Celia Applegate

The 'Creative Possibilities of Science' in Civil Society and Public Life: A Commentary

The commentary categorizes some of the ways the authors have depicted the relationship of science to civil society and considers some of the parallels between these analyses of civil society and those in comparable fields (art and music especially)-fields that also are attempting to broaden their perspective to the place of their subjects in society as a whole.

Book Review: Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918

‘ductile, dynamic, always underway’, themes which, like Wagnerian motifs, can ‘overlap, interweave, change timbre and sense depending on the momentarily adopted perspective’. Liébert, moreover, goes one step further; he shows a commendable, rare sympathy for Wagner amongst Nietzsche scholars, when writing that Wagner was ‘in many ways a more perceptive psychologist than his disciple’. Unfortunately, however, this translation leaves much to be desired. Take the following example: ‘If Wagner no longer uses the expression “absolute music” to not appear to contradict himself, he continued to hold to the validity of this notion.’ The best one can say is that one knows what is meant, or perhaps that one could readily re-translate it. Titles of non-French works are often left in French; Strauss’s Daphne acquires an acute accent; Monteverdi’s somewhat mysterious, abbreviated Couronnement should be rendered either in full, in Italian, as L’incoronazione di Poppea, or in English, as (The Coronation of) Poppea. Erwin Rohde is frequently, but not exclusively, rendered as ‘Rhode’. And one can only assume that a computer ‘spell check’ altered Mozart’s Cretan Idomeneo to Idomea. An editor ought to have noticed and corrected such solecisms, of which but a few are listed here. It would be wrong, however, to conclude on so sour a note. Shortly before the end of the final scene of Ariadne, Zerbinetta, the actress par excellence, steals on to the stage. She both confirms and ever-so-lightly questions the main ‘business’ of Bacchus’ and Ariadne’s soaring duet: ‘When a new god arrives, we are left speechless.’ On the surface, this seems merely to refer to the helplessness of women in the face of pursuit by a god. Yet this is not just any god; it is Bacchus (Dionysus): ‘the best source of joy in life for mortals’, as Euripides has his Odysseus tell the Cyclops. If Dionysus is the best source of joy, the best source for the gay science of modern artistic production, he cannot yet come to us unmediated; that way lies the madness of Nietzsche’s ‘final’ period. Did Nietzsche, despite his early insistence that music could be purely Dionysian, know implicitly all along that the tension between Apollo and Dionysus has had to be mediated? And does this render him closer to dialectical Hegelianism than he would ever have admitted – or realized? Liébert’s book does not necessarily answer these questions, but it does point us towards them.