Nietzsche’s Strength, Poetry’s Strength
Curiously, Nietzsche, the hero of modern interpretative independence, has provided a doggedly stubborn puzzle for his interpreters: “the will to power.” It’s the word “power” that makes for trouble, and Nietzsche’s readers can be divided into those who, like Brian Leiter or Julian Young, essentially throw up their hands at its cogency and dismiss its centrality to Nietzsche’s philosophy, or those who, like Walter Kauffman or John Richardson, attempt to generously explicate it. Such a division in two camps is itself too simple, of course; Lawrence J. Hatab lists eleven mainstream interpretations of “the will to power” and goes on to offer a twelfth[i]. The mid-century editor Mazzino Montinari, discovered that the most famous of Nietzsche’s aphorism, “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides,” included in the posthumous edition by that name compiled by his sister, was rescued from the wastebasket where Nietzsche had consigned it; he himself was not at ease with how much he was asking the phrase to do.
While it would be perverse to suggest a mistranslation has taken place, I will propose that conceiving of Nietzsche’s Macht as our English power cannot allow it to do what he needs from it (I would like, only, to borrow Nietzsche’s words “in order to replace an improbability with something more probable” GM, Preface, 5)[ii] ). As John Richardson points out, Nietzsche extends the “will to power” to entities beyond the human, and yet in our way of speaking about the world, it is strange to think about the power of a plant or a rock, or even the power of an amoeba or lichen, even if we can say there is power involved in their being. Taking “drives” as ontologically primitive to Nietzsche’s system (like dynamic monads), he writes: “Drives or forces proceed mainly ‘beneath the level of consciousness’ even in persons—not to mention in the animals, plants, and non-living things in which or as which Nietzsche also finds them.”[iii] Richardson’s shift of emphasis from “power” to “drives or forces” tells us a lot about what “power” cannot, as a word, accomplish.
A further problem with “power” as a word is coupled with a historical memory that associates power with something as monolithic as energy (“power stations”) and, following Foucault, as ubiquitous as the medium of all relationships and communicative acts. It is not merely elemental in its simplicity but also in its uniquity and consistency, as “water” or “air” are constitutive of much of the world’s complexity without, on their own, accounting for it. Brian Leiter remarks that “one worry that haunts Realist readings is that ‘power’ becomes so capacious a notion that it simply denotes every end of action” and this is because of the ease with which “power” insinuates itself into so many of our accounts of life and the world.[iv]The will to power is universal; everything is on fire; power flows, gathers, congeals, breaks; and in response, countercurrents emerge and resist; we can empower and disempower, recover power and discover power; power is a fundamental concept of life, nature, the universe, existence. What’s more, power has the rare distinction of being measured in terms that are both impressionistic and calculable.
Power is finally a difficult term to manage because the “will to power” suggests that “power” is somehow related to a normative scheme, without offering sufficient clarity on the relation. If power is a mere number, then the best way to will oneself to power is to do whatever one must do to increase that number. But power cannot, in human experience, and in much of life beyond, be quantified so neatly. Some judgment is involved. The judgment is inevitably relative, against others but also over time, and this is where Nietzsche appeals to “might,” to power over and against the world, though it might be power over and against one’s past self that provides the useful measure. The trouble with interpreting Nietzsche as judging power as relative to others alone is that it collapses into something that he rejects: ressentiment, a reactionary weakness. How do we distinguish between reactionary weakness and true power? Reactionary weakness, ressentiment, is the will to power gone wrong. Another term, a clear normative term is required.
Fortunately, Nietzsche grants us such a term, and he does so without turning to (and in fact rejecting, at least initially) the usual suspects: truth and goodness (some might add beauty). Instead of these, Nietzsche asks us to consider “strength,” Strength is the individual’s self-regulating, self-balancing, self-centering in the ubiquitous fields of power. Strength is not power; it is the normative response to power, without being directly commensurate with power. Someone lacking power may possess great strength. It is also not reducible to truth, goodness, or beauty, though it is necessary to all three of those orders, and perhaps cannot be known apart from them on the final analysis.
In the Hollingdale translation of Beyond Good and Evil, Section 13 of the first chapter “On the Prejudices of Philosophers” appears:
Physiologists should think again before postulating the drive to self-preservation as the cardinal drive in an organic being. A living thing desires above all to vent its strength—life as such is will to power—: self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it.
Then in Section 21:
‘Unfree will’ is mythology: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills.—It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker detects in every ‘causal connection’ and ‘psychological necessity’ something of compulsion, exigency, constraint, pressure, unfreedom: such feelings are traitors, the person who has them gives himself away.
The word that matters most in these passages is not “power,” but “strength,” and it is the “will to strength” that seems a fruitful adjustment of Nietzsche’s phrase, for even if we accept that a living being desires to “vent its strength,” it may be the stronger thing to not vent it at all (unless we can speak of self-disciplining or containing as venting). Anything: a mind, an action, an imagination, an act of attention, a plant, a mountain, or an amoeba can be strong, can be said even to have a “will to strength,” an inborn telos towards not only a formal perfection but something that possesses and masters energy in the world, in relation to other entities and phenomena. It is all the more humanist for being all the more earthly and potentially inhuman. It is an escape from the metaphysics that humanism disguises, and of which Nietzsche is so suspicious.[v]
In skeptical response to Nietzsche’s claims to the explanatory scope of “the will to power,” JP Stern asks:
For if it is really the monistic explanation Nietzsche proclaims it to be, how are we to account for the sheer variety of the phenomena in which this will ‘objectifies’ itself—that variety in the detailed descriptions of which Nietzsche excels? Is it really convincing to claim that a man’s loving, caring, instructing, finding out and reflecting do not merely involve ‘the will to power’ but are ‘nothing else besides’?[vi]
Against Stern, “strength” is centrally involved in a man’s loving, caring, instructing, finding out, and reflecting. All of these require strength; they can be done with strength or without; they can be strong or weak. But whereas we think we know what the “power” would look like if we encountered it in any of these activities, suggesting that they possess a drive towards strength is to invite interpretation, and also to avoid automatically falling back into a bourgeois moralism that Nietzsche despises, since such a moralism provides no account of strength by its own terms. In so far as humans can imagine strength, and interpret strength, in any number of ways, “strength” is a constantly contested notion. Strength demands interpretation—it does not suppose it must be one thing. Nietzsche’s revaluation of values might be seen as a recovering, or uncovering, of what strength properly is; his attack on ressentiment, as opposed to nobility, does not deny that it has gained immense baleful influence, undeniable power, but would nonetheless claim that it has no strength in its own right.
Interpretation of strength, though, is not unbounded. This is one of the arguments he puts forward in The Genealogy of Morals. It is the power of the weak to interpret their weakness as strength, but it is a false interpretation. At the same time, I think Nietzsche goes too far in the other direction, bounding strength too narrowly, undermining his claims. There are two movements, for instance, in the following passage, from Section 13 of the first essay:
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a will to overcome, overthrow, dominate, a thirst for enemies and resistance and triumph, makes as little sense of weakness that it should express itself of strength. A quantum of force is also a quantum of will, drive, action—in fact, it is nothing more than this driving, willing, acting, and it is only through the seduction of language (and through the fundamental errors of reason petrified in it)—language which understands and misunderstands all action as conditioned by an actor, by a ‘subject’—that it can appear otherwise.
It is one thing to say that strength must be willing, driving, acting; it is another to say that it must be domination, triumph, overthrow. The latter set of terms is especially peculiar since they very much suppose the sense of self that a subject or actor possesses. For this to cohere, “overcome, overthrow, dominate, a thirst for enemies and resistance and triumph” needs to be interpreted more broadly than we are accustomed to doing. “Strength” as a “quantum of force” does not require them otherwise. It may be that the word “strength” is foundational to all of our judgments, proceeding morality because of its innate connection to security, to muscles, to being lifted and lifting, all of which we know from so early an age; it lives in the immediacy of our bodies. It is implicit in the conceit of the corporeal state in Plato and Hobbes. And this somatic mooring leads easily to discerning strength in occasions of physical domination, triumph, and overthrow: the world of wrestling. But Nietzsche, who celebrates the liberty of interpretation, would be doing himself an injustice to leave strength in the hands of those who batter.
What Nietzsche is productively getting at in the analysis is an inner self, a soul that shelters the weak, who would claim its preservation is in fact a movement of strength:
Just as the common people distinguishes lightning from the flash of light and takes the latter as doing, as the effect of a subject which is called lightning, just as popular morality distinguishes strength from expressions of strength, as if behind the strong individual there were an indifferent substratum which was at liberty to express or not to express strength. But no such substratum exists; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, acting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction imposed on the doing—the doing itself is everything. Basically, the common people represent the doing twice over, when they make lightning flash—that is a doing doubled by another doing: it posits the same event once as cause and then again as effect. (GM, 1, 13)
This penetrates into the heart of modern philosophy. For my purposes, I need only follow it so far as it leads to clarify strength as opposed to the lack of strength, force or the lack of force: either there is doing, movement, energy, force, or there is not. Even the most static object must be doing something if it is to be considered strong, in so far as it must hold something in place. Nietzsche’s is a celebration of the verb and its grammatical possibilities. The coup de grace in his argument comes a bit later:
When listened to coldly and without prejudice, this actually means nothing more than: ‘We weak men are, after all, weak; it would be good if we refrained from doing anything for which we lack sufficient strength.’ But this dry matter-of-factness, this cleverness of the lowest rank, which even insects possess (insects which, in situations of great danger, probably play dead in order not to do ‘too much’), has, thanks to the forgery and self-deception of impotence, clothed itself in the magnificence of self-abnegating, calm, and patient virtue, exactly as if the weakness of the weak man itself—that is, his essence, is action, his whole single, unavoidable, irredeemable reality—were a free achievement, something willed, chosen, a deed, a merit. (GM, 1, 13)
As radical as Nietzsche might seem, and would want to be seem, he is radical because, as befits a genealogist, he returns to a root of human understanding: that strength is admirable, that it cannot be separated from willing, doing, confronting resistance, and that it can be interpreted in a range of ways but not so to include inaction and mere inert being. Of course there is a Christian response to Nietzsche, one which he recognizes in the activity of ascetic self-disciplining, but he views this as ultimately a deprivation of strength that otherwise might have found outlet.
It brings us, in fact, startlingly close to Kant’s notion of autonomy, but with a restoration of somatic experience that Kant renders implicit, if it’s present at all. For what Nietzsche offers in his analysis of ressentiment is a set of criteria for strength that could be given Kantian expression: genuine agency requires non-reactivity, strength involves self-legislation, following a law you give yourself rather than being determined by external forces or mere inclination. Nietzsche was looking at Kant from the other end of the century, his moral philosophy having been interpreted into moralism and digested into bourgeois conformity; his defiant break from Kant owes in part to this. But it also owes to his returning philosophy to the body: autonomy is strength, and strength is known first and foremost through physiological exertion. Even the test of universalizability in Kant’s imperative, that one must think for oneself, think for everyone else, and think consistently, requires the strength to posit a course of action that is not merely reactive upon one’s particular circumstance. As for Nietzsche’s claim that there is no doer behind the doing, it is not, in that formulation, as far from Kantian accounts of practical reason that would identify practical reason with action itself. The doing is the reasoning. this is Kantian autonomy, the self-consciousness of action in knowing itself to act as it does (not the self-consciousness making its own law, but the consciousness that is, in its self-knowledge, its own law).[vii] In this Kantian tradition, strength is the self acting according to its own measure; strength is, in fact, a word for that very internal measure by which the self determines its action and form. This does not mean the self encounters no resistance and it does not mean that the self acts in isolation; it means that the strength with which it responds to the environment and encounters resistance is its own principle.
It’s at this point where Nietzsche’s account of strength does overthrow Kant, or at least reveal a latent imbalance in Kantian and Hegelian ethics. The metaphysical root of Kant and Hegel can be traced back to Augustine, whose account of evil in Book XIV of The City of God is also an account of the human will:
But the first evil act of will, since it preceded all evil deeds in man, was rather a falling away from the work of God to its own works, rather than any substantive act. And the consequent deeds were evil because they followed the will’s own line, and not God’s. And so the will itself was, as it were, the evil tree which bore the evil fruit, in the shape of those evil deeds; or rather it was the man himself who was that tree, in so far as his will was evil. Moreover, though an evil will is not natural but unnatural because it is a defect, still it belongs to the nature of which it is a defect, for it cannot exist except in a nature. But it can only exist in a nature. But it can only exist in a nature which God created out of nothing, not in that nature which the Creator begot out of himself, as he begot the Word through whom all things were made. (568)
Now, could anything but pride have been the start of the evil will? For ‘pride is the start of every kind of sin.’ And what is pride except a longing for a perverse kind of exaltation? For it is a perverse kind of exaltation to abandon the basis on which the mind should be firmly fixed, and to become, as it were, based on oneself, and so remain. This happens when a man is too pleased with himself: and a man is self-complacent when he deserts that changeless Good in which, rather than himself, he ought to have found his satisfaction. This desertion is voluntary, for if the will had remained unshaken in its love of the higher changeless Good, which shed on it light to see and kindled in it fire to love, it would not have been diverted from this love to follow its own pleasure. (571)
This the evil act, the transgression of eating the forbidden fruit, was committed only when those who did it were already evil; that bad fruit could only have come from a bad tree. Further, the badness of the tree came about contrary to nature, because without a fault in the will, which is against nature, it certainly could not have happened. But only a nature created out of nothing could have been distorted by a fault. Consequently, although the will derives its existence, as a nature, from its creation by God, its falling away from true being is due to its creation out of nothing. (571)[viii]
In what cannot but be a crass translation of Augustine’s into the Kantian tradition: the will is something in so far as it knows itself (in action and reason) in its orientation towards what is Good. The Good, as a concept—not as a particular instantiation—is that which can be universally willed, and though the Good is known in a particular act of willing, it is not specific to any act. The will is not a measure of the Good; the Good is the measure of the will. The Good is not specified; it is not individual; it is universal. No will can know itself to be absolutely good, because any act of the will is limited in its understanding; the gap between the universality of the Good and the limitation of the will means that the Good cannot ever be fully willed. The will aims at the Good that is beyond it, greater than it, its measure; but it can never attain the Good; it must be forgiven. This summary is essentially my attempt at paraphrasing, in excessively abbreviated form, the recent arguments of Sebastian Rödl.[ix] Rödl acknowledges the Augustinian inheritance, though not Augustine directly: he cites Paul’s letter to the Romans and Luther’s reading of Paul, but Augustine’s elaboration comes closer to the later philosophers, since he invokes nothingness. The most tantalizing move that he makes—and one that opens onto Nietzsche—is the equation of the will with nothingness. For Rödl, to say, as Hobbes says, that the will is the measure of the good is to eviscerate the very concept of the good: the appeal to goodness must, by virtue of the very concept of the good, look beyond my will, beyond my self. The self cannot be the measure of the good, or the good becomes no measure at all: it becomes nothing. And yet this is what Nietzsche seems to want to say: the self is the measure of what is good.
But if this is all Nietzsche wants to say, then he does not go beyond Hobbes, let alone Hegel and Kant. By the “will to power” he instead must want to do something else, and this is where the term “strength” becomes helpful: for “strength” orients the discussion along a new axis entirely. The axis is present in Augustine as well as Hegel: God is something, and this is nature, what is not God is nothing and this is unnatural. We can orient ourselves towards a something authentic within ourselves or else we can orient ourselves towards a nothingness that is the absence of that nature that we are. Now, I think, we are closer to the existentialist Nietzsche, for whom strength, and the will to power, means striving towards living by the measure that we are, and where such striving is only knowable by our sense of our own strength in ourselves, in what we are, since any other measure of striving, and any other measure of strength, would be what we are not, external to us, a negation of ourselves. Nietzsche would not simply oppose the Augustinian claim that “although the will derives its existence, as a nature, from its creation by God, its falling away from true being is due to its creation out of nothing.” Nietzsche would instead suggest that the will creates itself, out of itself, and a creation out of nothing would instead be a creation in reaction to others. The “nothing” that is the will directing itself by its own measure does not mean th at the Good cannot be a measure of the will; but it instead points out that the Good of the will cannot be a Good imposed from without, determined from without, or formed in response to what is external. To embrace such a good is weakness, not strength.
Strength, on this account, possesses something like the structure of Aristotelian virtue. But rather than being a particular virtue, strength is instead the ground for all virtues; strength is right willing, and right willing is the will’s being its own ground, which is what allows other virtues to come into existence. In the case of strength, if we take “strength” as a middle term, the diminished left-hand alternative appears as ressentiment, or the reactionary impulse by which an individual defines himself only in response to others and the environment; on the other hand, the right-hand side of excess, there is brutal domination, by which an individual defines himself only by imposing upon these, shaping them, rather than shaping himself by his own measure. Read as a foundational concept for all of Aristotelian virtue (the word “virtue” itself, by gendered assumptions, signaling the strength of men), “strength” sits between an excess of power that is brutality and a lack of power that is reactionary ressentiment. Either of these extremes is reactive, power determined chiefly by what is without rather than what is within. In the one case—what Nietzsche calls ressentiment—the self is determined by what it sets itself against; in the other case—what I am suggesting is “brutality”—the self is determined by what it can impose itself upon.
Nietzsche is himself most liable to be interpreted as endorsing the brutal extreme of “domination”, but we can read him as a polemicist keen to shift the “Overton window” of understanding around “strength”: for him, “strength” as the bourgeois understand it is in fact the diminished left-side of the spectrum lack of power, a “ressentiment” or reactionary cowardice that is hidden under the guise of Christian morality. Ressentiment is strength that cannot exceed its dependency on the will of another; it lacks independence. The nobility that Nietzsche describes is a strength that overflows from within, that is self-determined, truly autonomous. Nietzsche’s strength, rather than being an abandonment of morality, corrects it, recovering it from its grotesque double that is ressentiment. But strength also, because it insistently returns us to somatic experience, demands interpretation: we know strength first-personally, but refining and articulating it through social interactions makes its significance and requirements ramify. Literature and its criticism come to matter at this point: literature (any work of art, really) presents us with exertions of strength in concentrated form, and criticism asks us to train our discernment of genuine as opposed to spurious strength. Non-reactivity, self-direction, the capacity to hold opposition in abeyance rather than destroying it: these ways of distinguishing strength from ressentiment point towards the formal properties of literary success or achievement. They give us grounds for distinguishing genuine from spurious strength.
Strength is what it means for the will genuinely to be its own ground of action. This does not mean the will invent rightness. It means that it becomes, in the strength that it is, the condition for rightness at all. Such strength does not deny that rightness and orientation of willing can be located in the world, but it means they will not be determined by what is there, either in reactionary ressentiment or in brutal domination that knows itself only by what it inflicts on others. The strong self doesn't make goodness, but it can apprehend and discern it, displacing domination and reaction. It can orient towards something, rather than nothing. What I am proposing is an ethical vision within Nietzsche that does not simply reject Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, or even (dismissed by Nietzsche as a “psychological problem”) Kierkegaard; it allows that Nietzsche brings into focus what we must recover beneath and within the normative terms we rely on. He does not clash against these other philosophers so much as excavates what they too rapidly build on. Moral philosophers seek an account of what it is to live “well” and to die “well”—what it is to live a strong life, to approach death with strength (how can they mean to face death with “goodness” when there is no reason to think about being “good’ in relation to death).
Politics is the art of power between individuals, to allow for either the strength of a group (not liberalism) or the strength of those individuals (liberalism) to emerge. Political thought relates an theory of power to a theory of strength; politics relates the experience of power to a practice of strength. Even when it is a political argument, the admiration for what is truly strong, and the distinction between weak and strong, is self-evident in much of contemporary politics; it is of political significance that poetry queries and resist those distinctions, both in what it is and in what it shows.
Literature—all art—succeeds in so far as it knows and shows strength. The work itself, in what and how it is, shows strength; in so far as it is strong, it contains a measure of its own strength, and so “knows” itself to be strong and contains within itself the reasons why it is one way and not another; and it knows the strength both in its subjects (what it represents) and its medium, so that it can show those to us, as we experience it. Because literature shows strength, we feel this strength, encountering it as a sensation; we are moved by it. At the same time, to read literature well requires we appeal to the muscular imagination: we need to imagine what strength is required by its circumstance or occasion.
This is not optional; a poem’s strength (not quite the same as a “strong poem”) is the true target of criticism, and the poem’s apprehension or misapprehension of strength is a cause of censure, for any critic. Among the great critics of the nineteenth century, a Victorian Englishman with whom Nietzsche would likely not wish to be tethered, Matthew Arnold formulates the principle in his 1853 Preface to his collected poems, explaining his grounds for excluding one of his most ambitious works, “Empedocles Upon Etna”:
A poetical work, therefore, is not yet justified when it has been shown to be an accurate, and therefore interesting representation; it has to be shown also that it is a representation from which men can derive enjoyment. In presence of the most tragic circumstances, represented in a work of Art, the feeling of enjoyment, as is well known, may still subsist: the representation of the most utter calamity, of the liveliest anguish, is not sufficient to destroy it: the more tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment; and the situation is more tragic in proportion as it becomes more terrible.
There, interestingly, in Arnold is a phrase, “vent in action,” which almost exactly matches the translation “vent in strength,” from Beyond Good and Evil. Arnold’s position is not esoteric, though it was an esoteric devotee W.B. Yeats who famously echoed Arnold when, in compiling his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, he excluded Wilfred Owen on the grounds that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.” The suitable response in both cases would be to point out how the poetry is not passive, not merely inert, but actively resisting, and containing within itself the grounds for its own resistance.
Behind both Arnold and Yeats stands William Wordsworth, whose poetry made just such uncertainty over the sources and presence of strength the stuff of his greatest poetry: is it weakness, he asks repeatedly, or is it strength in a form we would fail to recognize if we did not attend with sufficient imagination and patience, or if our attention were insufficiently strong. One of Wordsworth’s masterpieces, “Resolution and Independence,” hangs on Wordsworth’s desire for an old leech gatherer to give adequate answer to his question: “How is it that you live, and what is it you do?” That the old man cannot do so does not prevent him from being an emblem of human strength in naked majesty; instead, the inadequacy of his answer drives home how disappointing such strength might be if we approach it with the wrong presuppositions. Most vitally (with the full sense intended) for Wordsworth, strength is distinguished from power by its enduring and permitting endurance, which he would rescue from a passive mineral state, or which he would grant to minerals as something expressive of a deeper activity of the world. Nietzsche might object that a poetry that seeks strength in endurance and humility is a variation on Christian claims to strength in weakness; but Wordsworth does not make the appeal that Nietzsche finds so objectionable, to an inner soul or self, but instead moves in another pantheistic direction that would locate activity, will, and force across external objects and experiences that are often felt to be distinct, and, most influentially, that would appeal to an inner self not as a static being but as an active becoming wrought by the triumphs and occasional defeats of memory.
All of these poets point us to a challenge that Nietzsche must face: it is one thing to insist that strength be bounded by force, will, action, and another to lay claim to identifying just where those are, or how they manifest. The genealogical method can be of help in tracing the sources of our judgments as to what is properly strong, or the further criteria by which strength is determined, but it cannot make out for each case whether something has been mistakenly deemed to be strong, only to further a profounder weakness. This is one of the open contestations of political life, which cannot be resolved by philosophy, just as it is the ongoing enterprise of literary criticism and poetry (it is in the sense of distinguishing not good and evil, but strength and weakness, that Arnold is entirely justified in calling poetry “criticism of life”). It points to how and why a training in literary criticism might be valuable in a civic education. Like “the will to power,” “strength” is a concept that does not explain but that orients and disorients interpretation, helpful because it dissolves as it is approached with a question of how and why something is weak or strong, and what weakness and strength for a thing might consist of. As a concept, “strength” is lost in the clearing that it makes; we recognize it only in the approach, and most clearly when the approach is least direct.
A sense of strength is what allows, for instance, T.S. Eliot’s insight into Swinburne’s poetry:
You may say ‘diffuse’. But the diffuseness is essential; had Swinburne practiced greater concentration his verse would be, not better in the same kind, but a different thing. His diffuseness is one of his glories. That so little material appears as to be employed in The Triumph of Time should release such an amazing number of words, requires what there is no reason to call anything but genius. You could not condense The Triumph of Time. You could only leave out. And this would destroy the poem; though no one stanza seems essential.
Now, in Swinburne the meaning and the sound are one thing. He is concerned with the meaning of the word in a peculiar way; he employs, or rather ‘works’, the word’s meaning. And this is connected with an interesting fact about his vocabulary: he uses the most general word, because his emotion is never particular, never in direct line of vision, never focused; it is emotion reinforced, not by intensification, but by expansion.
This is criticism worth returning to, and many have returned, seeking the example of its strength in its sense for what is strong in Swinburne, something present in the verb “release” and the poetry’s finding unity in diffuseness. Against that, there is, in the second passage, an articulation of the limits Swinburne’s strength, the description carried by “intensification” set against “expansion,” and the sensory invocations of vision, strong as it is able to focus. There is, in these passages, an exquisite awareness of energies, forces, and pressures in the language, and in the poem, also weighed and managed by the language and by the poem; the strength of a work of literature must involve a precise measure of the energies and forces in any circumstance, with an awareness of just how much those energies and forces can be directed without weakening them. Like all true criticism, Eliot’s makes us see better what is distinct about the condition of strength that a poet discovers and embodies in his work, and he does so in language that does not hammer away at “strength” but that attunes us to what in Swinburne’s poem enlarges our sense of what it can involve. Eliot’s own principle of impersonality, his insistence that a poem be something other than personality, might in turn be related to Nietzsche’s disavowal of the inner self, or the fiction of a connecting tissue; a poem should be, Eliot says, akin to a chemical operation; its strength is in the agential power of words on words.[x]
What holds constant, as a principle of strength in literature, is that it holds discordant energies in suspense, perhaps reconciling them, but at least balancing them, or balancing their imbalance against something else. For Lawrence J. Hatab, such an agonistic principle is at the heart of what Nietzsche’s will to power always involves: “Will to power is predicated on contestation…an opponent persists as a challenge and remains something to challenge.” In a similar way, strength in literature cannot be a denial effacement, or minimizing of oppositions; if they are reconciled, it is within the larger unity of the work, not in a dissolution of the counterforces they generate, but a holding of them in a controlled tension.
The critic Christopher Ricks often discerns the strength of literature in the balance it achieves: “The greatest poems will weld together novelty and naturalness, just as they will weld together sound and sense, form and content, the particular and the universal, the personal and the impersonal, fidelity to the disorder of life with fidelity to the order of light.” [xi]There is might in the verb “weld,” just as there is strength in the title of Ricks’ first collection of essays, The Force of Poetry. And there is the word itself when Ricks defends Milton’s “Lycidas” from Samuel Johnson’s censure: “the strength of the poem begins in the fact that it does not do what commentators so often praise it for doing: it does not make out that Part II follows from Part I. The Christian consolation is based on a different premise from that of morality’s stoicism.” What Ricks praises, and other critics fail to see, is how the two opposing grounds of consolation in the poem are not falsely united but instead remain distinct. Ricks’ criticism does not depend on morality, but on an almost scientific measure of the inherent pressures in a subject and in poem’s formal containment of those.
Ricks criticizes Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” for its failure to reckon with the two massive halves of the incarnation: “the author of a poem on the Nativity cannot claim that he is writing about the divine aspects of the Nativity and not about the human aspects since the Nativity is inseparably a poignantly human event and a magnificently cosmic one. ‘Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe’: Donne’s great line reminds us that a full poem on the Nativity will have to do as much justice to the dear womb as to the immensity.” He concludes that “there were dangers in Milton’s magisterial powers, dangers which even his greatest work was not always to avoid”; he did not always have the strength to master his powers of imagination. [xii]
Some of Nietzsche’s admirers have felt something similar: his sense of “power” can extend too far to “power as domination,” to something that is too close to brutality. Nietzsche perhaps would welcome the spirit of objection that his work incites. This, he might feel, is a sign of its power—even if is not necessarily a sign of its strength. And in raising this worry, I am already approaching Nietzsche as a work of literature and suggesting how the reading and judgment literature might be training for politics. For what literature affords is not only a reminder of what strength can be, and of how strength differs from power, but also the opportunity to exercise one’s own strength in judging what is not truly strong, and for resisting the urge to collapse power into strength. Here is Ricks writing on Milton’s great late work, Samson Agonistes, finding his premonitions of the dangers in Milton’s magisterial powers realized at the last, in a poem whose horrifying excesses of revenge are often insufficiently registered and are instead assumed, by poem and its critics, as natural in the poem’s scheme of justice. To Ricks, the poem does not show itself to be sufficiently aware of the full horror of Samson’s culminating act of destruction, even as it vividly represents it for the reader:
Samson Agonistes, if it is treated with anything other than the polite admiration which is reserved for ancient monuments, is a very disconcerting work, and some of who praise its greatness may find that we are doing so in the same spirit in which Professor Helen Gardner praised Lady Chatterley’s Lover: that it moves us to profound dissent.[xiii]
Honest dissent, strong stuff in its own right, is invited in claims to, and claims about, strength, in poetry and politics both. Dissent, the spirit of Nietzsche, incited and exemplified by him, may be the spirit also of criticism; it too is a venting of strength.
It is in the criticism of William Empson (see also the post on Empson and Habermas, or the post on Empson’s poem “Aubade”) where the political strength and strength are fathomed as the common ground of valuation, and this aspect of Empson’s thought is most sharply displayed in Some Versions of Pastoral. Just as his earlier Seven Types of Ambiguity could not have been written except for modernism’s insistence on refracting the unity of a poem into its constituent conflicting drive, and just as the later The Structure of Complex Words could not have been written without Empson’s first-hand experience of wartime propaganda behind him, so Some Versions of Pastoral could not have been written without the political anxieties of the 1930s. In it, he asks how literature can order what he refers to as “serious forces,” which are themselves frequently political and ideological in nature. The object of the book is a peculiar unity effected by pastoral literature, the interlacing of hierarchical or contrasting positions—high and low class, old and young, scholar and artist—such that they are made to reflect one another and also to reveal how each is “good in some ways, not in others” in relation to the other. They share a common strength but also mutually complementary strengths, and this requires a sophisticated verbal and structural machinery for a work of literature to establish. Since the positions are contrasting or hierarchical in their social valuations, the work done by a poem or novel (the “work of” literature) is political: coordinating social positions into a greater whole, whose strength is determined by the nuance of its coordination.
It’s not an unrelated quirk of Empson’s intellectual development that in this book the language of “strength” is most explicit: upon it, he skates between social and literary. In the same decade that Auden wrote his famous line “poetry makes nothing happen,” suggesting that poetry might be impotent, Empson was showing that poetry might exemplify a strength that allows it to stand as a symbol for a harmonious social order. Auden was considering poetry as power; Empson does not do so. If you have a chance to read any of Some Versions of Pastoral, read the first three pages and you will just what Empson can do and how quickly he can do it, for it’s on the third page that he soars to one of his most impressive insights into life as something that contains literature and a good deal else. Writing on Gray’s elegy, and having set forth objections to its complacent bourgeois morality about the inevitability of squandered human talent, he turns into a fresh paragraph:
And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity. (Empson, 5)
“Human powers” but not “power,” singular: powers here are those capacities or drives that remain possibilities. The key word, unsuspecting because it is not, like “waste,” repeated, is “strength”: because in this word, Empson makes the crucial move, evading the hopeless paradox of asserting that value is established by waste, to which he comes close. Instead, with “strength” he suggests that waste is by necessity the squandered value of “human powers,” but that such a willingness to squander is meaningful as an exercise of strength, one that could even be called heroic. Nietzsche’s “vent its strength” might be understood as a variation on what Empson writes: the venting of powers could be their wasteful loss rather than their productive release. The English “vent” cuts both ways. The thought that the “will to power” cannot mean “will to strength” because “vent its strength” suggests that power depends on a certain activity or dynamic of strength is belied by its being impossible for Nietzsche to want to say that the will to power involves a squandering or loss of strength: this would be a movement away from power. “Vent its strength” must be understood more along the lines of “demonstrate” or, closer in English metaphors, “air its strength,” where we refresh strength by exercising it, even when such an exercise involves a waste of potential.
A throughline of Some Versions of Pastoral is in fact that power is one thing, strength another, if we mean by power something relational in a social dominance. The hierarchies and oppositions of age and youth, experience and innocence, critic/editor and poet/edited, aristocrat and peasant, legitimacy and criminality, each of which is a topic of one of the chapters in the book, are set on axes of power; they are equalized by virtue of mutually compensating strength and weakness. Saying this, one might be tempted to go a step further, to suggest that such a strength must be a form of power, that all strength must be a form of power; and this is exactly the wrong step to take, since at the end of the day, the power of humans is socially enabled and circumscribed, and because not even in the fictions of pastoral literature is such power equalized between the contrasting pairs. Strength is just what we need in order to break free of the totality of power without fleeing into the narrow confines of the overtly moral. Moreover, it is what Empson needs in order to talk about what the works of literature do by virtue of their designs. On an ambiguity in Marvell’s “The Garden” (“Annihilating all that’s made | To a green thought in a green shade”), he writes:
This gives its point, I think, to the other ambiguity, clear from the context, as to whether the all considered was made in the mind of the author or the Creator; to so peculiarly ‘creative’ a knower there is little difference between the two. Here as usual with ‘profound’ remarks the strength of the thing is to combine unusually intellectual with unusually primitive ideas; thought about the conditions of knowledge with a magical idea that the adept controls the external world by thought. (Empson, 120)
Or, writing on Christopher Smart’s “Hymn to David”
The feeling is chiefly carried by the sound; long Latin words are packed into the short lines against a short one-syllable rhyming word for of consonants; it is like dancing in heavy skirts; he juggles with the whole cumbrous complexity of the world. (Empson, 121)
This is not just affirming the “strength” of Smart’s lines but specifying what such a strength resembles—joyful and trained. Or, on the myriad possibilities in Shakespeare’s sonnets:
The vague and generalized language of the descriptions, which might be talking about so many sorts of people as well as feeling so many things about them, somehow makes a unity like a crossroads; makes a solid flute on which you can play a solidity of tunes, whose solidity no list of all possible tunes would go far to explain. The balance of feelings is both very complex and very fertile; experiences are recorded, and metaphors invented in the Sonnets, which he went on ‘applying’ as a dramatist, taking particular cases of them as if they were wide generalistions, for the rest of his life. (Empson, 90)
Or, on the rogue as heroic type in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera:
The rogue so conceived is not merely an object of satire; he is like the hero because he is strong enough to be independent of society (in some sense), and can therefore be the critic of it. There was a feeling that the unity of society had become somehow fish—Hobbes’ arguments in its favour, for instance, themselves products of civil war, only affected one the other way—and that the independent individual—the monad, gravitating particle—was now the only real unit. (Empson, 200)
There is in these instances Empson the social historian, Empson the poet-critic, and more and there is always a wonderful attention, both fluid and focused, on the various ways that strength is imagined and that the imagination may be strong.[xiv]
If it has become unsettling these days to judge politics according to the strength of a leader or strength of a nation or polity, then literature and literary criticism can serve as a salutary reminder of how imaginative such a judgment needs to be if strength is to be an adequately strong concept for the task.
To properly criticize a work of literature, we need to ask whether it is strong, but also how we understand the measure of strength, in relation to the particular vantage and situation the work occupies: why does this situation, this subject, this convention, or this medium require the strength that this literature shows? Does it? Strength follows the Aristotelian model of phronesis: it is a medium, a middle, and this means that it is circumstantial; we cannot criticize or judge a work of literature by appealing to a generalized measure or theory. We must discern the specifics of the situation, enter into them, and compare them with other instances, like and alike, in varying measure. Knowing and showing strength, literature in turn must know and show the power against, within, and through which that strength emerges. Literature, like all of the humanities, like political theory and political practice, concerns this relation between power and strength, where strength is overtly normative (science might know strength too, of course: a strong bond, a strong construction, a strong body; science does not exist beyond the reach of the normative, but the relation of strength and power is—speculatively—not as open as in the humanities). In education, we want for students to be strong thinkers, strong people—and this strength entails, requires, coincides with truth, goodness, and other basic normative concepts and specific virtues. But this means above all that we want for students to develop a measure of strength, and develop the capacity to revise this measure, and not to confuse strength with power. The study of literature—and the study of true criticism of literature—has a central function in a post-Nietzschean political world.
[i] Lawrence J Hatab, “The Will to Power,” The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Tom Stern (Cambridge University Press, 2019) p. 329-330.
[ii] This and all quotations from On the Genealogy of Morals are from the edition translated Douglas Smith (Oxford Classics, 1996).
[iii] John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New System (Oxford University Press, 1996), 37.
[iv] Brian Leiter, Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (Oxford University press, 2019), 57.
[v] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingale (Penguin Classics, 1990)
[vi] J.P. Stern, A Study of Nietzsche (Cambridge University Press, 1979), 120.
[vii] This discussion of Kantian autonomy is deeply indebted to Sebastian Rödl, Self-Consciousness (Harvard: 2007), Chapter 4. Also relevant to the discussion as a whole is his more recent work on Hegelian ethics, in lectures online. A central argument is found in his essay “Non-Natural Goodness” in The Idea of the Good in Kant and Hegel, ed. Goran Vranešević (University of Ljubljana Press: 2024), 83-104.
[viii] Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettinson (Penguin: 2004).
[ix] A central argument is found in his essay “Non-Natural Goodness” in The Idea of the Good in Kant and Hegel, ed. Goran Vranešević (University of Ljubljana Press: 2024), 83-104.
[x] T.S. Eliot, “Swinburne as Poet,” Selected Essays (Faber, 1934), 323-27.
[xi] Christopher Ricks, “Introduction,” Poems and Critics (Harper and Row, 1972) 16.
[xii] Christopher Ricks, “Milton: Poems (1645),” Sphere History of Literature: English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674, ed. Christopher Ricks (Sphere, 1986) 245-276.
[xiii] Christopher Ricks, “Paradise Regained and and Samson Agonistes,” Sphere History of Literature: English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674, ed. Christopher Ricks (Sphere, 1986) 309.
[xiv] William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Chatto & Windus, 1935).