"Reflection on the right to will": Auden's "Canzone" and Arendt's notes on willing

Comparative Literature, Spring 2001 by Gottlieb, Susannah Young-Ah

With the advent of modernity-and this is, in a sense, the meaning of "modernity" and the source of its predicaments-the present takes precedence over the past, and the present ceases to be an enduring present as it seeks its legitimation in the future (instead of in the past or in the necessary order of things). In this way, as Arendt explains, the Will not only gains a certain legitimacy with respect to the faculty of thought, it progressively-and often under the protection of the imperatives of progress-overwhelms the other faculties. As a result, an attempt like that of Scotus to defend the rights of the will against the claims of contemplation no longer makes sense. Once the Will vanquishes all competitors (this happens for Arendt in Nietzsche's work), the only thing that it can will is return, the return of all things, and Nietzsche's doctrine of recurrence, which he understood to be the culmination of a theory of will as the will-to-power-that is, as a will-to-will rather than as a will to accomplish specific tasks-is Arendt's evidence for this ironic reversal. Thus, even though Auden's "Canzone" contains no trace of cyclical time, the future in any genuine sense is as foreclosed as it would be if the poem's content corresponded with its poetic form. The references to the "triumph of the will" and "bacchic fury" underscore Auden's acute ear for the Nietzschean paradox: at the height of willing, there is nothing to will but return, but this will-to-return is the pure form-or formal test-of willingness: can one will-not merely bear-to suffer everything all over again? Taking up the wisdom of Silenus, on which Nietzsche based the dynamics of his first book, and retrieving the image of the Dionysian dance, to which he was drawn during his last lucid days, Auden writes in "Death's Echo": "Not to be born is the best for man;/The second-best is a formal order,/The dance's pattern; dance while you can" (Auden, Poems 153).

Arendt sees this history of the will from its discovery in early Christianity to its apotheosis in Nietzsche with remarkable clarity. Once the will has subsumed all other faculties into itself, it closes the temporal horizon without which there can be no specific act of volition. For Nietzsche, then, the future is given over to those who can pass the formal test of the will, and as Arendt explains as she outlines the two leading "metaphors" of his writings, this test is administered in the precise location where contemplation had once taken place: in utter solitude. The Nietzschean Will hears the residue of thought in the words of a demon who appears out of its "loneliest loneliness" (2:166)20 When fellowship returns -and it is the strange fellowship of a Nietzschean "we" that is one of a kind and not therefore subject to the vicissitudes of plurality-the word will is heard everywhere. Arendt is attentive to this resounding return of the word will and centers her account of Nietzsche in her notes on his doctrine of return and on a curious aphorism (Gay Science, book 4, sec 310) in which Nietzsche hears the word Wille in Welle, "will" in "wave": "Thus live waves-thus live we who will ... [So leben die Wellen-so leben wir, die Wollenden]. Carry on as you like, roaring with overweening pleasure or malice-or dive again... and throw your infinite white mane of foam and spray over them ... For ... you and I-are we not one of a kind" (2:164-65)? Hearing the echo of Wille in Welle, Nietzsche reveals the total collapse of everything, starting with the primal sea, into the will.