La dolce vita implies a degree of political awareness insofar as it observes both Rome's problematic status as a model for the modern city and the connection of this problem to Fascism. At a congress on urban development in 1937, the Fascists anointed Rome the modern capital not only of the Italian nation and Catholic Christianity but of the entire world. The "Esposizione Universale" of the Rome of 1942 which gave the precinct its acronym was supposed to establish Rome as the exemplar of the ideal modern city. Numerous Italian architects took part in an architectural contest during the years 1937-1938 to develop the district that came to be referred to as the EUR and was then known as "E42." The contest was held under the supervision of the architect Piacentini, who proposed to uphold the crucially nebulous values of the rational, the modern, the Mediterranean, and the classic. Unsurprisingly, the different projects were gradually modified in the direction of the classical through insistence on certain materials such as marble and granite, on elements such as the column and the arch, and on Pythagorean proportions and mirrored symmetries. On this score, we might view the "Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana"--otherwise known as the "squared coliseum"--by Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto La Padula, and Mario Romano as representative. 33 The building is distinguished by its forbidding, decorative arches and, perhaps on account of this eerie mixture of luxury and menace, appears in a number of Fellini's films from Nights of Cabiria to Ginger and Fred.
Fellini was fascinated with what Brunello Rondi has labeled the "science-fiction" style of architecture that prevails in the EUR. 34 This fascination coexists with an anxious sense of alienation, a deeply Baudelairean melancholy that arises from witnessing the rapidly changing physiognomy of the modern city:
Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N'a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout por moi devient allégorie,
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs. 35
Like Baudelaire, Fellini reads allegorical significance into the historical transformation of his surroundings in order to counteract the horror vacui of modernist urban planning. The very existence of the EUR elicits a feeling of cultural and spatial dislocation from which Marcello may prove incapable of recovering. Without a Hausmann-like visionary to reorganize the city plan, Rome bears only sporadic traces of modernity's influence. If sites such as the Via Veneto, the Caracalla baths, the Fontana di Trevi, and the sixteenth-century Odelscalchi castle at Bassano di Sutri provide the film with a complement of opulent, one-of-a-kind, theatrical settings for sustained visual reveries, the modern suburbs of Rome represent the "wake-up call" of a mass-produced reality where life cannot be sweet. The episode involving Marcello's night on the town with his father dramatically encapsulates the film's sobering historical outlook. After a boisterous evening of dancing and drinking at the Kit-Kat club, Marcello's father accompanies the dancer Fanny to her apartment in the city's industrialized outskirts. Once he arrives at the city's modern, dehumanized periphery, he suffers a heart attack that cuts short the festivities and forces him to exchange hasty and fumbling good-byes with Marcello.
The architectural settings of the film's scenes appear to alternate between two different styles: that of a benign, dream-like ancienneté associated with the pleasure principle and that of a grim, functionalist modernity associated with the reality principle. Fellini's oscillation between these modes brackets the older type like a quotation, a suspended fragment of the past that achieves by virtue of its rootedness in human history and memory a mythic, archetypal resonance. Assuming what appears at first glance to be a contrary stance in his essay "The Return of the Flâneur," Walter Benjamin expresses perplexity that the modernist imagination has seized upon Paris rather than Rome as the city par excellence of flânerie:
The flâneur is the creation of Paris. The wonder is that it was not Rome. But perhaps in Rome even dreaming is forced to move along streets that are too well paved. And isn't the city too full of temples, enclosed squares, and national shrines to be able to enter undivided into the dreams of the passer-by along with every paving stone, every shop sign, every flight of steps, and every gateway. . . . 36
Yet it is precisely Rome's historical overdeterminacy, so eloquently captured by Benjamin, that in Fellini's mind gives the city its undeniable allegorical value. By looking at the symbolically saturated, "unconscious" strata of Roman antiquity from the conscious, realist standpoint of modernism, the director finds a consoling alternative to the brutal, industrialized hypercapitalism of the latter twentieth century. In certain respects, Fellini may be said to recapitulate Freud's view of Rome in Civilization and its Discontents, where he treats the Eternal City and its buried ruins as a psychical entity with a long and copious past, a material representation of the various layers of mental life. 37 Like Freud, Fellini appears to privilege the past in La dolce vita. He contrasts the archaic, baroque regions of Rome, where the circulation of the streets replicates the exhilarating freedom of a primary process of the unconscious, to the palpable discontent of modern civilization, where the secondary mechanisms of conscious thought are denied the relief of condensation and displacement. If modernism finds in Paris its paradigmatic city, it perhaps encounters in Fellini's Rome its nemesis and corrective, a prelude to the double-coding of postmodern aesthetics.
After the extreme shock delivered by Steiner's suicide, Marcello seems on the verge of a momentous decision, perhaps even of a conversion to the dolce vita of the title and a renunciation of his previous ambitions. We see him in the movie's final episode presiding over an increasingly debauched party in Fregene as a sort of impromptu master of ceremonies. The orgy sequence achieves with satiric brio what Jean Baudrillard would call the transformation of the "scene" into the obscene. Bauman helpfully elucidates this dichotomy: "The world is no longer a 'scene' (a plane where the play is staged which, as we have the right to suspect, will be directed towards some concrete ending, even if we do not know in advance what it is); instead it is obscene: a lot of noise and bustle without plot, scenario, director, and direction." 38 The party appears to celebrate simultaneously the annulment of a friend's marriage and Marcello's new job as a publicity agent for movie actors. Accordingly, he reminds the guests with revealing lack of specificity that the party marks the annulment of "everything."
The ensuing revelry represents a transvaluation of all values initiated by a couple of transvestites dancing to "Jingle Bells." The party grows progressively duller following a striptease that only momentarily assuages the participants' restlessness. Marcello, the nominal "intellectual" of the group, promises to produce thousands of ideas for further performance, but is too pathetically drunk to articulate any of them. As he formulates his raccourçi of late capitalist logic with respect to publicity, excess, and celebrity, the meaningless chatter and sexual titillation escalate toward a tired finale, during which Marcello sadistically humiliates a young girl from the provinces by riding and whipping her like a mule. This final sequence is crucial to understanding the movie as allegorized cultural analysis. Jean Baudrillard imagines the historical arrival of modernity as an "orgy," a moment of explosive liberation after which the "current state" of postmodernity looks like an experience of enervation or disappointment. 39 Taking our cue from this French theorist, we might view Marcello's participation in the antics at Fregene as the final discharge of modernist energy within the movie.
Notably, it is the transvestite, Mariuccio, whom Fellini assigns the one line in the original screenplay that in any way elucidates the title. Observing the quickly degenerating atmosphere, he tells Marcello, "I love life . . . the very sweetest life. And you?" 40 Mariuccio evidently possesses the kind of innocence and melancholy reserved for an individual who has embraced without denial the chaotic but poetic nature of his own desires. But it is notable that Fellini does not keep Mariuccio's line in his final work. Seen through the eyes of the more embittered and fatalistic Marcello, the notion of "la dolce vita" might achieve congruence with the kind of douceur that, according to Baudrillard, is characteristic finally of the postmodern condition: "On se demandait jadis ce qui pouvait advenir après l'orgie--travail de deuil ou melancolie? Ni l'un ni l'autre sans doute. . . . À la fuite en avant nous préférons l'apocalypse rétrospective, et le revisionnisme en toutes choses--toutes nos societés sont devenus revisionnistes, elles repensent tout en douceur. . . ." 41
In the morning, the last of the numerous dawnings that punctuate the film, the guests file out of the villa like actors exiting the stage with theatrical flourishes and farewells. Walking through a wood of pine trees at the border of the seaside, the group seems melancholic and anxious. The only possible source of the Lichtung they hope to find is the vast and empty sea itself. 42 Yet the only event of interest results from the discovery of an enormous fish on the beach that, one bystander observes, has been dead for three days. Some critics have proposed to interpret this event as a Christian metaphor, relying on the traditional association between fish and Jesus and the reference to the three days between his crucifixion and resurrection. It seems to me instead that Fellini's camera performs a powerful subversion of a potentially auratic spectacle here, discovering in the fish the sign of a grotesque and hostile cosmos. Through a remarkable medium shot of the fish's dead eye returning the gaze of a disquieted Marcello, Fellini suggests a confrontation that is primarily aesthetic and epistemological in its contours. If Benjamin is correct that the model of the auratic experience is the investment of an object with the ability to return a gaze, then the fish in La dolce vita represents the ultimate travesty of such experience. 43 What is certain is that here, at the finale, Fellini avoids any suggestion of resurrection or deliverance for his characters and hence any hint of a redemptive religious message.
Marcello begins to walk along the shore of the beach when Paola, the girl whose personal pop-music soundtrack diverted him from his book, appears in the distance, waving to catch his attention and gesticulating to remind him of their previous encounter. His reunion with the young siren indeed promises to enlarge on the charged significance of their first meeting.  One could also argue that the film itself does precisely to Paola in the final scene what Marcello did earlier . . . 'reproducing' her as an icon of spirituality." 44
Fellini toys with our expectation of a fleeting "moment of being" or epiphany that will enlighten the anxious hero, an expectation in keeping with the classic narratives of modernism. Marcello, however, appears to miss his opportunity for inspiration, unable as he is to hear Paola's shouted attempts at communication over the noise of the ocean. Resigned to his condition, he walks away to join a woman from the previous night's group of partygoers. 45 The piercing last shot of the film lingers on the sweet, benevolent smile of the young girl. Marcello is absent from the picture, the epiphany has not happened, and the riddle of modernity has not been solved. The hermeneutic elusiveness of the moment might best be captured by Foucault, when a few years later he envisions the very concept of man inviting his own annihilation "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." 46 It is of crucial significance that Fellini chooses for the final drama of failed consciousness one of the favorite loci of high modernism: the seaside encounter with a young girl.
Not only can we think of the narrator's crucial encounter in La recherche with Albertine, la jeune fille en fleur, but also of Stephen Dedalus's sublime moment of self-discovery in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Joyce's Bildungsroman, Stephen walks along the seashore as he ruminates on his new-found ambition to "create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable. . . . " 47 A few moments later he spies a girl by the water and undergoes an overwhelming epiphanic realization:
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. . . .  Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy. . . . A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of horror and glory (433-434).
Clearly, Stephen's vision of the young girl represents a conversion experience of sorts in the Portrait, a conversion away from organized religion and toward artistic self-determination that in some sense represents the antithesis of Marcello's capitulation to the pressures of a spectacularized capitalism in the wake of Steiner's suicide. In considering Fellini's opinion of the "classic" modernist conversion myth, we ought to keep in mind that, as originally scripted, La dolce vita was to have ended on a different and somewhat more hopeful note with respect to a possible epiphany.
In its iconography and overall outlines, the final scene has a more Proustian than Joycean quality. Marcello in fact meets not with a single "angel," but with a group of young girls, "sweet feminine res, . . . calm, safe, and joyful as girls are when in company," arriving at the beach (Qf; 279). He recognizes Paola, and their brief conversation leaves them both with a feeling of happiness. When he tries to interest her in the dead fish, however, her attention wanders, and after a few minutes she runs away. Fellini describes Marcello as he watches her withdraw in the company of her friends: "He is gripped by a profound, inexplicable emotion; he does not really know if it is sorrow or joy, desperation or hope. . . . Marcello's turmoil is agonizing. He looks far off; in the luminous and still sea, the little girls run wild with joy, mysterious messengers of a new life" (Qf, 281-282).
Yet in the finished film, it is Marcello who walks away from Paola, as he perhaps bows to an advancing sense of reality. We cannot fail to notice the emotional implications of his decision--we may expect Marcello's abandonment of the girl to occasion no artistic inspiration, merely an elegiac pang of regret. If the myth of epiphanic self-realization is both deconstructed and lamented by La dolce vita, quoted as the residue of a past from which we have to distance ourselves, it will be translated into a kind of absurdist afterlife in 8&1/2. Whereas Fellini in La dolce vita aims to survive the apocalypse of modernity by presenting his images as the last, viable modernist signifiers, he no longer cultivates any illusions about the efficacy of his own art in 8&1/2, a film whose title evokes the cryptic labeling of abstract expressionist paintings of the 1940s and 1950s. After an archetypally modernist convalescence at a pseudo-Thomas-Mann-style sanitarium, the protagonist Guido Anselmi embarks on a search for enlightenment via an encounter with a beautiful girl in white whom he has glimpsed at the spa. 48 Unlike La dolce vita, though, 8&1/2 uses its familiar quest narrative in an evidently parodic mode and concedes without reservation the untimeliness of Guido's dream of purity.
The latter film concludes with the justly famous image of the cast of characters holding hands and dancing in a circle. Guido directs everyone to their position and then finally joins the circle to the strains of Nino Rota's haunting theme music. At the time of the movie's release, most critics and viewers found this denouement puzzling in its transmogrification of life and art into sheer spectacle. The birth of postmodernity in Italy may be said to coincide with this illusory triumph. It is strangely fitting that the closing scene of 8&1/2 was originally shot as the promotional trailer for the film's theatrical release. Not satisfied with the narrative crescendo of the "real" ending and appreciative of the surreal energy that the scene exuded, Fellini revised his plan to incorporate the trailer's visually metonymic, allusive summation of the larger movie. The redemption of film from all that is not spectacular and cinematographic is now accomplished; no longer is film, as in Kracauer's theory, supposed to redeem physical reality. As Umberto Eco adroitly puts it, Fellini "has lived to redeem the cinema from what is external to itself." 49
Alessia Ricciardi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University. She has written and published on Italian culture and postmodernity in the fields of literature, cinema and architecture. She is currently working on a book project entitled "Beyond the Mourning Principle: Modernism, Postmodernism and the Culture of Loss."
1. Tullio Kezich, "Fellini e altri: bloc-notes per La dolce vita" in Il dolce cinema (Milano: Bompiani, 1978), 25.
2. "There are always many modernisms. . . . The modernism that mattered most to me in the beginning--for years I had a blow-up from Roberto Rossellini's Paisà on my wall--was that of film and literature in Italy after 1945." T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 405.
3. "Indeed those features of style or narrative called postmodern-pastiche, self-conscious narrative, game-playing, polyvalence--which are undoubtedly present in contemporary culture--are already there from the start as part of a modern departure from the classical narratives of sound cinema, a departure which takes place towards the ends of the 1950s. Most are neo-modern inventions." John Orr, Cinema and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1993), 3.
Jameson identifies three significant periods in cinematic history since the advent of sound movies, taking care to distinguish these three periods from the literary movements of the same name: realism, modernism, and postmodernism. The cinema of auteurs that emerged at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s is defined by Jameson as modernist. "It will seem appropriate to characterize the moment of modernism as the moment of emergence of the great auteurs: Hitchcock, Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Renoir, Welles, Wajda, Antonioni, Ray, etc." Fredric Jameson, Singularities of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992), 199.
4. Kezich, op. cit., 278.
5. The territory is highly controversial, since for certain critics cinema represents the quintessential modernist art, whereas for others such as Michael Fried film is essentially unable to fulfill canonical modernism categories: "cinema is not, even at its most experimental, a modernist art." What Fried wishes to suggest is that, being an impure medium, cinema does not possess inherent dimensions and functions. See Fried's "Art and Objecthood," originally published in the June, 1967 issue of Artforum and reprinted in Minimal Art, ed. G. Battock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 141.
6. Tony Plinney, "Editor's Introduction: Modernism and Cultural Theory" in Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernity (New York: Verso, 1989), 15. Pinkney makes an important claim a little earlier in the essay: "It is, I would argue, film that is for Williams the pre-eminent Modernist medium . . ." .It should be noted, furthermore, that Williams in fact rethinks the whole of Modernism in the light of film. Woolf and Joyce, too, are film-makers manqés; for their fragmented "stream of consciousness" is deeply related to Joyce several characteristic forms of modern imagery, most evident in painting and especially in film which as a medium contains much of its intrinsic movement. See Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973), 290.
7. Frank Burke, Fellini's Films (New York: Twayne, 1996), 267.
8. P. Adams Sitney, Vital Crisis in Italian Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 110.
9. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
10. In this sense, I would extend to La dolce vita the definition that Kezich applies generally to Fellini's cinema of the 1950s from Luci del Varietà to Notti di Cabiria. See Tullio Kezich, Fellini (Milano: Rizzoli, 1988), 189.
11. Gilles Deleuze has written the most thoroughly considered commentary on the disjunctive, experimental narrative techniques of European cinema from the 1950s through the 1960s. Deleuze identifies the Italian films of the period as the chief instances of such techniques and reads these works in continuity with the preceding generation of neorealist films as belonging to a cinema of the "time image." As opposed to the European cinema prior to neorealism, in which meaning is achieved through a synthetic action-movement, the new cinema of the "time image" is characterized by dispersive situations, weak plot links, the voyage or "stroll" form, and an absence of plot. The visual flânerie of La dolce vita thus provides a textbook case for the application of Deleuze's theory. Deleuze makes the point that the movies of Visconti, Antonioni, and Fellini all might be considered neorealist, as they all share what he considers the two main achievements of neorealism: that of a "direct image of time" and that of a purely optical space. The spectator is provoked by this kind of cinema, which will come to encompass the French New Wave, to decipher an image rather than to follow an action. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time Image, trans. H. Tomlison and R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 4.
12. Robert Richardson, "La dolce vita: Fellini and T.S. Eliot" in Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism ed. Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 105-106.
13. Pier Paolo Pasolini, "The Catholic Irrationalism of Fellini" in Perspectives on Federico Fellini, eds. Peter Bondanella and Cristina degli Esposti (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1993), 104.
14. It is useful in this connection to note that Stanley Cavell argues for the relevance of Baudelaire's essay, "The Painter of Modern Life," both to film and to film criticism, particularly with regard to the poet's identification of certain mesmerizing, iconic archetypes of modernity such as the military man, the dandy (or flâneur), and the woman. According to Cavell, these character types play a central and recurrent role in the development of cinema. I think the essay ought to be pondered carefully by anyone wishing to assess the essential qualities of Fellini's cinema. See Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harward University Press, 1979), 41-60.
15. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 9.
16. Ibid., 12.
17. Indeed, the inspiration for Fellini's chef d'oeuvre may have been a contemporary fashion style: "La dolce vita was inspired for him, then, by the fashion of women's sack dresses which conveyed that sense of luxurious butterflying out around a body that might be [physically] beautiful but not morally so; these sack dresses struck Fellini because they rendered a woman gorgeous who could, instead, be a skeleton of squalor and solitude inside." Franca Faldini and Goffredo Fofi, L'avventurosa storia del cinema italiano raccontata dai suoi protagonisti 1960-1969, (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1981), 4-5.
18. P. Adams Sitney, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 112-113. Barbara Lewalski, "Federico Fellini's Purgatorio" in Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism, ed. Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
19. Anne Paolucci, "Italian Film: Antonioni, Fellini, Bolognini," in Massachusetts Review 7:3 (Summer 1966) and Sitney, 117-118.
20. Hollis Alpert, Fellini: A Life (New York: Atheneum, 1986), 151.
21. Flaiano has likened the scriptwriters' effort to find the appropriate name for the character of Paparazzo to the two years of labor spent by Flaubert to settle on "Emma" as the first name of the heroine of Madame Bovary. "Paparazzo," Flaiano tells us, derives from a text by George Gessing entitled Sulle rive dello Jonio. At any rate, the success of Fellini, Flaiano, and Pinelli at their endeavor may be judged by the thoroughness with which the plural form, "paparazzi," has penetrated the contemporary vernacular as a shorthand label for tabloid photojournalists. Ennio Flaiano, La solitudine del satiro (Milano: Rizzoli, 1973), 13-14.
22. Guillaume Apollinaire, "Zone" in Alcools (Paris: Gallimard, 1920), 9.
23. Richard Poirier regards the "appearance of bravery" and an insistence on difficulty as two sine qua non conditions of the modernist enterprise. See "Modernism and its Difficulties" in The Renewal of Literature (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1987), 112.
24. Manuela Gieri, Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion, Pirandello, Fellini, Scola and the Directors of the New Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
25. Despite his decision not to appear in La dolce vita, Vittorini made a public statement following the film's release to defend the work against charges that it was a corrupting, anti-Catholic influence, accusations that Vittorini regarded as fascist and reactionary. In fact, the Fascists did introduce a motion in the Italian parliament on February 9, 1960 accusing Fellini of desecrating the reputation of the Eternal City. Sitney, Vital Crises, 111.
26. See Gottfried Boehm, "Giorgio Morandi's Artistic Concept" in Giorgio Morandi, eds. Ernest Gerhard Guese and Franz Armin (New York: Morat Prestel, 1999), 9-20.
27. According to Kezich, Fellini decided to cast the French actor Alain Cuny as Steiner after Pasolini described him as a "Gothic Cathedral." Kezich, Fellini, 279.
28. "Modernism must be under the sign of suicide, an act which seals a heroic will that makes no concession to a mentality inimical toward this will." Benjamin, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. H. Zohn (London: NLB, 1973), 75.
29. Discussing the characteristics of postmodern cinema, Jameson argues that the typical modernist hero of film never approaches the "bewilderment of an honest schizophrenic life." Fellini's Marcello, however, strikes Jameson as closest to the postmodern existential condition: " . . . Nor is the chaos and bewilderment of the honest schizophrenic life really the 'problem' of modernist film makers either, having little enough to do with the obsessions of the hero of Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), or the neuroses and psychoses of Bergman and Antonioni characters, although in this last arguably we come close, and in La dolce vita (Fellini, 1960) we're already on our way." Fredric Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 42-43.
30. Federico Fellini, "La dolce vita" in Quattro film (Torino: Einaudi, 1974), 204-205; hereafter cited in the text as Qf.
31. On the missing episodes, see Brunello Rondi, Il cinema di Fellini (Roma: Edizioni di Bianco e Nero, 1965), 207-208.
32. The phrase occurs during the description of Dorothea's honeymoon with Casaubon in Middlemarch. Poirier remarks on the suggestiveness of the description with regard to the shortlived nature of forms of knowledge (Renewal, 154).
33. See Girogio Ciucci, "Roma come Modello" in Storia dell'arte italiniana, vol. III (Torino: Einaudi, 1982), 373-378.
34. Rondi, Cinema, 227.
35. Charles Baudelaire, "Le cygne" in Les fleurs du mal (Paris: Corti, 1968), 168.
36. Walter Benjamin, "The Return of the Flâneur" in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 263.
37. Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents" in Standard Edition of the Complete Works, Volume XXI, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 69-71.
38. Zygmund Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (New York: Routledge, 1992), 151.
39. Jean Baudrillard, La Transparence du Mal (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 4.
40. Fellini, Quattro film, 277.
41. Jean Baudrillard, L'Illusion de la Fin (Paris: Galilée, 1992), 40-41.
42. There is a similar moment in an earlier Fellini film, Nights of Cabiria, when Cabiria walks through a pine wood at the end of the movie, as the scene conveys an anxious expectation of a moral and aesthetic Lichtung.
43. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Illuminations, 188.
44. Burke, Fellini's Films, 271.
45. We ought to bear in mind that Fellini stressed in an interview the possibily deliberate nature of Marcello's withdrawal from Paola: " . . . It [Marcello's incomprehension] could be considered a bantering gesture: 'I do not hear you because I do not want to hear you'." Alpert, Fellini: a Life, 151.
46. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), 387.
47. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in The Portable James Joyce ed. Harry Levin (New York: Penguin, 1976), 432.
48. In "The Painter of Modern Life," Baudelaure stresses the importance of both convalescence and childhood to the ideal artistic Bildung: " . . . Convalescence is like a return toward childhood. The convalescent, like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial nature." Baudelaire, Painter, 7. Paul De Man regards the re of the convalescent as one of the archeypes that epitomize modernity. See De Man's "Lyric and Modernity" in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 157.
49. Umberto Eco, "Thoth, Fellini, and the Pharaoh" in Bondanella and Degli Esposti, eds., Perspectives, 294.
What philosophers are in the habit of doing is adopting a popular prejudice and exaggerating it.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 1
Human beings today no longer know what to do with themselves. They therefore believe everything is at an end and become the fools of what the present day happens to bring.
--Martin Heidegger to Elisabeth Blochmann,
20 December 1931
2
This exploration of a broadly revealing strand of Martin Heidegger's thinking is intended, at least tangentially, to rehistoricize the debate about the shift from the modern to the postmodern. If ongoing discussions of the postmodern have a central issue at stake--a discernible core rather than a perpetually evasive "uncentering" or diffuse "unfounding" in the cause of ineffable Otherness or unnamable différance--then Heidegger will continue to be invoked there. As Karsten Harries has observed, "postmodern theory is unthinkable without his questioning." 3 French critics Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut are even more adamantly encompassing: "The Heidegger controversy merely stands in the foreground of a controversy that has a quite different impact, involving nothing less than the significance attributed to the logic of modernity." 4
The "logic of modernity" is a large subject and Heidegger, who did not shrink from the largest and most indefinite of all subjects (Being as such), endowed the otherwise intangible logic of modernity with a palpable shape, historical telos, and easy comprehensibility by associating it with the most venerable, renewable, and clichéd concept in German (and European) thinking about modernity. I am referring to the tandem notions of Americanism and Americanization, which served in Heidegger's thinking to convey the recent phase of mankind's fateful course of Ruinanz--that is, the total but unrecognized ruination of the world through the occlusion of Being by way of putative progress. As both ordinary way of life and blockage of the sense for Being, Americanism came to incarnate modern humanism run lethally amok. In its blind, pragmatic-technological frenzy, it was utterly inhuman and at the same time all-too-human. In a compound logical and eschatological sense that combined fulfillment, perfection, and extinction, Americanism came to stand for the end of human history, as it did for other "classical" thinkers of the twentieth-century posthistoire, including Heidegger's contemporaries Alexandre Kojève, Ernst Jünger, and Arnold Gehlen. 5
Heidegger's account of the logic of modernity served his unique ontological aims, but his choice of these particular terms of reference was anything but idiosyncratic; rather the choice was foreordained by received ideas. For over a century before Heidegger's main writings, German thought had characterized the "most modern" by the catchphrases Americanism and Americanization. Over the long term, these prepotent epithets have exerted a deeply formative influence on the German understanding of modernity as a demonic-dynamic trajectory of mass civilization, running automatically amok beyond all proper bounds and measures toward the consummately inhuman. More than all others, these two terms have served to encapsulate the dreaded "common way" of the liberal-democratic, capitalist-industrialist West against which the German "special way" (Sonderweg) was, until 1945, held up as the heroic exception and exalted alternative.
Even today, after the great transformations following upon 1945 and 1989, these twin shibboleths continue to impart the sharpest critical edge to lingering German doubts about most modern (and postmodern) civilization as a potentially inhuman, inverted world of man's own making. These two habitual terms continue to serve as the most compelling master tropes (or commonplace conceits) for distilling the otherwise elusive, self-surpassing dynamic of modernity. They are the ambivalent residue when more innocent conceptions of Promethean progress have been demythified, deconstructed, or even ironically inverted by the searing calamities of the twentieth century. Moreover, as spectral self-clichés of modernity, these twin terms continue to re at the forefront of almost all attempts to think "beyond the modern," whether to overtake and steer it along different lines or to transcend and supersede it altogether with some radical otherness, be it countermodern, postmodern, or transmodern. For multiple reasons, a careful historical exploration of Heidegger's unique and yet commonplace employment of these fateful terms promises to be timely and illuminating.
My chief argument is that the notion of Americanism assumed an axial position in Heidegger's writings that was sustained from the mid-1930s to the late-1960s. Indeed it loomed larger and more luridly in the period after his avowedly Nazi period and after his resignation from the rectorship of the University of Freiburg in April 1934. His usage continued unabated but not unmodified through the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 and persisted thereafter throughout his later thinking on global technology. To phrase it succinctly, Heidegger increasingly essentialized the entire destiny of modern Western civilization into the reductive catchword Americanism, which served as a holistic, homeopathic mass cliché for the totalizing trajectory of mass civilization itself.  More graphically and handily than all other terms, Americanism served to embody the ever-more convenient but ultimately catastrophic way of being human in the modern world. As the most concrete and convenient term for human-centered convenience as such, it was interpreted as fulfilling eons of unwitting anthropomorphism and centuries of modern self-conscious humanism--while allegedly obliterating all residual appreciation for Being itself.
Heidegger's reductive and essentialist use of the term was not static; after World War II and the American occupation of Western Germany, this ingrained but now politically touchy appellation was diffused into less sensitive terms, including generic humanism and even vaguer notions of "planetary technicism" and the primordial "will to will." 6 But the barbed original term Americanism explicitly continued to play a crucial diagnostic and prognostic role in Heidegger's writings and addresses. Among all his notoriously arcane archaisms and vatic neologisms, the term Americanism remained an intellectual Archimedean point in the unfathomable flux of time, history, and Being; it was as close as Heidegger comes to a conceptual constant or ideé fixe, perhaps appearing circumstantially under other names but "ontically" and essentially still the same. As the most familiar antithesis and most readily understood dialectical foil to his core notion of Being, Americanism remained central to his thinking through all its confounding turns and reversals. As with many other European thinkers of his generation, Americanism served Heidegger as a "pop" historical apriori, a ready-made idée reçu for easily eliciting and projecting the ultimate meaning of modernity.
Heidegger is often said to have radically de-essentialized both Being (Sein) and man's own concrete way of being in the world (Dasein); but by the same token, he just as certainly and radically essentialized modernity into the correspondingly formulaic and hackneyed stereotype of Americanism. These two tendencies of his thinking remained reciprocally and, in his sense, "essentially" related: the radically deconstructive or essence-naughting tendency in his thinking necessitated the patently schematic and reductive tendency embodied in his caricature of Americanism as Western and then planetary destiny. Heidegger's sustained effort to dethingify the Being of all beings entailed the correspondingly relentless reification of the thingified mindset dubbed Americanism. The present exposition constitutes a sustained response to Hugo Ott's question: "When are we finally going to see a study of stereotypes in the writings of Martin Heidegger?" 7 The approach adopted here may seem thoroughgoing to the point of being overbearing, but it is only in keeping with the relentless tenacity with which Heidegger himself framed the issue; Americanism remained the most "absolute" and encompassing of his stereotypes, reverberating loudly and sometimes tediously through his writings as the conventional, plebian mass mantra for modernity. His defamiliarization of practical-functional things in the higher cause of Being required a corresponding instrumental use of Americanism as the most familiar and functional of modern clichés for modernity itself. There is a great irony here, to say the least, but only the reader can say whether it ultimately works for or against Heidegger's standing as one of the great thinkers of modern times.
Heidegger's use of Americanism necessarily cuts across the prophylactic cordon sanitaire erected by some interpreters between his philosophy, which is deemed profoundly original and immensely suggestive, and his quirky politics, which are just as often considered a repugnant but brief lapse that he quickly moved beyond but never clearly renounced. Wherever and whenever Heidegger turned, he continued to carry with him his dark vision of Americanism as the culmination of Ruinanz--a constant and final end to what has aptly been called his "politics of Being." 8 His relentless instrumentalization of Americanism demonstrates more clearly than any other facet of his thinking that his dialectical metaphysics (at odds with all previous metaphysics) cannot by its own lights be quarantined from the mundane realm of the political, the ideological, and the worldly.
A special interpretive economy or intellectual trade-off obtains in the effort to understand Heidegger on Americanism that derives from the reciprocal relation between the critical (or deconstructive) and reductive (or stereotypical) vectors of his thinking. As a radical metaphysician-against-metaphysics, Heidegger is notoriously difficult to understand in his own terms, but Americanism is easy to understand since almost everyone already understands what it means by an implicit, unreflective preunderstanding. This habitual familiarity and tacit taken-for-grantedness of America and Americanism as nearly everybody's latent stereotype of modern life was slyly spoofed in Bertolt Brecht's 1929 work "From a Reader for City Dwellers," which also carried a self-parodying, self-ironizing effect characteristic of Brecht but hardly of Heidegger:
I can hear you saying:
He talks of America
He understands nothing about it
He has never been there
But believe you me:
You understand me perfectly well when I talk of America
And the best thing about America is
That we understand it. 9
For Heidegger, by contrast, the absolute worst (yet best) thing about Americanism was precisely that nearly everyone in the West was coming to understand it not merely as the dominant modern way of life but simply as life itself--at the incalculable and unrecognizable cost of the loss of Being itself. Americanism perfected mankind's anthropomorphic urges to doing, making, having, and knowing, while at the same time obliterating the true thinking of Being.
Heidegger pressed the odd quasi-familiarity of Americanism as the quintessence of modernity to the limit. He emphasized repeatedly its superficial, thoughtless matter-of-courseness (Selbstverständlichkeit) and its deeper, hidden power to convey the staggering paradox of the fully humanized yet somehow also dehumanized world. In his earliest writings, he expostulated on the woeful aura of an inverted human/inhuman world before finding the upper-case "proper name" for such an abject condition. In 1910, while still a theology student in Freiburg before World War I and on the verge of his tortuous rift with Catholicism, Heidegger railed against modern decadence and the "destructive influences of modernism." 10 In an address at the dedication of a monument to the seventeeth-century Augustinian monk-preacher, Abraham a Sancta Clara, the young Heidegger denounced modern ways of living and being:
The ground-destroying rage for the new, the crazed distraction from the deeper spiritual content of life and art, the modern sense of life directed toward continually self-annulling stimulations, the self-enclosed hermetic space--sometimes to the point of suffocation--in which contemporary art of every sort moves--these are elements which point toward a decadence [Dekadenz], toward a sorry falling away [Abfall] from the healthiness and the transcendent value of life. 11
By the logic of his own developing ideas, Heidegger's term for modernity's grievous "falling away" would soon undergo a hypostatization into first Ruinanz and then eventually Americanism. In the wake of World War I and his reading of Oswald Spengler, Ludwig Klages, and Georg Simmel, Heidegger coined his own solecistic yet infinitely synthetic term Ruinanz to encapsulate the deeper metaphysical/ontological dynamic concurrently at work in the widely discussed "decline of the West." 12 As both essence and process, this gerundive term was supposed to connote much more than merely an end (Untergang) of the spiritual-idealist high culture of the once-Christian, Eurocentric West. Rather Ruinanz was meant to convey the intrinsic movement of debasement or preternatural "falling away from Being" through man's peremptory formulation of things, concepts, and entities. Foremost among his many terms for this ontic falling from Being toward thingness, Ruinanz remained more inexorable and more imponderable than mere civilizational Untergang--in the same way that Being itself must remain more primordial than all things at man's behest or disposal. Transitive, self-surpassing Ruinanz became for Heidegger the darkening shadow of the human will to Transzendenz. 13 In Heidegger's evolving thought, these two equally primordial tendencies of human striving--toward transcendent Being and toward cognizable, manipulable things-other-than-Being--became so mutually implicated and intertwined that they threatened to become tragically indistinguishable, like the two "sides" of a Möbius strip. In this confounding circularity, the commonplace catchphrase Americanism came to serve as his all-purpose, familiar trump-term for rendering the ontological difference both more commonly recognizable and more radically diagnostic. 14
Apart from unique, ulterior ontological allegiances, Heidegger's conception of Americanism as wholesale Ruinanz masquerading as ersatz Transzendenz was similar to that of many contemporary culture critics, including Spengler, Klages, Werner Sombart, Hans Freyer, Hans Zehrer, the Jünger brothers, and others often grouped under the rubrics of "radical conservatism" or "conservative revolution." They too viewed Americanism as a vulgar hyperhumanism or instinctive animalism of the uncultured masses, at once cravenly conformist and wildly amok, potentially inducing by its very excesses a dialectical backlash or leap forward toward some redemptive kingdom come of super- or transmodernism. Declaring "total cultural war" and a decisive "struggle to the last" to redeem the German spirit and culture from the coils of "anomic" Western liberal civilization, these radicals urged the "manly," hard voluntaristic course of direct action and revolutionary deed (literally, "die Tat") in response to the pervasive aura of cultural pessimism. 15
Calls for hard action stemmed from an underlying mood of darkening despair; Heidegger proved susceptible to both summons. The manichean and masculinist posture of Weimar culture warriors was given softer, more poetic expression by Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter of 13 November 1925, lamenting the transformation of real things into commodities and counterfeit substitutes. In a passage often cited by Heidegger, Rilke cast the genuinely human sense of substantial Being against the encroaching American sense of fungible, disposable, commodifiable things. The ontological difference was rendered palpable in Rilke's phrasing:
For our grandparents a "house," a "spring," a familiar tower, yes, even their clothes, a cloak--these were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost every thing was a vessel in which they found and conserved something human. Now, coming from America, there surge empty, indifferent things, fake things, dummy-life [Lebensattrappe]. . . . A house, an apple, a grape vine, in the American sense, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which our forefathers poured their hope and solicitude. . . . Things living, experienced, and communing are going under and cannot be replaced. We are perhaps the last ones who will have known such things. 16
After World War I, even soberly rational minds not surrendering to poetic melancholy were nevertheless given to sweeping prophetic pronouncements regarding the spread of such Americanism. In his famous address "Science as Vocation" in 1918, Max Weber equated modernization and Americanization, insisting broadly that "[I]n very important respects German university life is being Americanized, as is German life in general." 17 Writing in 1925 amid the pandemic craze of Weimar "Americanitis," the liberal journalist Rudolf Kayser urged semantic caution, "Americanism is the new European catchword. Like all catchwords it is subject to the same fate: the more one uses it, the less one knows what it means." 18
For Heidegger and other cultural critics of left, right, and center, however, the best thing about Americanism was precisely its ubiquitous popular meaning as the perpetually self-stoking dynamic of modern mass civilization, accompanied by the paradoxical, uncanny tendency to "mean" the loss of meaning altogether. As in Heidegger's subsequent writings, Americanism in Weimar Germany was used more and more loosely as a wild-card catchword; but rather than the term undermining its own meaning through flagrant and exaggerated overuse, it continued its boundless hypertrophy even through the Great Depression, owing to its singular capacity to mean the end of meaning--and for many commentators, the end of history, nature, culture, and even the world itself. Moreover, Americanism carried this paradoxical premonitory meaning not merely for an elite of intellectuals and cultural critics but for many anxious "little people," who in the turbulent interwar years cared more about a loss of practical livelihood, savings, and jobs than about any loss of ontological Being. Like the German Reichsmark, Americanism in the Weimar period lent itself to stupendous hyperinflation without an accompanying semantic deflation so that subsequent Nazi usage of the term might best be called a caricature of a caricature. For his part, Heidegger prepared to impel this modern slogan toward "absolute" ontological dimensions by his path-breaking exegesis of human existence and its concrete historicity.
Heidegger's great unfinished work of 1927, Being and Time, sent shock waves through German and continental philosophy. The work was hailed widely as another epochal Copernican turn in thinking, on a par with Kant's earlier transcendental turn. Ironically, Heidegger's rich but elliptical work soon established his stature in the wider realm of public fame that he scorned in the work itself as "inauthentic." Neither Ruinanz nor Americanism appeared explicitly in the work itself, but both notions were implicit in much of Heidegger's interpretation of everyday human existence. As a phenomenology of "everydayness" and ordinary, quotidian life, this dense work laid down lines of interpretation that would clearly converge a few years later in his formulaic use of Americanism as the prevailing worldview of modern man.
Being and Time set out to provide a philosophy of radical reflection upon human existence as a unique form of Being as such. More technically, the work undertook a hermeneutic phenomenology of concrete human Dasein in its immanent experiential horizon of temporality and finitude. Under the universal categories of existence, temporality, and historicity in general, it presented a certain mode of human life in a certain period of human history--what could be called modern Dasein or modern Western life under urban-industrial conditions. Apart from this underlying tension between its universal phenomenological claims and its restricted historical range of evidence and specific areas of concrete lived experience, the work adumbrated an even more ambitious general ontology or hermeneutic of Being as such.
Abjuring the transcendental departure of much modern thought from the abstract human subject or pure consciousness, Heidegger began within concrete existence and the experiential human situation. But his exposition of purported universal structures of human existence in terms of familiarly and recognizably modern usages presumed what needed to be demonstrated. 19 As some mildly skeptical commentators noted at the time, Heidegger prejudicially conflated the exegesis of human existence as such with a slanted interpretation of modern life under current conditions as refracted through the biased categories of Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Graf Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, Spengler, and other thinkers hostile to modern civilization. One might go a step further to argue that the metaphysical "opening to Being" adumbrated in Being and Time (and reserved for future elaboration) constituted the opening for his subsequent deployment of Americanism as the stereotypical "essence" of Western Ruinanz. Human Dasein came to its ruination-cum-perfection through its own immanent logic of "being modern."
The "normal" everyday world of "inauthentic" human existence presented in Being and Time consisted of humdrum routine, daily praxis, and "publicness"--superficial sociability, collective conformity, and thoughtless compliance with the anonymous rule of the other as "them" (das Man), whom Heidegger called "everybody and nobody." Existence tends to slide toward an inauthentic life of averageness, homogeneity, conformity, publicity, busyness, and business-as-usual; it also tends to become ridden with boredom, empty talk, distractions, newspapers, comfort, security, sensationalism, and a host of other forms of life that were habitually associated with Weimar Americanitis. Heidegger insisted that this unthinking "normalcy" of daily existence entailed not only the loss of a sense of Being but also of the active and manly qualities of heroism, risk, autonomy, decision, vitality, tradition, and hierarchy, as well as the passive, nurturing capacities to reflect, to keep silent, to listen, to revere, to thank, and to be capable of awe or wonder.
Entwining human-historical and ontological modes of comprehension, Heidegger discerned a double trajectory consisting of the deepening loss of Being concurrent with growing self-alienation among human beings; the authentic "I" tends to become lost in the "they," just as Being becomes obscured in practical "things" regarded as entities, commodities, and instruments at the disposal of human beings. Surrounded by the ever-ready tools of technology, Dasein tends toward the average, anonymous "mass being" of public conformity rather than toward authentic selfhood: "By publicness [Öffentlichkeit] everything gets obscured and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone." 20 Significantly, it seems to require an average "templated" idea like Americanism to convey the full dimensions of man's own intrinsic tendency to a "templated" average consciousness. The esoteric notion of ontological Ruinanz, so to speak, averages out most intelligibly for nearly everybody as vernacular Americanism.
Heidegger indicated that the specifically modern mode of existence annuls metaphysical awe and questioning in favor of scientific knowledge and technological mastery; these dispositions of mind in turn flatter man's wishful self-image of sovereign control even as they shatter cherished illusions of human specialness. A modern form of self-conscious anthropomorphism trumps the traditional form of naïve anthropomorphism; but in any case, man remains fixated upon himself and his own designs. The ultimate driving force in the obliteration of Being through man's abiding self-fixation turns out to be the Moloch of modern technology.
Immediately after Being and Time, Heidegger began in 1928 to realign his exposition of human existence by emphasizing the growing powerlessness of Dasein in the face of the boundless domination of technology "which rages about in the world like an unchained beast" (G, 26:215, 279). Man was being irrevocably overpowered by his own instrumental power; what man has brought into being reacts reflexively upon him to obliterate all bonds with primordial Being, leaving man estranged and homesick, sprung out of all original bounds and bonds into a "groundless" and "homeless" world of his own devising. The world (of true Sein and Dasein) was becoming the "world" (in lethal quotation marks) and "worldview." In 1929-30 Heidegger repeated Novalis's pronouncement that genuine philosophy was always in essence "homesickness," while adding a sharp jab at the unrecognized "normal" sickness of contemporary existence: "Homesickness--is there something like this in general today? Has it not become an incomprehensible word, even in everyday life? For have not contemporary urban man and the ape of civilization (Zivilisationsaffe) long since abolished homesickness?" (G, 29/30:71) The specter of modern man, stylized as the anonymous "das Man" or the subhuman "Zivilisationsaffe," was "progressing" toward its end point in Ruinanz--the robotic homunculus of homo americanus.
In On the Essence of Truth Heidegger escalated his critique of the "blind" subjectivism and anthropocentrism of modern thinking, "He [man] is all the more mistaken the more exclusively he takes himself, as subject, to be the standard for all beings." 21 Subjectivism bred its logical reciprocal in doctrines of objectivism--and vice versa. The seemingly (but superficially) antithetical worldviews of marxism and modern Catholicism revealed themselves on deeper inspection as bankrupt kindred forms derived from the same modern anthropocentrism, differing only in degree rather than in kind. In a letter of 22 June 1932 to Elisabeth Blochmann, a liberal-democratic Jewish friend who had recently converted to Protestantism, Heidegger was at pains to differentiate among modern intellectual horrors: "Communism, among other things, may well be horrible, but it is a clear affair, whereas Jesuitism is--pardon me for saying this--diabolical." 22 On 30 March 1933, two months following Hitler's assumption of the chancellorship, Heidegger wrote in the same manner of a new German two-front war against the insidious twin specters of materialist "antispirit" and "expiring ex-spirit," "The confrontation with 'Marxism' and with the 'Center Party' would slacken away from its true sense, if it did not ripen into a confrontation with the antispirit of the Communist world and no less with the moribund spirit of Christianity." 23 The crises of present day politics assumed real meaning only in reference to the even more urgent metapolitics of Being; the acute emergency of human values self-evident in the death throes of the Weimar Republic counted for nothing in relation to the perpetual emergency of human blindness to Being. Modern civilization had to be overcome to clear the way for something other than mere things.
During his notorious tenure as Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg for nine months during 1933 and 1934, Heidegger's previous dire warnings about man's narcissistic hubris and maniacal self-apotheosis did nothing to inhibit his own apotheosis of Hitler as the exalted, superhuman "heroic" standard-bearer of all things German and authentic, as the sole remaining earthly agent to combat modern degeneration. With his own special hopes of "leading the leader" toward Being, Heidegger bestowed upon Hitler the unique historical-ontological status of total incarnation of German (and European) destiny, who might "invert the inversion" and re-turn Ruinanz toward authentic Transzendenz. 24 Not just historically, for the passing moment, but ontically and eternally, Hitler was Germany--as the stock phrase went--and Hitler was thereby the incarnate, existential vessel of Being itself: "Let not propositions and 'ideas' be the rules of your Being [Sein]. The Führer alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law." 25 A reopening of human access to Being thus remained the purpose of political engagement, but only as a self-sublating politics to end all politics.
In Heidegger's unabashedly National Socialist phase, it was not politics in any usual sense but rather Being itself that constituted the supreme stake in Germany's revolution: "This revolution brings with it the total transformation of our German being." 26 Heidegger thought that the Nazi revolution would accomplish the "practical" activist equivalent of the philosophical epoché, the deliberate, reflective rupture of thoughtless, daily routine for the sake of authentic existence and Being. In a private letter of December 1933 to his confidant Erik Wolf, Heidegger transmuted authentic individual Dasein into invincible collective Deutschsein, with both personhood and nation-state conscripted in the supreme service of Being itself: "The individual, whatever his place, counts for nothing. The destiny of our nation within the state counts for everything." 27 The authentic personal selfhood of Being and Time was "transcended" in the tide of destiny.
In view of Heidegger's abbreviated but total public engagement for Nazism, the bitterest irony would come in the form of censure from several Party superzealots who complained that Being and Time remained "a fundamental ontology which looked at man in his passive role rather than in his active one." 28 What these critics left out of their cavil was that Heidegger had embraced Nazism precisely to force the turn from "normal" conformist passivity to voluntarist "decision" on behalf of Being. This critique notwithstanding (which in hindsight may seem somewhat prescient but was unfounded in view of his publicly stated position), Heidegger remained vehement that a concerted radicalism of thought and deed was necessary to overcome the pervasive meaninglessness of modern existence. His subsequent use of Americanism at so many turns offered a singularly effective rhetorical and philosophical way to reclaim an ideological orthodoxy and ready-made intelligibility while also retaining his reputation for unabashedly radical thinking. He could use familiar old wine in familiar old bottles with old labels and old stoppers to refer to the newest installment of Ruinanz.
It is noteworthy that Heidegger wrote the first recorded passages concerned expressly with Americanism in the period following his resignation from the Freiburg rectorship on 23 April 1934. (He remained a member of the Nazi Party until the end of the war.) If his own affiliation with Nazism was turning more heterodox and even idiosyncratic in its ontic orientation, he couched his opprobrium against Americanism in far more conventional, worldly terms. In a report urging university reform dated 28 August 1934, he saw the American menace already lurking inside the temple of German learning and Wissenschaft. Echoing Weber on the Americanization of German learning and life, Heidegger urged a counterstrategy leading to a final cultural showdown, "If the American influence in contemporary academic and scientific life, already far too powerful, is to be effectively countered and eradicated in the future, it is essential to allow the restructured academic disciplines to grow in accordance with their own inner exigencies." 29
In another university document--a confidential report filed with the National Socialist Professors' Organization at Göttingen opposing the candidacy of his former student Eduard Baumgarten, who had studied the pragmatism of John Dewey in the United States--Heidegger judged Baumgarten (who happened to be a nephew of Max Weber) to be dangerously unreliable in view of the urgent national imperative to meld philosophy, culture, and politics into a total unity. Heidegger's report was alternately pointed and elliptical regarding Baumgarten's shortcomings: "His stay in the United States, during which he was Americanized, no doubt allowed him to learn much about the country and its inhabitants. But I have solid reasons to doubt the sureness of his political instincts and his judgment." 30 Even if privately Heidegger was rethinking the necessary congruity of politics and metaphysics, he began publicly to deploy the inveterate catchphrase Americanism as a cultural tocsin--a call to arms in the service of authentic Being and becoming "truly" German.
In a well-known passage from his Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935, Heidegger posed the question "Is 'Being' a mere word and its meaning a vapor, or is it the spiritual destiny of the Western world?" He went on to insist:
This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man.
He proceeded to lament the fact that under the global impact of technology, time has "ceased to be anything other than velocity, instantaneousness, and simultaneity and time as history has vanished from the lives of all peoples. All this frenzied haste raises the question what for? Whither? And what then?" 31 Heidegger was capable of seeing all the difference in the world between Being and beings but no difference worth considering between Bolshevism and Americanism. The supreme ontological difference between Being and beings gave rise to a sovereign indifference regarding "worldly" distinctions and values. Just as he had recently excoriated "Jesuitism" as more diabolical than Communism, however, Heidegger would similarly denounce Americanism as far more sinister than Communism-- precisely owing to the former's thoughtless convenience, ready familiarity, distraction, and sly dodge away from firm ideological explicitness. Henceforth Americanism loomed larger and larger as the unrecognized telos of matter-of-courseness in modern human existence, which takes itself and all Being for granted. In this sense, Heidegger's pathway of ever more radical and encompassing Destruktion represented a homeopathic disclosure (and, faintly but potentially, a rearguard reversal) of the fateful Ruinanz exemplified in commonplace Americanism.
In a gesture of supreme radicality, Heidegger insisted that all human-centered categories and values remained utterly fatuous. The "childish" anthropomorphic categories of hope and despair, like the everyday human categories, practical forms of life, and ordinary practices generated out of man's mundane concerns--all these remained distorting mirrors and blinders, diverting man from the sense of Being. Americanism remained unmatchable in endowing the ontological difference with an intrinsically powerful anthropomorphic and ever catchy popular meaning. The German spirit, as embodied in the German language, became the redemptive response to Americanizing Ruinanz. Germany's double vocation of politics and metaphysics required it to confront its identical-twin antagonists by ting fire with fire: the concerted total mobilization of National Socialism (and allied European fascist movements) were required to counter the enveloping technological mania of Americanism and Bolshevism.
Heidegger continued to portray contemporary developments in the later 1930s entirely in terms of his primordial "ground-category" of Ruinanz, which was now protracted not only beyond "childish" optimism and pessimism but beyond any residual element of human recognition or recollection whatsoever. The "falling away" from true spirit culminating in the modern age degenerated into the uniform, standardized mass mind and mass existence of the twentieth century as institutionalized in the interchangeable Molochs of Americanism and Bolshevism.
In his summer 1936 course on Schelling given several months before formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, Heidegger held out both Mussolini and Hitler as having "learned from Nietzsche" and as having begun a "countermovement to nihilism." Democracy represented not "freedom" but a kind of cultural death: "Europe tries to cling to 'democracy' and will not admit that this 'democracy' will be Europe's historical death. For democracy is, as Nietzsche clearly saw, only a kind of nihilism." 32 In terms again redolent of Max Weber's famous Munich address, Heidegger went on to pinpoint the problem of the universities and their conception of science, "We have long since slipped into the most sterile Americanism, according to whose principles the truth is merely the successful and everything else is 'speculation,' that is, 'irrelevant dreaming'" (G, 45:54-5).
Perhaps heeding his own call to "courage for the absolute," Heidegger also ventured some cautiously veiled reproofs of the dogmatic rigidity and racialist delusions of National Socialism. (He was under Gestapo surveillance at the time.) But at the same time he continued to denounce Americanism in terms far more damning than those of Nazi officialdom, which was at this critical juncture still hoping to preserve American neutrality by dampening precisely such propagandistic diatribes. Heidegger began to hint gingerly that all mundane "isms" and discrete worldviews were fated to resolve into the same fundamental, twisted transformative will-to-power intrinsic to modernity. Whatever signs of doubt about Nazism one can find in Heidegger in this period, they remain entirely of a piece with his much more adamantly forthright opposition, indeed "total" resistance, to the Ruinanz that was most fully evident (but not necessarily intellectually "reflected") in what he never stopped calling Americanism. Heidegger's critique of Nazism consisted of reassigning it from the role of sole practical redeemer to one of partaking vaguely in the same Ruinanz as the totalizing destiny of Americanism.
In the recently much-studied Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger's censure of Nazi science and its racialist mania centered not on its overtly inhuman values but on its deeper, unrecognized Americanism of technological power over things and persons: "The 'folk-based' 'organization' of science moves on the same path as the 'American,' and the question is simply which side will most quickly and fully have at its disposal the greatest force and means" (G, 65:149). 33 Heidegger's erstwhile effort to "lead the leader" resolved itself into understanding Nazism "better than it understood itself," resolving it into a latter-day variant of power-besotted anthropomorphism. He thereby assigned "functioning" or "operational" Nazism to the sprawling camp of modern civilization and its core dynamic of "unlimited" Americanism. What had formerly recommended itself as National Socialist "rescue" was being co-opted (from the standpoint of Being) into the pan-Ruinanz of Americanism.
In "The Age of the World Picture" of 1938, Heidegger again singled out Americanism by way of a discussion of the disproportion between "man's measure" (which must always remain anthropocentric) and "the gigantic" (which manifests both the hypertrophy of the man-made but also in some oblique, awestruck way the vestiges of Being itself). He underscored the inevitable failure of purely quantitative means to comprehend the staggering quality of the gigantic. A new note of ironic metareflection resounded in several key passages. Heidegger seemed to press the issue of Americanism beyond the childish and churlish level of popular understanding by using the customary term with the caveat of distancing quotation marks, "We do not think at all, if we believe we have explained this phenomenon of the gigantic with the catchword 'Americanism.'" 34 The new note of irony did not, however, invalidate the notion of Americanism as the uniquely proper name for the dynamic propelling the world to total Ruinanz; rather this new typographical gesture of deeper self-consciousness served to underscore the claim that Being remained the real issue at stake. An appendix to the lecture elaborated on this passage in an even more thought-provoking way:
"Americanism" is itself something European. It is an as-yet uncomprehended variety of the gigantic, and the gigantic itself is still inchoate, still not yet capable of being understood as the product of the full and complete metaphysical essence of modernity. The American interpretation of Americanism by means of pragmatism still remains outside the metaphysical realm. 35
Just as the immanent self-understanding of Nazism and Communism missed the mark, so the immanent or "inside" understanding of Americanism in its own practical terms was destined to remain a misunderstanding that necessarily missed Being.
As elsewhere, Heidegger plays here upon a seeming paradox in order to provoke deeper thinking. The passage leaves unclear whether the European character of Americanism concerns the actual practical dynamic of Ruinanz itself, which he is presumably trying to avert (or deflect), or its proper metaphyscial understanding by Europeans, which he is presumably trying to promote. The new note of deeper reflection suggests that Americanization could no longer be regarded as something alien, encroaching from afar, but rather should be seen as a process, now relocated by reflection, at the very core of Europe's essence. So relocated by deeper reflection, Americanism would serve to lead Europeans back to Being and out of their Babylonian captivity in civilizational "progress" and the commodious thing-world of instrumental functionality.
After the outbreak of war in 1939 and amid the escalating maelstrom of human and inhuman events, Heidegger continued to present all history as the ontological encounter of Being versus (but also Being as) Ruinanz; the destiny of human beings seemed rather beside the point. At the same time, however, he continued in public lectures to couch the ontic stakes of the struggle in terms of actual specific events and clearly designated adversaries. Human beings and their collective groupings served as unknowing and unwilling vessels of ontological disclosure; nations became emanations of Being. Thus, the defeat of France in June 1940 fulfilled a "mysterious law of history" whereby the culture that nourished Descartes was crushed by a people, the Germans, who have pressed the "machine economy" to its utmost but who at the same time miraculously remain "most spiritual." As both the fulfillment and dialectical overcoming of Western tradition, Heidegger invoked the notion of total mobilization borrowed from the maniacal pan-productionism of Ernst Jünger's The Worker: "only the superman is capable of an unconditional 'machine economy' and vice versa: the one needs the other in order to establish an unconditional domination over the earth" (G, 48:205). 36
As the war against Britain shifted to the "gigantic" war upon Russia, Heidegger identified the redemption of Being with Europe as a whole becoming fully German in spirit. For its own authentic well-being and the sake of Being, Europe must cast its collective existential "decision" for German spiritual culture. This conjoined Euro-German destiny entailed doing battle not only against the Bolshevik East but against the most advanced civilization of the West. With American entry into the war in December 1941, Heidegger removed the hedging quotation marks around Americanism; active battle was called for by world destiny, not reflective or ironical problematization. At this critical juncture, Germany, as the homeland of spirit, must purify itself and stand fast against its own "inner America." Heidegger warned expressly against a peculiar German susceptibility to inner, self-inflicted Americanization as the worst form of craven cultural capitulation, "Unfortunately for itself, the surrender of German being to Americanism goes so far at times that Germans are ashamed that their people was once called 'the people of poets and thinkers'" (G, 52:134).
In the Hölderlin lectures of summer semester 1942--several months after America's entry into World War II but prior to the decisive battle of Stalingrad--Heidegger restated the ontological difference between Being and beings by insisting that such a "question of questions" remained entirely at odds with mankind's worldly concerns, measures, values, categories, events, and self-centered "plans." Now even metaphysics itself ceased for Heidegger to be a meaningful response, or even a revealing clue, to the loss of Being. Western metaphysics no longer red as Gegenruinanz but rather as a veiled auxiliary of pan-technology; Western metaphysics resolved itself into "proto-Americanism" raised to a higher power. What had been "total mobilization" was now given over to Heidegger's radical program of total deconstruction (Destruktion or Abbau). The whole edifice of Western thought had to be entirely "undone" to make way for the first and last things: now only poetic language was deemed to offer a fragile "clearing" or "hospice" for Being. Actual ruination remained the only proper homeopathic means of Gegenruinanz.
The war in Heidegger's rendering proceeded in a hybrid manner--partly as the Clausewitzian "extension of politics by other means" but also as a paradoxical kind of total mobilization of poetic language by its own means, redirecting language against its own inertial Ruinanz into all-too-worldly, reified uses. Heidegger's position echoed that of Rilke and the followers of Stefan George, whose motto was "Language is the innermost bastion of the spirit in a world of things." 37 At this same time, efficacious "means" in the sense of worldly aims were becoming gravely compromised for Heidegger, as they all conspired to occlude Being. The spiritless tide of Americanism, as the hypertrophied essence of the West, was bent upon the destruction of any vestigial hospice of Being. Americanism remained bent upon besting all its variants before completing the obliteration of the homeland of Being itself. Hölderlin's "homesickness" was taken to portend the obliteration of the German homeland and of all homelands of "rooted" cultures and peoples. Heidegger's new ontology of poetic refuge--however radical its turn from power-politics or will-to-power toward poetry--was still ideologically consonant with Nazi New Order Europe. Heidegger warned with a tone of dire emergency and of hope against all odds:
Today we know that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has decided to destroy Europe, and that means the homeland, and that means the incipient origin of the West. What is origin is indestructible. The entry of America into this planetary war is not the entrance into history, but is always already the final American act of American history-lessness and self-destruction [G, 53:68].
In perhaps the most surprising of his many convoluted turns, Heidegger asserted in 1942 that Bolshevism was merely a derivative offshoot of Americanism; the more advanced and "boundless" Western pincer had already subsumed its Eastern counterpart in preparation for engulfing Germany and all Europe:
This primacy of quantity is itself a quality, an essential mode, that of measureless [Masslosigkeit]. This is the principle of that which we call Americanism; Bolshevism is only a variant [Abart] of Americanism. This is the truly dangerous form of the measureless, because it appears in the form of democratic citizenship, mixed with Christianity--and all of this in an atmosphere of pronounced history-lessness [G, 53:86].
Language, like human Dasein itself, harbored the latent potential for both the greatest promise of homecoming and the greatest danger of ruination. This deep duplicity of language was evidenced in the fact that modern Germans could "say" German words but really "speak" American meanings. 38
Shifting away from the Western front, Heidegger instanced Japan as Germany's equally hard-pressed far-Eastern ally that was also waging battle against ruination through American-style civilization. There, too, language could be more dangerous and devastating than man-made bombs falling on ancestral homelands. These bombs showed the sudden, visible horror of the Ruinanz of all Being when Being is deployed instrumentally in man-made systems and categories. There remained, however, an even more essential danger: the final Ruinanz of language itself as venerable hospice of Being: "We [Germans], like the Japanese, learn the English-American language. This has its own technical-practical necessity that no one in their right mind would question. The question remains whether beyond the utility of such language capacities, we also recognize their essential danger" (G, 53:80).
As the house of Being, language showed a double tendency and double meaning, akin to the German homeland in its precarious middle position [Mittellage]. Deprived of its "useless" poetic use, language can be deployed to serve the world of pragmatic-practical "business" and "distraction," especially when language becomes shackled to the alien forms of quantity, number, and commensuration. Echoing Hegel, Goethe, and other German thinkers contra numeros, Heidegger insisted that sheer quantity had assumed a unique quality all its own--a fundamental condition of modern life that obtruded everything genuinely qualitative. In the Contributions, Heidegger dilated on the superhuman scale of this quintessentially modern Ruinanz, "What transformations are taking place [within the industrial economy]? Manipulation and business. The big number, the gigantic [das Riesige], sheer spatial extension, and growing superficiality and hollowness. The inevitable fall into kitsch and the inauthentic" (G, 65:392). In its anthropomorphic ambition to "make" history entirely in the human image as "things for disposal," Americanism forfeited any trace of the "being" of authentic history, culture, and nature: "Nature is history-less. [But] Americanism is history-less and therefore catastrophic in a way that nature itself could never possibly be" (G, 53:179).
In the Heraclitus lectures of 1943, delivered during and after Stalingrad and after Goebbels's call for total war, Heidegger juxtaposed the climactic catastrophe of current events with the consoling serenity of a continuing German destiny in Being projected far beyond the fray of current history. Trumping the Americanism he despised, Heidegger could find consolation in an alternative or counterhistory-lessness of a time-being of postmodernity and even a kingdom come of posthumanity. If Germany's self-appointed National Socialist mission in the world was ending in utter destruction, her surpassing destiny beyond this "all-too-worldly" world of worldviews was not thereby finished. In the dire winter of 1944, Heidegger wrote of opportunity vested in calamity, of reversal implicit in Ruinanz,: "Decline is not the same as death. Every decline remains secure within the ascent." 39 Heidegger's famed ontological difference provided the primordial engine for an oddly paradoxical kind of "progress" after all, not in the banal, anthropocentric American sense but rather in a superhuman "progress beyond progress."
While expressing these rarified superhuman hopes, Heidegger was already looking beyond the physical destruction of Germany to an even greater danger: the impending planetary Ruinanz that refused to recognize itself as such. For Heidegger, the darkest night was arriving en masse as "enlightenment," reeducation, and the prospect of further Americanization. The world had fallen so far into Ruinanz as "the absolute humanization of all Being" that any alternative to mankind's narcissism was precluded. Indeed, the grand tradition of Western metaphysics was henceforth the deepest problem rather than any kind of possible solution: "metaphysics is anthropomorphism--the formation and apprehension of the world according to man's image." 40
With French occupation of southwestern Germany, Heidegger fell under a partial denazification ban from 1945 to 1951. He was forbidden to teach at the university level but not forbidden to publish or to lecture. During the ban from 1945 to 1951, Heidegger continued his turnings and re-turnings--backward again to Greco-Germanic origins but also outward toward French and Eastern thought while deepening his reflection upon the Western tradition. His turn toward the East included reading and attempting to translate Lao Tsu. As West German society of the Wirtschaftswunder was said by many critics to be lapsing more and more into Americanization (indeed, becoming "more American than America"), Heidegger took up his "homely dwelling" in steadfastly regional, Alemmanic folk culture. 41 He took solace from and pride in the fact that he was becoming as deeply interesting to the French and the Japanese as he was embarrassing to the Germans--and anathema to the Anglo-Americans. His reputation, at low ebb at home, soared abroad.
Heidegger's exegesis of mankind and its anthropomorphic "systems" and "centrisms" always resolved itself simultaneously into a gnosis of Being and a diagnosis of Americanism; the two were inextricably entangled and mutually dependent. His notion of Being remained so altogether "different," so ex-centric and ec-static, yet so relentlessly all-encompassing and beyond human concerns as to permit staggering conceptual equivalences pitched far beyond the categories and values of any mere "worldview," whether Americanism, Communism, positivism, or other variants of humanism. Heidegger insisted that Americanism belonged alongside Bolshevism, Communism, and National Socialism as variants of collectivist "massification," "You can also say Americanism in this regard. It is exactly the same thing." 42 The Ruinanz of Being remained the implacable outcome of mankind's modern way of thinking even more than of its ways of doing, having, and existing.
Heidegger's final testament came in the famous Spiegel interview of 1966, which was not published until ten years later, on 31 May 1976 (four days after his death) under the telling title "Only a God Can Save Us." The title was especially revealing in light of his apothegm that modern man remains "too late for the gods and too early for Being." For this "final Heidegger," mankind has become quite beside the point while still fancying itself to be the only point. It may at first seem incongruous that Heidegger chose the allegedly most Americanized magazine of German popular opinion in which to leave his final message, but in a sense his entire homeopathic counterlogic of Gegenruinanz required such a "mass" forum. Heidegger's interviewers, publisher Rudolf Augstein and his associate Georg Wolff, assumed the role of common citizens, who, as quasi-devil's advocates, tried to wrest some satisfaction from the "miracles" of German recovery and the fact that in the present Federal Republic "everything is functioning." But for Heidegger, of course (i.e. the "of course" of the logic of Ruinanz), that condition was the very essence of the most profound problem. In modernity, sheer functioning has displaced wondering and reflective thinking. Ruinanz has run its disastrous course, with the expected losses: practicality precludes profundity, efficacy eliminates epiphany, and mastery dispels mystery. The ever-salient, self-reconstituting term Americanism cropped up obliquely but crucially as the two interviewers pressed Heidegger further on his notorious reaffirmation of "the inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism as residing in "the encounter between technicity on the planetary level and modern man" (G, 40:208). The Spiegel interviewers asked Heidegger if he included the Communist movement among those who misunderstood the meaning of technology. He answered, "Yes, definitely--as determined by global technology." The interviewers then added: "Americanism also?" Heidegger answered, "Yes, I would say that too. Meanwhile, the last thirty years it should have become clearer that the global movement of modern technology is a force whose scope in determining history can scarcely be overestimated" ("OG," 104). The "all-encompassing breadth of meaning" that his interviewers gently challenged in Heidegger's promiscuous use of the habitual term nihilism actually applied far more aptly to his reflexive use of Americanism--especially as nihilism and Americanism stood for the same implacable thing-ification of Being. In the Spiegel interview, the ever-salient term no longer carried the ironically questioning quotation marks that Heidegger had seen fit to apply thirty years before, when, paradoxically, he still believed there was some possibility of altering the course of Ruinanz.
Later in this final interview, Heidegger returned to the theme of American ways of thinking and alluded briefly to an exceptional element within the otherwise desolate American scene:
I see the task of thought precisely in this, that within its own limits, it helps man as such achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity. National Socialism did indeed go in this direction. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years.
The interviewers asked, "Do the Americans today have this explicit relationship?" Heidegger replied,
They do not have it either. They are still caught up in a thought that, under the guise of pragmatism, facilitates the technical operation and manipulation of things, but at the same time blocks the way to reflection upon the genuine nature of modern technicity. At the same time, here and there in the USA attempts are being made to become free from pragmatic-positivistic thinking. ["OG," 111]
One can only wonder what Heidegger meant in this coyly tantalizing reference; most likely it referred to the growing interest in phenomenological, existential, and hermeneutical thinking, most notably including his own body of writings. Given his ontological catch-22 that mankind's every effort at transcendence has worked ultimately to reinforce its servitude to technology, it seems implausible to find any redeeming element in American efforts at "becoming free" by way of self-criticism. Would not the American self-critique of Americanism remain wholly within the terms of Americanism, just as Heidegger had shown ad infinitum that the Western critique of Western thinking remained, ultimately, within that thinking and fell short of Being? In the final analysis, Heidegger's unremitting use of Americanism as "know-how" and "instrumental ratio" remained the necessary polar antithesis to his vision of Being. Increasingly, Heidegger turned far "back" in time but also "beyond" the Western tradition for the rescuing power from the East. In the Spiegel interview, he looked eastward after glimpsing only the faintest trace of hope from America: "And who of us would be in a position to decide whether or not one day in Russia or China very old traditions of 'thought' may awaken that will help make possible for man a free relationship to the technical world?" ("OG," 111)
The same deep thinker who aspired to dehabitualize and to de-cliché Being with successive radical turnings--first of thinking, then of acting and willing, and then of un-willing--wound up harping on one of the most hackneyed stereotypes and shopworn rhetorical tropes of modern times. Excepting one or two elliptical passages, Heidegger did not question or deconstruct this rampant master-cliché; rather, he hypostatized and totalized it into a veritable planetary mode of un-Being--the most palpable, empirical-historical form of man's fateful Ruinanz. Heidegger's polemic against Americanism was an integral and unwavering element of his critique of modernity, humanism, and the whole Western intellectual tradition. Throughout his thinking and rethinking, Americanism represented the "totalization" or absolutization of anthropocentric "will to will" that, in the cause of mastery over all beings and things, produced only Ruinanz.
In his deposition in 1945 to French military authorities, who were vetting him for the right to teach, Heidegger declared with disarming candor, "Nietzsche did me in" ("Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht"). 43 Nowhere did Nietzsche, whom Heidegger designated as "the first of the last metaphysicians," strike closer to Heidegger's radical way of "thinking through Being" than in the mordant observation: "What philosophers are in the habit of doing is adopting a popular prejudice and exaggerating it." Heidegger adopted and exaggerated Americanism as the arch-avatar of all modern deformations of Being and of being human; it remained his habitual incantatory mantra for modernity. He used it so massively and so promiscuously, however, that he came close to using it up altogether--ironically, somewhat akin to the historical fate of Being itself, "done in" by its own implacable Ruinanz.
Michael Ermarth teaches modern European intellectual history and German history at Dartmouth College. He has published on Wilhelm Dilthey, Karl Jaspers, historicism, and hermeneutics. He is currently completing a two-volume study entitled Germany's Inner America: Americanization, Counter-Americanism, and Transmodernity in the Twentieth Century.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), 25.
2. Martin Heidegger-Elisabeth Blochmann Briefwechsel, 1918-1969, ed. J. Storck (Marbach: Schiller-Archiv, 1989), 46; hereafter abbreviated MH-EB.
3. Karen Harries, introduction to Günter Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), xi. Lutz Niethammer avers, "he increasingly appears as the foster-father of postmodernity" (Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? [New York: Verso, 1992], 97, n. 79); see also Richard Palmer, "The Postmodernity of Heidegger," Boundary 2, 4 (winter 1976): 411-32.
4. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 53. For a readable intellectual-biographical study, see Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). More strictly ontological is Herman Philipse, Heidegger's Philosophy of Being: A Critical Introduction. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); see also James Ceaser, "Katastrophenhaft: Martin Heidegger's America," chap. 8 in Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 187-213.
5. See Niethammer, Posthistoire, for these fascinating and dense affiliations.
6. See Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism" , and "The Question Concerning Technology" , in Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 193-242 and 287-317; and idem, Holzwege, 5th ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1972), 78ff.
7. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. A. Blunden (New York: Basic Books 1993), 295. Americanism is hardly the only stereotype in his thought, but it is the only stereotype that did not undergo radical transformation in the course of his development. Karl Löwith, a former student who broke with his teacher, has offered a concise summation of this tortuous development: "A Jesuit by education, he becomes a Protestant through indignation; a scholastic dogmaticist by training, he became an existential pragmatist through experience; a theologian by tradition, he became an atheist in his research, a renegade to his tradition cloaked in the mantle of its historian" (Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 [Frankfurt a.M: Metzler, 1989], 45).
8. See Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Another thoughtful treatment is Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). The wider German philosophical context of the interwar years is the emphasis of Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
9.  Somewhere between Heidegger and Brecht, a recent British reporter observes, "It is the universality of American culture that means we understand it even when we don't know what it means" (Financial Times, 9-10 March 1996).
10. Martin Heidegger, review of Autorität und Freiheit, by Friedrich Wilhelm Forster, Der Akademiker (May 1910); quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 60. Ernst Nolte, Heidegger's student and recent interpreter, has said, "The 'anti-modernism' that his theological teacher Carl Braig articulated in a book of 1911 remained the most lasting component of Heidegger's thought." (Nolte, Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken [Berlin: Propyläen, 1992], 19). Americanism was a discrete, controversial doctrinal position condemned by the Vatican at the turn of the century. See Otto Pöggeler, "Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Politics," in Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds., The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 119; see, more generally, Oskar Köhler, Bewusstseinsstörungen im Katholizismus (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Knecht, 1972).
11. Martin Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1983), 1ff.
12. See Martin Heidegger, "Die Ruinanz," in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1976), 61:131-53; hereafter abbreviated G. Heidegger insisted that "the whither of Ruinanz is nothingness" (Das Wohin der Ruinanz: das Nichts) but that authentic philosophical thinking also posed the possibility of a potential "counterruination" (Gegenruinanz) (G, 61:143, 153). On the term and its vastly encompassing valences, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 114, 242, 490, 507; see also Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999), 65, 144.
13. Heidegger's Ruinanz continued to carry the peculiarly dual sense of an unnoticed, meaning-constituting intentionality (as the phenomenological "sense of being" (Seinssinn) of Aristotle, Brentano, and Husserl) as well as the "dynamic" sense of ever more progressive decadence in Nietzsche's "degenerence" (Degenereszenz); see Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, ed. A. Baumler (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1964), 78:229. Thus, Ruinanz entails the stupefying paradox that the mind's intentionality is directed toward a thingness that is also nothingness. But the main meaning of the onto-historical process remains that Being becomes lost in the mind's own operations: man's being occludes Being itself.
14. Other protean, pejorative terms coined in this period for man's way of being in the world included "Darbung" (emptying), "Larvanz" (masking), as well as "Verfallenheit" (fallenness). See Nolte, Heidegger, 57-8. Nolte observes acutely, "In this sense one can also say that [for Heidegger] man's way of Being-in-the world means precisely Being-in-the-Untruth" (Nolte, Heidegger, 77).
15. See Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); and Klemens von Klemperer, Germany's New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).
16. Rainer Maria Rilke to Witold Hulewicz, 13 November 1925, Briefe in Zwei Bänden (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1950), 2:376-7; quoted in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 130. Löwith has observed that "certain sentences from Rilke's letters . . . could easily serve as guiding threads to the intellectual achievement of Heidegger's oeuvre" (Löwith, "The Political Implications of Heidegger's Existentialism," in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993], 170).
17. Max Weber, "Science as Vocation," in H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 131.
18. Rudolf Kayser, "Amerikanismus," in Vossische Zeitung 27 September 1925; quoted in Anton Kaes, ed., Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur, 1918-33 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), 265.
19. For a thorough treatment of the context of the work, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time.
20. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 165. See also the original in Sein und Zeit, 7th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953), 127. Using language itself as his metametaphor, Nietzsche had called this process of massification "the attrition of the plural against the singular" (Nietzsche, "Morgenröte," in Sämtliche Werke, 73:128).
21. Martin Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," in Basic Writings, 135.
22. Martin Heidegger to Elisabeth Blochman, 22 June 1932, MH-EB, 46.
23. Martin Heidegger to Elisabath Blochman, 30 March 1933, MH-EB, 52ff, 60.
24. See Otto Pöggeler, "Den Führer führen? Heidegger und kein Ende," Philosophische Rundschau 32 : 26-67; see also "Führer der Führer," Der Spiegel 34 , 164-9.
25. Martin Heidegger, "Address of 3 November 1933," quoted in "Political Texts 1933-34," in Controversy, 47.
26. Martin Heidegger, "Address of 11 November 1933," in Controversy, 52.
27. Heidegger to Wolf; quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 283.
28. The chief critics were Ernst Krieck, Erich Jaensch, and Arthur Rosenberg; the main lines of attack and the quotation are recorded in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 290. Heidegger discussed these attacks in the final Spiegel interview; see "Only a God Can Save Us," in Controversy, 102; hereafter abbreviated "OG."
29. Martin Heidegger, "Report of 28 August 1934," quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 259. Heidegger's intent here may have been twofold: to use the specter of Americanization as a means of insulating the university from further Nazification.
30. Martin Heidegger, "Report on Eduard Baumgarten," quoted in Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. J. Rockmore and T. Margolis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 210. The report is reprinted in H. Becker, H.-J. Dahms, and C. Wegeler, eds., Die Universität Göttingen under dem Nazionalsozialismus (Munich: K. Sauer, 1987), 179ff.
31. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor, 1961), 38-9.
32. Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1988), 40-2.
33. Heidegger also found in Nazism a "popularization" of the people as "flat" as that in America or the Soviet Union (G, 65:496). Alexander Schwan insists that Heidegger came, astonishingly and perversely, to understand Nazism as "radical liberalism." See Schwan, "Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie and Politics," in K. Harries and C. Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994), 76ff.
34. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 135.
35. Ibid., 153.
36. Only the most radical implementation of total mobilization could disclose underlying Being. Jünger had instanced the United States' mobilization in 1917 as the closest approximation of "rigorous" total mobilization in his sense. See Jünger, Der Arbeiter (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 298ff.
37. See Friedrich Gundolf, George (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), 1.
38. "Daher kann es sein dass wir 'deutsch' sprechen und doch ganz 'amerikanisch' reden" (G, 53:80). In the Spiegel interview, Heidegger would insist on the "terrible consequences" not of doctrines of racial and national purity but rather those of linguistic-cultural translatability, "We need to think of the terrible consequences brought on us and still felt in our own days that derive from translating Greek thought into Roman Latin" (Heidegger, quoted "OG," 113).
39. Heidegger, originally quoted in Georg Picht, "Die Macht des Denkens," in Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger, ed. Günther Neske (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 204ff; quoted in Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, 281.
40. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 4:83.
41. On West German super-Americanization, see Ralph Willett, The Americanization of Germany, 1945-1949 (London: Routledge, 1989); and Michael Ermarth, ed., America and the Shaping of German Society (Providence, R.I.: Berg Publishers, 1993).
42. Martin Heidegger, "Was ist eine Akademie? Tonbandprotokoll von Vortrag und Diskussion in der Abteilung Bildende Kunst, 2 Oktober 1961," in Christine Fischer-Dafoy, ed., . . . . und die Vergangenheit sitzt immer mit am Tisch: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Akademie der Künste (West)--1945/1954 bis 1993 (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1997), 258.
43. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 91-7.
If the title of this essay were "Love rhymes with shove.," it would probably make us smile. One reason would be that the second rhyme word is unexpected: we would be likely to predict a more conventional, decorous choice of echo for love in dove or above. At the same time, love:shove is a familiar type of bathetic rhyme designed to raise a smile in all sorts of humorous poetry, where absurd pairings of like-sounding words are the traditional vehicle for expressing what W. H. Auden called "comic contradiction." 1 By contrast, love:of does not belong to a category of rhyme we would find in poetry we are typically used to. Such combinations virtually never appear in English poetry except in rare humorous verses until the nineteenth century, and even then they were seldom used and only for comic effect or for a formal reason such as to encourage enjambment. Rhymes like love:of have signifying possibilities that were first taken seriously in the early twentieth century because they satisfied the intentions of the modernist aesthetic.
The premise of this discussion is that "Love rhymes with of." works in unique ways. Everyone who hears that title laughs, not only because they had not thought of the rhyme before but because the paired words are mismatched in a different, unfamiliar, and unsettling way from either love:dove or love:shove. Although the statement "Love rhymes with of." is instantly recognizable as true, it is true in a way hard to know how to think about; it is outside our everyday patterns of thought and language. How it comes to have these incongruent effects is both a conceptual and a historical question that this essay will explore.
One clear signal the title gives is that what follows will be about poetry and not prose, even though "Love rhymes with of." is a prose sentence that uses a rhyme to prove its statement. We tend to associate rhyme with poetry as distinct from prose because we do not, except in extraordinary instances, hear or think of like-sounding words in prose speech or writing as rhymes: for instance in familiar phrases like the love of God or the god of love. The reason for this difference in response is that prose is not systematically arranged to emphasize similarity of final sounds by their accent and syntactical position, the way almost all rhymed poetry in English was structured roughly from Chaucer to Tennyson.
Simply, rhyme in English poetry--described by T. V. F. Brogan as "historically its single most consistent characteristic"--is the bringing together into related positions in the verse of words that are partially like in sound but differ in meaning. 2 It is a specialized form of repetition since the linked words are not identical. Linguists describe the relationship between words that rhyme by various terms, among them: consequence, consonance, convergence, equivalence, parallelism, symmetry. Rhyme works rhetorically like a simile because both kinds of verbal patterning make a comparison in which perceived likeness at the same time calls attention to difference. In the paradigmatic instance of simile, Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, the beloved is like a summer's day and also is not. Structurally, a rhyme word placed at the end of the line works to mark off the line as a unit while binding together different lines by their like end sound. The prominence granted by their final position strengthens the double power of such rhymes to liken and distinguish, as does the traditional practice, recommended in theory until the nineteenth century, of having the metrical accent fall on the final syllable. End rhymes, empowered by their position to engage the reader most actively in recognizing both likeness and difference, are the subject of this discussion.
"It is in the nature of rhyme to bring differences together and to reveal the differences in likeness," according to Jurij Lotman's definition, but the balance of the comparing and distinguishing effects of rhyme can tilt in either direction between pairs of words, between whole poems, or phases of an author's work. 3 The greater emphasis of poets on the closeness or distance between rhyme pairs has varied within the same period--particularly with respect to different genres--and from one period to another. Even so, there are signs that there has been a growing interest among poets writing in English over more than five centuries in widening the phonetic, structural, semantic, and grammatical gaps between words linked by resemblance of sound.
The discussion here proposes that the most radical phase of this history, the practice revealing the most fundamental transformation of attitudes toward the ordering of thought in the language of rhymed poetry, is the acceptance by poets in the twentieth century of rhymes like love:of. Their common appearance is witness to wide recognition of truth in the paradoxical proposition that there are legitimate conceptual grounds for such agrammatical rhymes in spite of their inherent conceptual incompatibility.
Every reformation in English poetry has involved shifts in attitudes toward rhyming, in the practices of it, and in the rules for its proper conduct. A starting point for looking at this slow and unsteady movement is in the sixteenth century. Then English writers--some of them theorists as well as practitioners of rhyme--first explored the state of their language as it was emerging from what Sir Philip Sidney called "that mistie time" of the greatest poet England had yet boasted, Chaucer. 4 The challenge these writers faced was to find support for their argument that poetry in English could achieve its own excellence without the inflectional grammar that had supported the unrhymed system of ancient verse and had left traces in the rhymed poetry of Chaucer and his followers. Chaucer himself had long ago complained of a "skarsete" of rhymes in the English he had to work with. 5
Inevitably, the sixteenth-century defenders of rhyme turned to the new mode of endings that George Puttenham called "the cheife grace of our vulgar Poesie," which "consisteth in the Symphonie," a synonym for rhyme that meant at once likeness of sound and metrical accent in particular, agreement or harmony in general. 6 The "most auncient" vocabulary from "our naturall Saxon English" with its wealth of monosyllables supplied a high proportion of words with like sounds that could substitute for inflectional endings. They were preferred for end rhymes over words of more than one syllable because, as Puttenham said, the "monosillables of our English Saxons . . . do naturally and indifferently receive any accent." 7 This meant that at the end of the line they accommodated themselves inevitably to the pattern of masculine rhyme, the norm accepted in English poetry for most of its history.
Rhyme, scorned by classicists as new-fangled ornamentation--Thomas Campion called it "childish titillation"--was defended on the grounds of its fidelity to the structure of the English language and to its "most auncient English" vocabulary. 8 George Gascoigne, in the earliest treatise on the making of English verse in rhyme, instructed poets that "the more monasyllables that you vse the truer Englishman you shall seeme." 9 Even though the argument for the naturalness of rhyme was made for its expedience, it was predicated on ways of thinking so widely and unquestioningly taken for granted, it seems, that there was no need to bring them to the surface in these earliest defenses of rhyme.
When Elizabethan writers recommended specifically monosyllables handed down from "naturall Saxon English," they were essentially referring, without having to say so, to nouns. Nouns made up a vast proportion of the prized monosyllabic end rhymes, verbs a lesser share, adjectives (still considered, as in Latin, to be a species of noun) and adverbs together making up a very much smaller number than verbs. 10 Since the position of end rhymes gives them a special prominence, their place would belong naturally to nouns and verbs, which are the parts of speech that chiefly determine the structure and carry the burden of meaning in a sentence, where for those reasons they are normally stressed.
Nouns that name what we can see and touch are the first words we are taught as infants. They are the grammatical guides that help us most to get along in the world, as anyone knows who has traveled in a foreign country with only the most rudimentary knowledge of its language. Nouns are the first category to be explained in any treatise on English grammar, reflecting a hierarchical ordering of parts of speech that goes back to antiquity. In the earliest English rhyming dictionary of 1570 the only classes included are, in this order, nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs. 11
Nouns and verbs of Saxon origin in particular tend to be the names for common things and events that make up ordinary life. (Many foreign nouns were imported in the sixteenth century to supply English with a vocabulary of terms for abstract concepts it had no words for.) Because these things and events are part of everyday experience, the nouns and verbs for expressing them were themselves recognizable realities. Their solid familiarity gave them precedence over less essential words belonging to other parts of speech, so that the hierarchical structure of English grammar supported the use in poetry of rhymes that contribute most to the making of "order and forme," which Samuel Daniel in "A Defense of Ryme" claimed to be "pleasing to Nature." 12
The monosyllables paired in rhymes usually belonged to the same part of speech, so they had the same grammatical meaning. That agreement meant they filled the same function in structuring the mind's understanding of order in the world. In sixteenth-century terms, pairing like grammatical parts in rhyme induced the "certaintie" and "clozes" that Daniel believed "the diuine power of the spirit" imposed on the poet's imagination to bring about harmony. 13 Grammatical agreement was an important instrument in the preferred aesthetic of rhyming, in concert with other agreements in sound, in syllabic structure, in metrical accent, and in closeness of lexical meaning or what Roman Jakobson called "semantic propinquity" (using dove:love as an example). 14
Sequences that bind their member rhymes together by their likeness in multiple features have threaded their recognizable way through English poetry at least since the sixteenth century: God:rod, breath:death, womb:tomb, lust:dust, tears:fears, sleep:keep, name:fame, prime:time, rhyme:chime, trees:breeze, heart (in the sixteenth century often spelled hart): part:smart:dart. The series love:prove:move, pronounced alike at least into the eighteenth century (in poems by Pope, Gay, and Prior among others) has gone on being a useful formula, perhaps because historically love has been pointed out as a famously difficult word to find rhymes for. 15 As recently as 1970, G. S. Fraser used it as his example in a discussion of the poverty of rhymes in English by comparison with languages rich in words with like endings: "Amore in Italian rhymes with cuore, but love in English perfectly only with the undignified word shove or the trivial word glove" (a conservative statement, we shall see, in the light of practice in twentieth-century poetry). 16
The first stanza of "Gascoignes good morrow" shows the focused interest and expertise of sixteenth- and earlier seventeenth-century poets in bonding like-sounding words by harmony among their various features, to create verses that might be perceived as reflecting the divinely given orders of nature and language. This was the prevailing ideal of poetry that the laws for rhymed verse first explained by Gascoigne were dedicated to fostering:
You that have spent the silent night,
In sleepe and quiet rest,
And ioye to see the cheerefull lyght
That ryseth in the East:
Now cleare your voyce, now chere your hart,
Come helpe me nowe to sing:
Each willing wight come beare a part,
To prayse the heavenly King. 17
The stanza is composed of forty-four monosyllables, five words of two syllables, and one of either two or three; the pattern of regular iambic trimeter expected of the last line makes it most likely that "heavenly" is contracted to two syllables, though since it is the most significantly charged word and is positioned in the last line, it might be allowed three.
The metrical arrangement of syllables is reinforced by the end rhymes, themselves all monosyllabic nouns except "sing," which as an infinitive works more like a noun than a verb. Beyond those syllabic and grammatical symmetries, the paired words are close to one another in lexical meaning, and not only those end words that agree in sound but also those that are acoustically unlike. That is: "night" has the same semantic orientation as "lyght" but also "rest"; "lyght" in turn is located by familiar Biblical imagery in the same semantic field as "East." The pairing of "hart" and "part" is so common in sixteenth-century poetry that their likeness in sound could persuade, as Hugh Kenner said of proverbial rhymes, "that they inhere in the workings of the normal mind"; 18 "part" also has a semantic association with "sing" in the language of religious and other ceremonies because in choral music, which the poet in this stanza invites readers "to sing," each voice is assigned its "part."
Likeness of syllabic structure, and of lexical and grammatical meanings, together with like sound, create a symphony that draws into its concert even the rhyme words that are unlike in their vowel sounds: "night," "rest," "lyght," "hart," "part" all close on the sound of t. Only the "heavenly King" demands a rhyme of His own, but one that agrees with the uninterrupted accentual pattern of masculine rhyme.
These likenesses between words linked as end rhymes were conceived as given not only in the senses that the same pairs were always at hand, expected, and the more valued for having been so often repeated as to have become proverbial truths. George Herbert, in the last two stanzas of "A true Hymne," stated or--to use his own preferred verb--copied out another understanding of rhyme as given:
He who craves all the minde,
And all the soul, and strength, and time,
If the words onely rhyme,
Justly complains, that somewhat is behinde
To make his verse, or write a hymne in kinde.
Whereas if th' heart be moved,
Although the verse be somewhat scant,
God doth supplie the want.
As when th' heart sayes (sighing to be approved)
O, could I love! and stops: God writeth, Loved. 19
Because agreements in many features of the rhymes together make the harmony in these stanzas, as they do in Gascoigne's, the form of the verses agrees closely with their sense so that form and sense themselves can be said to rhyme. Herbert's title, which could serve equally for Gascoigne's morning hymn, implies as much: to call a hymn true was to describe it as being faithful to eternal verities and exact in form.
Sixteenth- and earlier seventeenth-century prescriptions for end rhymes were based on the hierarchy of grammatical parts in English, and reflected the hierarchy of poetic kinds that the makers of the new vernacular verse promoted (probably encouraged by the examples of modern Italian and French poetry). Theorists like Puttenham condescendingly allowed scattered departures from the accepted norm of monosyllabic masculine rhyming in poems of lesser stature in the hierarchy of kinds:
And the accented sillable with all the rest vnder him make the cadence . . . but alwayes the cadence which falleth vpon the last sillable of a verse is sweetest and most commendable: that vpon the penultima more light, and not so pleasant: but falling vpon the antepenultima is most vnpleasant of all, because they make your meeter too light and triuiall, and are fitter for the Epigrammatist or Comicall Poet then for the Lyrick and Elegiack, which are accompted the sweeter Musickes. 20
This view gave poets license to vary details of their rhyming style to suit verses of different kinds. The more elevated in rank demanded rhyme pairs closest in sound and in other features that would mirror concord in the creation. The humorous kinds that treat of disorderly conduct and upset values, accidents and tricks might be served by words mismatched in form and in lexical and grammatical meanings, which would represent conflict in the human world and untrustworthiness in its language: Sidney's "love":"shove"; Spenser's "handsomly":"I"; Donne's "kinde":"blind-"/["nesse"], "away":"India," "or":"abhorre"; Jonson's "love":"Glove," "embrace":"Pythagoras," "at a":"taffeta"; Herrick's "Go on":"Predestination," "Tiffanie":"the":"Sea."
The revolution in English poetry in rapid progress by 1700 was a reordering of the hierarchy of kinds, again measured by new standards for the proper practices of rhyming. These were laid out in 1702 by Edward Bysshe in his respected treatise, The Art of English Poetry. The kind of verse Bysshe took for granted as norm and ideal was rhymed "Heroick Poetry," defined to be lines coupled by end rhymes, each line made of exactly ten syllables arranged in iambs so that the final syllable would be strongly accented. In his treatise Bysshe explained the more minute formal regulations of the new verse, and included a dictionary of "such Words only, as both for their Sence and Sound are judg'd most proper for the Rhymes of Heroick Poetry." 21
By definition the strict criteria for heroic rhyme excluded schemes of alternating end rhymes and divisions into stanzas, structures preferred by earlier poets writing in the highly ranked "Lyrick and Elegiack" kinds; in Bysshe's ranking "the Lyrick" was demoted to the same inconsiderable status as "Burlesque" (AEP, 22). The stricter rules for insuring the accent on the final syllable of the line and the closure at the end of the couplet promoted close agreement rather than difference in accent between the paired words, and since the rhymes were adjacent, their accents were sharply audible. At the same time, Bysshe's catalogue of exclusions listed rhymes that are phonetically "too perfect," which, though "allowable in the Days of Spencer and the other old Poets," are "not so now; nor can there be any Musick in one single Note" (AEP, 23). His example-- "Light":"Delight"--makes clear that the objection was specifically to pairs where not only the vowel sound but the consonant before it are acoustically alike. Still, there is a more general suggestion implicit here that though there were more and stricter criteria for proper rhyming, agreement overshadowing all differences between rhyme pairs was deliberately to be avoided in heroic couplets.
The same suggestion is implied by the silence in Bysshe's treatise and in other discussions of heroic verse about the desirability of monosyllabic rhymes, which typically come close to perfect agreement and were in large part for that reason treasured and preserved by repeated use. In "An Essay on Criticism" Pope used "Breeze":"Trees" (an instance of the "too perfect" type of "Light":"Delight") to make fun of the stock of "unvary'd Chimes. / With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes." 22 Simple boredom must account to some degree for the lack of enthusiasm for familiar, monosyllabic nouns as end rhymes; a sense of historical distance from earlier and more impoverished stages of English must also have played a part. Beyond those causes, there seems to have been at issue conceptions of the origins and nature of rhyme that differ from the sense of it as given that informed the earlier enthusiastic practice of monosyllabic end rhyming.
Four couplets into Pope's "Windsor-Forest" is a set passage that, like Gascoigne's and Herbert's stanzas, calls attention to its matching of form to sense. These lines present themselves as a deliberate model for poetry, and specifically for heroic rhyme ordered "harmoniously," "as the World" in its divinely intended form:
The Groves of Eden, vanish'd now so long,
Live in Description, and look green in Song:
These, were my Breast inspir'd with equal Flame,
Like them in Beauty, should be like in Fame.
Here Hills and Vales, the Woodland and the Plain,
Here Earth and Water seem to strive again,
Not Chaos-like together crush'd and bruis'd,
But as the World, harmoniously confus'd:
Where Order in Variety we see,
And where, tho' all things differ, all agree. 23
Like the earlier sort of poetry that Gascoigne's morning hymn represents, Pope's "Song" celebrates a natural order where parts "all agree." Here that emphasis is conveyed by adjacent masculine rhymes, closely matched in sound, anchoring the ends of lines identical in number of syllables and in positioning of accent. Agreement in these features always creates the most immediate impression of harmony. Even so, the balance toward closeness over distance in rhymes does not have the same effects in Pope's lines as in Gascoigne's. Only four of Pope's ten end words here are monosyllabic nouns, and of them only "Flame" and "Fame" are paired together. "Song" is linked in imperfect grammatical agreement with "long," while "Plain" is mismatched both grammatically and in syllabic structure with "again." The distance is not disturbing, as it deliberately is in the examples quoted earlier of unruly comic rhymes, but it does allow space for "Variety" within the measured "Order" of rhymes.
Pope's end words do not belong to the metalanguage of conventional rhyme that Gascoigne used when he joined "night" with "lyght" or "hart" with "part." These were commonplaces passed on from poem to poem so that readers could participate easily by predicting the completion of the chime, singing their part in the song. Pope selected his words from a much larger and more various vocabulary. The echo of the first paired word by the second could not be predicted in these couplets (except perhaps the perfect match of "Flame" and "Fame," used more than once in Sir John Denham's "Cooper's Hill," the model of descriptive verse imitated in "Windsor-Forest").
The introduction of variety and unexpectedness within the strict order of structure and sound in the rhymes makes readers aware of the poet's acts of choosing and bringing the end words together in these couplets. Authorial presence is more strongly felt than in Gascoigne's hymn, where the poet is a voice summoning us to join him in a choir of other voices all singing their given parts.
Of course this awareness of the poet fetching rhymes is stronger in Pope's satires, where the "uncommon," "Low," and "Miscompounded Words" allowed by Bysshe only in humorous verse widened the distances between rhymed words in lexical and grammatical meanings, as well as in syllabic structure. Still, Pope even in satires took care to avoid the most extreme form of disagreement between rhyme pairs that would result from drawing on those parts of speech Bysshe altogether outlawed as words that "ought not to end a Verse; as the Particles An, And, As, Of, The, &c" (AEP, n.p.).