Hulme-an, All Too Hulme-an: T. E. Hulme’s “Cinders” and Nietszche’s Twilight of the Idols
Theron U Schmidt



Whereas the influence of Henri Bergson on T. E. Hulme is undoubtedly of a genitive nature (in the sense of paternal), the relationship between Hulme and Friedrich Nietzsche seems to be much more of a wary dialogue, though obviously a dialogue in which only one of the parties (Hulme) is responding to the other (Nietzsche). Thus, for example, one could not say that Hulme is “Nietzschean” in the sense that one can say he is “Bergsonian,” however mistaken this latter title may be, or however limited in application it should be. However, they are acquaintances in a struggle against tradition, and though Hulme may disagree radically with the content of Nietzsche’s alternative philosophy, he seems to have learned a good deal from his form and energy that is suitable to his own project. In the formal similarities between the two, particularly in works such as Hulme’s “Cinders: A New Weltanschauung” 1 and Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer2, much is revealed about the position that the writers stake for themselves in relation to tradition and to the future; additionally, the stylistic resonances that began between these two works of literary philosophy have reverberations that continue, I think, well into the remainder of the century.
There are many disagreements between Hulme and Nietzsche’s positive assertions of a new philosophy and their formulations of new aesthetics. Indeed, this is hardly surprising given the large number of contradictions within the work of each writer. Though my chief focus here will be a stylistic and formal comparison, both these internal contradictions and the disagreements between the two writers’ weltanschauungs are worth pursuit, and I will attempt a quick summary here. Most fundamentally, Nietzsche’s philosophy of overflowing vitality and his relentless assault on cultural structures that limit the expression of vital energy is directly at odds with Hulme’s project of separating the vital from the divine and the mechanical as laid out in “Humanism and the Religious Attitude”. At least in this writings, Hulme would disagree strongly with Nietzsche’s definition of ‘peace of soul’ as “the gentle radiation of a rich animality into the moral (or religious) domain” (54). In “Cinders,” Hulme does seem to contradict his earlier stance and call for an animalistic evaluation: “We must judge the world from the status of animals, leaving out ‘Truth,’ etc.” (229). However, Hulme seems to see this as the first part of a dialectic movement, not the goal; the natural order exists for Hulme as a way of escaping the corruption and decay of the symbolic order of language. Hence on the same page he writes, “Animals are in the same state that men were before symbolic language was invented.” Though Hulme does at times echo Nietzsche’s stalwart ‘this-worldliness’ (as when he writes “Why grumble because there is no end discoverable in the world? There is no end at all except in our own constructions” [243]), there persists throughout “Cinders” an undercurrent of belief in divine possibility; near the end of the fragmentary collection, for example, Hulme writes “If all the world were destroyed and only these left.... That all the gods, all the winged words (love...) exist in them on that fluid basis [...] There is another form of space where gods, etc., do exist concretely” (243-4; the sentiment seems to me to be sincere, though the phrase “gods, etc.” leaves one to wonder). Hence, even in aesthetics, Hulme seeks a form outside human physicality (“There is only one art that moves me: architecture” [238]), while Nietzsche sees art as the potential reflection of inner human perfection (83), and architecture itself is a manifestation of purely human will to power (85).
Despite these disagreements about the role of vitality in their respective weltanschauungs, the two are united in their opposition to tradition, and in particular to liberal humanist and romantic traditions (though I think they both could be called “humanist” to some extent, omitting the qualifier “liberal”). Both Hulme and Nietzsche are fiercely opposed to any such program, though their reasons are somewhat at odds with each other; Hulme despises the corruption of language by desire, while Nietzsche is sickened by the mediocritisation of human greatness. (Even in this difference, though, the two share a shockingly similar ideological stance of the elite right, which is all the more disturbing given Hulme’s affinity with proto-fascism and Nietzsche’s eventual appropriation by the German National Socialist Party). Perhaps the sentiment which the two share most strongly is the necessity for a redemption of the world; Nietzsche writes, “The concept of ‘God’ has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence.... We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world.” (65). Similarly, Hulme’s vision of a world of cinders and chaos is that of a world that is to be transcended (presumably in a movement led by his created hero Aphra, much as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra transcends the mundaneness of his world). What is particularly provocative about their work from both a philosophical and literary perspective is that they both express a need for the redemption of language, and so their texts appear as simultaneously both a polemic and an enactment of this need. Hulme complains throughout Speculations of the failures of representative language (echoing Bergson’s critique of the distortive nature of all representational symbolisms, language included); in “Cinders,” this complaint has become an outright condemnation of “the disease of the symbolic language” (221). Nietzsche shares the complaint that language is structurally supportive of consistent errors in apprehension: language is the “perpetual advocate” of erroneous conceptions of the autonomy of will, of reason, and of being (48). For Nietzsche, too, the redemption of language is an inseparable part of his liberation of humanity: “I fear we are not going to get rid of God because we still believe in grammar...” (48). In the long section “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” Nietzsche writes, “We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. [...] We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average, medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking” (94). In this way, then, both Nietzsche’s project of ‘spiritualizing’ human activity (53) and Hulme’s project of separating the divine from the vital depend in their very structure on developing new modes of communication, and I think the formal similarities between “Cinders” and such work of Nietzsche’s as Twilight of the Idols reveal a similar -- and perhaps characteristically “Modern” -- direction taken in the impulse to remake language.
The obvious starting place for an analysis of the discourse of these two writers is their self- conscious use of aphorism. Nietzsche writes, “The aphorism, the apophthegm, in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‘eternity’ [...]” (115). His avowed reason for the use of aphorism is an economic one -- “to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book” (115) -- yet I think there is something more ideological about this form; this is not least because I think we should treat Nietzsche’s privileging of “economy” with some scepticism, given his philosophically advanced appreciation of abundance and the degree of repetition of similar arguments throughout his books (though, compared with others in the German philosophical tradition out of which he comes, there is something to be said for the conciseness of his writing). There are two ideological levels on which this form works for both Hulme and Nietzsche: one within their projects, in which the form of the aphorism exemplifies the argument for direct communication contained within it; and a more pragmatic level, in which the form works to stake out a new position of authority.
Both Hulme and Nietzsche seek a more direct form of communication, a purification of language, though they disagree radically on the nature of the contaminant:3 for Hulme, it is vitality and human interest, while for Nietzsche, it is orthodoxy and solidified ressentiment in which grammar and God as structures work together to sap the vital energy of the strong, as in the above referenced passage. There is a sense, then, that a directness of language can escape these perversions, and that a particularly efficacious form is that of aphorism or aphoristic allegory (as in Zarathustra or Aphra, Hulme’s own uncompleted version of the ubermensch parable); it is very possible that Hulme learned this technique from Nietzsche (just as it is possible that Nietzsche borrowed it from Schopenhauer). But the use of the form to break old structures of language goes much further back, and I think Hulme and Nietzsche are more likely connected by their similar appeal to this established practice. This is consistent with Hulme’s neo-classical arguments; even if this position is not directly advanced in “Cinders,” certainly some remnant of it remains in Hulme’s admonition “always seek the hard, definite, personal word” (231). Nietzsche more self-consciously reveals his classical heritage in “What I Owe to the Ancients”: “My sense of style, of the epigram as style, was awoken almost instantaneously on coming into contact with Sallust,” and his writings contain “a very serious ambition for Roman style” (116). In his admiration, Nietzsche is much like Hulme in his praise of hardness (“aera perennius” or ‘more enduring than brass’) of language -- “compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold malice towards ‘fine words’, also towards ‘fine feelings’” (116). The epigram in particular seems to suit Nietzsche’s description of the essence of Roman discourse as a “mosaic [cf. Hulme’s admiration of Byzantine mosaic work] of words in which every word, as sound, as locus, as concept, pours forth its power to left and right and over the whole, [a] minimum in the range and number of signs which achieves a maximum of energy of these signs” (116).
In this passage, however, some of the ideological positions inherent in Nietzsche’s (and Hulme’s) use of aphorism come across; here we see the relation of the form to his valuing -- in the double sense of exhorting and hoarding -- human vital energy. Further, I see the use of this form by both writers as a means of claiming authority. The first level of this claim is by embedding themselves within a tradition, from which they can select and modify as the choose; for example, Hulme appropriates an aphorism as evidence for his own epigrammatic statement: “Hence in a sense ‘Man is the measure of all things’ and Man (egoism) has always existed and always will exist” (219, his emphasis). The second level is in the very syntax and organisation of words. The aphorism is often characterised by its scarcity of verbs, and this is even the more case in Hulme and Nietzsche’s writing (even, or especially, that which is not strictly aphoristic). Hence in Nietzsche the colon or hyphen substitutes for a verb (e.g. p. 63), and in Hulme’s notes suggestive sequences of nouns are only implicitly connected by prepositions rather than explicitly through verbs (e.g. “Jealousy, desire to kill, desire for strong arms and knives, resolution to shake off social convention and to do it./ The knife order” [242-3]). But I think we should read these writings not for their absence of verbiage but for their abundance of nouns and adjectives; the form implies a higher discourse, in which verbs should be obvious to the clever reader, and it is the nouns and images that are truly clever and original. However, by agreeing with this assumption and its ranking, one automatically buys into the causal and hierarchical claims that Nietzsche and Hulme advocate. Because the reader must supply the linking verbs -- or for the general case of aphorism, the linking logic for this particular coincidence of nouns and verbs -- and thereby construct the relationality of concepts, the reader is less likely to question the existence of the relationality, having been a sort of midwife to its coming into being. If successful, this formal tactic leads the reader to admire the cunning co-positioning of images rather than doubt the authority by which they are so positioned.
Nevertheless, this form (of the aphorism/notebook) is not a guaranteed route to authoritative authorship, but one form of discursive practice among many. It contains its share of ambiguities and instabilities, and perhaps even more so than other forms. Despite the subversion of the author that these flaws may bring about, however, I think that they have the opposite effect on the text itself, vesting it with more ideas and greater longevity than the author’s vision. It is not for his self- authorising tone that Nietzsche is so beloved by post-structuralist theorists, but because of the ambiguities of his fragmentary tone -- a formal affinity as much as, or even rather than, a resonance of content. This simultaneous groundedness and ambiguity produced by this form, I think, very much anticipates Modernist literature, obviously in those who used the conventional aphoristic form (like Wilde), but also those who expanded its formal characteristics to structure their text as a “whole” to produce a dis-figuration rather than a figure-ation (as in the imagistic tendencies of Nietzsche and especially Hulme). I conclude by merely gesturing at what I mean by this with my own epigrammatic epitaph, “Kafka is the first writer to master the novel-length aphorism,” which is a statement I’d very much like to see attributed to me on the backs of new editions of Kafka, but whose implications and support are beyond my ability to pursue.