Why Ardor?

Adam Zagajewski:  A Defense of Ardor. Claire Cavanaugh translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004. First published in Poland in 2004.

 

A Pole who has lived in what was West Berlin (“a peculiar synthesis of the old Prussian capital” with a frivolous “fascination” with “Manhattan and the avant-garde”), Paris (“one of the few European metropolises to possess the secret of eternal youth,” although no longer the intellectual capital it had been in the previous generation), and Houston (“computers, highways, and crude oil but also wonderful libraries and a splendid symphony”), Adam Zagajewski likens himself to “a passenger on a small submarine that has not one periscope but four: Polish tradition, German literature, French culture (“with its penetrating intelligence and Jansenist moralism”), and the Anglo-American “literature of specifics passion, and conversation,” of Shakespeare, Keats, and Robert Lowell. He regrets to report that wherever he has lived, he has encountered a mood of cool irony, a refusal of the ardor with which literature, music, and painting are made. 

In an earlier generation, Thomas Mann’s irony made sense. “The author of Buddenbrooks saw Nazism and fascism as a return to the energies of the mythic world, to the destructive violence of archaic myths, and hoped to resist this great wave of terror with the soothing humanist irony.” Today’s irony “expresses rather a disillusionment with the collapse of utopian expectations, an ideological crisis provoked by the erosion and discrediting of those visions that hoped to replace the traditional metaphysics of religious faith with eschatological political theories,” most especially Marxism. But recurrence to the conservatism of T. S. Eliot, as some propose, will not suffice, “blind” as it is “to the phenomenal (and fragile) benefits we derive from liberal democracy.” Using irony as a weapon, some contemporary authors “flog consumerist society,” others religion, and “still others do battle with the bourgeoisie.” In doing so, however, they release the imp of the perverse, the all-too-perverse. “Too long a stay in the world of irony and doubt awakens in us a yearning for different, more nutritious fare.” 

What would that be? Zagajewski recommends Plato’s Symposium, with its speech by Diotima “on the vertical wanderings of love,” the eros or ardor by which the soul ascends toward what is worthy of the soul and its ardor: what is good, what is beautiful. Plato describes metaxu, the condition of “being ‘in-between’ our earth, our (so we suppose) comprehensible, concrete, material surroundings, and transcendence, mystery.” This in-betweenness’ “defines the situation of the human, a being who is incurably ‘en route.'” Incurably: in this life “we’ll never manage to settle permanently in transcendence once and for all.” We won’t “even fully learn its meaning,” here. We “always return to the quotidian: after experiencing an epiphany, writing a poem, we’ll go to the kitchen and decide what to have for dinner.” “And this is as it should be, since otherwise lunacy lies in wait above and boredom down below.” Because we live in-between, and must live in-between, “we must keep close guard on our own selves,” avoid the temptation to live as if permanently transported to some higher realm. That is, the opposite of inveterate irony is unthinking ardor. Still, “the real danger of our historical moment” is excess of irony, not excess of ardor. Properly exercised, irony fine tunes ardor. It should not corrode it, becoming itself “a rather perverse form of certainty.”

And it need not. “Uncertainty doesn’t contradict ardor,” as zetetic Socrates showed by his way of life. Nor does ardor preclude a sense of humor, as indeed Socrates again showed. Not only philosophy but poetry too can respond to ardor, “the earth’s fervent song,” with “our own, imperfect song.” The Polish essayist and poet, Czeslaw Milosz, himself an exile from the Communist regime, has lived in “a ceaseless wandering” between the goodness of moderation and moments of transcendence, “transform[ing] the condition of metaxu into an ongoing, vivifying pilgrimage, an occupation for the long-distance artist.” “True ardor” links earth and sky; it may yet “return to our bookstores, our intellects.” 

But is poetry not vulnerable to the Socratic critique—too lacking in reason, too arbitrary? Poet Zagajewski resists the claim. “Poetry, after all, involves precision and correctness,” not “through empirical, quantifiable observations” but “through existential preparedness, through experience, through our own lives, through reflection and moments of illumination. But they are verified.” In the time of Socrates and Diotima, and very often for centuries since then, poets put precision and correctness (and not only of language) at the service of the religious beliefs they often shared with their political communities. Just as often, philosophers questioned those claims. Zagajewski rejects the aestheticist defense of poetry (“the ceaseless chatter of self-satisfied craftsmen”) as “a sort of fainthearted appeasement, a policy of evasions and concessions as concerns the literary vocation” that has resulted “in the decline of high style and the overwhelming predominance of a low style, tepid, ironic, conversational.” Poets began to take the brutal realities of the First World War as a refutation of that style because those realities belied the elevated thoughts and sentiments that young soldiers took into battle, where artillery shells ground them up in the trenches. That is, in reaction to the war they took brutal realities as reality, simply; like soldiers in the trenches, they began to keep their heads low. But this isn’t the only response to brutality. “Neither Milosz, who survived the Nazi terror, nor [Osip] Mandelstam, who didn’t survive the Stalinist nightmare, ever fell prey to the lure of a false simplicity.” Longinus understood poetry in terms of the sublime; Edmund Burke, writing on poetics and politics, understood the sublime and the beautiful—which he distinguished, as between ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Athens,’ while firmly acknowledging prudence as the virtue of politics. “Surely we don’t go to poetry for sarcasm or irony, for critical distance, learned dialectics or clever jokes”; “from poetry we expect poetry,” that is, “the vision, the fire, the flame, that accompanies spiritual revelation.” (We might even go to it for prudence, as Shakespeare proves.)

But does that vision, that fire, that flame of spiritual revelation reveal truth—that is, truth beyond the honest expression of the sentiments of the poet? Does the spiritual revelation poets bring to their readers have a genuinely noetic character? “The sublime must be understood differently these days,” “stripped of its neoclassical pomp, its alpine stage set, its theatrical overkill” to reveal not dogmatic certitudes but “the world’s mystery.” That is, poetry must become zetetic, like Socrates. And for its part, philosophy must not preen itself as the authoritative expression of the ‘spirit of the times.’ Zagajewski quotes the German poet and philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz: “Philosophy is the epoch’s judge, but things go ill when it becomes the epoch’s mouthpiece,” even as politics goes wrong when it attempts to bring the sublime directly into practice. (Pannwitz, an admirer of Nietzsche, might have reflected on that. And not only Pannwitz, Zagajewski suggests, but Jünger, Drieu La Rochelle, Malraux, Hemingway, Benn, Mayakovsky, Montherlant, Brecht, Yeats, Eliot—critics not of (or, in Hemingway’s case, not only of) the brutality of modern war but of the banality of modern peace.)

Poetry has its own form of dialectics. “The high style grows from a ceaseless dialogue between two spheres, the spiritual realm whose guardians and creators are the dead (like Virgil in the Divine Comedy) and the domain of eternal praesens, our single, precious moment, the pocket of time in which we’ve chanced to live.” What, then, can mediate between the high and the down-to-earth, whether the down-to-earth is brutal or ‘bourgeois’? “A certain metaphysical modesty,” not lacking in humor, “learning to open up” to the sublime and the beautiful in a way precluded in minds overwhelmed by the brutality of war and the banality of peace. “Modernity can’t be fought (you won’t win), even if it needs chiding upon occasion”; it “must be improved, expanded, enhanced, enriched; we must speak to it” because it “resides within us; it’s too late to attack it from the sidelines.” At the same time, “while high style need no longer stem from a dislike of modernity,” the “low style—ironic, colloquial, flat, small, minimal—may arise precisely from ressentiment—from a rejection of our silver-tongued forebears.” 

Nietzsche, the poetic philosopher who inspired those forebears, “was a mysterious figure to me and my contemporaries back in the seventies” in Poland. The Communist regime dismissed him as a lunatic, attempting to steer impressionable youths away, with the predictable opposite effect, giving him “the glory of the poète maudit.” In reading him, young Poles in Krakow experienced “the same shiver of emotion that his first readers must have felt.” Nietzsche’s derision of the pure scholars, “who seem to know everything” by means of analysis, recognizes that such men “study the fire but can describe only its ashes.” “Nietzsche gleefully calls this principle that the scholars overlook none other than life itself.” Nor did Nietzsche neglect to scorn the political dimension of modern rationalism, the state, “Bismarck’s Reich.” This braced the young Zagajewski, “living as I did under the rule of the totalitarian, Khruschevian-Brezhnevian-Gomulkovian system and half consciously seeking allies in the challenging acrobatics act of liberating oneself from the ideological and administrative constraints of Marxism.” “Here was someone who came right out and proclaimed his intellectual independence,” who “spoke from within his own spirit,” with “such buoyancy and brilliance” in resistance to “the automatism of a specific historical reality.” Such “spiritual resources” have “no need for bureaucrats and political structures.”

At the same time, “I was put off by his jabs at Socrates. I liked and admired Socrates; I had a hard time believing that the decline of Greek and European culture began with him.” But as a young poet, Zagajewski read Nietzsche not for his (mis)judgments of Socrates and of Christianity but for the “charge of pure energy” Nietzsche puts into his writing, brings to his readers. As he read on, and as his own life went forward, he came to Nietzsche’s later works, “the bombastic Zarathustra, the insufferable, unpardonably narcissistic Ecce Homo, the grim, posthumously published Will to Power.” The older Nietzsche struck the older Zagajewski as taking “the tone of a cult’s founder, of a perverse moralist obsessed with settling scores with Christianity, socialism, morality.” The older Nietzsche “did not escape the dangers of solitude that he had pointed out in his youthful essay on ‘Schopenhauer as educator’—a certain embitterment, a callousness.” Nietzsche’s retinue of followers, including but not limited to the luminaries Zagajewski has already listed, animated a century of politics they lacked the spiritual resources adequately to resist; they resisted the banality but not so much the brutality. “Certain extravagances of modern French thought,” for example, “might never have seen the light of day,” had Nietzsche not ginned up the thinkers. Was not even the Marxist V. I. Lenin, not the author of his own “manifesto of the will to power,” What Is to Be Done?” written in 1902, “when Nietzsche mania had seized all of Europe”? “I’m not sure…that I wouldn’t prefer” a “hypothetical century without Nietzsche.” “Would it have been such a disaster if Nietzsche’s famous skepticism toward the notion of truth hadn’t given birth to so many eager imitators, even in the last few decades?” In Nietzsche, and in his followers, “irrationality finally wins the day” in “this unsuccessful, betrayed mediation” between the high and the low. [1]

As a result, today “we have a vast, positivist, scientific culture that has almost entirely been purged of curiosity about the dark and irrational, while on the other hand there is the New Age with its superstitious take on the cosmos, alongside mass culture, which either favors sentimentalism or else openly admits its fascination with force, blood, and the devil.” Nonetheless, it remains true that “Nietzsche can neither be acquitted nor convicted in the political courtroom to which he is dragged time after time by both his admirers and his enemies.” Better for poets to seek “suggestions, allusions, a net full of metaphors,” amidst the “energizing uncertainty” of being, rather than “a single, central metaphor” that attempts to find and enunciate a comprehensive systematic of being. “God may have died” in the minds of moderns; this means that Dante’s poetic universe will not be reimagined any time soon. But Nietzsche was right to see that the world the moderns have made for themselves “doesn’t cherish life,” lacking “generosity, spontaneity, nobility, and poetry.” 

For one who cherished life with the strengths of character a life lived humanly requires, Zagajewski turns to the example of Józef Czapski, whom he met while both men lived in Paris, both in exile from Communist Poland. Soldier, painter, poet, essayist, Czapski had survived his internment at Katyn after Soviet forces attacked Nazi Germany. He as transferred to another prison camp before some 22,000 Polish military officers, police officers, and intelligentsia were murdered by the Soviets in several of the NKVD prisons, then buried in mass graves in and around Katyn. At the Vologda camp, he delivered lectures on Proust to his fellow prisoners. His books were banned by the Polish Communist regime, complicit in the Soviet cover-up of its war crimes.

He descended from an aristocratic family, taking from the aristocracy “only his graciousness, his breeding.” A Catholic, “he was so profoundly antidogmatic that he didn’t even trust himself,” suspecting “that faith was taking the easy way” but knowing “that disbelief could be easy too.” He resembled Socrates in that “his ‘I don’t know’ was passionate, incandescent,” ardent. “This wasn’t an ‘I don’t know’ arising from amnesia, laziness, depression, negativity, agnosticism. This ‘I don’t know’ was positive, inspired, intelligent,” “the soul of his spiritual life, his long pilgrimage.” It was “accompanied by an equally decisive ethical ‘I do know,” whereby he did not hesitate “when it came to helping the suffering, bearing witness to historical truth” (he had investigated Soviet Russian atrocities during the Polish-Soviet War that followed the Great War and those committed during the second Great War), “opposing Stalinism or Nazism.” For his trouble, the “fanatical Parisian communists” of the late 1940s “murmured that he must be one of Goebbels’s agents.” He was “the master of my not-knowing. And what is not-knowing but thought?” What the ardent Socrates knew.

“He was curiosity personified, the perfect embodiment of curiosity.” In this, “he had an extraordinary gift for empathy,” listening intently to his visitors but resisting any final judgment on what he heard from them, always ready to renew the conversation. His “theodicy was meant to remain incomplete,” as “he was constantly testing to see if his experiences were real, if those great moments of illumination weren’t simply a diversionary ploy undertaken by his glands and hormones.” As an artist, he distrusted the iconoclastic mysticism of Simone Weil and as for the regnant historicisms of his time, he exclaimed, “What’s all this about the Zeitgeist, what counts is staying true to your own vision, end discussion!” [2] And if Nietzsche, with all his thunderous judgments, finally fell short of self-knowledge, “this judge, who was also a painter, above all a painter, judged and observed himself as well, unlike those other judges who judge others exclusively and lose sight of themselves as soon as they don the wigs that transform them into wax figures, bodiless and passionless so that they can’t see themselves.” [3] In Czapski, the investigator of Soviet massacres and poet, inner freedom and civil liberty achieved “something like harmony.” To Stalin’s police, who “knew perfectly well what had happened to the Polish officers” at Katyn, an atrocity he investigated after the war, he “personified an enemy class…doomed to extinction.” And it is true that Polish aristocrats are in short supply, these days, but the Soviet Union isn’t around anymore, either. 

In Milosz, “a poet of great intelligence and great ecstasy,” he finds an equally anti-historicist tenor. “Milosz courageously takes the field to test himself against his foes, as if he’d told himself, I’ll survive this age only by absorbing it.” His poems exude “the scent not of roses but of reason,” but not the reason of modern rationalists. He understands reason in the older sense, “a way that precedes the great schism which placed the intellect of the rationalists on one side of the divide, while the other was occupied by the imagination and intelligence of the arts, who not infrequently take refuge in irrationality.” Poetry has nothing necessarily to fear from that reason, as both poetry and classical reason can “raise us above the petty network of empirical circumstances that make up our everyday lot and confinement,” “so that we can scrutinize the world attentively and ardently.” Zagajewski finds poetry’s limit in its incapacity to scrutinize modern tyranny, in “a certain variety of evil…that is simultaneously both psychological and theological,” the evil of Hitler and Stalin. For understanding that, “reach rather for historians and philosophers” or for Dostoevsky’s novels. (But perhaps also for some epic poetry, Milton, Satan’s “Evil, be thou my good”? In saying “poetry,” Zagajewski seems to be thinking mostly of lyric poetry, however.) Poetry is better at the gentler but indispensable task of “defending the spiritual life, the inner voice that speaks to us, or perhaps only whispers…as the mainstay and foundation of our freedom,” guarding “the indispensable territory of reflection and independence” against “the mighty blows and temptations of modern life.” Lyric poetry lives between reasoning inquiry and the certitudes of revelation, “between Athens and Jerusalem,” the “rift” described by Lev Shestov and Leo Strauss. “I’m angered only by small poetry, mean-spirited, unintelligent, a lackey poetry, slavishly intent on the promptings of the spirit of the age, that lazy bureaucrat flitting just above the earth in a dirty cloud of illusion”—a cheap certitude that requires none of the demands of revelation. Given the temptation to write this way, “poetry needs doubt far more than doubt needs poetry,” a doubt that purges poetry of “rhetorical insincerity, senseless chatter, falsehood, youthful loquacity, empty (inauthentic) euphoria.” At the same time, poetry opposes the excess of doubt, the resigned giving up of the search for insight, the urge to drop off Diotima’s ladder.

But how can one live a life that inquires in the poetic manner? In his final chapters, Zagajewski considers the poet’s regime—not in the sense of the rulers and ruling institutions above him, but a right way of life for him. First, leisure—as the classics would agree. From the “Puritan workaholism” of the United States to the “almost Stakhanovite work ethic” that once animated Germany, to the really Stakhanovite work ethic propounded by the Soviets, and even to the frenzied pseudo-leisure of ‘travel’ (“which tears us from our favorite books”), the contemporary world is hard on leisure. Still, one having arrived at a trip’s destination, there is refreshment in getting away from books for a while and taking a look the outside world. Zagajewski even recommends a destination: Punto Bianca, Sicily, where the remains of Hitler’s bunkers dot a spectacular beach and nature preserve. And he recounts visits to his native Lvov (“a beautiful city, bright gold in the sharp sunlight”), Krakow, the place of his intellectual awakening, and Paris in “November’s sweet warmth,” no longer Europe’s intellectual capital (is there one?). 

Second, reading. “Young poets, please read everything.” Read for memory, be “curious about what our many precursors produced before our own minds were opened.” And “read for ecstasy,” for wisdom and information but also for “a kind of energy that comes close to dance and shamanistic drunkenness.” “Memory and ecstasy need each other desperately,” memory for sober grounding, ecstasy as one reward for ardor. 

Never forget your country—Poland for Zagajewski, with its “long, theatrical existence” of military defeat, partition, tyranny with occasional glimpses of freedom. “The present young generation, well versed in postmodern theory and the pitfalls of the text, has already forgotten [the] horror” of the Communist regime, but they might make the effort to read the books that can teach them. “Polish poets never accepted modernism’s ascetic dictates; they refused to retreat to a sanctuary of hermetic metaphors”; their increasingly unwitting successors would do well to refuse retreat into a sanctuary of hermetic ‘deconstruction.’ And given that, as La Rochefoucauld observed, “sun and death” are the “two forces we can’t look in the face,” they might consider “the now unfashionable (and essential) question of religion.” Plato’s eros is one form of ardor, Biblical agape another.

 

Note

1. It is fair to say that Zagajewski follows Nietzsche, the ‘young Nietzsche,’ as it were, in his protest against the positivist rationalism of German (and Euro-American) scholarship of the late nineteenth century. But he prefers Socrates, whose only professed knowledge is of eros (a not-inconsiderable knowledge, inasmuch as he presents it as the animating reality of all nature), to the Nietzsche who replaces Socratic eros with the will to power. For a sympathetic treatment of Nietzsche’s ‘turn,’ see Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024).
2. Of another poet he admires, Zbigniew Herbert, Zagajewski remarks, “Poetry by its nature is not an entirely faithful daughter of its age; unfaithful, since she commands a secret hideout known only to herself in which she can always take refuge.” 
3. Did Nietzsche really lack self-knowledge? The eminent Nietzsche scholar Laurence Lampert thinks not: see Lampert, op. cit.