Nietzsche as Educator
Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher who stays at the transition of one era of philosophy to another, and his influence echoed greatly in the world of Western philosophy after the 20th century. One of the fields which his philosophy seeped in is that of poetry, namely in the works of Romanian poet and mathematician Ion Barbu.
Ion Barbu (real name Dan Barbilian) mainly wrote between 1919 and 1930. The style that best defines his creation is hermeticism. Hermeticism is an artistic style resulting from the abstractization of ideas, emotions, and language in the poet's attempt to reach the contingent beauty. Following in the footsteps of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, hermetic artists seek pure poetry, whose message addresses the essence of existence, indifferent to concrete and everyday forms of reality. In this regard, Ion Barbu supports a similar artistic vision, highlighting similarities between poetry and geometry in his article "From Geometry to Poetry." According to Ion Barbu, poetry and geometry resemble each other in their ability to imagine possible forms of existence, through the stylization of reality and symbolic communication. This approach gives poetry a modern dimension, and Ion Barbu has always been fascinated by the Orphic poetry of ancient artists, considering it a model of creation. He advocates for a return of poetry to its original function of instructing about fundamental things.
Thus, Ion Barbu argues that poetry should fulfill its original role, instructing and bringing to light essential aspects of existence. Therefore, in his view, poetry should not only be an artistic expression but also a means of knowledge and understanding of fundamental reality.
A New Humanism
In conception and expression classicist and in temperament and inspiration romantic, the poet and mathematician achieves the synthesis of a new humanism, the major filter of modern thought.
Thinkers have become accustomed to conceive modern man unilaterally, especially in the sense of the impossibility of achieving a Renaissance-style universality. Thankfully this impediment is not total. The modern man gains concentration in a given field, having essential knowledge about the world and a global understanding of art and science. The Renaissance man appears scattered in flat investigation, excelling in quantity. Ion Barbu argues for "a new, mathematical humanism," in qualitative emulation with the classical one.
Juxtaposing mathematical spirit with poetry, a new totalitarian view on the universe is born. The poet-mathematician circumscribes within the boundaries of this new humanism. This view also comes as a continuation of the Hellenic humanism, taking from it "the state of geometry" as a rigourous way of perceiving the world. But what Barbu does is not purely transcribing into poetry the dry and abstract land of geometry. The Geometric spirit that resides at the genesis of this new humanism is a given , just like the Poetic spirit. Debuting his hermetic poems, Barbu displays a deep revolt to labels of modernism, and on the contrary, affirms, "in my poems, what might be perceived as modernism is nothing but a knotting with the most distant past of poetry: the Pindaric ode. Unable to appear before my fellow countrymen like poets of yore, with the lyre and flowers on my head, I have adorned my words with as many resonances as possible. In addition to spiritual unity, I also add a phonetic one."
Nietzsche as Educator
Ion Barbu belongs, thus, through his temperamental structure and intellectual formation, to the current of thought that draws its origin from cultural nihilism and Nietzsche's vitalism, proposing as a solution to the current crisis of humanity the reactualization of the model of humanity and culture of Ancient Greece. Similarly with Nietzsche's arguments in The Birth of Tragedy(1872), for Barbu, Hellada is not a mere geographical or historical reality, but a spiritual coordinate ("a simple hypothesis, from which derives a form of civilisation and creation"). In the figure of the author of the epochal book "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," the young poet incarnates, in a poem entitled precisely "Nietzsche," his own creative spirit:
A fierce and bold warrior, conqueror of distant lands,
To have undertaken the assault of the dreaded gates
Wearing the chilled pride of your strength
Higher and farther towards new evaluations,
To have pierced the lethargic twilight and fog
Woven by norms of a murky Daedalus,
So that, delving with horror into the numinous abyss,
In the evening of triumph, you glimpse how Life
Returns drowsy in its sterile cycle,
Beneath the burden and mask, a mime of absurd art,
Yet above the futile rotations,
As a creator of meanings, you rise virile;
And, intoxicated by active and profound adherence,
— Applauded uniquely in the twilight's scene —
Tearing your creative word from fervor,
To call for the eternal return of Life:
"Encore!"
Despite apparent neoclassical formalities, Ion Barbu manifested a persistence in approaching Romanticism even in his early theorizations. Under the Greek perfection, the latent urges of the subdued impulses of vital Dionysianism are perceived. Greek hubris is the supreme sanction of the manifestation of this obscure background. Hubris and liberation through catharsis represent, according to Barbu-Nietzsche, the bipolarity of Hellenic spirituality: the tragic romantic soul and the aspiration for appeasement in Apollonian forms. The Erinyes roam the Attic lands, stirring the abyssal depths of Oedipal turmoil; the Gods have no authority, as they themselves commit hubris. The path of catharsis remains - aesthetic catharsis is achieved primarily through tragedy. True Greece is found in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, not in the angelic purity of Phidias' marble. The Apollonian ecstasy gives birth liberatingly and definitively, as a supreme sublimation of the Dionysian background. The poet shows that Nietzsche inspiredly discovered the coordinates of Greek spirituality in opposition to Winckelmann's Hellada: the Dionysian fervor restrained cathartically through Apollonian perfection. Ion Barbu's resonation with such spirituality deepens, internalising Nietzsche's intuition: "The great original pain, the restless sea of forms not well unfolded from sleep, demands with all its infinity the chance harmonies, the unstable aggregates whose incurable solitude is baptized as being. The turmoil of the obscure being, impatient to melt into the swirling, still musical, water of uncreated matter, this is what Nietzsche calls the Dionysian principle. The destructive frenzy would pulverize the unity of being without the intervention of the liberating principle, of individuality. Dionysian intuitions, deadly through the excess of unleashed pain, escape their subjective condition, objectifying themselves in full dream: in an imagined world, where the harmonious allocation of forms hides the Dionysian substrate. Through this Apollonian ecstasy, man sits among the Gods; like them, he converts a depth of restlessness into soothing visions."
This paragraph describes that the intense, destructive aspect of the Dionysian could lead to a loss of personal identity but also one of integrity and uniformity in the artistic process, and how the realm of imagination or artistic creation, the chaos of the Dionysian is concealed beneath a facade of harmonious forms. Ergo connecting the two urges within aristic or creative endeavors, individuals can, like Demiurges (creator deities), transform "a depth of restlessness into soothing visions."