On Dubious Paths ...

An Outline of Nietzsche's Concept of Wandering

On Dubious Paths ...

An Outline of Nietzsche's Concept of Wandering

6.3.25

Michael Meyer-Albert

Perhaps it is Nietzsche's main philosophical achievement that he described thinking as a process that happens in person. For him, reflection is a cooperative tension of body and mind. The mind is grounded in the nervous cosmopolitanism of the body. Nietzsche's conversion of Christianity: The flesh becomes word. This shows thinking in gestures. The following is intended to provide a sketch which indicates the main types of these reflexive gestures. This is intended to illustrate what it means when Nietzsche repeatedly describes himself as a wanderer. An intellectual tour that leads from standing and sitting as basic modes of traditional philosophy to walking, (out) wandering and halcyonic flying as Nietzsche's alternative modes of liberated thought and life.

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We are not the kind of people who first think between books, at the instigation of books — our habit is to think outdoors, walking, jumping, climbing, dancing, preferably on secluded mountains or close to the sea, where even the trails Get thoughtful.¹

I. Standing

Whoever is standing has something to say. At the very least, this position should reflect a precise position that claims validity in the exposed situation of upright. The Agora, the meeting place of the ancient polis, is the prototypical place of representation. Whoever stands wants to have a say. Hannah Arendt saw in a public voice the implementation of Vita activa as an essential dimension of the human being. The quest for fame through successful public interaction legitimizes citizenship, “natality.” Such an interaction knows how to successfully weave the impulse of the new, which comes into the world with every life, into the already existing garb of the usual in such a way that the impulse to contribute innovatively is also stimulated in others. The recumbent “being to death” of mortals, which their teacher and lover Martin Heidegger adopted as the dominant mode of being, takes the place of Arendt the struggling being, which is based on the birth of the standing person. Every walk through the streets and squares of a city teaches about the “freedom to be free” (Arendt). Like a hidden pantheon, urban places remind us of the glorious ancestors after whom they are named. For standing, this means: We stand up in the light of the famous people who have stood up successfully before us.

II. Sitting

Who is standing does not understand. He wants to make an impact. If you sit, you don't want to have an effect. He wants to understand. Those who sit do not represent points of view, but think about them, at least in traditional European areas. If you look at Asia, the inactive activity of just sitting — for example that of “zazen” from the Japanese centre—gains in particular the train of not thinking. In contrast, European zazen is realized in an intellectual collection that creates well-thought-out connections in conceptual coherence. The immediate subsides and a reflection sets in, which learns to embrace broad topics. The proximity of everyday “talk” (Heidegger) gives way to concentration which, according to the pathos of sedentary thinking, explores the essential things. The typical tool for seated thinking is the book. The person sitting usually sits to read and write. Reading writing and writing reading are the elementary movements of sedentary thinking.

The result of European sedentary thoughtfulness could be described as a “sitting point” if the word didn't sound too funny. When sitting, thinking gains an initial transformation. It creates extraordinary deceleration and concentration, which invents and discovers new levels of abstraction through dialogue with absent spirits, conveyed through the book. The sitting starts with Vita contemplativa. Philosophically, sitting is like dying lucid in the midst of everyday life.

When the person sitting up again, he returns to the world of viewpoints. Ideally, he does this not just to represent his old views with new impetus. Anyone who gets up philosophically from sitting down stands up with reinforced enlightenment sympathy. This is traditionally expressed through an unusually complex form of rhetoric, which wants to share its reflexive differentiation gains. Sitting brings prudence to standing.

III. Walking

When you leave, you don't represent any points of view, you don't just think about them, you think about thinking about points of view. With Nietzsche's approach of physical reflection, thinking achieves the mode of true walking for the first time. His idea of relating body and mind as a form of reflexive nervousness emerges as a suspicion of sedentary thoughtfulness and its primary color of gray. Nietzsche's thesis: The immobility of sitting leads to the hypertrophy of a thoughtfulness that removes life too much from the mindset mind:

As little as possible sit; do not believe a thought that was not born outdoors and during free movement — in which the muscles do not also celebrate a party. All prejudices come from the intestines. — The sitting meat — [...] the actual sin against the Holy Spirit.²

For Nietzsche, sedentary thinking is too unvital to be able to think objectively about life. The exuberance and reactivity of the presence of mind is lacking. In the slowness of contemplative sitting, the vast horizons and surprising connections are quickly lost sight of. In particular, sitting lacks a lively presence. The phenomena evaporate before his spectator reflection. Thinking as a nervous reflection that gives one's moods a say is an affront to sedentary thinking that is rationalized away as irrationality.

In contrast, the walking thinker knows that thinking does not think. They are states that think. Seated thinking is uptight thinking that considers everything but its own stiffness. Nietzsche thus extends the universal romantic irony of the rigid text to a physiological irony versus a thinking identity. Just because you're there in a variety of ways can you be diversity-minded. He turns Descartes' “Cogito ergo sum,” “I think therefore I am,” around: “Sum ergo cogito.”

With Nietzsche, philosophy thus acquires an expanded objectivity as physical coherence. The successful theory is walking that becomes experienced and is flexible enough to explore and illustrate it linguistically. Nietzsche's definition of Vita contemplativa is therefore constructive. The “thinkers”³ Evolve and condense reality through its “vis creativa” (ibid.), its creative power. Ideally on the go as a “walk with thoughts and friends”⁴. Nietzsche even dreams of a wandering urbanity that replaces his previous dreams of a music-mythical Bayreuth. After his Wagner discipleship, he is interested in a culture of Enlightenment with “quiet [s] and wide [s], extended [n] Places [s] to think about, places with spacious long hallways [...] [W] ir want within us go for a walk when we walk in these halls and gardens. ”⁵

IV. Migration as emigration

From a cultural therapy perspective, Nietzsche's walking thinking recognized that a society that does not produce strolling intellectual culture is upset by resentful compensation. A sedentary enlightenment ultimately falls prey to agony, which is unpleasantly encouraged by moralizing by repeatedly mobilizing points of view, supported by irrational myths. Anyone who does not cultivate walking will have to endure marching. It is this poisonous compensation for a lack of modern intellectual mobility that led Elias Canetti in 1960 to a profound interpretation of the German nature and his romantic “sympathy with death” (Thomas Mann): The army was the mass symbol of the Germans. But the army was more than the army: it was the marching forest. In no modern country in the world has the forest feel remained as lively as in Germany.⁶

Anyone who doesn't want to endure marching emigrates. Therefore, the mobility of enlightenment is wandering. You hike to be able to walk. And it is only when you reach new levels of walking that you are able to emigrate from the resentments that have persisted with you. As a wanderer who distances himself doubly — from the customs of a public sphere and from his internalized imprints — the philosopher thus becomes the guardian of being bright. While Hegel only formally devots what he calls the “path of despair,” it becomes an existential truth for Nietzsche. Crises of despair lead to overcomes that result from changes of opinion, crystallize in revaluations and are ultimately intended to assume the habit of reshuffles. Dialectics becomes an “art of transfiguration”⁷, which is free from the burden of “commanding Werthurtheile []”⁸ and wants to free her feelings of life internalized in flesh and blood. This includes being able to endure the freezing cold of lack of social closeness in order to gain new vitality. For Nietzsche, hiking has the intensity of mountaineering because it has to overcome itself and also emigrate out of itself. Nietzsche's birth of the idea of superhuman humanism originates from the spirit of an existence in ice and high mountains, whose movens a “migration in Forbidden”⁹ is. Nietzsche's metaphor for this dimension of wandering thought is alpine:

that ices It is near, loneliness is tremendous — but how calm all things are in the light! How freely you breathe! How much you feel about yourself! — Philosophy as I have understood it so far and Did you live, is voluntary life in ices and High mountains [...].¹⁰

Nietzsche acclimatization to mountain air means a strict selection of diet, place of residence and type of recreation. To get away from Schopenhauer's pessimism, Wagner's romanticizing tragedy, Prussian-German militarism and creating the mood for “pathetic and bloody quackery.”¹¹ To solve revolutions, the life-walker Nietzsche listens intensively to Bizet, travels to Sils and Genoa, follows a strict diet — “No snacks, no café: Café darkens. Thee Only beneficial in the morning”¹² —, lives in secret. Nietzsche's philosophy as a “decision to serve life” (Thomas Mann) in the mode of wandering is less a “work on concept” (Hegel) than a culture of the physical. In doing so, cultural psychologist Nietzsche abhors “the hope of sudden Recovery”¹³ and votes for gradual change through small doses. Life reform of one's own life instead of political revolution against the system:

If a change is to be as profound as possible, the remedy is given in the smallest doses, but incessantly over long distances of time! What can be done big all at once! So we want to be careful not to exchange the state of morality to which we are accustomed with a new appreciation of things head over heels and with violence — no, we want to continue living in it for a long, long time — until, presumably very late, we become aware that the new value estimate has become the predominant force within us and that the small doses of it, That we'll have to get used to from now on, have created a new nature within us.¹⁴

From Genoa, Nietzsche writes of the successes of his post-heroic loneliness:

When the sun is shining, I always go on a secluded rock by the sea and lie still outside under my parasol, like a lizard; that has helped my head again several times. Sea and pure sky! How did I torment myself before! Every day I wash my entire body and especially my entire head, in addition to heavy tossing.¹⁵

V. Wandering as overcoming

However, Nietzsche's mobility of migration adds another dimension to this kinetics of thought. Just being alive on a therapeutic journey and working on your resilience is not enough. Life wants vitality. In order to sustain itself, it must increase its spirits. Walking thinking may be courageous; it is only through hiking that one becomes cocky. The hiker Nietzsche realizes: The philosopher's bottled oxygen in the lonely mountain air is self-enthusiasm as a desire to discover a new world. Hiking becomes an existential approach to existential topics.

Since Nietzsche sees and reflects on a constitutive grounding of the mind in the body, his philosophy must address his existential tension. Philosophy doesn't come from the skin that makes it think. Nietzsche's “perspectivism” therefore has narrow limits. It follows the paths of the basic moods in which you live. For Nietzsche, this means that he must philosophize the bipolar vitality of his life. His thinking is born in the interplay of his minimum and maximum vital signs:

From the hospital look to healthier concepts and values, and vice versa from the abundance and self-certainty of rich Looking down on the secret work of the décadence instinct — that was mine longest exercise, my actual experience, if anything, I became a master at it.¹⁶

Nietzsche's wandering means experimenting with the constitutional conditions of an immigrant living mind. Despair is not simply resolved; rather, it is sought out. Nietzsche's ethos of dangerous philosophy invents language games that emerged from despair games. Different than in Heideggers The dirt road — as a manifesto of intentionally idyllic walking in the “space and time” of horizontal areas — Nietzsche's wild contemplation gains verticality. Nietzsche's hiking becomes a kind of laboratory for altitude experiments that research how far you can go. In a recent publication, Sloterdijk points out that the phenomenon of the vegetation line in particular must have been a significant inspiration for Nietzsche in order to gain an expanded understanding of nature and human existence during his “margins of liveliness.”¹⁷ It is precisely because Nietzsche does not keep both feet in the middle of life, but always revisits this dead zone of existence beyond life and this dead zone of existence, that life is rediscovering for him. In this way, the plight of wandering becomes the virtue of a more precise philosophy of life. A successful reception of his findings and “true ecstasy of learning”¹⁸ Because of his philosophy, Nietzsche believes that it is only possible for readers who can understand his range of ups and downs in life, “because I come from heights that no bird has ever flown, I know chasms into which no foot has yet strayed” (ibid.).

Nietzsche's dangerous meditation on the intermediate realm of absolutely inhospitable rockiness of existence and “infinite [r] abundance of light and depth of happiness” reaches the summit¹⁹ in his idea of the “eternal return of the same”, which, according to his own statement, came to him in August 1881 on the Pyramid Rock of Surley. With this idea of a modernized cosmos, Nietzsche is trying to overcome the biggest challenge of the wanderer who emigrated from the lowlands, which lies in the fact that the true is understood as the heavy, serious, tragic — think of the European mega imprints of Plato's melancholy concept of “anamnesia” and Augustine's gloomy idea of “original sin” — and passively endured. The pain of truth and the truth of pain are not denied. However, the pain is no longer being substantialized. Saying yes to a cosmos that allows everything to recur again in the same way affirms a life of wandering with an entrepreneurial commitment to actively shape the oscillation of arrival and overcoming as a new basic form of a post-metaphysical life that strives to do its best. Without success, life is a mistake, but failure is part of the business of being. Being there, sticking with it, testifying more consciously is everything:

Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls forever. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs forever.

Everything breaks, everything is reassembled; the same house of being is built forever. Everything divides, everything greets each other again; the Ring of Being remains faithful to itself forever.

Being begins in every instant; the sphere there rolls around every here. The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.²⁰

Nietzsche's idea of an eternal return is a post-metaphysical thought experiment that provokes existential resilience in an era marked by the death of God. With this, the politically disastrous pain compensation from the redemptive whole other and from saving Advent, the hoped-for return of Christ, lose their charisma.

However, physical thinking, which introduced feeling into reflection, must admit that the time for general post-metaphysical mobility has not yet been reached. Standing too loudly, sitting loudly, indignant marching and wounded emigration dominates. Resentment still reigns. A discouraging philosophy of culturally critical suspicion sets the tone.

VI. Hiking as flies

Nietzsche's wandering leaves his time behind in order to be able to dive into it again. The difficult mobility that hiking requires as an emigration from surviving influences inspires thinking just as the attempts to carry out hiking as an experiment that shows how far you can go. The result is a kind of physiological dialectic: When wandering, life that thinks and thinking that lives change. Nietzsche recognized that hiking, which affirms itself in its severity, changes its aggregate state. Now thinking no longer runs the risk of just taking the form of a beatiful stroll or a frivolous cheer up. Thinking comes to a fluid mode as thinking outside of oneself. As overthinking, philosophy becomes dancing and ultimately carried by one's own thermals into flying. The aim of hiking is to fly. The wanderer and his shadow become an aviator and his sky. Paths become runways. Looking back, Nietzsche can say: “And all my wandering and mountaineering: it was only an emergency and a remedy for the clumsy: — fly I alone want all my will.”²¹.

Migration creates a fly which, if successful, becomes halcyonic. The last way of thinking is halcyonics. The highest kinetics of thought thus repeats the calmness of ancient thought as a show in a more reflective way. There is no longer a need for a pre-modern god and no more modern self-encouragement. Existence is enough. The contingency, which in modern existentialism is philosophically emotionalized as “disgust” (Sartre), as the “absurd” (Camus), as “abandonment” (Heidegger), is shown by hiker Nietzsche as “heaven coincidence” (ibid.). This drains the physiological cause of resentment. When existence is no longer interpreted “fundamental-ontologically,” as something permeated by pale and absurd basic sentiments, the tragic interpretations of being lose their validity. Where Heidegger suggests that “deep boredom in the abysses of existence like a silent fog goes back and forth”²² And shows the arch-conservative's clear will to philosophize a new state of emergency out of this phenomenon as an “emergency of needlessness,” Nietzsche's halcyonism points to the innocence of contingency. Boredom as a lull in life is rather a phase that precedes new winds. No swirling fog fundamentally dips existence in pale gray. Rather, it is always open like a vast field in which, as in the deep light of late summer days, world tensions arise, such as floating, silver spider threads that can be condensed into ideas. Thoughts become a kind of air plankton. Halcyonic contingency discovers the reality principle as unexpected lightness. The clearest concentration of the high notes praising thinking is perhaps found in the section “Before Sunrise” in Zarathustra. In it, the wandering Cogito praises the space that makes it fly. Altitude as a distance from the social you entails a new closeness to heaven, as a condition for the possibility of freedom. Nietzsche's thinking, which has wandered freely, begins to sing when it comes to and from these levels of thought:

Oh heavens above me, pure! Lower! You pit of light! Looking at you, I shiver with divine desires.

To throw me in your height — that is my Depth! To hide me in your purity — that is my Innocence! [...]

We have been friends from the very beginning: we have grief and reason in common; we still have the sun in common.

We don't talk to each other because we know too much — we keep silent, we smile at what we know. [...]

Together we learned everything; together we learned about ourselves and smile cloudless: —

— smile down cloudless with clear eyes and from miles away when coercion and purpose and guilt steam like rain among us.

And I wandered alone: Wes Did my soul starve in nights and astray paths? And I climbed mountains Whom Have I ever looked for, if not you, on mountains?