Alba III: The Philosopher and the Wanderer

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, all too Human, in its original and first volume (1878), concludes with a famous aphorism on “The Wanderer,” offering a certain degree (an increment or clinamen) of intellectual freedom by way of a comparison with the wanderer in his fluctuating between weariness and exultation. “He who has attained to only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on this earth—though not as a traveller to a final destination: for this destination does not exist” (HH 638). “Only some degree” might suggest that there’s more to be achieved in intellectual emancipation, in which case the simile would lose its pertinence once a further increase in the degree of this freedom has been won. No final destination exists in the case of the wanderer, who “will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world.” The pervasive poetic figure of the wanderer, whose relation to the future remains unsettled, symbolises the degree of thinking a philosopher might attain once he can see the constraints of a conventional culture for errors, and release himself from them. The lack of constraints, therefore, correlates with an equivalent lack of long-term attachments: “for this reason such a man must not let his heart attach too firmly to any individual thing; with him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience” (203). The condition of the wanderer, albeit never unattached from the shadows thrown by an overhead sun, follows an implacable topological movement in Nietzsche’s philosophy related to the theme of the dawn. Buried in centuries of German speculation the wanderer, the shadow, the city and the dawn have regularly been bound in awkward and uncertain relations.

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170-1220) evidently adopted for his Tageliet, already existent in various forms in medieval German, the alba of the Troubadours, for whom the figure of the watchman plays a significant fictional role: the watchman suits the interests of the seducer. In this, though, the watchman also plays the gatekeeper. Only the worthy gain admittance. The implicit theology in this mythopoetic structure is reinforced in that the paradise to which the knight has been admitted evaporates at dawn. The Tagelied typically begins in the voice of the lamenting mistress.

„Ez ist nu tac, daz ich wol mac mit wârheit jehen,

er will niht langer sîn.

Diu vinster naht hât uns nu brâht ze leide mir

Den morgenlîchen schîn.

Sol er von mir scheiden muo,

mîn friunt, diu sorge ist mir ze fruo“

[“It is now day and I can say with truth/he will not be here long.

To my sadness the dark night has brought/the gleaming morning/if my friend must leave me now/these troubles come too early”]

One of several in Wolfram’s name, the Tagelied “It is Now Day” dramatizes a sense of foreboding shared with the Provencal alba: the lovers disturbed from slumberous enjoyment in a forbidden late-night embrace take turns in cursing the grâwen tac, and anticipate a day of troubles. Night flees prematurely. They mark their sudden sad divorce in the mutual pleasure (si beide luste) of their kisses, a momentary but intense union that not even “three suns” could have shone between. So “love’s abiding glory” quickly gives way to an anonymous dread that she cannot restrain in the face of the advancing day, now an unrelenting figure of parting. The personae fold out into incommensurable couplings: day divides but in the grip of its division a more intense union forms momentarily; the union occurs against and despite the day’s assault. The momentary union therefore motions to an outside or beyond of time—a glory resistant to the intrusive force of three suns: an idealised eternal dawn between darkness and light.

obe der sunnen drî mit blicke wæren,

sin mö zwischen si geliuhten.

[three suns with flashing glances would have failed to shine between]

But despite all this the union achieves only a fragile literary immunity from dissolution when night passes into day, an immunity still attached to the dream world that the morning extinguishes. In respect of such a union, the dawn song offers a preview of the loss it memorialises. The figure of the lovers—the figure of a dividuum, and so vulnerable, passionate, hurt—breaks down into its distinct individuals in the coming light of the rational sun. But in the eternal moment the dividuum amounts to a single indivisible essence only in the idea of its parting: it can therefore only break down into further dividua. In the passage from night into day the only constant remains that of the divisible thing, insolubly destructive of individuals who carry this moment with them into the doom of their future.

This irrational “eternity” of the mediaeval dawn song survives in probably illimitable mutations through the centuries. A short aphorism from Nietzsche’s Third Book of The Gay Science hints at its endurance. The remark addresses a characteristically “German” problem of morality, regarded as a kind of obstruction to enlightenment, and so can be contextualised alongside the fault lines that run between the sluggish genealogy of German thought and the speedier progress of a pan-European one:

On moral enlightenment. – One must talk the Germans out of their Mephistopheles, and their Faust, too. They are two moral prejudices against the value of knowledge. (GS 178).

Mephistopheles, the “spirit who always denies,” does so with a conventional narrative irony: a perverse tendency to pander to wishes that are each time disappointed before they can be enjoyed. The Geist of an eternal “no,” Mephistopheles offers previews of what is to be lost, eternal promises of forfeiture in the quest for knowledge, establishing a negative a priori and thus predicating the promised thing on its negation. Faust, in contrast, represents a spirit of disappointment in the epistemological quest. In the stakes of his wager with Mephistopheles he abandons the search for knowledge for a glimpse—a crystallised moment—of unspoilt beauty:

If ever I should tell the moment:

Oh stay! You are beautiful!

Then you may cast me into chains

[…]

The clock may halt, the clock hand fall,

And time comes to an end for me! (1699-1706)

A moment at the end of time or unobtainable knowing: Faust hobbles the entelechy of knowledge, a condition (ekhein) from which unlimited aims (téle) may be achieved. Such an entelechy implies infinite encyclopaedic progression within which each finite discovery will be assured a place.[1] Because Faust and Mephistopheles represent specific moral limits, morality becomes the epistemological limit in general: hence the title of Nietzsche’s most incisive book of aphorisms against ethical frameworks, Morgenrote.

The implicit ethical framework in Wolfram’s Tageliet, which subtly surrounds the illicit romances, the misgivings of the watchman and the hesitation of the knight, becomes more explicit in the mature poetry, in Parzival and Titurel, in which a ranking of noble loyalties reaches upwards via marriage to the divine. It may be glimpsed also in a Tagelied that explicitly addresses the Tagelied formula: “watær swîc” [Watchman, silence!] when:

Whoever is or was accustomed to lie with his love without concealment from spies does not need to struggle out through the dawn, he can afford to wait for day, there is no need to guide him out in peril for his life! One’s own avowed sweet wedded wife can give such love as this. (455).

Wolfram’s apparent rejection of the ethical framework of the courtly tradition has occasioned critical speculation. The fulfilment of this rejection may be expressed in texts like Parzival, a theistic ascendancy marked, in Nietzsche’s famous argument, by the same epic failures that Wagner’s great operatic rendition brings to light. But what enters into the light is the following realization: a poetic framework contrasting the two worlds of night and day, which throws the night world into an explicit disharmony with that of its social environment, undergoes a further bifurcation into, on one side, the world of illicit love guarded by the civic complicity of a nervous watchman, and, on the other, the world of eternal love and marriage with no need of any worldly cover: either the sensuous aesthetic or the ascetic ideal.

Poets evidently lose the voice that comes to them under the threat of the dawn when the sun rises.

[1] [The “Study scene and c.f., Lichtenberg on the infinite in knowledge].