He is the face of the German music world: pop titan Dieter Bohlen [...] he has repeatedly reinvented himself over the course of his career [...] not only a talented musician and producer, but also a captivating TV personality [...] a truly exceptional artist.²

If you believe this and other media voices, we lived in the Bohlenocene of German cultural history. Who is this fascinating “titan”? Is he a revenant of the deities of giants in human form who, according to Greek mythology, once lived in a legendary Golden Age? The Titan Bohlen had become popular among mortals as a member and producer of the pop duo “Modern Talking.” He had previously composed songs for various German pop singers very modestly in secret. With singer Thomas Anders at his side, the Golden Age of the Titan began in 1984. The “biggest German pop duo of all time”³ reached with unforgettable world hits such as You're My Heart — You're My Soul, You Can Win If You Want or Cheri Cheri Lady number one in the German single charts several times and also excelled in other European and Asian (!) and African (!) hit parades.

I don't know how to make tears and make music, I know the luck [...] not to think without a shiver of anxiety.⁴

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In the Bohlenocene of German Cultural History

In addition to Modern Talking, Bohlen produced other terrific Eurodisco and Eurodance hits with “Blue System” and “C.C. Catch”. His musical style was of the genre Italo Disco inspired and was characterized by high vocal performances, catchy rhythms and idiosyncratic poetic English lyrics. The Titan's titles always seemed to be made of one piece, based on, for example, the mega hit Brother Louie on catchy drum machine and bass rhythms, which were combined with keyboard and piano inserts as well as synthesizer sounds and fuelled with “cool” electric guitar or synthesizer riffs.

While Thomas Ander's singing spread a numbingly powerful fluid — “he even fused lard”⁵ — Titan stood out due to its high, almost screamed falsetto insoles.

When does sound become music? Especially in the highest states of pleasure and agitation of will, as cheering will or fearful of death, briefly in Noise of emotion: in yell.⁶

During live performances by Modern Talking, the Titan's godlike abilities could occasionally be admired, for example when he clapped his hands and continued playing his electric guitar at the same time.

On the outside, Anders showed an androgynous long-hair look with make-up, while the titanium had golden chains strumming golden chains in the wide shirt neckline. Both loved pastel-colored overalls, and both were unmistakably excessive tanning enthusiasts, so that ill-intentioned chroniclers complained that they had “become more and more brown and faggy. ”⁷ But no matter what the critics want to object to — with around six million records sold, the duo Modern Talking is one of the biggest revenue players in the German music industry. By 2010 alone, they sold 20 times as much internationally: around 120 million records, CDs and downloads,⁸ They achieved outstanding success in the Soviet Union and in the CIS countries. As part of the glasnost policy of cultural openness, Modern Talking 1986 was the first western band whose records were sold freely in the USSR. They appeared modern, lively, polyglot, apolitical to Soviet citizens — they provided a kind of door opener product that opened up the post-Soviet cultural space for Western global pop. As a duo and alone, Bohlen and Anders completed numerous concerts in Russia. The audience was not bothered by the ominous fact that “Dieter Bohlen” in Russian sounds exactly like “Dieter is ill” (Diter Bolen). Thomas Anders appeared ten times in the Kremlin Palace, the sick Dieter was decorated as a “Hero of Russian Youth” and Anders received an honorary professorship in Kiev on the grounds that Modern Talking had shaped the musical taste of an entire generation — and rightly so: The popularity of Modern Talking in Russia and in Ukraine is still very high, especially among the boomer generation, so that both musicians are without exaggeration the most successful cultural export in the recent German-Russian relationship history since Richard Wagner may apply.

And so I ask myself: What wants Actually my whole body of music anyway? I think his easement: as if all animal functions should be accelerated by slight bold, exuberant self-assured rhythms; as if the brazen, the leaden life should be gilded by good tender harmonies.⁹

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How the Titan Became a Beast

As if all that wasn't enough, the Titan underwent a metamorphosis as a mature man and transformed himself from musician to judge of music. This second career removed him from mortals even further than before, but brought him new prominence in younger years: He became a jury member of the casting broadcasts Germany is looking for the superstar (DSDS) and The super talent. He was a juror at DSDS until 2024 — for a good 20 years — and in 2026 he will be there again after a short interruption. ”His hard-hitting sayings, which were always mercilessly honest and mercilessly entertaining, made him the face of the show,” the TV journalists praised.¹⁰ Like Nietzsche once upon a time, Bohlen tried his hand at being a “master of short form”: razor-sharp judgments, pointed aphorisms, provocative, witty and so good that they had to be published again in book form.¹¹ He graciously produced pleasing pop ballads with several American Idol winners, but the role he played in the jury was more important. Here he figured as an unpredictable predatory figure who sometimes hissed at the candidates benevolent, sometimes devastating judgments. His “awesome sayings,” often garnished with fecal humor, seemed to ignore all rules of politeness and fairness. The more or less appraisal candidates had to confirm the verdicts in front of the cameras running. In the dazzling light of the television arena, in front of millions of viewers, they were at the mercy of the beast Bohlen, who sometimes played moquant with them before tearing them apart.

At the bottom of all noble races is the predatory animal, the magnificent wandering for prey and victory blonde beast Unmistakable; this hidden reason requires unloading from time to time, the animal must come out again...¹²

Can it be that Bohlen — as well as the erratic “Don the Con” Trump or the apocalypse-believing “contrarian” Peter Thiel — is one of those “blond beasts” who renew civilization from time to time through disruptive and brutal interventions?¹³ Those seductive “New Barbarians” who are now arriving everywhere, all “The Cynics. [...] The Tempters.”¹⁴?

People with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, predators, still in possession of unwavering willpower and desire for power, threw themselves at weaker, more well-behaved, more peaceful, perhaps trading or cattle-breeding races, or at old grubby cultures in which the last life force of spirit and corruption flared up in brilliant fireworks.¹⁵

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Bohlen's barbaric “judging with the hammer,” his attitude of preaching diligence, toughness, assertiveness and willpower to the candidates, wasn't that the overdue attack of the blond beast on our “old grumpy culture”?¹⁶ Unfortunately, after his metamorphosis to the beast, Bohlen no longer wore the characteristic lion-like mane that had been his trademark at a young age: that subtly backed-on, highly-bleached and casually blow-dried mullet masterpiece. Now the Beast appeared with a gelled and re-bleached short hair, no longer clenched his fist as in the best modern talking times, but spread out his arms dominating the room, stabbed the air with his finger excited or slowly shook his head, which amounted to a wordless execution for displeased candidates.

Perhaps that even our last music, as much as it reigns and is domineering, has only a short period of time ahead of it: because it originated from a culture whose soil is rapidly sinking — one immediately sunken Culture.¹⁷

On the occasion of the publication of the autobiographical work The Bohlenweg In an interview with The Beast, the magazine “Stern” suggested that some passages in the book read “like Nietzsche” and continues: “Do you still have enough chaos in yourself to 'give birth to a dancing star”? To which the blonde author replies: “Wow, cool saying! It could be from me! “But it's from Nietzsche,” says the reporter, as the beast suddenly recognizes an equal giant in Nietzsche:

Hammer guy! I'm always amazed that other people also think of great things.¹⁸

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Article Image

The Titan at a Young Age. Pastel drawing on paper (2025). From Nelly.

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Literature

Bohlen, Dieter: My awesome sayings. Munich 2006.

Bohlen, Dieter & Katja Kessler: Behind the scenes. Munich 2003.

Spoecker, Christoph: Dieter Bohlen. Little anecdotes from the life of a pop titan. Munich 2019.

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Footnotes

1: About truth and lies in an extra-moral sense, paragraph 2.

2: https://www.gala.de/beauty-fashion/beauty/von-modern-talking-bis-pop-titan--so-sehr-hat-sich-dieter-bohlen-im-laufe-der-jahre-optisch-veraendert-24182340.html (14/5/2025).

3: Christoph Spöcker, Dieter Bohlen, P. 43.

4: Nietzsche versus Wagner, Intermezzo.

5: Dieter Bohlen & Katja Kessler, Behind the scenes, P. 66.

6: The Dionysian worldview, paragraph 4.

7: Spöcker, Dieter Bohlen, P. 52.

8: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/dsds-neues-modern-talking-mit-medlock-und-bohlen-1.854734 (17.5.2010).

9: The happy science, Aph 368.

10: https://www.tvspielfilm.de/news/stars/aus-dsds-und-supertalent-dieter-bohlens-100-heftigste-sprueche,10500354,ApplicationArticle.html (6/4/2026).

11: planks, My awesome sayings.

12: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 11. — In the case of the figure of the “blond beast,” Nietzsche may have been inspired by traditions of the appearance of blond and red-haired Germanic and Celtic warriors in the Roman Empire. At times, Roman women even dyed their hair blonde to appear “wild” and “barbaric.”

13: See the discussion by Tobias Kurpat, The superman in the hamster wheel. Nietzsche between Silicon Valley and New Right, on this blog: “Are the new tech CEOs really the barbarians Nietzsche was hoping for — or a post-ironic simulation of the same idea? ”

14:Subsequent fragments, No. 1885 35 [28]. On Nietzsche's figure of the barbarian, see Marion Friedrich's article The barbarians of the 21st century. Narcissism, Apocalypse, and the Absence of Others on this blog.

15: Beyond good and evil, Aph 257.

16: This role is a bit contradictory The interview with gold trader Dominik Kettner in autumn 2025 granted. Here, the now 71-year-old blond beast presents himself as an exponent of “old grumpy cultures”: disappointing culturally pessimistic and old-fashioned populist. Perhaps old age is already taking its toll here, the powers of the beast are weakening.

17: Nietzsche versus Wagner, Music without a future.

18: https://www.stern.de/lifestyle/leute/dieter-bohlen--selbstzweifel-sind-nur-was-fuer-weicheier--3748176.html (11/10/2008).

The Blond Beast and the “Hammertyp”

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How Dieter Bohlen Finally Discovered a Titan of Equal Rank

At first glance, Dieter Bohlen and Friedrich Nietzsche have as little connection as Marie Antoinette with Rosa Luxemburg or Napoleon with Angela Merkel — but a second reveals greater affinities than one might suspect. In any case, this unlike synopsis enables a new perspective — on Bohlen and on Nietzsche in equal measure. “Pairing the strangest and separating the next”¹, in the following text, our regular author Christian Saehrendt undertakes a truly Nietzschean search for clues on the tracks of the “titan” of German pop, which to this day polarizes like only a few celebrities in the German-speaking world — this, too, a line of connection between philosopher and musician.

I. The Orgies Mysteries Theatre

Bodies covered in blood and the orgy as the ultimate form of meaning and communion with the deity.²

Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch, born 1938, creates cross-border contemporary art with his concept of the “Orgies Mystery Theatre” (hereinafter abbreviated as O.M. Theatre), which had been constantly developed since the early sixties. Based on ancient tragedy, his action art is intended to trigger deep, lasting feelings about the moment of Rausch. In addition to Jesus Christ and Oedipus, the Greek god Dionysus is at the center of the mythological concept of the actions.

The O.M. Theatre has no stage and no actors in the usual sense. Game participants do not fictionalize; rather, the representative element of art is overcome in favor of direct experience. The realisation of the O.M. Theatre is expressed in action work lasting six days and six nights. Sexual and religious taboos and their obscene violations are dramatically staged, while holistic sensory perceptions are intended to culminate in a new experience of reality. Beauty as a singular object of art is negated. The instincts released include the slaughter and removal of animal bodies, their crucifixion and mauling, as well as the baring of the sexual organs of the game participants, rubbing them with blood and entrails of the animal victim. Until his death in 2022, Nitsch carried out O.M. Theatre events every year. Activities continue to be carried out even after his death, most recently from June 7 to 9, 2025 at Prinzendorf Castle in Austria.

In Nietzsche's early writing The Birth of Tragedy (1872; short: BT), he formulates his basic theory of ancient tragedy, at the core of which he locates the tension between the Apollinian (Apollo: God of measure, form, clarity) and Dionysian (Dionysus: god of intoxication or Rausch, ecstasy, dissolution). Nietzsche sees the Apollinian and the Dionysian as forces of nature on the one hand and as aesthetic categories or principles on the other. Art is created between two poles. The Apollinian describes a measured, distant beauty and serenity. The Dionysian describes Rausch as instinctive vitality. In the moment of Dionysian Rausch, Nietzsche recognizes an indispensable physiological requirement for the creation of art. Dionysian gives rise to an art that speaks the truth in its Rausch.³

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II. The Cry of Dionysus (ecstatic)

Dionysus is lying naked on the ground, his genitals are pelted with fresh, wet flesh. Accompanied by a screaming choir, sound orchestra and trombone players, he is showered with a bucket of slaughter-warm blood. Dionysus runs ecstatically screaming to a slaughtered ox, eviscerates it and rummages in its intestines.⁴

During the actions of the O.M. Theatre, Dionysian Rausch rages between extreme affirmation of life and deadly destructive power. Nitsch's Rausch is noticeably torn. In the cry of Dionysus, everything inside tears apart the outside. This is what Nitsch wrote in his book Das Orgien Mysterien Theater (“The Orgies Mysteries Theatre”), published in 1990:

A philosophy of intoxication, ecstasy, delights, as a result of the fact that the innermost part of living is intensely vital, intoxicating excitement, orgiasm, which represents a constellation of existence in which pleasure, torment, death and procreation approach and permeate each other. (P. 8 f.)

In scream, a celebration of existence that drives itself into torment. It is possible that the body of Dionysus in the O.M. Theatre lets exactly that penetrating cry come out, which Nietzsche had described as the height of pleasure and suffering as well as an insight into the excess of nature.⁵

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche describes the ancient Dionysus festivals (those festivals in honor of the god Dionysus and the origins of Greek tragedy) as a “hideous mixture of lust and cruelty.”⁶ Art is created between two poles. In the O.M. Theatre between the pleasant scent of roses, the sweet taste of red wine, and the abysmal sight of blood and slime. In Nietzsche's words: An artistic game which, even in ugly and disharmonious ways, plays with itself in the eternal fullness of its pleasure.⁷ Nitsch's intoxication is noticeably torn. Nietzsche describes the power of Rausch with its inherent duality particularly clearly in Twilight of the Idols:

For there to be art, so that there is some kind of aesthetic doing and looking, a physiological precondition is essential: Rausch. Rausch must first have increased the excitability of the entire machine: sooner there will be no art. All types of Rausch, however different, have the power to do so: in particular the Rausch of sexual stimulation, this oldest and most original form of Rausch. Similarly, the Rausch that comes in the wake of all great desires, all strong affects; the Rausch of celebration, competition, bravura, victory, all extreme movement; the Rausch of cruelty; the Rausch of destruction; the Rausch under certain meteorological influences, for example the Rausch of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; finally, the Rausch of will, the Rausch of an overwhelmed and swollen will.⁸

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III. The Abreaction

No. 0 grabs the genitals of No. 6 (reach out) several times, No. 6 screams almost parodically like a pig to be slaughtered. (castration [pubic fury]). At the moment when No. 0 touches the genitals of No. 6, penetrative noise from the orchestra sets in, and the screaming of the choir increases with every new touch to an extreme cheer of ecstasy.⁹

Between theatre and festival, Nitsch equates the Dionysian with his instinct for abstinence. Since its beginnings, theatre has been characterized by a collective need for reaction. Nitsch is not just about overcoming it, but rather about generating energy through the reaction of the unconscious mind. Nietzsche recognizes in the tragedy both a purifying as well as an unloading force and writes of that pathological discharge of Aristotle's catharsis,¹⁰ on which Nitsch's concept of abreaction is also based. Using the moment of violence, Nitsch aims to ensure that participants experience catharsis within the protected frame of the theatre and that the person is cleansed of affects that would otherwise uncontrollably and violently discharge in everyday life.

The next level of Rausch, then. And so, on the third day of the action, the Rausch of the Dionysian orgy is intended to complete the reaction which, for Nitsch, represents the fulfillment of sublimated instinct satisfaction. According to Nitsch, the reaction reaches its peak here, “reaches sado-masochistic excess, turns into destructive, to destroy the body.”¹¹ The resulting ecstatic sensory experience should function as a medium for breaking through instincts and enable the release and awareness of repressed psychological content. Cleaning and unloading.

The tearing side of the Rausch develops its inner potential in a reaction that wants to purify and discharge. The moment of violence is not only important as a pole in the duality of Rausch, but also stands for the regenerating claim of action art. BLOOD IS SPILLED FROM THE CASTLE WINDOWS. Sperm, as warm as the body, is spread over the bodies.¹²

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IV. The Sense of Unity

At night, his mouth opened like a red fruit.¹³

The sun rises and falls six times as the festival progresses. Rausch requires participants in the O.M. Theatre to dissolve the limits of their own body, to relinquish control over themselves — to step out of themselves. A sense of unity. You feel yourself in everything, you are a stone, grass, tree, animal, fellow human being. A feeling of being absorbed within the whole. Divinity, be absorbed in God.¹⁴

The mystical sense of unity in Rausch that seeks to destroy and redeem the individual¹⁵ is also recognized by Nietzsche as the “next effect of the Dionysian tragedy,” in which “state and society, in general the gap between man and man gives way to an overwhelming sense of unity, which leads back to the heart of nature.”¹⁶ Nietzsche goes so far as to talk about “breaking the individual apart and becoming one with the original being.”¹⁷ The mystery theory of tragedy is “the basic knowledge of the unity of everything that exists, the consideration of individuation as the root cause of evil, art as a joyful hope that the spell of individuation should be broken, as the idea of a restored unity.”¹⁸

Unity means resolution of opposites. In theatre, Nitsch wants to reveal that everything is interdependent; that everything is one. Eating and drinking together, incorporating, all sensory experiences (smells, sounds, colors) penetrate from outside to inside, become part. In the interexchange of Rausch penetration takes place in all directions — we remember the cry of Dionysus (from the inside towards the outside).

And perhaps Nietzsche's poles will eventually dissolve when he writes: “Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo, but Apollo finally the language of Dionysus: with which the highest goal of tragedy and art is achieved in the first place.”¹⁹ Unity means resolution of opposites: pleasure and suffering. The human and the other animal. Me and You. Me and God. Being and nothing. Apollo and Dionysus.

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V. Epilogue. Or: The Rebirth of the Dionysian Spirit

The last morning, 5:30 a.m. Expect sunrise, players hug and kiss each other, drink wine and eat bread.²⁰

Have we experienced the reawakening of the Dionysian spirit and the rebirth of tragedy in the spirit of Nietzsche? Nitsch follows Nietzsche in an understanding of art that combines Rausch, dream, play, and celebration. They both see art as part of life, in terror and pain, in beauty and joy. In Nitsch's O.M. Theater, participants experience the Dionysian Rausch as a complex act of contemplation and reaction. In this sense, the O.M. Theatre can be regarded as the scene of the rebirth of the Dionysian spirit. Nitsch wants to revive that spirit of tragedy and keep it alive, even after his own death. Perhaps Nitsch's radicalism consists in taking Nietzsche literally. Because Nitsch does not radically develop Nietzsche further, the excess has already been written down— Nitsch implements it performatively. And this is how Nietzsche's voice permeates the O.M. Theatre:

I want to be happy, I want to race ecstatically with happiness, I want an exceptional state of being, I don't want to vegetate, I don't want to be afraid of living and dying, I want to be there and even look into the abyss of existence when you want and even step into it. That is something extremely important. For me, art is about intoxicating yourself, realizing intensity and realizing creation.²¹

In the O.M. Theater, participants experience the Dionysian Rausch in scream, in reaction, in unity. Art abolishes two poles.

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Article Image

100th action, 1998. Photo: Cibulka-Frey Archive

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Literature

Martin Poltrum im Gespräch mit Hermann Nitsch. In: Hermann Nitsch zu Gast im Salon Philosophique des Anton-Proksch-Instituts, Spectrum Psychiatrie 3/2010, S. 70.  

Nitsch, Hermann: Das Orgien Mysterien Theater. Manifeste, Aufsätze, Vorträge. Salzburg 1990.

Idem: Das Orgien Mysterien Theater. Partituren aller aufgeführten Aktionen. Band 10: Das 2-Tage-Spiel des Orgien-Mysterien-Theaters. Prinzendorf a. d. Zaya 2004.

Idem: O.M. Theater-Lesebuch. Vienna 1983.

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Footnotes

1: Cf. Nitsch, Das Orgien Mysterien Theater, p. 85. All translations are our own unless stated otherwise.

2: Cf. Nitsch, O.M. Theater-Lesebuch, p. 240.

3: Cf. BT, § 4.

4: Cf. Nitsch, O.M. Theater-Lesebuch, p. 398.

5: Cf. BT, § 4.

6: BT, § 2.

7: Cf. BT, § 24.

8: Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes, § 8.

9: Nitzsch, O.M. Theater-Lesebuch, p. 567.

10: Cf. BT, § 22.

11: Nitsch, Das Orgien Mysterien Theater, p. 37.

12: Nitzsch, O.M. Theater-Lesebuch, p. 549.

13: Georg Trakl, Poems.

14: Nitzsch, Das Orgien Mysterien Theater, p. 55.

15: Cf. BT, § 2.

16: BT, § 7.

17: BT, § 8.

18: BT, § 10.

19: BT, § 21.

20: Cf. Nitzsch, Das Orgien Mysterien Theater. Partituren aller aufgeführten Aktionen. Band 10, p. 207.

21: Martin Poltrum im Gespräch mit Hermann Nitsch, p. 70.

Aesthetics of Rausch

Reading Nitsch with Nietzsche

In its early publication The Birth of Tragedy (1872) Nietzsche formulated his basic theory of ancient tragedy. The moment of Rausch — a term which often translated as “intoxication” but refers not just to states of intoxication caused by the use of intoxicating drugs — is just as fundamental here as it is for Nietzsche's understanding of art in general. Emma Schunack investigates how the Dionysian intoxication of ancient tragedy is reflected in Hermann Nitsch's contemporary art. Between bloody animal pelts on purple, vermilion and lemon-yellow colored sheets + candied white violets.¹ To what extent can the concept of Dionysian Rausch in Nitsch's “Orgies Mystery Theatre” be understood as a contemporary continuation of Nietzsche's understanding of art? An attempt to read Nitsch with Nietzsche.

Before AI, i.e. artic intelligence, starts writing new texts by Nietzsche (like the psychics and spiritists who continued the works of Conan Doyle and Joseph Conrad, or Schubert's Unfinished finalized) or even invent further exegetes (from Guatemala, Puerto Rico or the Vatican), it is time to rescue and examine the last castaways in the analog world. In other words, there are still a number of completely lost Nietzsche commentators who have worked intensively on Nietzsche away from the mainstream, often not only by studying him but also by studying him lived have. If you look at France, you should not recite the same mantras of Derrida, Foucault or Deleuze, but also consider Jacques Bouveresse (1940-2021), who played Nietzsche against Foucault as an anti-relativist and played Nietzsche against Foucault in his last book (Les foudres de Nietzsche¹), scourging the delusion of the French Nietzsche followers.

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I. A Life between Tango and Taxi

Jean-Baptiste Botul is also one of these French Nietzsche experts. Botul shared his birthday, August 15, 1896, with Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), an Indian politician, mystic and philosopher who repeatedly referred to Nietzsche, and the Day of Indian Independence 49 years later. There is only sparse information about his parents: The father ran a lottery shop on the Loire, the mother sewed uniforms for the military. One can only speculate about Jean-Baptiste's early years. One of his followers, the Irish philosopher Frederick de Selby, appears to have used the art of speculation in his rather thin biography of Botul, making a distinction between euphoria and outright lies. It was published in 1953 under the title Biographical Extravagancies. The Life of J.-B. Botul and can only be viewed in special libraries. (The German interlibrary loan service that I wanted to use unfortunately completely failed.) Since this work appears to be quite unreliable, that might not be a bad thing.

Let us therefore stick to the undeniable facts that Frédéric Pagès strings together in his edition (2004) of Botul's main work: In 1894, Botul met the founder of the scouting movement, the British cavalry officer Robert Baden-Powell (1857-1941), but it was not founded until 1907. So there should be in his Memories of an eclectique (1934) have postponed the memory somewhat. He certainly wanted to highlight similarities between himself and Baden-Powell: searching for clues, observing wild animals in the jungle, moral principles, idealistic activism. The first engagement with Marthe Betenfeld failed. In 1914, Botul evaded mobilization by fleeing to Argentina. At the same time, the kindred boy Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) moved from Buenos Aires to Switzerland to learn the language of Heine and Schopenhauer. Meanwhile, Botul is dedicating himself intensively to tango and will soon be offering courses in this discipline. In particular, he is now a taxi driver. A first philosophical attempt is taxi analysis, which we only know combines tracking (worthy of Holmes) with logical-analytical thinking (Bouveresse says hello!). But he doesn't yet leave any traces himself. He now becomes a representative of the French government on a Mexican atoll — unknown why there and anyway. From 1919, correspondence with the serial killer Henri Désiré Landru, the so-called “Bluebeard from Gambais,” presumably out of an interest similar to Musil's in his Man Without Qualities harbored opposite Moosbrugger.

Botul begins a proper study of philosophy at the Sorbonne. Pagès writes of a brief relationship with the noble Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962), “Freud's Princess” and girlfriend of Rilke, as well as author of a three-volume analysis by Edgar Allan Poe. The same, and this is important now, from a brief liaison with Lou Andreas-Salomé, who belonged to the same circle around Freud. This can be dated to 1923, but it was only around 1930 that an erotic correspondence can be found, hitherto unedited, as the legal issues in this delicate matter remain unresolved. The brief affair with Simone de Beauvoir, as she suggests to Pagès, seems doubtful to me. Botul had the tendency to interpret taxi rides with celebrities as friendship or even as an affair.

A visit to Röcken — Nietzsche's birthplace and burial ground — appears to have taken place in the 1930s. A letter about this to Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche is preserved in the Botul archive, which is located in the castle of the Baron de La Cuisse-Este-Maison, Indre-Loire. In this letter, he writes (without date) about his planned visit to “Recken.” There is no sign of this in the guest books or similar documents in skirts or sützen. But it is possible that the horse on the goat stable at the rectory in Röcken was drawn with brown lines by him, as it is signed with JBB. The Nietzsche-Verein Röcken has the firm intention of having the picture dated exactly once. A Leipzig sepulchral researcher is in the starting blocks. In any case, this strange image has the potential to become a magnet for tourism in the Lützen area in addition to the graves of Gustav Adolf and Nietzsche.

Botul spent the last decade until his death in 1947 (also on August 15) as a taxi driver in Paris. He claims to have driven Stefan Zweig once.

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II. The Nietzsche Pendulum

Let us turn to his Nietzsche studies, which, however, appear less academic, but they are closer to Nietzsche than those of established philosophers because they bring Nietzsche into life or describe him in an experience of life. The correspondence with psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé led to this. In the Botul Archive, we learn more, even though the archive manager there, the named Baron, had a somewhat opaque relationship with Botul and does not want to make the letters available to the public because they are banned from publishing until 2044. His suggestions, however, give an idea of the dimensions of thinking of “JBB,” as he always abbreviates it.

According to this, Botul has in his Memoirs of a Forgetful (published posthumously, Les Éditions de la Quinzaine, Paris 2023, in which his works were published in their entirety, by the way) wrote about a taxi ride that changed his life. One evening, it is February 6, 1937, in front of the Paris Opera House, the streets shining with rain, a customer gets into a taxi, a young lady who, when asked “Where? “only “Cours Désir” stated what he probably misunderstood, because he was currently working intensively on psychoanalysis (he also called it “taxi analysis”). The young lady is a student at a strict Catholic institute on Rue de Rennes, which bears this very associative name.

What exactly happened that night remains in the shadow of history. In any case, she only arrived home early in the morning, causing her parents' anger. She did not want to give any information. Botul stated that Daemon of Noon I forced him to talk to the young woman about Nietzsche all night, i.e.: He saw in the lady an embodiment of the recently deceased Lou Andreas-Salomé, a demon with whom he had so much in common. As a result of this suspicious trip, the dreaded “taxi court” was convened, and numerous taxi drivers also gathered to interrogate Botul. Botul presented his understanding of German philosophy to this committee for about twelve hours. Here he called it Nietzsche's “taxography” for the first time, which was to become the title of his seven-volume major work. The success among his colleagues was that during his nine-hour presentation, most of them had left the hall, or the chairman threatened him that there would soon be a fight if he did not immediately leave this German philosopher. Botul hurried home and began to write down his work as if in a trance.

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He described the conversations with taxi customers as “taxography,” which, while accepting many detours, he unerringly engaged in thoughts about Nietzsche. After arrival, customers were unable to complain about the fare because they had experienced a certain mental uplift; some compared it to a near-death experience. But let us be careful because many did not want to provide any information. Even as the “botulism” was already becoming a phrase in the Latin Quarter, no one wanted to admit that they had received their survey in this taxi. In any case, “elevation” is a correct word, because, as from taxography III (§ 8), Botul always developed his thoughts on Nietzsche in terms of two dualities: Up vs. Down and Easy vs. Heavy; Exaltation and Humiliation, Aggravation and Relief. A pendulum law. Botul wanted to wrest the hammer from Nietzsche and equip him with a shovel instead. While the hammer destroys or nails down, the shovel is mobile; it is also an instrument of archaeology (here first echoes of Foucault, who unfortunately discovered Botul too late), a child's tool and a symbol of construction. Your movement is versatile. You can excavate thoughts, yes, even as Nietzsche knew, poems that are also trees.² This is how Botul named him Elevateur de la poésie, which, by the way, was supposed to come as a “poem lifter” in the German translation, but unfortunately became “weightlifter” due to a typographical error. Not a good omen for German reception. The shovel, however, combines the top and bottom as well as the light and the heavy, a quality that Botul thought of. Time was neither cyclical nor linear for him, but he saw with Nietzsche in time a sphere on which the lines from above and below, from East and West intersected without interruption. Superhumans can arise at any of these intersections. They are not the product of breeding or the future, but are the result of pure chance. According to JBB, this is what Nietzsche meant with the preposition “on the way to the superman.”³.

Botul often brought taxi customers into his car, his “Frédéric Mobile”, with the help of a calendar and detailed observations of their steps through Paris. Some traces of them could be reconstructed in his writings. It should be noted that he hated quotation marks above all else. In taxography IV, § 37, we find a text in which every word is provided with quotation marks — in retrospect an early parody of postmodernism, which was intended to put its “Nietzsche” on the sign.

A trace may be mentioned as an example. He was a great admirer of composer Erik Satie (1866-1925) and was also able to steer him into his taxi one day, in front of the famous cabaret, of course Le Chat noir. The gymnopedist quickly got into the old, well-known taxi. Although he had never read it, he liked to be engaged in a conversation about Nietzsche's pendulum thinking. In the notes of Satie's friend Contamine de Latour (1867-1926), we read about Satie's difficulties with music. Botul seems to have adopted the text with minor modifications:

He [Botul writes about himself in the memoirs always in the third person, sometimes singular, sometimes plural; just Nietzschean] created a personal philosophy. His philosophical education was very incomplete, so he gathered together the elements he had mastered and made a special recipe from them, declared the rest to be non-existent and even harmful to a good philosophical way of thinking. He was in the situation of a person who only knew thirteen letters of the alphabet and decided to create a new philosophy with this material instead of admitting his lack of skill.

His motto: In any moment, you can be a superman. But this is only possible with the complete map of Paris in mind. He was a great admirer of the French writer Marcel Schwob (1867-1905), who unfortunately died early. His dream would have been to have driven him in a taxi and then to have been drawn by him as a literary portrait. The trip with Stefan Zweig was too short for such a result. He was able to bring the legendary Pierre Menard to a Spanish archive, where he was currently carrying out his monumental studies on the geology of La Mancha.

In his later years, Botul turned to Asian thought without giving up Nietzsche. “Nietzsche would have done that too,” he used to say, “unless he would have become a Jesuit, maybe even a taxi driver if his eyes had allowed it.” One of his last words was: “It's a shame that the term 'Zen. ' ”

May there finally be a renaissance, also here in the German-speaking world. After all, Bernard-Henri Levy has his Kant critique with the help of Botul's brilliant analyses of Kantian sex life (La vie sexuelle d'Emmanuel Kant, ed. F. Pagès, posthumously 1999).

Unfortunately, flat spirits keep trying their hand at JBB, this mountain range of a thinker, and, up to this day in 2026, often with the accusation of having led a dubious existence that Nietzsche research did not advance, but did not advance at all: on the contrary.

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Elmar Schenkel, Anglist and author, read Nietzsche at the age of 16 in his Catholic village in Westphalia. As a German teacher in France, he became aware of the importance of Nietzsche. Member of the board of the Nietzsche-Verein Röcken since 2015. Publications about Nietzsche: 101 letters to Friedrich Nietzsche about his 175th birthday (Edited by Fayçal Hamouda); Ed.: Nietzsche: The happy science (Kröner Verlag 2023); as author: True stories about Friedrich Nietzsche (Tauchaer Verlag 2024) and Nietzsche globally. Around the World in 80 Supermen (Kröner 2025).

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Article Image

Undated portrait of Botul, probably created around 1905, which is attributed to the young Pablo Picasso, but could possibly also be by Paul Klee. It is the only surviving authentic pictorial representation of Botul, who was hostile to photography and had a strict aversion to painters. Used with permission from Archive Botul, Inv. -No 13.

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Literature

Botul, Jean-Baptiste: taxography I-VII. Paris: Editions naufrages 2025.

Bouveresse, Jacques: Les foudres de Nietzsche et l'aveuglement des disciples. Marseille: Hors d'atteinte 2021.

From Selby, Frederick: Biographical Extravagancies. The Life of J.-B. Botul. Dublin: Dalkey Publishers 1953.

Pages, Frederic: Nietzsche et le Demon de Midi. Paris: Editions Mille et Une Nuit. 2004.

Wehmeyer, Grete: Erik Satie. Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt 1998.

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Footnotes

1: Editor's note: The title of this untranslated work is ambiguous; it can be translated both literally as “Nietzsche's Lightning” and translated as “Nietzsche's Wrath.”

2: “And indeed! Where such trees stand next to each other, there are Blissful islands! But one day I want to dig them and set everyone alone: that they learn loneliness and defiance and caution” (So Zarathustra spoke, From the blissful islands).

3: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, On human intelligence.

Jean-Baptiste Botul, a Forgotten Nietzschean from France

Time and again, our blog is dedicated to overlooked figures from the Nietzscheverse. The Leipzig Anglist Elmar Schenkel went deep into the archives for us in order to introduce you to an almost unknown figure of French-language Nietzsche reception: the “taxi philosopher” Jean-Baptiste Botul, who lived from 1896 to 1947 and not only came into contact with numerous prominent figures of his time on his trips through Paris, but developed also, in conversations with them, his very own Nietzsche interpretation, which, due to its subversive explosive power, has been stored in the poison cabinet by the mainstream of Nietzsche research to the present day. If Nietzsche was, in his own words, “dynamite,” then Botul is a rocket of the Force de frappe, still awaiting detonation — a stroke of luck?

I have followed Alexander Kluge's films, his writings, theories and food for thought intensively since the mid-1970s. He was one of the great universal and lateral thinkers between art, literature, film, philosophy, science, history and politics. His death opens a huge gap, if not an abyss. And that in these times!

My favorite movie was always The Patriot (1979), I've certainly seen it twenty times. Cult! Strangely enough, the equally cumbersome and poetic film, with Hannelore Hoger in the lead role, is rarely mentioned or shown today. Because it is about Germany. Back then shared. today Thinking about it can easily get you sidelined. Really? One of the intertitles states: THE CLOSER YOU LOOK AT A WORD, THE FARTHER IT LOOKS BACK: GERMANY. How could there be or have been misunderstandings? And that a decade before the fall of the wall? The words clever exemplify the critical self-reflection that he wanted to initiate in us, the 1968 and post-68 generations. I, then a teacher training student, remember the scene with history teacher Gabi Teichert, who researches and digs for the source material for German history, who personally goes to the Bonn Bundestag to question members of parliament: “Don't you also think that the source material for the history books in the Federal Republic of Germany must be changed? “So the story? How should you change them? One of Kluge's typical ideas that led to mental hiccups. You had to digest that first. Because back then, in the 1970s, we left-wing intellectuals in old West Berlin and in West Germany were all thinking about the revolutionary change in history forward. Of course, history cannot be changed retrospectively, but looking at it can. With this trick, the word and visual artist Kluge succeeded almost incidentally in installing a Nietzschean, i.e. perspective view of history and also of the concept of truth. Because didn't we think that what was written in the history books of the Gabi Teichert generation was “truth”? It was just one of many. Like today. There have been many more in the post-factual age, but there is no one left to sort them for us, like Alexander Kluge.

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He was a great individual, like Nietzsche, but he also had allies and co-thinkers such as scientists, writers, and artists. The start was made by Oskar Negt (1934-2024), with whom he in 1972 Publicity and experience wrote and wrote the tremendous mammoth work in 1981 History and self-will presented. In the former, the organization of the bourgeois and proletarian public sphere was analysed by Negt and Kluge examining the connections between social experiences and structures of public spheres, it was then, more pragmatically, a “book of use.” “We are interested,” wrote the authors, “what does material-altering work in a world in which it is obvious that disasters occur. These are the historical working capacity: Born from separation processes and armed with self-will that defends itself against separations.”¹. On the other hand, Kluge chose the category of connection throughout his life. Against Negt's political-sociological, purist view, Kluge became aware of personal, real human experiences in order to enable a new, autonomous public sphere. This required insight into the connections, ultimately the old Faustian question of what holds the world together on the inside. But Kluge wanted the “sensuality of connection.”². He was driven by a tremendous interest in knowledge and by a passion for communication that is unparalleled at a time when everyone is next to themselves. He cleverly knew how to turn the capitalist category of “self-interest” from head to toe: He challenged his audience, reading and seeing, to pick out from the big picture of history the things, messages, examples and experiences that have to do with their own life. His films and books were offers of inner insights, calls for individual resistance, emancipation assistance from a late enlightenment who wants to help out of immaturity. But there was no longer a consistent narrative thread, just collages and fragments, which nevertheless had a lot to offer and remained in the memory. He did not want a “reader” from A to Z, but wanted a selective dive, in a sense by jumping head into the cold water, with permanent repeatability in individual reception: “There is no book more than the opportunity to behave independently” (ibid.). That also required courage, but you could learn that from him as a reader, and you could become addicted to it just like swimming once you got used to cold water.

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Later, there were other allies who joined Kluge or that he found: the writer Ferdinand von Schirach or the artists Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. They all embodied what he was looking for: the sensuality of connection. Because Kluge had long since experienced that language alone was not enough. He was not only a collector of stories, but also of pictures, newspaper and advertising photos, which he processed into image-text collages and interspersed into his films and books, sometimes confusing and irritating, seemingly incoherent. Work of discovery, ordering and structuring came to the reader, whom Kluge wanted to empower him to become independent, as did Nietzsche his audience.

Like Nietzsche, Alexander Kluge was a word and image artist. Both spoke in metaphors and fragments whose meaning one had to evoke or which one had to recompose. Both made use of the full range of literary and visual options. At Kluge, the media and the confident use of photo and film were added. Like Nietzsche, he understood how to use words to create images in front of our inner eye and Vice Versa To put pictures into words that actually contained the ineffable and outrageous, showed the incomprehensible, such as episodes of the Second World War that Kluge, born in Halberstadt, had witnessed and repeatedly recalled from memory, called upon, presented in his short stories and films and established as lessons. In the movie The Patriot Kluge does this with the help of the artificial figure “The Knee” from Christian Morgenstern's poem A knee goes alone around the world, which personifies Kluge and makes him a participating observer of the events of the World War, allows him to fight against the “quarrelsome brain.” In this way, he succeeded in describing or filming the incommensurable as that “depiction of the unrepresentable” (Jean-François Lyotard). He had internalized and authentically transformed the pathetic “never again” worn out in post-war Germany as his own life experience, but exaggerated linguistically and visually and impressively made comprehensible for the next generation.

Kluge was an excellent philosophical and scientific thinker and author, but he was also a talented storyteller and storyteller. “Whoever laughs at fairy tales was never in need,” says the screenplay for patriot, and he masterfully understood how to extract emancipatory and utopian content and potential from the traditions of myths, legends and fairy tales collected since time immemorial, to blend into his films as subtitles or to intersperse subheadings in his treatises. The fairy tale of stubborn child The Brothers Grimm is one such example. Disobedience is punished and leads to death, but self-will still emerges from the grave, as the dead child keeps sticking his hand out of the ground. Grimm's fairy tales — for Kluge an example of the trench in German history: “They dug and dug and found the fairy tales. Its content: How a people worked on their wishes for over 800 years”³.

I always liked to listen to Kluge when I was able to see him “live” or during interviews on television (he was never in the picture himself). Once I dared to call him myself, it was in the early 80s. Back then, there was a strange atmosphere of fear and hopelessness in all discourses in the old Federal Republic; there was a vital and not just virtual peace movement against the impending US medium-haul deployment in Europe. What could art do about it? That was the big question. Could it change political consciousness or even reality? I was just curating an exhibition of politically critical art in Berlin and wanted to invite Alexander Kluge to a panel discussion, but he said both dryly and politely: “I am a lawyer and unfortunately have no time to come to Berlin.” But he sent me a portrait of himself, signed, which I kept. Of course, this did not show him as a lawyer, but as an author. He had many roles and was present at countless events and forums. So he could hide behind one or the other when needed.

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On December 6, 2016, I saw Kluge “live” again at the Babelsberg Film University, where he gave a presentation on DADA and then received a prize from the students. It was an experience to listen to him — brilliant speaker with the voice of a storyteller that he was — but it was also funny with the rocking horse on stage and other bits and bobs that were standing around there. Students then showed a film about Nietzsche with a character hitting another on the head with a hammer, accompanied by weird music. The whole thing as a stick figure aesthetic against the backdrop of the Nietzsche museum room in Sils Maria, where not only So Zarathustra spoke But so did the idea of eternal return. The film was entirely in the style of clever, black and white, fragmentary subheadings filling with screen. That's when the hammer came into the picture. It was Nietzsche and Kluge's symbolic tool. How could you have better clarified what Nietzsche into On the genealogy of morality With his saying he meant: “[N] ur that doesn't stop Woe zu tun“Remains in memory”? Kluge quotes him more completely, in typical discomfort, as early as 1979 in a draft text The Patriot: “'It was never without blood, torture, sacrifices when people felt it necessary to remember! Ah, reason, seriousness, control over affects, this whole gloomy thing that means thinking, all these privileges and showpieces of man: how expensive have they paid off! How much blood and horror is at the root of all good things. '” — Our beautiful Germany, adds Kluge, “is a 'tremendous collection' of such 'good things.' They are the commodity that history deals with, that good thing in people that continues incessantly.”⁴.

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All images used in the article are photographs taken by the author during the mentioned presentation on 6/12/2016 in Babelsberg.

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Barbara Straka, born 1954 in Berlin, studied art education/German literature and art history/philosophy in West Berlin. As a curator and art mediator, she has initiated exhibitions and major projects of contemporary art in Germany and abroad since 1980. She was director of the 'Haus am Waldsee Berlin — Place of International Contemporary Art, 'President of the Lower Saxony Art University HBK Braunschweig and consultant for cultural and creative industries and international affairs at the Berlin Senate. She is the author and editor of numerous publications on art after 1945 (www.creartext.de).

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Literature

Kluge, Alexander: The patriot. Texts/images 1 — 6. Berlin 1979.

Kluge, Alexander & Oscar Negt: History and self-will. Historical organization of work assets — Germany as a production public — Contextual violence. Berlin 1981.

Höhne, Petra & Michael Kötz: The sensuality of context. On Alexander Kluge's film work. Cologne 1981.

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Footnotes

1: Kluge & Negt, History and self-will, P. 5.

2: Petra Höhne & Michael Kötz, The sensuality of context.

3: The Patriot, ibid., p. 123.

4: Alexander Kluge, The patriot. Texts/images 1 — 6, P. 26.

“A Question of Context”

Thoughts and Memories of Alexander Kluge

The filmmaker, writer, lawyer, and philosopher Alexander Kluge, born in 1932, died on March 25. Kluge, who became known to a large audience not least through his films and his artistic television interviews, was repeatedly inspired by Nietzsche. In his diverse work, he not only dedicated himself decisively to him, but also followed a profoundly Nietzschean, perspectivist approach throughout his life. That should be reason enough to dedicate an obituary to him on our blog, which art historian and curator Barbara Straka thankfully wrote for us.

4. Misothymia and Hybrithymia

With the deeper reflection made possible by Fukuyama, the phenomenon of illiberal polarization can be understood in more detail. Polarization results in bipolar disinhibition of isothymia and megalothymia, which can be seen as a reasonable form of recognition in the mirror of the other person.

The truth of these excesses lies in the fact that their intensity articulates a diffuse form of recognition of the desire for recognition. They are true as self-unclear forms of will to want to live thymotically. This is also where they get their attraction.

The charisma of polarization lies in the fact that it compensates for the lack of Thymos. Both poles offer thymotic stimulation. They act irresistibly as messengers with an aura of substance. In both struggles for recognition, drama flows unnoticed, which arise from a bored lack of substantial life. It's finally about something again. Important again at last. At last the “big moral words again, always the bumbum of justice”¹ in the mouth.

The particular complexity of the current polarization results from the fact that the different forms of recognition are at war with each other in order to make themselves believe that the battle for recognition is not over and must continue with full force. This leads to an escalation of the forms of recognition described by Fukuyama. Through their cultural-fighting orientation, they transform themselves into illiberal figures that radiate into the community.

Isothymia becomes megalothymic as a fight against megalothymic and megalothymic mobilizes isothymically in the sign of pre-modern megalothymia. For some, the urge to show it to everyone and to win is the evil of the world. For others, striving to suppress the desire to be superior is evil par excellence. The terms “misomegalothymia” and “hybrithymia” could be used for these escalated aggregate states of isothymia and megalothymia.

Misomegalothymia describes an active hostility to any ambition in itself to develop a desire to be superior.² It represents an escalation of the empathy of isothymic sense of justice. The prelude to this is the marginalization fixation of a hyperisothymia, which, as a permanent microagressivity, requires the world to adapt to its elaborate feelings of hurt. You are proud to be so rude in an overharsh world (think of Hugo Baal's phrase “Athletes of Despair” in reference to early Christian hermits). Hyperisothymia takes on an offensive form in polarization. Successes, victories, superiority are understood solely as an expression of an aggressive will to power, which must be eliminated. In the perspective of hyperegalitarian, selective solidarity, the quest to be better appears like a pre-modern relic of a virile warrior culture. Isothymia as support for marginalized groups towards equality becomes a fight against any ambition not to be equal.

Megalothymia feels threatened in its right to exist by misomegalothymia and reacts by radicalizing its own desire to be recognized — often with an “even more so” attitude, often as a local reaction of defiance. The prelude to this is often a relapse into old pride customs as an essential guiding culture that claims irreformable validity and activates the mere affiliation to certain cultural figures as a basis of superiority. This tendency is intensified in hybrithymia. The decoupling from a real basis of superiority is thus complete. Competence no longer matters. It is about an urge to be regarded as a performance of validity that does not have more to offer than that. Hybrithymia legitimizes itself as a mere disinhibition of superiority, which appears excessive and provocatively as a show of superiority. She is her own work as a trumpy lack of work, which feels so superior that she no longer needs any works. It proves itself to be the force of its appearance and as a coup against anything that only shows the appearance of withholding recognition.

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5. The Four Despairs

If the struggle for recognition is recognized as a manifestation of indignant enlightenment that is reaching greater proportions in the current polarization, the question is whether there are not also rational reasons for thymotic resentment. If one continues in the direction of Fukuyama's analyses, a sharper picture emerges of the insulting conflicts that turn modern consciousness against its own freedom. There are also rational thymotic reasons that go beyond a lack of life-and-death struggle, which has hurt the Enlightenment's self-respect so much that it no longer feels comfortable in its own skin. This means that there is another component from the “middle” which means that the excess of enlightenment from the margins can continue to let off steam against itself. Even the “moderates” believe too little in their own as an enlightenment, because it is shown in the light of defects that make it doubtful. Contrary to Fukuyama's description, the main threat to liberal democracy is therefore not isothymically stimulated, megalothymically charged boredom that becomes pregnant with a will to fight for the sake of struggle. Rather, the story continues as a project against mass demoralizing lethargy. Four reasons for enlightened lethargy can be identified, all of which are rooted in tradition and — at least this integrity provides minimal reassurance — represent typical constants in modern culture.

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a) Romantic Despair

Humans in the “Anthropocene” (Paul Crutzen) are increasingly aware of their nature-destroying potential. The fact that he cannot live in harmony with the earth weighs on his trust in the ability to cooperate. The crown of creation has embarrassed itself. This critique has its roots in Romanticism. The doubt itself widens to the question of whether the human is not fundamentally bionegative as an ignoble unwild. Titles such as “The Fall of the Earth in the Spirit” by Theodor Lessing from 1918 interpret the Enlightenment as rational, mechanical and hostile to life. Max Weber interprets capitalism as a “steel-hard case.” The ecocentrism of all countries sometimes declares that being human is an earth-incompatible way of life.

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b) Humanistic Despair

The excesses of uninhibited freedom in the consumer sphere and on the world stage show a neglect of noble behavior. Freedom appears as the egomania of a will to power. The illustrative examples of authoritarian tendencies in the political world, which is no longer just non-Western, and the degree of destruction of nature that cannot be ignored provide evidence for an interpretation of Human condition as misery due to the will to power. Man becomes impossible. This negative view of freedom as recklessness is latently promoted by the massive influence of Augustine's thinking, who, with his merciless doctrine of grace, understands subjectivity solely from the perspective of “original sin.” Schopenhauer in the 19th century and Heidegger in the 20th century are philosophical titans of denial of goodwill for good opportunity who transform Augustine's heritage into secular. Heidegger's human ideal would be to be as a fundamental ontological “Degrowth“, in which man, as a “shepherd of being,” gently as the notorious mushroom collector and sparrow observer writer Peter Handke reoriented himself on bees and birches in his notebooks:

Birch trees never exceed their capabilities. The bee colony lives in its best possible way. Only will, which is omnipresent in technology, drags the earth into the confluence and use and change of the artificial. It forces the earth beyond the established circle of its possible [.]³

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c) The Skeptical Despair

The increase in information and the increasing interconnection of everything with everything create a state of complexity that appears chaotic and in which you feel powerless. Freedom sinks into resignation from confusion. It contains dramas and concepts that set out around 1600. The modern skepticism, which began from Copernicus and Galileo's refutations of sensual appearance, had a philosophical effect on Descartes' thinking. This is the source of epistemic paranoia as to whether recognition can ever reach an objective world at all.

This paranoid doubt about everything in the modern age is reinforced by a change in public communication. On the one hand, the digital omnipresence of an information industry creates a flood of information about situations where nothing can be done about. The more informed, the more powerless. There is also a change in the quality of world messengers: So that the flood of information does not create chaotic effects on the part of information producers, there is a tendency to reduce complexity through narratives and reporting reporting. Mediumship is thus moving away from the work of interpreting and experiencing reality by “embedded journalism” and embedded philosophy. Uninvestigative intelligence amplifies the effect of confusion. This creates a mediumship of “last people,” that transform their resignation of complexity into new communities. Mind completely shields itself from stressful reality. As a community of conspiracy hordes, he hides into communicative caves and emigrates into an unassailable sovereignty that always knows exactly what is.

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d) Existentialist Despair

Provoked by being surrounded by destruction of nature, the will to power and chaos, one's own leisure time appears not as dignified pride, but as an unpleasant state of diffusely insulting and degapping powerlessness. The self-transparency of the mind acquires the characteristics of absolute doubt, which attains the quality of a truth of despair.

In Western tradition, this mood is suggested and refined primarily by the philosophy of existentialism through philosophical abstraction, but has significant preludes in the culture of Belle Epoque between 1871 and 1914, who also belongs to Nietzsche. Kafka is probably the most brilliant representative of this attitude, but it also echoes in Schiller's term of “sentimental.” Notorious here are the exaggerated descriptions of modernity as “transcendental homelessness” (Lukács) or Weber's phrase of “disenchantment of the world.” Existentialism transforms aghast into a sign of the true. Mind alone becomes lethargic, not because you can't do anything and don't know what to do with yourself that could change anything about it, but because that corresponds to the contingency of existence, as with Sartre, who taught that existence precedes essence. In Heidegger, this emptiness is sacralized into “abandonment of being.” This can also result in a final stoicism that starts lethargy like a service. Time without being resolutely and radically authentically confronts the “throw” (Heidegger), the “absurd” (Camus), the “disgust” (Sartre).

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6. The Goodwill to Appear

In view of these descriptions of the thymotic insults of enlightened consciousness, the central concept of appearance in Nietzsche's philosophy once again gains acute significance. Nietzsche recognized that the honesty of the Enlightenment as a “passion of knowledge” requires a regulatory idea in order not to lose its vitality.⁴ Precisely because the accumulation of knowledge has a harrowing effect on positive self-respect, Nietzsche votes in favor of an anti-Enlightenment “countervailing power.” Too much devastating truth provokes a transfigurative appearance. As a “goodwill to appear”, the quest for recognition is subdued in such a way that its vitality is not irreversibly damaged by the disillusioning results of its findings. It is important to establish a distance from the urge for truth in an “artificial distance” and to look at the dramas that go with it more conciliatory from this distance. When the truth is too cruel, relief is the real deal. Analogous to the romantic irony of the text, there is a philosophical irony of thought. Self-irony relieves the self-interpretation of the idea of being an atlas that not only has to handle the weight of the world, but also doesn't cut a good figure in the process. Philosophy becomes the art of turning philosophy.

In a thymotizing new version of Plato's concept of the three parts of the soul, it could be assumed, Nietzsche is thinking of an epistemic justice in which honesty and vitality are balanced by the controlling power of appearances. Before the Enlightenment falls into the maelstrom of rejecting itself and the world as insane and unjust — “The whole is the untrue” (Adorno) — Nietzsche philosophically appeals for a higher therapeutic justice that protects against excessive because masochistic demands. Paradoxically, Nietzsche takes thymotics seriously by ironizing it. The pathos of the true can thus be understood as clarification, as relief, as an invigorating and motivating lie.

The aim of this vital ironization is to maintain the “passion of knowledge” as a source of pride even with regard to chasms that, as Paul Valéry said, are known to be big enough for everyone. Nietzsche is therefore concerned with basal encouragement. Where there is despair, self-irony can still create the soothing veil of reconciliation. In this way, enlightenment preserves a “freedom above things” in situations that seem hopeless.

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7. The Four Transfigurations

Nietzsche's idea of an enlightened thymotic irony towards the Enlightenment can be transferred to the current state of the times. The “goodwill to appear” must therefore prove itself fourfold in the depth of the enlightenment. A philosophical transfiguration attempts to show motivational ways of describing the debilitating phenomena: “He is a thinker: that is, he knows how to take things more simply than they are. ”⁵ This is intended to plausibly reveal realities that are also latent in the matter. Enlightenment explains itself “how you could regard yourself as a hero, from afar and, as it were, simplified and transfigured — the art of 'setting yourself in the scene' in front of yourself . ”⁶

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a) The Romantic Transfiguration

With regard to the lack of cooperation with nature, reference can be made to the sub-areas of technology and science which, as “bionics”, expressly invent nature-imitating techniques. In it, they follow Francis Bacon's saying that only those who listen to nature can also conquer nature. Knowledge can only be power because it is obedience to nature. Paying attention to the intrinsic complexity of things and the contexts they produce highlights the act of humility of knowing. Obedience as the first scientific obligation thinks under the “primacy of the object” (Adorno). In doing so, natural acts of creation are partly accelerated, but partly also increased, improved and completely reimplemented through a more precise understanding.⁷ Humans live unsymbiotically with nature. The fact that humans can be counternatural is only something reprehensible in the light of an “original sin” devised by Augustine. This view continues unnoticed in the hysterical growth of growth phobia, which blocks the essential tendency to explain what needs to be improved. Humans can be nature-optimizing in nature and therefore produce a second improved earth on earth that creates improved stories of creation.

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b) The Humanistic Transfiguration

The egomania of the will to power can be understood not only as imperious arbitrariness that wants to assert itself, but also as the authority of a competence that wants to convince through its ability. The will is thus atoned. He appears as an embodiment of a truth, not only as an “informal compulsion of a better argument” (Habermas), but as a betterment in a certain skill. In a reevaluation of Heidegger's thinking, one could speak of will as the conquest of unconcealment. He embodies the scope of gaining truth and colonizes them through his inventive initiative. The expansion of the reality zone is stabilized by the willingness to commit objectivities. Being is guarded not through the “will to not” (Heidegger), which is symbiotically oriented towards bees and birches, but through the pull of successful unlikely work. Think of the increases in life made possible by trade routes across the world's oceans, through better medical vaccines, of the accumulation of lovers through “online dating” (“Tinder children”). The will to want can also mean something for the gross domestic product and one's own body mass index to do.

On a social level, there is a culture of competition in a post-feudal social formation that is intended to evaluate the best performers. With Fukuyama, the will to win is to be interpreted as a form of megalothymia that has the ambition to show off its own excellence and to show it to the whole world. As a competitor, the other person doesn't have to be the enemy you have to destroy in order to be. Where there was killing, there can be victories. Ambition can once again strive to present works that are not regarded as arrogant works of art from the outset, but are evidence that training egomania can turn into admirable excellence.

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c) The Skeptical Transfiguration

The aspect of complexity is particularly enhanced by Nietzsche, for example. The decisive event for him that God was dead has shaken and shadowed the values and transfigurations of the world and of life. Everything became more chaotic, more disenchanted, more doubtful. He registers the emotional pain that results from this omnipresent skepticism, but reinterprets Götterdämmerung. It may be dawn. Especially when the requirements of origin lose their decisive influences, this opens up the opportunity for initiative, recombinatorics, essay-like existence. The sea of interpretations is once again open and promising. As an ambiguous existence, the world as a “new infinity” tempts you to be discovered again and again. Life as an essay as a retreat from retreat.

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d) The Existentialist Transfiguration

The desolation of existence in empty time in particular could be creatively transformed with Nietzsche as a prelude to a new energy of creative acts of knowledge. It is to be understood as a phase, as a lull that precedes new vigour. Unlike Heidegger, for example, who wants to present boredom as an indication of a new need as “need of necessity” and prematurely substantiates it into a mood of “abandonment of being,” Nietzsche distances himself from such metaphysical interpretations. Letting be also means abandoning the dogmas of abandonment, absence, misery. With Nietzsche, the diffuse pain of boredom receives the connotation of mental contractions that can announce new things and create them. Success is bubbling in the grey of everyday life.

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8. The Four Fields of Research

Enlightenment is gradually regaining a trust in itself that can promise and a promise that it trusts. She tests herself as a work on plausible overviews with the belief that in what she shows, to better describe the real as it is, without claiming to be able to completely describe the “it is so.” She also knows a vacation from discerning life as “goodwill to shine”, which regenerates itself in a therapeutic, well-dosed escapism.

On a positive note, Enlightenment can theoretically address the content of their resentment as clarification against the Enlightenment. Once again, four points arise here that could serve as fields of research for future enlightenment.

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a) Critique of Resentful Reason

With a rediscovered “passion of knowledge,” a critique of thymotic extremes should first be formulated. The starting point would be to understand misomegalothymia and hybrithymia as phenotypes of resentful reason. Nietzsche's backworld and world slanderers find themselves in the defamers of the western prosperity zone, who obscure this halfway optimal this world in the name of an over-optimal otherworldly world. Enlightenment as a critique of “critical theory” frees itself from the will to resignation and its desire to doom as a diffuse revenge against everything that is successful, creative and free as a healthy self-will. As anti-Adornism, an enlightenment enlightened by its enlightenment must tirelessly suggest that there is a real life in the wrong one.

The methodological starting point so that such critique does not just become a critical “critical theory” again is the mode of this anti-resentful critique, not a detailed examination of individual arguments of the affluents. Instead, it is important to repeat in a larger context a therapeutic philosophy such as the post-Aytic American philosopher John McDowell carried out with regard to paranoid modern skepticism. In a kind of philosophical exorcism, the context of minimal optimism is to be plausibly described, within which the suspicions of resentful reason settled themselves. You describe a credible different framework and the confused suspicions of the will to misery disappear “like a face in the sand on the seashore” (Foucault). Distress and distress are unnecessary.⁸ Ideas like those from a”Deep State“or one”patriarchy“As an interpretive film for the current situation in the West, with regard to established differentiations: the liberal rule of law, the way of life of the inventive entrepreneur, the research company, the healthcare system, the pension system, social security and, above all, the expansion of the cultural consumption zone. All this creates effects of life increases that increase literate life expectancy with massive expansion of leisure time, liquefy the constraints of origin and thus notoriously brighten up the metaphysically balanced feelings of life and constructs of reality that always locate the best in an afterlife and paint this world as scarcity, need and misery. Philosophy has endeavoured, in the jargon of alienation, to disparage this connection of prosperity to a “delusion connection” (Adorno). Peter Sloterdijk has at the end of his Opus magnum SPhären A lucid portrait of the relieved society and its enemies was given back in 2004:

The excessive victimism in the established era of prosperity can only be interpreted by the situational blindness of newly relieved people. [...] Today, it is gradually becoming apparent that the denial of levitation is the constant of the recent history of ideas.⁹

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b) Half-Open Cosmopolitanism

The fact that enlightenment could fall into the trap of self-hating freedom of mind can be an occasion to reflect more deeply about the existence of existence. In this process, designs such as Heidegger's “Throwness” are massively de-dramatized and stripped of their existential pathos. The own must be emphasized over the primacy of the foreign. Being has always been taken for granted. This nestle shelter allows a non-animal cosmopolitanism that is impregnated by moods. A philosophical economy of the own and the foreign would have to formulate a more concrete concept of liveliness. The central perspective is, as much could be said here: Priority is given to one's own. Inclusion only works as an exception. Existence can only become more liberal as a conservative. The common fatherland of global citizens is attention that finds windows to the world in their local homes.

Nietzsche's idea of appearances serves as a basic thesis when formulating a maximally half-open cosmopolitanism: Life requires priority of one's own over the foreign as a protective cocoon that limits and blocks out the inflowing new to such an extent that positive resonances can stabilize. A cultural immune system functions as a therapeutic suppression, as “a certain warm fear-preventing narrowness and inclusion in optimistic horizons.”¹⁰:

And this is a general law: every living person can only become healthy, strong and fertile within one horizon; if it is unable to draw a horizon around itself and in turn too selfish to include one's own gaze within a stranger, it taint or hastily seeps away at present doom.¹¹

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c) Body and Mind and Training

Dealing with resentful upsets gives greater importance to the connection between body and mind. It is essential to write understandings of the relationship between mind and world, which emphasize corporeality more strongly than nervous openness to the world in the constitutive dimensions of mood and atmosphere. It is therefore not a question of physical strengthening, but of discovering the metaphysically coded phenomenon of “inspiration” as a somatic mood. As a result, a bodily grounded concept of intelligence requires a physical-atmospheric Work outto get in shape. He trains on soul equipment in a somatic-mental gym. It is essential to cultivate underlying sentiments and to disempower incorporated resentments. When humans, as an “animal with classics” (Ortega y Gasset), emphasized the primacy of the mind as a matter of course, the winning combination was reading large books in libraries. Today, it might be listening to inspiring podcasts while jogging. The decisive factor here is that mind-body formation is not a one-time climb from higher altitudes, from which a panorama of views suddenly emerges in brighter atmospheres. Qualified recognition is carried out as a daily exercise program during ascent. Human revolt is lifelong learning. Sisyphus as an eternal student. There is no waking up in the morning from restless dreams and you find yourself transformed into a tremendous cosmopolitan athlete in your bed.

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d) Global Civilization Sciences

Overall, these projects open up the agenda of a civilization program of global reach. Nietzsche saw this as the battlefield for a post-heroic heroism of recognition. Viewed from an enlightened vitality, all local cultures are to be regarded as forms of training — in order to translate the term “breeding”, which Nietzsche uses more frequently, in a contemporary way. Locality is to be evaluated to see what contributions they could make to building a civil globality. Philosophy becomes comparative cultural studies as an experiment with sustainable concepts, sounds and rituals from the perspective of civilisation. What do the individual local cultures have to say? Can they be told anything? Who remains most loyal to Earth?

Regarding this issue, Hans Jonas has proposed an extended, irreversible version of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on Earth.”¹²

Jonas' idea can serve as a basal yardstick. However, it requires significant development and expansion. Particularly in view of the growth of secular-eschatologically dramatized ecological growth phobia and a masochistic fixation of the Enlightenment on certain forms of social microviolence, it is necessary to point out the highly cultural dimension of a “principle of responsibility.” Nietzsche could be central to this. He trains a glimpse to comprehensively assess the various local cultures as global training cultures. Nietzsche emphasizes in particular the departure from end-time imperatives that lose sight of humanism as a quest for optimization by means of the individual's powers of knowledge, which morally grant themselves the license to immoral themselves and want to radically change what exists through revolution — think of the tradition of moral immorality, which ranges from the Inquisition to Georg Lukác's idea of “second ethics.”¹³ This aspect becomes even more important after the 20th century. After all these departures, thinking must be understood as an arrival, but this can no longer mean the finished world of creation of a metaphysics. Nietzsche's entire philosophy could be understood as a kind of advertisement for an ambiguous existence, an “open sea.”¹⁴that would have to be discovered. His formula for this: Remain loyal to the earth. It is important to recognize this world without gods, utopias and revolutions and to accept responsibility for the magical possibility of flights of fancy.

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9. The Beautiful Own

The current zeitgeist can be described as the transition of an abundance of freedom into forms of identity that must react to the real existing globalization, insofar as they still value the status of enlightened consciousness.¹⁵ The illiberal upset, which is embodied in polarization and can be described more precisely by Fukuyama's thoughts, basically shows the difficulty of formatting in recognizing this new reality. Enlightenment must now ask itself how to develop an identity that could function without metaphysical dogmatics of obedience, without mobilizing revolutionary security and without resigned demoralization as a “passion of recognition” (Nietzsche).

As a guard of appearances that protect relief and stimulate resonance, Nietzsche reveals the first contours of existentialism that moves ascents horizontally. If secular loyalty to the earth succeeds, it is embodied as a differentiation in an economy of the own and the foreign, which has the “ambiguous character.”¹⁶ can let go of existence. This includes the habit of a stable openness to intellectual transgressions as “reverence for everything that goes beyond [one's own] horizon. ”¹⁷ Beyond tolerable obedience and permanent departure, the dynamics of a new humanism are philosophically tested, whose creative exuberance — ergothymia — demonstrates and thinks more intensively. The works, constructions, ideas that come out of arrival recognize you. As self-solarizations, they glorify life.¹⁸

Nietzsche ultimately tries to illustrate his understanding of arrival with the idea of the “eternal return of the same” as a cosmologizing thought experiment. In doing so, the idea of rebirth is changed. What would it be like if you had to relive your life this way and not otherwise? Could that be answered in the affirmative? The pain of truth and the truth of pain are not denied. But pain is no longer substantialized and as the grave, serious, tragic — think of the European mega imprints of Plato's melancholy concept of “anamnesis” — the good is always behind us, there are only traces of remembrance of it — and Augustine's gloomy idea of “original sin” — man is corrupt from birth, he can be saved by the grace of God alone — understood. Saying “yes” to a cosmos that allows everything to recur again in the same way affirms the uncertainty of life with an entrepreneurial commitment to actively shape the oscillation of arrival and overcoming as a new basic form of post-metaphysical life. In it, art expands into the art of living:

[H]ow well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?¹⁹

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Article Image

George Frederic Watts: Hope (1884) (source)

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Sources

Adorno, Theodor W. & Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment, Frankfurt a.M. 1998.

Bejan, Teresa M.: Hobbes Against Hate Speech. In: British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32/2 (2022), PP. 247-264.

Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the Last Man, New York 2006.

Günther, Gotthart: The consciousness of machines. A metaphysics of cybernetics. 3., for an introduction and the German translation of Cognition and Volition extended edition. Baden-Baden 2002 (also available online).

Heidegger, Martin: Overcoming metaphysics, In: Talks and essays (1954). Pfullingen 1985.

Jonas, Hans: The principle of responsibility. Frankfurt am Main 1986.

Sloterdijk, Peter: foams. Spheres III Frankfurt am Main 2004.

Lukács, Georg: Tactics and ethics. In: Political essays I: 1918—1920. Darmstadt & Neuwied 1975.

Sontag, Susan: What's Happening to America (A symposium). In: Partisan Review 34/1 (1967), p. 57 f.

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Footnotes

1: The happy science, No. 359.

2: The tendency to completely expel Thymos can be found among the fathers of liberal thought (see Fukuyama, p. 184 f.). Hobbes and Locke could therefore be described as the first woke. It fits in with the fact that Hobbes was the first thinker to use a mature language custom of political correctness than Agree not to disagree devotion, which provided for state penalties. Because even contradicting someone else's opinion is a source of aggression, its articulation should be prohibited, at least on fundamental issues, and especially vis-à-vis the state. Consensus becomes the first civic duty. Cf. Hobbes, From Cive, Sections five and six in the first chapter. See also Teresa M. Bejan: Hobbes Against Hate Speech. pp. 247-264. In defense of Hobbes, it could be noted that his thinking was hypnotized by the proximity to the Thirty Years' War (1618-48).

3: Heidegger, Overcoming metaphysics, p. 94 — It remains appealing to imagine how the cultural development of the West would have gone if Augustine's rival thinker Pelagius, who emphasizes free will for his own moral efforts and rejects the thesis of the original corruption of man as a sin being, had become formative.

4: The happy science No 107.

5: The happy science No. 189.

6: The happy science No. 78.

7: Cf. Gotthard Günther, The consciousness of machines, p. 102 ff.

8: Cf. The happy science No. 56.

9: Sloterdijk, spheres III, pp. 690 & 696. The entire third chapter of this volume can be read as a canonical continuation of “cheerful science,” which masterfully strives to illustrate the relieving weight of the world in modern times.

10: The happy science, No. 370.

11: The benefits and disadvantages of history for life, Paragraph 1.

12: Jonas, The principle of responsibility, P. 36.

13: With the concept of “second ethics,” Lukács argues that a crime (such as violence or murder) has ethical value when the agent knows that it is actually wrong — the first ethics of law — but still commits the act in order to achieve the higher goal of the revolution. You sin for the absolute good: “Only someone who knows steadfastly and unquestionably that murder is not permitted under any circumstances can — paradoxically and tragically — commit murder as an ethically moral act” (Georg Lukács, Tactics and ethics (1919), P. 77).

14: The happy science, No. 343.

15: In addition to the path to mobilization through polarizing populisms as a kind of instant identity, the supermarket also lends itself to denying reality, which promises a vacation away from identity with increasingly sophisticated entertainment media. Gaming and streaming are digital paradises that accommodate “goodwill to shine.” Consumers are lucky enough not to need Thymos first-hand. However, there is also a paradoxical overconsumption which, in the form of connoisseurism, develops megalothymic superiority in an area aimed at complete neutralization of “courage.”

16: Happy science, No 373.

17: Ibid.

18: “If you consider how a philosophical overall justification of his way of living and thinking works on each individual — namely like a warming, blessing, fertilizing, shining specifically for him sun, how it makes self-sufficient, rich, generous in happiness and goodwill regardless of praise and rebuke, as it incessantly turns evil into good, all powers to blossom and mature Bringing and not letting the small and big weeds of grief and annoyance arise at all: — this is how you finally exclaim: Oh that many Such new suns would still be created! Even the bad guy, even the unfortunate person, even the exceptional person should have his philosophy, his right, his sunshine! “(The happy science No 289.)

19: The Gay Science, § 341 (translation: Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House 1974, p. 274.

“How Well Disposed Would You Have to Become to Yourself and to Life”

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Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy That Will Be Able to Present Itself as an Enlightenment — Part II

After our author, in the first part of this article, described the current political-cultural situation with reference to Fukuyama as an outgrowth of deep-seated boredom, which numbs itself in excesses of anger and indignation, he tries in the following second to suggest a possible turn for this zeitgeist, which could manifest itself in a new Enlightenment verve and a new positive self-image of the Enlightenment. Our author, with Nietzsche, opposes the “four despairs” that afflict the present tense, “four transfigurations” and “fields of research” resulting from them. An ironic view of the world and oneself should help to practice a transfigurative perspective on the world, which would be able to overcome the lethargy of postmodernism and revitalize the modernist project. The program of self-reliant future Enlightenment.

"We do not easily negate; we make it a point of honor to be affirmers.”

‍Nietzsche, Twllight of the Idols, Morality as Anti-Nature, 6 (source of translation)

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"Proctophantasmist: You still are here?

Nay, ’tis a thing unheard!

Vanish, at once! We’ve said the enlightening word.

The pack of devils by no rules is daunted:

We are so wise, and yet is Tegel haunted.

To clear the folly out, how have I swept and stirred!

Twill ne’er be clean: why, ’tis a thing unheard!! ”

Goethe, Faust (source of translation)

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1. Basic Disgruntlement

A ghost is haunting the West — the specter of anti-liberal disgruntlement. It stems from a culture of Enlightenment that pushes its promise of a better life through intelligence into the background through a habit of criticism. Because spirit and freedom do not seem to complement each other, spirit begins to suspect freedom. The skeptical spirit thus itself becomes a reason why trust in the spirit's vital promise of ascension has given way to intelligent suspicion. The cunning cleverness, with which Odysseus escaped from Polyphemus' cave and with which Boccaccio in his Decameron made sympathy for this world against dogmatic Christianity plausible, becomes an abstract discourse of hypercritical consciousness, which develops its inventive power in ever new suspicions against itself. Being becomes being-against as being-against-oneself. As “Enlightenment about the Enlightenment,” Enlightenment turns from exhilarating logos into the myth of a tribunalization that, in ever more advanced narratives, casts a gloomy light on its own existence — to the delight of the autocratic Internationale, which looks grudgingly at Western culture. Adorno, the siren-like grandmaster of the apodictic hypersensitivities of a cultural criticism industry against everything that exists, explained together with his co-author Horkheimer: “Enlightenment is totalitarian.”² Thinking must be correct when it repeatedly rejoins into the chorus that there can be no right life in the wrong one. Through this type of diagnoses, which in a totalitarian manner adjudge Enlightenment to be totalitarian and whose heirs today determine the subject matter of the humanities almost hegemonically, a point is reached at which Enlightenment must ask itself whether it has not fallen into an extremism of criticism, which shows masochistic traits and, in this state, contributes to exacerbating the problem of dysfunctional liberalism. An Enlightenment that no longer follows the fury of criticism must reinterpret the disgruntling interpretations so that there could be a change of mood. It finds its yardstick in experiencing freedom as a fragile opportunity to recognize an unlikely abundance to which, surprisingly enough, we belong.³

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2. Toxic Elective Affinities

In a kind of Enlightenment about the Enlightenment of Enlightenment, it would first be possible to differentiate phenomenologically two main types of extremist criticism. The first litany, which often belongs more to the left-wing camp, is directed against the own as an aggressiveness against the foreign. The West is stigmatized as a capitalist-colonialist plot by white men against the rest of the world. In an expression that leaves nothing to be desired, the young Susan Sontag writes in this sense: “The white race is the cancer of humanity.”⁴ This kind of big interpretation leads to the plausibility of social chemotherapy that pays homage to the utopia of a radically different future: “in solidarity,” “empathetic,” “consensual.” Today, this critique of the own often shows itself under the value of “justice.”

Criticism in the opposite tendency is directed against one's own as a force pervaded by strangers. It takes place under the guiding principle of “decadence.” Perceiving one's own culture as “alienated” is usually practiced by right-wing critics. The decline of values is stylized as the notorious “fall of the West” (Oswald Spengler, 1918⁵). He is summoned in the mode of the dark romance of an end-time Götterdämmerung. Cultural criticism becomes eulogy. Salvation lies in the nostalgia of the good old days, garnished with the authority of God. Currently, this criticism of one's own, which is interpreted as “alienated,” is mostly seen as a defense of “freedom.”

Both critiques could be interpreted as justified to a certain extent. A modern liberal-democratic society needs the conflict that stems from its internal tension of freedom and justice. A proportionate and recongestant immune response against lack of freedom and against injustice indicates social fitness. However, this vital and vitalizing response has currently reached the state of emergency of a permanent stress response, which is taking on the outlines of a double autoimmune disease. The tricky thing is that both overreactions are not reduced because they represent a milieu for each other that makes their respective state of alarm appear appropriate. These cultural critiques, formed from contrasting angles but related emotional states, thus create mutual stability. They form a successful toxic relationship as intertwined cultural autoimmune diseases. In doing so, each other's exaggerations become welcome reasons to be able to glorify one's own exaggerations as objective and realistic. While you stand out clearly in your distortions alone, you look good in the light of the contrasting distortions. Your own contradictions and radicalisms can thus easily be reinterpreted as “fake facts” and appropriate proportionality. The agenda of one side determines the agenda of the other. This is how “Woke” and “MAGA” complement each other in the USA.

The longer this double autoimmune reaction lasts, the more it stabilizes. The sentiments of Occidental “no” against themselves are concentrated and organized in diametrically arranged industries of cultural criticism. This is reflected, for example, in a homophobic friendliness that is otherwise not interested in the foreign and a xenophobic love of home that has understood little of its own culture. Being for something is fed by being in opposition to being in opposition to the other being. You like something because the other side doesn't like it. In this interprovocation, certain shibboleths, codes of belonging, are formed, which mark one's own horde membership. They each provide the philosophical service of a warming horde of communal ill-finding and ill-doing in times of a functionally “differentiated society” (Luhmann). Hassen unites and creates the magic of community. The slogan in these racquets is: The fight must go on and on. Together in hate, they become analogous conspiracy theories against the West. In this way, a bipolar cultural struggle against the West is being formed, which maintains its integrity from the struggle of the two main poles of cultural criticism in a self-image as a rational immune response.

Public discourse is increasingly being consumed by the phenomenon of “polarization,” because the spaces of neutral confrontation are themselves under the suspicion of being partisan. This situation is escalated by the utopia of a radical new start promoted by both sides. The concept of world revolution is available on the left and the concept of rebirth is available on the right. In slogans: “Smash the system! ““Make America great again! ”

Under the stress of two self-stabilizing autoimmune diseases, the social body increasingly lacks the capacity for sustainable cultural work, in which the foreign and the own become more deeply recognizable, become friends with each other on this basis or can at least remain cooperative in a conscious sense of otherness while civilizing each other. In the spirit of Odo Marquard, it could be said that what avoids declarations of a state of emergency would be healthy.⁶

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3. And Yet It Continues

In order to better understand the phenomenon of radical Enlightenment versus one's own Enlightenment, one could refer to ideas that Francis Fukuyama wrote in the last chapter of his great book The End of History and the Last Man from 1992. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, Fukuyama does not triumphantly argue that the has ended with the victory of the West against the East in the Cold War. Instead, he adopts a view that gathers “weakly deterministic”⁷ arguments as to why historical development has a tendency to lead to liberal democracies. Fukuyama justifies this interpretation by saying that liberal democracy is the political form for the possibility of a rational civilizing of a basic psychological energy, which he understands as “thymos” with reference to Plato's teaching of the three parts of the soul. Unlike “sophia,” which embodies wise reflection, and “eros,” which means greedy desire, thymos stands for a psychological figure that has received little attention in modern times. It covers the spectrum of feelings associated, for example, with pride, recognition, self-esteem, envy, jealousy, and ambition. Thymos, translatable roughly as “courage,” is portrayed by Fukuyama in the manner of a drive for heroism:

“Thymos” is the side of man that deliberately seeks out struggle and sacrifice, that tries to prove that self is something better and higher than a fearful, needy, instinctual, physically determined animal.⁸

In his diagnosis, Fukuyama distinguishes between two types of thymos. “Isothymia” is stimulated by the defamation suffered and urges equal treatment. “Megalothymia,” on the other hand, describes the urge to show off one's own abilities ambitiously and “show it to everyone else.”⁹ In a fight for recognition, both forms of thymos prove themselves in the quality of honorable sacrifice for something higher than one's own life.

Political thought has traditionally considered the negativity of the megalothymic. In an instructive overview, Fukuyama lists the previous ways of dealing with it. While Plato attached great importance to the education of Thymos, Machiavelli votes for a Balance of Thymos, Power should be kept in check by force.¹⁰ Modern liberalism in Hobbes and Locke thinks of Thymos as a vain quest for recognition,”Vainglory“To completely neutralize (Hobbes). A rational quest for self-preservation and material prosperity should replace the barbaric desire for fame. After all, the founding fathers of the USA did not seek to “rationalize away” thymotic energies, but rather to implement them in a politically wise manner Checks and Balances to channel.¹¹ Fukuyama joins this model. He makes it clear that the liberal attempt to domesticate Thymos through reason and consumption alone falls short. Peace does not produce peace and prosperity does not produce prosperity. In a liberal democracy, the extremes of Thymos must not only be tamed, but they must also be transformed in such a way that they become essential productive elements of social life as civil courage and as a desire to do one's best.¹² However, this only ever happens in a balance of freedom and justice, which is always considered trade off is to be watched. Emphasis on freedom comes at the expense of justice and vice versa. As examples, Fukuyama cites the USA, where the primacy of freedom and Europe, where the primacy of justice is decisive, and he also explicitly mentions Germany as the country in which the”European Dream“was most clearly realized as the successful end of history in peace and prosperity.¹³

Fukuyama sees the core problem of Western culture in not being able to moderate the irrevocable tensions and excesses of isothymia and megalothymia effectively enough. The reason for this is a lack of understanding of the power of recognition. In addition, isothymia as a plausible factor in postal history is culturally interpreted as good and megolathymia as an apparent relic from non-civil times as evil. So the story doesn't end for Fukuyama. It goes on. But now as an internal tension of liberal democracies that have successfully left the history of imperial history.¹⁴

The good life in prosperity has its specific difficulty in the absence of the magic of recognition struggles. This creates the type of “last person,” which Fukuyama, unlike Nietzsche, does not portray as squinting comfort in small day and night lusts. There is aggressive dissatisfaction in the thymos oblivion of prosperity. Peace becomes unpeaceful because it is bored with itself. You are no longer in demand as a top performer. Everyday life can be tackled by just giving 40%. The battles have been fought, and efforts are still being made to do so. Little enemy, little honor. Normality is an underchallenge. “The inadequate/Here is the event” (Goethe). As a result, there is a greed for symbolic sham battles that distract attention from the fact that the true struggles for recognition in the West have largely been successfully ended and are largely successfully institutionalized in the West.

The best of all political worlds has the problem that it disposes of radicalization to radicalization through its too brief understanding of de-radicalization. Therefore, the lack of challenge must be balanced in such a way that life continues to be thymotically stimulated but does not tip into uninhibited thymotic excesses (see “Cancel Culture” and “MAGA” and the anger attention industry, for which in English the terms Angertainment, Doomporn or Ragebait circulate).

Fukuyama sees the future task of liberal democracies as resolving the lack of awareness of the negative consequences of recognition. Politically, recognition has been latently recognized, but in theory they have not yet understood deeply enough what it means. This is how confusion ensues. It remains unclear what a thymotically comprehensive dignified human condition is and how exactly human rights are to be defined, and so it remains unclear how thymotic energies are to be treated within the framework of a liberal democracy.¹⁵ This ambiguity leads to a consensual way of life that is thymotically underwhelmed and is attracted by thymotic exaggerations. This opens the way for two radical extremes — on the one hand, the hyper-intensified demand for the recognition of ever more specific identity rights (isothymia) and, on the other hand, the unleashed return of megalothymia, which manifests itself in the ruthless drive for imperialist superiority. This creates a mental situation that Fukuyama foresaw in 1992: “This opens the way to hyperintensified demand for the recognition of equal rights, on the one hand, and the re-liberation of megalothymia on the other.”¹⁶ History continues: As a battle of citizens, the descendants are of citizens who successfully ended the story.

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The article image was created by Linus Rupp based on the painting Diogenes by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1873; link).

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Read Part II.

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Footnotes

1: A German translation of this important text by Alexander Görlitz and Paul Stephan, published by the Halcyon Association for Radical Philosophy, was published in 2020 as the first volume of the series of publications Edition Halkyon (link). (Editor's note: You can also acquire this brochure as a reward at our recent crowdfunding campaign.)

2: Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, p. 12.

3: The following thoughts can be seen as additions to the aphorisms with which the small notebook Die Freiheit zu sein (“The freedom to be”) from the year 2022 (link), which was intended as a kind of attempt at a cautiously affirming philosophy, fade out. (Editor's note: You can also acquire this brochure as a reward at our recent crowdfunding campaign.)

4: Susan Sontag, What's Happening to America, p. 57 f. (Our translation.)

5: Editor's note: On Spengler's right-Nietzscheanism, see also Christian Saehrendt's article Nietzsche’s Monkey, Nietzsche’s Varlet on this blog.

6: Editor's note: Cf. the article Abyss and Enablement? The Suspense of Contingency Johannes Hansmann Discusses Odo Marquard and Richard Rorty by Natalie Schulte and Paul Stephan on this blog (link).

7: Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man p. 354.

8: Ibid., p. 304.

9: Ibid., p. 180.

10: Consider the European Pentarchy from 1763 to 1914, which could currently be repeated on a larger scale globally if a post-transatlantic West was created. It would consist of the USA, China, Russia, Europe, and the Gulf region.

11: See ibid., p. 184 ff.

12: In addition, there must be rooms, arenas, in which the megalothymic can exist. Fukuyama, for example, speaks of “free solo rock climbers”, “skydiving”, “ironman”: “TheAlpinist has, in short, re-created for him or herself all the conditions ofhistorical struggle: danger, disease, hard work, and finally the risk of violent death” (ibid., p. 319).

13: Ibid., pp. 293 f. & 346 f. The thymotic epochal change in Germany could perhaps be described as an outbreak from an all-out war for all to prosperity for all, which could currently be known as the slogan “Care for all.” The welfare state becomes the care state. The self-image as a victim becomes opium for the people and the defense of this self-image becomes the cocaine of the people's representatives. Both sides instrumentalize isothymia as an “affect medication” (Nietzsche). Some do not want to despise and change and others do not want to feel important and therefore do not want to upset the sovereign. Mediocracy instead of meritocracy. Perhaps it is the unfamiliarity in dealing with thymotic energies that has led to the growth of a custom of slight insult in Germany, the special student of modern times and the model student of posthistory, so that even current heads of state are not afraid to apply the strict sanctions of paragraph 188 of the Criminal Code against harmless satire.

14: Ibid., p. 292 ff. — Realpolitik remains acute insofar as there is an inequality with regard to the historical development of post-history (see ibid., p. 276 ff.) Tensions may continue to arise at the collision zones of modern and ancient history, in which the language of realpolitik Lingua franca is. This phenomenon can currently be observed — March 2026 — in the conflict between the Shiite theocracy in Iran and its Western opponents. But Fukuyama also admonishes that the paradigm of realpolitik has considerable weaknesses in looking at everything through the filter of strength. It should be added: It is part of the pattern of real politics that criticism of this scheme is already interpreted as a form of weakness. This leads to solutions that become problems: “Treating a disease that no longer exists, realist now find themselves proposing costly and dangerous cures to healthy patients” (ibid., p. 253).

15: Ibid., p. 296 f. & 337 f. — The so-called strengthening of right-wing politics should be interpreted as cultural backlash megalothymic energies in a hegemony of isothymic dramas. There is a lack of forms of rational thymotics that would not have to repeat the old idiocies in order to be able to embody themselves.

16: Ibid., p. 337 f.

“How Well Disposed Would You Have to Become to Yourself and to Life”

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Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy That Will Be Able to Present Itself as an Enlightenment — Part I

The following text explores the hypothesis that every philosophy of the zeitgeist finds its onset at something that bothers it: in the beginning, there was disgruntlement. This something is interpreted here as an illiberally disgruntled enlightenment, which is embodied in the current “polarization.” With Francis Fukuyama's help, this trail is explored and the drama of the recognition of modern Enlightenment is described.

The philosopher Fukuyama, born in Chicago in 1952, is primarily known for his essay The End of History? from 1989¹. There, he held that the “end of history” assumed by Hegel had finally arrived with the looming collapse of the Soviet Union. He saw the triumphant liberal Western democracies as the final stage of the process of historical progress. In 1992, Fukuyama published his main work based on this essay: The End of History and the Last Man, in which he combines Hegel's thesis with Nietzsche's diagnosis of the “last man.” Our author is also referring to this book. It caused controversial debates worldwide and continues to provoke today. — Do we really live after the “end of history”? Our author agrees with Fukuyama: While with the form of liberal democracy a final embodiment of the course of history has been achieved, history has been continuing as a conflict within this embodiment. World history has become history of liberalism.

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“Look at me so sweet in the forest

I'm going to be so sorry, forget it soon.

Does a rose blossom fragrant in shark grass,

I'll kiss the rose and cry a little.

Funny how wind blows, a dream sweeps through the heart

Does a lime blossom fall from a tree. ”¹

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With the beginning of Romanticism, the forest in German-speaking countries became a place of longing, where you can escape from hectic and rationalistic modern life. For Nietzsche too, the forest becomes a relaxing retreat, but also a source of inspiration and a veritable “magic forest”, where people transform into trees and encounter ghosts becomes possible.

The modern person, who evades mass urban society and chooses voluntary isolation in the forest, opens up his channels of perception for nature and his own inner life. In doing so, he also opens a door to archaic pre-Christian ideas, according to which all living nature is also animated and is penetrated by good and evil spirits. Not only in Grimm's fairy tales, but in many subsequent creations of high and popular culture, the forest appears as a place of transformation and enchantment of modern man. Dark, fearful topoi play a major role in this: witches, wizards and creepy hermits, forest spirits and wolves. Nietzsche also regularly sought solitude during forest hikes and flirted with a life as a forest remit.

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Nietzsche's Wanderlust

Even today, a hiking trail near Cham in the Bavarian Forest reminds of Nietzsche's forest and wanderlust. In August 1867, he visited this area together with his student friend Erwin Rohde, after he had completed his philosophy studies. “As soon as I was loose and single, I flew to the Bohemian Forest with friend Rohde to bathe the tired soul in nature, mountains and forests,” he wrote to his friend Carl von Gersdorff.² He explained to mother and sister: “I really want forest and mountain after such needs have been artificially built up as a result of a 2-year stay in Leipzig and have thus become very strong. ”³ This hike awakened Nietzsche's love for the forest.⁴ Experiences of nature cheered him up and created feelings of grandeur: “Mighty black firs against mountains and spring greenery standing out — sun on long treeless strips in the forest in the evening — you expect the most cheerful dance”⁵, he wrote down in 1878 and added: “In spring, grassy path in the forest — undergrowth and bushes, then taller trees — feeling of blissful freedom. ”⁶ Forest life enchanted Nietzsche in such a way that even passers-by noticed it: ”Once, in the forest, a gentleman who passed by me got very excited: I felt at that moment that I must have the expression of bright happiness in my face and that I had already been walking around with him for 2 hours. ”⁷ In addition, Nietzsche sometimes stylized himself as a hermit or flirted with this role when he shares his master plan with Heinrich Köselitz, for example: “Move away from the world into the forest! Dot. ”⁸ In a later letter to Köselitz, Nietzsche took up this idea again: “I'm leaving for the next few days, via Munich to Naumburg, to hide in a forest. ”⁹ But a nice neighborhood would be a prerequisite for hermit existence, Nietzsche confided to his sister: “A deep forest would be the best thing, but there would have to be cheerful people who I don't need to be wary of.”¹⁰ — because Nietzsche also knows: “[T] he forest solitude is uncanny.”¹¹

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Delivered to the Forest Spirits

The fear of the forest with its darkness and demons, the discomfort in “haunted” places has always been part of the Central German mentality. Nietzsche was certainly influenced by this; he will also have known Grimm's fairy tales, in which the forest plays a prominent role. Places that must seem scary to forest goers included deserts. Many Central German villages were abandoned in times of plague and medieval climate change. They were desolate. There are numerous legends about this sunken villages. They sometimes saw nighttime lights there and avoided these places whenever possible. Stories about hermits were also a source of discomfort, wild women and represent witches. Irritating, supernatural perceptions, which hikers sometimes reported, were attributed in folk stories to the work of forest spirits who accompany the hiker for a while and which you should never irritate if you did not want to lose orientation.¹² Also animated by ghosts Irrwurzeln and Irrgräsern According to the vernacular: Soil plants with a distinctive red color, growing near graves. Whoever steps on it wanders around in circles without ever finding their way out of the forest again.¹³ Even at the time of the Germanic ancestors, the landscape of Central Europe, with everything in it, was considered to be inhabited by good and bad spirits: whether rock, animal or plant. These traditions continued in folk stories, in the world of legends and fairy tales, and sometimes also subcutaneously in the Christian faith. Nietzsche views this critically, but at the same time as the basis for a sublime experience of nature:

Man has even applied this interpretation of all movements and lines to intentions to the nature of inanimate things — in the delusion that there is nothing inanimate: I believe that everything we call a sense of nature when looking at sky, ground, forest, thunderstorm, stars, sea, landscape, spring, has its origin here — without the ancient practice of fear that everything has a second underlying meaning Looking back, we would now have no joy in nature, just as we would not enjoy humans and animals, without that teacher of Understanding, fear.¹⁴

Referring to Schopenhauer's philosophy of nature, he attested to Richard Wagner that he wanted to make animated nature speak with his music:

He also dives into dawn, forest, fog, chasm, mountain height, night showers, moonlight and reminds them of a secret desire: they also want to sound. When the philosopher says that it is a will that thirsts for existence in animate and inanimate nature, the musician adds: and this will wants, at all levels, a resounding existence.¹⁵

The centuries-old fear of forest demons may have been reinforced by poisonous and psychotropic plants and mushrooms that people consumed unintentionally or ritually in previous centuries. Black belladonna, for example, owed hallucinations, the urge to speak, severe excitement, but in higher doses also coma and cardiac arrest. Folk names such as Vertigo cherry, devil cherry, walkerberry, wild berry, furberry, wolfberry or Tollkraut indicated that unpredictable demons were seen at work here. Fortunately, there were also protective forest plants, such as St. John's wort, blackthorn and elderberry. Black elderberry For example, was used as a protective plant against black magic, fire and lightning strikes, as Lebensbaum and regarded as the abode of well-intentioned house spirits. The person who cut down and cut back an elderberry bush provoked misfortune and death. The name of the shrub is said to be derived from Ms. Holla or Holda, a Germanic goddess of home and fertility, a deity friendly to humans, who was able to heal animals and humans. The Brothers Grimm also have in their fairy tale Ms. Holle This mythological figure uses — in general, the Grimms' fairy tales were preceded by numerous stories of witches, vampires and werewolves from regional legends — as can be seen when looking at the historical traditions of the authorities and courts. The Germans' penchant for the supernatural also occupied the Allied occupiers in their reeducation programs. At that time, intelligence officer Terence J. Leonard analyzed German schoolbooks from 1925 to 1945 on behalf of the Textbook Section of the British military government. He found that apart from militarism and hero worship, there is a “cult of morbid and occult” prevailing in these books and he asked himself: “[W] he can children from an early age in the spirit of a deceptive pagan mysticism Smus (ghosts in trees!) Have you ever been raised to completely get rid of these ideas? “German philology is steeped in an “atmosphere of black magic, a mishmash of good and evil.” The Allied re-educator rejected the objection that fairy tales always ended in a good way, because the question was how the turn for the better is achieved in German fairy tales. People could never achieve anything on their own, but only “with the help of a malformed dwarf, an ugly woman, talking animals, or spirits speaking from trees. ”¹⁶

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Become a Tree!

Even in ancient times, forest gods and spirits had taken possession of plants. Nietzsche refers to this several times. In his “Dionysian worldview,” he mentions “the wisdom of the forest god Silen” and the Forest Demon Pan, who has “the gift of prophecy.” Together with Satyrs They both belonged to Dionysus' entourage.¹⁷ Like the Greeks had their demons, the Romans had theirs Genien, guardian spirits who guided man, protected and possibly saved him remain invisible, as Nietzsche in the strange sentence — “The geniuses in the forest wait until the wanderer is over.”¹⁸ — expressed. Nietzsche repeatedly brings the forest into play as a place of gaining knowledge — symbolically, but also in a very concrete way. He writes at one point: “We are the knights who understand birds' voices in the forest, we follow them. ”¹⁹ In another place, he reports about “swarms of muses in the fog of the mountains,” about forest and mountain spirits who throw good and bright things at the hiker “out of their tops and hides of leaves,” “the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountains, forests and solitude and who, like him, are wanderers and philosophers in their soon cheerful and thoughtful manner. ”²⁰ The forest spirits appear to Nietzsche here as friendly relatives and companions.

It is hardly surprising that Nietzsche's fictional character too Zarathustra shares its creator's love of the forest. Zarathustra repeatedly roams the forests and meets miraculous figures there. Right at the beginning of the book, chased by wolves, he drags the body of an injured acrobat through the dark forest for hours, seeks help from a hermit in vain and conceals the carcass in a hollow tree to protect it from animal damage. He later meets two richly decorated kings and the creepy “ugliest person” in the forest. At the same time, the forest serves as a metaphor for Nietzsche in his Zarathustra story. This is how a hunter is described in this book who returned “from the forest of knowledge” unsuccessfully and in a dark mood²¹, elsewhere Zarathustra praises the sublime peace of the forest: “Forest and rock are worthy of being silent with you”²², and asks people to transform themselves into the tree: “Like the tree you love again, the broad-leaning one: it hangs over the sea quietly and listening” (ibid.). In Nietzsche, tree and man sometimes appear as dual beings because he finds a decisive thing in common between them:

It is with people as with trees. The more he wants to go up and up into light, the more his roots strive earthwards, downwards, into darkness, into depth — into evil.²³

The transformation of people into trees, or the image of the human-inspired tree, can be found several times in Nietzsche's writings, especially in the words Zarathustra, who muses about a tree on the mountainside. One cannot help but recognize Nietzsche's self-stylization here:

This tree stands alone here in the mountains; it grew high above humans and animals. And if he wanted to talk, he wouldn't have anyone to understand him: that's how tall he grew. Now he waits and waits—what is he waiting for? He lives too close to the seats of the clouds: he's probably waiting for the first flash?²⁴

Zarathustra then also performs the transformation into a tree, into an object of an animated nature. This is how Zarathustra declared when he entered a forest clearing with his disciples:

I may be a forest and a night of dark trees: but anyone who is not afraid of my darkness will also find roses under my cypresses.²⁵

Literature and forest landscape produce each other. Writers, philosophers and poets are inspired by the dense plant world and subsequent travelers and inhabitants perceive the forest filtered and pointed through stories and through reading. In doing so, the boundaries between literary fiction, expectations and real experience are blurred. This also affected the walker Nietzsche, who perceived the forest as a place of miraculous transformation, but also as an eerie intermediate world with which the hiker, now turning into a tree himself, into a forest, can merge.

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The article image was painted by Australian artist Mitchell Nolte (link), whom we commissioned to illustrate our entire forest series.

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Literature

Story from Bohemia. Folklore Archives. Central Archive of the German Folk Narrative Marburg, No. 140604.

Legend from Styria in the forest near St. Margareten. Folklore Archives. Central Archive of the German Folk Narrative Marburg, No. 188320 & 188737.

Leonard, Terence J.: First Steps in Cruelty. In: British Zone Review. vol I, No. 34, 4/1947, pp. 10-13. Translation and reprint in: Hessian newspapers for folk and cultural research, Vol. 18: Two hundredth of the Grimms, Marburg 1985, p. 111ff.

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Footnotes

1: Letter to Raimund Granier dated 28/07/1862.

2: Letter to Carl von Gersdorff dated 24/11/1/12/1867.

3: Letter to Franziska and Elisabeth Nietzsche dated 6/8/1867.

4: Cf. https://www.bayerischer-wald.de/attraktion/friedrich-nietzsche-wanderweg-9d4b9f08fc.

5: Subsequent fragments 1878 27 [36].

6: Subsequent fragments 1878 30 [116].

7: Letter to Heinrich Köselitz of 20/8/1880.

8: Letter to Heinrich Köselitz v. 21/4/1883.

9: Letter to Heinrich Köselitz v. 7/5/1886.

10: Letter to Elisabeth Nietzsche v. 7/5/1885.

11: Letter to Heinrich Köselitz of 18/7/1880.

12: See e.g. Story from Bohemia.

13: See e.g. Legend from Styria in the forest near St. Margareten.

14: Morgenröthe, Aph 142.

15: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, paragraph 9.

16: Terence J. Leonard, First Steps in Cruelty (Translation, p. 113). The text was apparently aimed primarily at members of the British occupying power in order to explain the mentality of the Germans to them.

17: The Dionysian worldview, paragraph 2.

18: Subsequent fragments 1882 17 [10].

19:Subsequent fragments 1870 5 [44].

20: Human all too human I, aph. 638.

21: So Zarathustra spoke, From the exalted.

22: So Zarathustra spoke, From the flies of the market.

23: So Zarathustra spoke, From a tree on a mountain.

24: Ibid.

25: So Zarathustra spoke, The dance song.

Inside the Magic Forest

Nietzsche and the Sorcerous Power of Trees

In cultural perception, the forest is much more than a mere supplier of raw materials or a local recreation area, but, especially in German culture, a magical place of encounter with the supernatural. In the second part of our series ”the forest as a livelihood“ Christian Saehrendt explores this romantic fascination for the forest and to what extent it is also reflected in Nietzsche's works. Because Nietzsche was not only a passionate forest walker, he also writes again and again about this gateway to the “otherworld” and, last but not least, places his Zarathustra in sylvan sceneries.

My legs are heavy and I barely feel my arms anymore. My head blares continuously and the voices sound like a distant echo in my skull. This life doesn't belong to me; my soul is stuck in a body that hasn't belonged to me for a long time. Maybe it never did. I'm not ill. Just tired, endlessly tired of these voices whispering over and over again: “There is no escape.” No escape from what? From this leaden burden on my shoulders? Or from this endlessly repetitive vicious circle that gives me the same pain day after day?

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I'm walking alone in the woods. A cool autumn day, but the sun warms me enough. I like to go here; the forest relieves my head, eases the tangled thoughts that sit deep in my chest every day. I don't like the word “difficulty.” “Heavities” would be more honest, because everything is heavy. But here, between the trees, this heaviness seems lighter for a moment. There is no meaning, alright, I agree with Friedrich Nietzsche on that, but the meaninglessness doesn't bother me here. Here, it is just there, like the wind, like the rustling, like the light that falls through the branches.

I am thinking of the infinite void, of the nihilism that Nietzsche warned us against breaking in. Or rather wanted to warn? I believe nihilism has has entered long time ago. No, I don't belief so, because God is dead. I know that nihilism has entered a long time ago. I see it in the eyes of people who only have dollar signs shining. They're holding this square thing that screams, flashes, vibrates. When I ask them “Why?”, they shrug their shoulders. Sometimes I get dizzy when I'm standing among them, these robots. I'm one of them, but I think they programmed me in a wrong way. I speak another language and I see differently. Is my perspective the wrong one or theirs? Am I sick or are they? “You don't belong here,” I hear my teacher's voice. I was seven back then. Maybe I'm really sick.

A red squirrel sits a little further away. You barely see them anymore. Their world is dying, tree by tree, so that the industrial building can grow. Poor squirrel, I think. Poor paws. Poor forest. Everything is affected by nihilism as if by a parasite. And the nihilistic parasite is efficient: one cut and it's all over. The squirrel whizzes up the trunk. Further ahead, a fox, its eyes light up at me like two tiny mirrors. But as soon as I take a step, it's gone. It's all over.

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I keep going and I come to a huge oak tree. It stretches its crown into the sky like a cathedral, maybe a thousand meters, maybe only twenty. Measures blur. Can that oak tree tell me what's waiting for us up there? Void. I'm moving on. I don't know how long. I don't like relying on time. They used to say, “Your time will come.” I never understood what time they meant or how it should come. Today I know that it was a lie. They barely ever said anything else. These robots.

There is the oak tree again. That can't be the case. I've already passed by it. The big oak tree. I must have been wrong. I'm going on, the same way back. But there it is again. I'm pausing. Turn me around. Go faster. The oak tree. I'm going backwards. The oak tree. I close my eyes and walk blindly through the undergrowth, feeling roots, thorns, branches. I open my eyes. The oak tree. I'm getting down on my knees. It stands in front of me unchanged. I roll across the forest floor, soil stuck under my fingernails, moss squeezing into my face. But when I look up: the oak tree. I realize that no matter what I do, this oak tree is waiting. I'm trapped. In this forest, in this body, in this life. Every path leads back to it. Each step is repeated. I slap my fists on the rind, but nothing changes. I scream into the dark forest but no one hears me. There is no one there.

And suddenly, between my hectic breaths, I no longer hear the voices in my head, but a sentence that breaks away from the depths of my memory. Like the leaf that falls from a branch over there. “You must live this life, as you are living it now, again and countless times.” Nietzsche. The demon. The biggest heavyweight. I stare at the oak tree as if it had whispered this sentence to me. Maybe it has, maybe it's the demon.

I wipe dirt off my face and watch the moonlight fall through the crown of the oak tree. What if this return isn't a coincidence? What if it's a question? I'm taking a step back. The air smells of soil and cold. My heart beats faster, but not because of fear. More because something lifts up in me, like an animal that has slept too long. So a question: Can I bear coming back to this exact point over and over again? Would I want this life, every tiredness, every mistake, every despair again? And then again and again? And infinitely often?

Turn thoughts into my head. I hear my teacher again, the other students and finally my grandmother: I'm not one of them here. And I could run, run away from anything, from the oak tree. I could pretend I've never seen it and live a lie. But I can also stay.

I sink to the ground, very carefully at first. The earth below me is cold, but it sustains me. I lean my back against the oak tree and my gaze wanders into the night sky. I sit there leaning against the oak tree and breathe. Deep in, then out again. I'm just breathing. Not nice or calm, but I'm breathing. And as I sit there, I feel the voices calm down, the voices that have been loud for so long. If I keep coming back to the oak tree, it's probably because it's the only one that understands me. I don't have to pretend for the oak tree, I don't have to explain myself to it. And that's when I realize for the first time that an eternal return might not mean being trapped. Maybe it means that you find places in life that feel familiar to you and where you simply may be. Which you can also stick to. My scratched hand strokes the rough bark and it feels like the wounds are healing.

A small, weak “yes” is created somewhere in me. Not a big “yes” to life, but a “yes” to this moment. To the oak tree. About me, and for a moment, it's enough just to be there.

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Giulia Romina Itin was born near Lucerne in 2007 and is currently studying philosophy and history at the University of Basel. In her texts, she deals with existential and sociocritical questions: meaning and meaninglessness, rebellion, identity, the dreamy, and resistance to the preformed. Her thinking is shaped primarily by Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus, whose perspectives on freedom, revolt, and absurdity sharpen her attention to the fractures of the present day. In addition to studying, Giulia writes poetry and prose so as not to fall silent inwardly in a meaningless world. For her, writing means continuing to ask questions where others are silent.

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The article image was painted by Australian artist Mitchell Nolte (link), whom we commissioned to illustrate our entire forest series.

The Eternal Oak

Where Everything Returns

With this literary contribution by Giulia Romina Itin, we are launching our main focus topic this year. Throughout the year, we will publish several articles dedicated to the topic of “forest” — the forest in its dual meaning as an almost mythological place of encounter with the, sometimes uncanny, sometimes encouraging, primal forces of life, but also, viewed more pragmatically, as the real basis of existence of our civilization that remains decisive but also threatened. We would like to explore this double face together with you this year in order to determine the contours of the forest as a living space in a new way — with Nietzsche and beyond him. We need to see and appreciate the forest in a different way again.

If you would rather listen to this article, you will also find it read by Caroline Will in German on the Halcyon Association for Radical Philosophy YouTube channel (link) or on Soundcloud (link).