was where the Presence was
Circumference between. (J 1084 / Fr 1099)43
The scene of this poem is radically temporal and radically linguistic. The
circles of clock measure intensify the condition of becoming, of time and
change, as the context for human experience. That experience itself is
represented as one of linguistic activism. Against a "sky" that is "silent," the
"Bird" figure introduces a "melody" figured as a "term" that is "Propounded" –
that is, as language.44 The relation of the bird to the sky is one almost of
address or dialogue; yet it remains "cautious," even modest, with the bird
explicitly feminized as "Her" in the next stanza.
The second stanza does break into power. "Experiment" displaces "Test,"
subjugating and supplanting "all the rest." The song here asserts what
Nietzsche called the "impulse towards the formation of metaphors," one that is
not only inescapable, but also defining of human existence in the world. Yet
this proves but a moment in an ongoing course that the poem too pursues.
Wolosky EDFN 32
The projection of voice in time becomes empty space. "Place was where the
Presence was." "Circumference" here marks language balanced on the edge
of itself, of what it can, and cannot, offer and accomplish. The art of song is
celebrated; but it is also retracted, limited in its power to shape or govern or
command a world that is ever changing, every escaping from it. In her writing
it emerges as a boundary that both generates power and defines its extent –
both as to its reach and what it cannot reach beyond.
1
Dickinson texts will be cited by both the Thomas Johnson and the R.W.
Franklin The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998) poem numbers. The question of textual stability is itself a vexed
and complex one, which I will not enter into here. I will say, however, that the
textual instability of Dickinson texts concur with the argument in this paper
towards the role of language as and in a realm of becoming.
2 As Nietzsche famously said in The Gay Science III: 7 "Thus the philosopher
abhors marriage and all that would persuade him to marriage, for he sees the
married state as an obstacle to fulfillment. What great philosopher has ever
been married?" trans. Walter Kaufmann, (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1974).
Hereafter cited as GS.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche The Will to Power (N.Y.: Vintage Books 1967).
Hereafter cited as WP followed by section number.
4 Much has been written on Nietzsche's aphoristic style. See especially
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation tr. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
5 This poem and its metaphysical critique I discussed in Emily Dickinson: A
Voice of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), where my focus was
on metaphysical revolt as well as historical conflict.
6 Martin Heidegger Nietzsche. Vol One, trans. David Krell (San Francisco:
Harper and Row Publishers, Inc. 1978), p. 202.
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche ed.
Walter Kaufmann, (NY: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 485.
8 On nachlass questions
9 Cf. a much cited aphorism in Will to Power, where Nietzsche writes that the
world "has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings: Perspectivism"
(WP § 481). Cf discussion in Lingis and Nehemas.
Wolosky EDFN 33
10
"On Truth and Lying in a Extra-Moral Sense" in Friedrich Nietzsche on
Rhetoric and Language ed. Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, David Parent (NY:
Oxford University Press, 1989) 246-257, p. 246. Hereafter cited as TL.
11 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980.
12 Of course one of the Cartesian topics. A central problem in epistemology.
Cf Gilbert Ryle eg the ghost in the machine.
13 Another philosophical topic: the impossibility of private language.
Wittgenstein. Kripke. Already in Saussure.
14Such location of the human in conversation has become a principal topic in
discourse theories, such as Habermas's. Note his critique of Nietzsche,
Nehemas; but closes off potential readings.
15 I have discussed Emersonian language theory in "Emerson's Figural
Religion," forthcoming.
16 See my "Personification" in The Art of Poetry, (NY: Oxford University Press,
2002).
17 Nehemas's argument here is not consistent re reason not being critical
unless via an exterior absolute standpoint. CC to N.
18 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, (Ny: Harcouty Brace & Company,
1994), pp. 304-309. The sublime of course is a major topic in Dickinson
studies. See Gary Stonum, Joanne Fieht Diehl.
19 Kant describes the sublime in Critique of Judgment , as involving "a
representation which makes us remark its inadequacy and consequently its
subjective want of purposiveness," finding "the whole power of the
imagination inadequate to its ideas," II. 26. Lyotard's interpretation of this
sublime as a chasm between representation and the unrepresentable is close
to what is under discussion here. On the other hand, to Kant the sublime is
ultimately a revelation of our own subjectivity, "true sublmity must be sought
only in the mind of the subject judging, not in the natural object the judgment
upon which occasions this state." As to Nietzsche, he read parts of the
Critique of Judgment (CJ) in 1867, but both Kant's sublime and Nietzsche's
relation to it are far too daunting a topic to enter into here. For discussion,
see: Kevin Hill Nietzsche's Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of his Thought,
(NY: Oxford University Press, 2003); Michael Harr, Nietzsche and
Metaphysics trans. Michael Gendre, (NY: Suny Press, 1996).
20 Curtius on inexpressibility. See Language Mysticism.
21 As Harold Bloom writes, the poem figures the "limits of her art," "an
ungraspable secret, a trope or metaphor not to be expressed." This contrasts
Sharon Cameron's reading that "the poem indeed if paradoxically grasps what
it claims cannot be grasped," although does see dominion as "redefined as
residing only in the momentary, in the particular piecemeal moments
reiterated in this poem as both comprehensive and unforgettable." Choosing
Not Choosing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 164-165.
22 Saussure Linguistics
23 Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (Chicago:
Henry Regnery Company, 1962), p. 47.
24 Lisa Harper offers a sustained discussion of the veil and the Gaze in
Dickinson in "The Eyes accost – and Sunder:" Unveiling Emily Dickinson's
Poetics," Emily Dickinson Journal 9:1 21-48
Wolosky EDFN 34
25
Significantly, "dispelled" plays on spelling, while, in the poem's conclusion,
reiterating the power of what is imagined over what exists, "Interview"
combines a trope of vision with that of language: "Lest Interview – annul a
want / That Image – satisfies" (J 271 / ).
26 I have discussed "The Single Screw of Flesh" in Emily Dickinson: A Voice
of War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
27 Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978), p. 65: Nietzsche is "a thinker of pregnancy, which for him is no
less praiseworthy in a man than it is in a woman." BGE 232 / GS 72
28 R. Howard Bloch discusses this traditional association with its implications
for language and the sign in "Medieval Misogyny," Representations 20, Fall
1987, 1-24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
29 Eric Blondel, "Nomad Thought," The New Nietzsche ed. David Allison,
(Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1986), 150-175, p. 156. Blondel also
discusses the veil in Nietzsche.
30 Cambridge History IV
31 Jane Donahue Eberwein, Strategies of Limitation (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1987), p. 199.
32Gelpi, the Mind of the Poet 97; Gelpi, Mind of Poet 97; 105 "oblivious to the
ethical preoccupations of Emerson and Thoreau; 108 cultivation of
consciousness her religion In The Tenth Muse, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), Gelpi pursues the psychological meaning of the
circumference, as verging into eternity p. 270.
33 Dwight Eddins, "Dickinson and Nietzsche: The Rites of Dionysus," ESQ Vol
27, 2nd Quarter, 1981, 96-107, p. 101. Cf. Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity
(NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963) p. 212, where he associates ecstasy
with Circumference Eddins focuses mainly on The Birth of Tragedy and reads
its Dionysianism as metaphysical, a reading that has been much contested.
See David Allison, "Nietzsche Knows no Noumenon," bpimdary 2 9: 3 Spring
autumn 1981 295-310 as non-metaphysical. Of course Heidegger famously
saw Nietzsche as an inversion of Plato, and hence metaphysical in his antimetaphysics. See Nietzsche. Vol One The Will to Power as Art, trans. David
Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc. 1978), pp. 200-20; "
the true and apparent worlds have exchanged places, ranks and forms But in
this exchange and reversal just that distinction between a true and apparent
world is maintained, (p. 622). Heidegger's metaphysical interpretation of
Nietzsche considers the "Will to Power" as an in-itself, and eternal return as
appearance in phenomena, duplicating traditional ontology. For discussion
see Ernst Behler, "Nietzsche in the Twentieth Century," Cambridge
Companion to Nietzsche,281-322, p. 312; David Farrell rell, "Art and Truth in
Raging Discord: Heidegger and Nietzsche on the Will to Power, boundary 2
4:2 Winter 1976, 378-392.
34 Tenth Muse, p. 269
35 Both Eberwein and Gelpi read this poem as accomplishing Romance
possession of knight to bride, a "union of bride and knight, Circumference
and Awe" (Gelpi, Mind of Poet; p. 126) "Art pressing perpetually at the limits
of mortal expression" as a "knight on a quest for this great boon representing
the ultimate reach of human aspiration" circumference as death joined in
Wolosky EDFN 35
loving union with Awe" 194 as stronger mysterious force beyond humanly
experienced boundaries."
36 Cf the interplay of "possession" and "awe" in:
Peril as a Possession
'Tis Good to bear
Danger disintegrates Satiety
There's Basis there –
Begets an awe
That searches Human Nature's creases
As clean as Fire (J 1678 / )
Here "Possession" is itself a "peril." To think we claim, we own, creates a
"Satiety" that is ultimately stultifying. Conversely, the "Danger that
disintegrates" "Begets an awe" over what we do not possess. "Human
Nature" itself is not unitary nor seamless, but (in an imagery of sewing) riven
with "creases." At this poem's center is an apparent tautology, but in fact
works as oxymoron: "There's Basis there." For "Basis," foundation, is
precisely what is not "there." Neither self nor experience nor world constitutes
a stable, possessible ground, but only an incessantly changing position, a
disintegrative force dangerous to "Satieties." The final image of "Fire" may
recall the Heraclatean one so central to Nietzsche, with fire, as Giles Deleuze
notes, a Nietzschean trope of transformation.36 The only "Basis" is one that
keeps shifting, launching further standpoints that never, however, securely
stand.
37 This is Michael Haar's interpretation of eternal return, Nietzsche and
Metaphysics (NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 28, 31-32.
He quotes Nietzsche, "Let us impress upon our life the image of eternity," and
comments: "The 'circle' is itself imperfect. The totality of Return is a shattered
totality." Cf. Thomas Altizer "Eternal Recurrence and the Kingdom of God"
232-243. check Heidegger.
38 This is De Man's reading in "Rhetoric of Tropes (Nietzsche), 103 – 118.
Referring to "Truth and Lie," De Man sees the fact that language is "rhetorical"
rather than "representational" 106 as a dissolution of the "literal" and hence
any sense of truth altogether: "By asserting in the mode of truth that the self is
a lie, we have not escaped from deception" 112. The Nietzsche text is itself
one of self-undoing: "The authoritative claims that it seems to makecan be
undermined by means of statements provided by the text itself." 117. J. Hillis
Miller similarly reads language in Nietzsche as an irresolvable "entangling
net," in which he is caught as an "impasse he is attempting to describe" p.42.
reading in "Disremembering and disremembering in Nietzsche's "On Truth
and Lies in a Non-moral Sense" boundary 2 (Vol. 9, No. 3) Syposium Why
Nietzsche Now" (Spring-autumn, 1981) 41-54.
39 Foucault's famous essay on "Freud, Described by Alan Schrift in
"Nietzsche's French Legacy" (CC to N): Foucault focused not on the subjects
of power but on power relations, power relations in the absence of a
sovereign subject; 340 Foucault: Each sign is in itself not the thing that
presents itself to interpretation, but the interpretation of other signs.
Nietzsche, Freud, Marx in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context 59- 67
Deleuze;
Wolosky EDFN 36
40
Cornel West, "Nietzsche's Prefiguration of Postmodern American
Philosophy" boundary 2 Vol 9 no. 3, 241-269, pp. 241, 243, 264. . check
critical reader
41 Jean Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation" in The New Nietzsche
190-200, 194-195, 197. Granier writes other positive readings: cf essays in
Yirmiyahu Yovel, ed. Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker (Martinus Nijhoff
Publishers 1986). Other positive readings of Nietzschean nihilism can be
found in Alexander Nehamas "Nietzsche, modernity, aestheticism" 223-251
disputes what he takes to be Rorty's view of Nietzsche as abandoning himself
to a blind contingency. (231) and mere goallessness. 232 No real world
doesn't mean no world, Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche ed. Bernd
Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (NY: Cambridge University Press 1996)
Alan White describes Nietzsche in terms of pluralist models, p. 135. Lyotard,
too, reads Nietzsche in terms of multiple and discordant voices.
42 Cf. WP 605 The ascertaining of "truth" and "untruth," the ascertaining of
facts in general, is fundamentally different from creative positing, from
forming, shaping, overcoming, willing, . . . to introduce a meaning – this task l
remains to be done, assuming there is no meaning yet. Thus it is with sounds,
but also with the fate of peoples: they are capable of the most different
interpretations and direction toward different goals.
43
This is one of the Dickinson poems translated by Paul Celan. I have
analyzed it and its translation in "Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan: Trajectories
of Mysticism"
Ein Vogel, einer, um halb vier:
dem Himmel, der da schwieg,
den einen Laut trug er ihm an
sparsamster Melodie.
Das war die Probe. Um halb fu"nf
gingsu" ber sie hinaus,
und sieh: ihr silbernes Zuerst
stach alles andre aus.
Halb sieben: weder Element
noch Werkzeug weit und breit.
Ein Ort hier, dort die Gegenwart,
mit einem Zwischenkreis.
44
This linguistic imagery is evident in a companion poem, "The Birds begun at
Four o'clock" (J 783) where the the birds' song is described as "Voices" that
"multiply."