12
PARTISAN REVIEW
Shakespeare's very success blinds us to his radical divergence from
our customary valuations. Kant was content to bury some of the
force of his radicalism in the obscurity of involved pedantry. And
Plato offered some of
his
most revolutionary suggestions in the tone
of urbane conversation. So, for that matter, did Hume. Not every
philosopher challenges society to put him to death for subverting
"the tradition" like Socrates.
The point is not that men like Nietzsche and Rilke were not so
revolutionary after all. Rather, all great poetry and philosophy is
deeply subversive--a fact appreciated by Plato and other advocates of
censorship, but overlooked by the cultured Philistine who admires
the great art of the past and condemns that of the present, without
recapturing the experience behind either.
The common suggestion that Nietzsche or Rilke, or any num–
ber of others, fall outside "the tradition" or invert it is probably re–
ducible to one of two positions: either we must reject, by the same
token, all the great philosophers and poets, modern as well as Greek,
or we are confronted with the truism that Nietzsche and Rilke are
very different from Thomas and Dante. More likely than not,
Thomas is viewed out of his historical context, and Dante's revolu–
tionary innovations are disregarded. More important, Shakespeare,
Milton, and Blake, Descartes, Hume, and Kant are all considered
as so many stages of decline. This may be
one
way of seeing history;
but the suggestion that Nietzsche and Rilke and other moderns stand
apart as men who invert the European tradition is a sheer perversion
of fact.
Consider just one of these supposed inversions to which Heller
alludes: "Lovers seek separation, not union." He has in mind Rilke's
only "Love Song":
1
How could I keep my soul so that it might
not touch on yours? How could I elevate
it over you to reach to other things?
Oh, I would like to hide it out of sight
1 All translations are my own. Those of Rilke appear here for the first
time; those of Nietzsche are from
The Portable Niet<.sche,
selected and trans–
lated, with an introduction, prefaces, and notes, by Walter Kaufmann (The
Viking Press, New York 1954) . With what Nietzsche and Rilke have in common
I deal in another essay, in the
Kenyon Review.
