“O comrades of my time! Don't ask your doctors and not the priests when you die internally! You have lost faith in everything great, so must you go if this belief does not return, like a comet from foreign skies.”
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(Hölderlin, Hyperion)

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I. In the shadow of God

Contemporary thinking takes the form of strolling. The work of the term is suspended and a participatory perception takes its place. Strolling is an active forgetting of the texts, which, if successful, rediscovers the world as an attempt to write an essay. Sometimes, however, you also come across literal finds. For example, the author was recently surprised by a graffito on his aphilosophical trips around the world. The following saying was written on an unappealing Leipzig house wall:

“God is dead.” (Nietzsche)

“Nietzsche is dead.” (God)

In Nietzsche's most legendary formulation, this profound laconicism could be dismissed as an elegant, defiant anti-atheist answer if it did not also contain statistical truth. There are currently just over eight billion people living on the planet. Of them, around 2.4 billion belong to the Christian religion, two billion to the Islamic religion and a good one billion to the Hindu religion. Almost a billion people are convinced atheists. From a purely statistical point of view, humanity's dominant concept of truth should therefore be metaphysically constituted. Even in 2024 after the birth of Christ, if you follow the dates, the saying of Jesus “I am the way and the truth and the life”¹ mean at least a quarter of the truth for humanity.

However, it can be denied that remaining in the official ties of a religion would be equated with the effectiveness of a religion. A different concept of truth has become established for the western hemisphere and the areas of its cultural influences. There is no longer a religious truth of revelation in the culture here. On the one hand, the focus on scientifically proven objective observational data that has emerged since the 17th century and its triumph in technical equipment and, on the other hand, the discussion of subjects as a voice in public space, which regulates itself through various forms, is decisive.

However, this truth beyond a divinely formed truth represents an epochal upheaval, the effects of which show symptoms of a crisis. To the subjects who have become “transcendentally homeless” (Georg Lukács), the world appears to be, as Max Weber said, “disenchanted.” With regard to the entire period of modern times, Nietzsche therefore points to an accelerating decentration of the human being, in which the feeling of nihilism is spreading: “Since Copernicus, humans seem to have fallen onto an inclined plane — they are now rolling away from the center point — where? In nothing? In's'pierced Feeling his nothingness? ”²

For Nietzsche, the reason for post-Copernican nihilism lies in the incomprehensible and usually not even understood devaluations of supporting understandings that were metaphysically constituted: “God is dead: but the way people are, there will be caves in which you show your shadow for thousands of years. — And we — we must also conquer his shadow! ”³

Two other dark truths can be added to support this Nietzsche finding. With the atomic bombings in August 1945 at the latest, science proved to be a seductive political handmaid. Her achievements since modern times, which consisted negatively in the neutralization of heated theological dogma struggles and which manifested themselves positively in the discovery of the world as an explorable space of complexity, are overshadowed by this. And the belief in the truth of the discourse was also clouded. Since the democratic mass agitations in the virtuous terror of the French Revolution, there has been suspicion of mob rule against the concept of truth of the resentful public. Alexis de Tocqueville's expression of the “tyranny of the majority” and Heidegger's formulation “dictatorship of man” point to the irreversible illiberal potential of democratic truth procedures as well.

This is an epistemological twilight over the era of globalization. God, science and conversation may not be dead. But they are all battered in the position of unquestionable authority. Time is doomed to an uncertain freedom of thought, which must inform itself through competent authorities. In differentiated complexity, there is a growing need to be an expert in the selection of experts who can provide you with halfway information about what is happening. What remains, however, is donated by the media, which people believe.

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II. Kings and couriers

Franz Kafka's diary notes contain the following aphoristic parable: They were presented with the choice of being kings or couriers. Like the kids, they all wanted to be couriers, so there are lots of couriers out there. And so, because there are no kings, they chase things together and shout to each other their own messages that have become pointless. They would like to put an end to their miserable lives, but they don't dare to do so because of the oath of service.⁴

The situation, which Kafka's little piece describes, illustrates the situation of the chaotically synchronized media world in the global age with a discrete reminder of what media were in the original sense. This does not only mean that Kafka is softening the understanding of media from fixation on technical equipment. Technical media are primarily just reinforcements of human mediumship. People are messengers, emissaries — “ángeloi” in ancient Greek — of information and passions.

But Kafka's text also shows how central to an intact media hemisphere the belief in participation in essential things is. The modern prejudice about this participation is that it is under culturally critical suspicion. This is plausible in view of the hierarchical order of the oldest media formations. From the outset, cultures were characterized by authorities who acted with the claim that the divine spoke through them. In the form of priestly kingship, they legitimized worldly power through spiritual closeness to the supernatural. The media were the messengers of objective truth and thus ruled by the grace of God.

Plato's concept of truth has a subversive power insofar as it requires secular God media to be able to attest to their strong relationship to the very top through logical coherence. Instead of cryptic oracle words and their supposedly high sense, the philosophical structural change of the public is trying to gain media authority through evidence. Competent expertise should prevail instead of social power. Plato's philosophy laments the shortage of skilled workers in the truth economy. The “philosopher king” should therefore be attributed the most competent competence. However, this result of platonic thinking raises the suspicion that something too much Pro domo to be. That is probably one of the reasons why its political market readiness was difficult. The first academy was therefore built outside the city walls of Athens. That they are after all almost 1,000 years (around 386 BC to 529 AD) Consistent, speaks for a location of university truth as distant proximity to urbanity. The truth of the Agora and the truth of the Academy come into productive tension due to a well-tempered distance from each other.

Kafka's profound parable now visualizes a situation in which Plato's concept was destroyed by his success. It shows the situation that results when the emancipatory push of Plato's primacy of evidence reveals an autonomy that drives criticism of all higher authorities to the point that the concept of “authority through truth” is shaken overall. None of the couriers dares to play language games in the form of “king's words” anymore. No one wants to be in charge because no one is a sufficient expert. Too much philosophical reflection allows us to distance ourselves from the idea of royalty, a philosopher king and certainly from seizing power through self-coronation. Complete Platonism is anti-Napoleonic.

There are plausible reasons for shaking faith in truth. The Enlightenment forced everything before the judgement of reason. As a result, it decomposed the canonical collection of classical orientations. In this way, a traditionally tense world is no longer inherited, but the impulse to create independent worlds through autonomous thinking. With the deformities that have come to light over time in science and in finding the truth by the public, reason itself has now returned to the judgement of reason.

With regard to the terror of virtue on the left of the Rhine, the Teutonic thinkers tried to think of a reorientation of the Enlightenment just a few years after the French Revolution. In doing so, art took on the role of complementing the cold-calculating mind. It alone solves the social question of how to immunize the Enlightenment into terrorist arbitrariness before it is implemented. Schiller, for example, was convinced “that in order to solve that political problem through experience, you must take the path through aesthetics, because it is beauty through which you migrate to freedom. ”⁵ Only an expanded formation of characters makes Jacobins citizens. The refinement of the human race should be an aesthetically promoted “development of sensibility.”⁶ move forward. Schiller's idea of comprehensive aesthetics resulted in the concept of beautiful politics. However, these all-too-beautiful ideas were tainted by the real aestheticism of the sublime state. Schiller was enthusiastic about the possibility of social synthesis through joy: “Beggars become princely brothers” (An die Freude). The disillusionment is followed by the reality in which emergencies require a say. When emergency policy reigns, social aesthetics turn into cheesy “sympathy with death” (Thomas Mann). The focus here is on heroic sacrifice for the big picture. In the 20th century, in the form of socialism and fascism, there was an unpleasant policy of the exalted as a new religion, which saw Enlightenment as a lethal revolution. The joy of being a meta-representative of every community has now turned into aggressive universalism.

With these sad results, the Enlightenment began to doubt itself so much that it questioned itself. Because the new kings were only spreading orders and not truths again, the couriers constantly whispered to themselves the message that they were probably all just deceivers. And at the same time, some couriers spread the rumor that every word may only ever be understood as bossy power and not as a power of competence. These unhappy messages replaced the king's word and gave a devastating but at least sustained participation in truth. The Enlightenment thus found a new security in ever more detailed critiques — to the delight of all fanatics and charismatics of the authoritarian: “Enlightenment is totalitarian. ”⁷ This dark truth was complemented by a negative aesthetic that suggests the experience of the “non-identical” as the only way out.

Nietzsche's thinking attempts to convert this enlightenment into a philosophy of dawn. To do this, he starts with a rehabilitation of Schiller's idea of a truth of art. His approach is to advance education about the Enlightenment by a further stage of reflection. When reason puts itself before the judgement of reason and dismantles itself ever more hermetically in ever new hermeneutical circles of suspicion, why not reconfigure this spiral of self-loathing? In Nietzsche's thinking, the placing of reason before the judiciary of reason as a whole is placed before the judiciary of reason. Art as a “cult of falsehood” gains as “good will [] to appear”⁷ a meaning that is intended to breathe new life into Enlightenment. Even though no one is a king anymore, there is still royalty as an effect of a noble lie about vitality. When faith in all great truths is lost, faith in the greatness of intelligent life can become a sublime truth. This has political implications: In a balanced social aesthetic, the heroic of the sublime is defused into an educational campaign that works on itself. And the politics of joy finds its realism in a commitment to a whole as a cooperative system that opens up spaces. What happens to couriers when it doesn't need a king or suicide, but an epistemological form of irony so that their miserable lives can change?

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Link to part 2

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Sources

Adorno, Theodor W. & Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical fragments. Frankfurt am Main 2004.

Kafka, Franz: Reflections on sin, suffering, hope, and the true path. In: Max Brod & Hans Joachim Schöps (eds.): During the construction of the Great Wall of China. Unprinted stories and prose from the estate. Berlin 1931, pp. 225 — 249 (online).

Schiller, Friedrich: On the aesthetic education of man in a series of letters, Zurich 1998.

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Footnotes

1: Mt. 11, 27; John 10:9; Rom. 5.1; Hebrews 10:20.

2: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 25.

3: The happy science, Aph 108.

4: Cf. Kafka, Considerations, P. 234.

5: Schiller, About aesthetic education, 2nd letter, p. 405.

6: Ibid., 8th letter, p. 430.

7: Adorno & Horkheimer, dialectics, P. 12.

8: The happy science, Aph 107.