The Enlightenment’s Twilight

Nietzsche's Truth of Semblance II

The Enlightenment’s Twilight

Nietzsche's Truth of Semblance II

19.6.24

Michael Meyer-Albert

After Michael Meyer-Albert told the sad story of the self-doubt of the Enlightenment in the first part of his text, he now reports on Nietzsche's “cheerful science” as an alternative.

After Michael Meyer-Albert in the first part of his text Telling the sad story of the self-doubt of the Enlightenment, he now reports on Nietzsche's “cheerful science” as an alternative.

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III. The truth of falsehood

When Hegel saw the victor Napoleon after the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, he said that he saw the “spirit of the world on horseback.” As a result of the fact that politics, in a word from Napoleon, has become fate, especially with the start of the First World War, the image of the world spirit is also changing. The winner on horseback becomes the thoughtful walker. The prototypical scene for this: Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, who in exile in Sweden in 1938 found the answer to a physical question that Otto Hahn, who researched the fission of uranium in Dahlem, asked Meitner in a letter. They realized the implications of the fission of uranium. Hahn's experiments showed the possibility of building an atomic bomb. With this insight, dark globalization began as the possibility of a man-made apocalypse. The worldly spirit of a militant revolutionary becomes an athlete concerned about being.

Nietzsche's philosophy not only heralds the structural change of world spirit. His thinking shows a sense of the deep structures of cultures, from which it would be possible to continue to learn how forced global cooperation could move on to more civil paths. Nietzsche's strongest intuition is that the understanding of truth is changing in Western culture. He therefore foresaw massive turbulences as a result of the loss of faith in truth. But he also saw that this cultural crisis would be exploited. And not primarily in the sense of political self-interest. For Nietzsche, the crisis plays a role primarily with regard to the psychological economy. When the self-evident truths fail, participants in a culture begin to stick to truth-based inventions that protect and animate their mental fitness. The necessity of the truth in question becomes the virtue of the fabricated construction of truth.

Art as an art of living emerges from reflected The will to appear. As unreflected, this takes on a toxic form. In the gesture of the absolute, the suffering of the truth crisis is converted into a willingness to fight, which names clear culprits and thus offers the prospect of a — supposed — solution to the crisis. This is why “emergency addicts” invent themselves¹ Dramas of battles with exaggerated monsters, preferably as a conspiracy between specific classes, races, sexes. But since the truth is only guaranteed as long as the struggle with fictions continues, the permanent retaliation must not stop: “[U] and this is how they paint the misfortune of others on the wall: they always need others! And always others! “(ibid.) The absolute spirit of agitating adversity finds its truth in the morality of misfortune. For him, love of life becomes arrogance and life successes become exploitation. The unreflected will to appear is vitalized by denigrating successes and clouding over the zest for life. Nietzsche calls this psychological world power “resentment.” The good life of resentment becomes an attack on the good life.

However, Nietzsche's psychological genius recognizes in this development not only a tricky form of toxic identity politics, which revolves around the type of “self-apostolate [en]”² forms that enrich the critical mass of disoriented people into frustrated people. Nietzsche's hyperempathy understands the truth in the made-up truth of the “needy addicts” in the fact that it articulates a semblance that motivates life. Not from the truth, but from the point of view of life, the conspiracy theorists are right. The truth of appearances is the liveliness that they see as a”Anesthetization of pain due to affect”³, as an “affect medication”⁴ granted. Intense feelings of retribution, revenge, indignation manage to brighten up the incriminating twilight of an unclear truth. In the prosecution's “pressure of light” (Paul Celan) with her self-assured “barking of indignation [s]”⁵ The modern ambivalence is dissolving. A quieter form of moral attitude is found in Adorno's stylish negativisms, before which everything identical darkens in light of the blissful inaccessibility of the “non-identical” and becomes Unsafe space will. In both cases, the suffering from the lack of truth is compensated for by a narration of guilt and thus translated into meaning. The wound becomes truth. Anger grows out of their pain. The slogan of activist resentment is: The world has been interpreted enough, it is important to fight back. The wretched courier life gains a regal quality in the transmission of reports that reveal a hidden truth. The formerly deranged couriers can finally take themselves seriously again as messengers of a universal investigative investigation.

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IV. Contingency training

As a former Wagner disciple who was inspired by a “holy theocracy of beauty” (Hölderlin), Nietzsche understood first-hand that the modern world is shaken by a reformatting of its balance of truth. The pain of uncertainty that results from this is undeniable. For the post-art religious Nietzsche, however, it is also certain that tragedy as truth is only a phase. It'll pass by. The only question is when it will be time: “When will all these shadows of God stop darkening us? ”⁶

Nietzsche's proposal for a change of mind, which counteracts the anonymous Advent of the end of all Advent hopes, results in sketches, ideas and sounds for an elegant kind of appearance, the truth of which transfigures life again and again, for himself and for others. In Nietzsche's thinking, therefore, “a different training is being tried against states of depression.”⁷, which installs a new structure of truth. The tragedy of the lack of truth thus does not become a myth of a universal conspiracy. As a “free spirit,” Nietzsche tries to revive humanism as a kind of counterconspiracy conspiracy. The fact that God is dead also means that people can live in their own meaningful relationships on their own and canonize life secularly. At the very least, he should have the decency and righteousness not to yield to the temptations caused by the omnipresent desire for resentment. “Well! ”

However, Nietzsche's endeavor is deterred by the demands it requires. It does not solve the crisis of meaning of modernity. Rather, the absurd should become “heaven coincidence”⁸ in which the free spirit is to complete his flying skills as a secular angel of the post-apocalypse. From the beginnings of this and from disdain for the resentful grounding, a different normality emerges. The crisis of meaning is the normality of couriers, who have had enough of the all-too-banal wretches of the other messengers and of the ideologically transfigured aggressions of Ángeloiwho act as kings. For the kingless couriers, Nietzsche became an archmessenger. The last utopia for people who want to be more than “last people”: contingency as air that allows you to breathe and fly. That this is an ethos of”Live dangerously”⁹ stuck, showed Nietzsche's fate. He became the Icarus of an invincible superhumanity.

Nietzsche's change of sense of truth is philosophically expressed when an ontological turn takes place in the understanding of truth, which learns to express itself in new concepts and emotional states. The reason for this lies in the deformation of truth through the concept of truth as a network that has an absolutely true center that radiates to the edges. Truth as absolute is untrue. Going beyond Nietzsche with Nietzsche would mean formulating the truth of appearances more ontologically explicitly as a hiding of depressing truths and as a meaning of pain. If no center and no loss of center provides elegant orientation and existence is not doomed to freedom as an eternal periphery, it is necessary to ask how dense and meaningful vitality should be thought of. In return, Kafka's miserable and disoriented couriers have themselves as fascinating inner worlds, as “soul as subject multiplicity.”¹⁰ discover who maintains her own networks of couriers and kings. Encounters with life-enriching, post-monarchical co-couriers are essential for cultivating the inner worlds. This means that the function of the center is being replaced again. They are being replaced by densifications and strong relationships. The tendency towards the absolute is softened by irony. The hierarchy of center and periphery becomes a rhizome of rhizomes of plural excitation centers, which can stimulate themselves in differentiated sympathies. The contingency of existence can then be regarded as a “luxury of forces,” in which the lack of evidence, convictions and motivations as a “laxity of determination” represents the condition for the possibility of acquiring truths.¹¹ As a result, the most powerful old European truths are collapsing. Being as an overflowing emanation of an optimal center of being is fading away towards ever more pitiful edges. And the story also passes as the advent of a just salvation in an end time. That God is dead means that history and existence have come to an end. Nietzsche is trying to send new good news to the world. His alternative cosmos is a fluctuating, creative vacuum, a truth as a self-refuting truth, which, you hear and be amazed, is articulated in the jargon of Heidegger's serenity: “Everything breaks, everything is added anew; the same house of being builds itself 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. ”¹²

This plurality of acentrality is stabilized by an update of the cardinal virtues: An existential irony capable of benevolent self-loathing, empathetic revisionability, diplomatic prudence and an entrepreneurial spirit that is not only economic keep the system of differentiated sympathies running. Central to this is a new educational ideal as philosophical anti-stressing honesty, which repeatedly results in a “desire for the unknown, the undaring.”¹³ Can persuade. In this way, the problem child Earth becomes a stage of unlikely royal experiences, as a result of which she is crowned the true queen, of whom the intelligent couriers can't get enough of to send messages to each other. And the most skilful reports themselves become kings again, from whom reports are filed. The principle of responsible admiration is: Live in such a way that the effects of your actions increase the permanence of narrative life on earth.

However, according to Nietzsche, becoming part of the New European courier system is linked to a psychological numerus clausus. It states that the qualification for kingless couriers who have the “decision to do life service” (Thomas Mann)¹⁴ It consists of picking yourself up to an interesting, relatable life. In addition to the goodwill to tactfully transfiguration of worrying abysses, this also requires learning the art of productive self-loathing. Her core competence is the “disgusting folly of my disposable existence.”¹⁵ Change your mind against resentment on your own. Contingency is not deprivation or an essential shortcoming. Nobody is ultimately entirely to blame for the fact that you are imbued with the feeling of being beyond all access to an essential reality. The frustration over the poor nature of one's own situation can no longer be passed on to others. Instead of the toxic entertainment of retaliation, the uncertain search for traces of intelligent, sympathetic life can take place in the space of one's own self and in the world. The habit of critical awareness with its ever more sophisticated suspicions becomes the subdued curiosity of a treasure hunt in a “disposable existence.” The reconnaissance twilight could thus receive the glow of a dawn that has not yet lit. “Wind is coming, let's try to live.” (Paul Valéry) But what remains is the result of training and strolling.

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