“Not too much sun, the light is misunderstood, twilight is the actual lighting of humanity.” (Benn, Three old men)

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I. Well-tempered cosmopolitanism

You can't just live in houses. A language, a legal system, customs or dream worlds can also be homes. Wherever strangers are transformed into familiarity and familiarity gains a liveliness that becomes a “beautiful stranger” (Eichendorff), people live. Life creates a house of existence through symbols, fantasies and rituals. It inspires itself through its work. “People live on this earth full of merit, yet poetic.” (Hölderlin) Architecture is therefore just another form of an existential world friendship movement. Life can light up in the twilight of structures.

Starting from aesthetic speculations about Greek tragedy, Nietzsche arrived at an existential-architectural understanding of life early on in his philosophy. He sees reality as an existential dialectic of the forces of Dionysian — ecstatic, eruptive — and Apollonian — as a dreamlike transfiguration and formation. Central, and this applies to Nietzsche's entire dramatic philosophy — even though, after his “turn” in Bayreuth in 1876, a marked change from tragedy to comedy prevailed in his thinking — is the primacy of order over chaos. Because existence is confronted with an excess of strangers, life that lives is constitutively Apollinan. All Dionysian outbreaks also only occur as a result of this vital transfiguration integration:

Could we ourselves an incarnation of dissonance think — and what else is a human being? — so this would dissonanceIn order to be able to live, you need a wonderful illusion that covers a veil of beauty over your own being. This is the true artistic purpose of Apollo: in whose name we summarize all those countless illusions of beautiful appearance which make existence worth living in every moment and urge us to experience the next moment.¹

In Nietzsche's phase of “free spirit,” following the painful break with Wagner, Apollinian then gains an expanded meaning in the term “appearance.” Appearance becomes a vital compensation for the abysses of truth that you cannot live with. Successful life requires an architecture of illusion. For Nietzsche, the aesthetic transfiguration of the Apollonian dream is transformed into a gentle theory. This is embodied on the one hand in benevolent, encouraging interpretations and on the other hand in a therapeutic suppression of facts that cannot be integrated. Nietzsche thus describes the enlightened non-enlightenment as a “decision to ignorance, to indiscriminate closure, to close his windows, an inner saying no to this or that thing, not letting it come close, a kind of state of defense against much that is known, a satisfaction with the darkness, with the final horizon, a saying yes and approving ignorance. ”²

One could see Nietzsche's thought as a prelude to an established understanding of the humanum established in 20th century anthropology as a being that, unlike the animal guided by its instincts, is cosmopolitan. “Cosmopolitanism” — a term coined by Max Scheler and preformed in Johann Gottfried Herder's thinking — appears in philosophy in substantial power first with Heidegger in Being and time on. There, a conceptual specification is achieved, which formally expresses Nietzsche's entire understanding of the rational existence of the free spirit: “The mood of state of mind existentially constitutes the cosmopolitanism of existence. ”³

Nietzsche's existential-architectural thinking is addressed in Heidegger's words. The mindset of the free spirit, which needs a house of appearances in order to be able to live in cosmopolitanism, must be located in a housing of good moods. As an architect of the vital, you build on your vitality by exposing yourself to certain influences — such as mountain lakes, magnanimous people, music from Bizet, the climate of Liguria, etc. What Heidegger does not reflect is the aspect of regulatable “Throwing” as a conscious will to transfigurative appearance. Only a well-tempered state of mind in Apollinian can develop an openness to cosmopolitanism at all. The chaos of nerves differentiates itself partially sealed into a cosmos that motivates life to live as a cosmopolitan citizen. It is only when realities are dimmed proportionally that twilight is created, which presents the contours of the world in an orderly manner to a highly nervous cosmopolitanism and enables a life that “world trust” (Heidegger) has and can pass on. Therefore, the”Not yet identified thiers”⁴ Man a filter, a shelter, a house for being, in order to Vita contemplativa to follow up. Only when the world is not annoying can it “worlds” (Heidegger). Without a stimulating interior and a protective outdoor architecture of life, there can be no cosmopolitan philosophy.

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II. Against the tree

In his recently published book Nietzsche's architecture of the discerning⁵ Geneva-based city planner and professor of architecture Stephen Griek has written a large-scale essayistic meditation on the connection between thinking and building. He took the title of the work from a Nietzsche aphorism, which he also prefaced it as a motto. It states:

Once and probably soon, we need to understand what our big cities in particular lack: quiet and vast, expansive places to think about, places with spacious long hallways for bad or overly sunny weather, where no sound of the cars and the caller penetrates [...] Buildings and facilities which, as a whole, represent the grandeur of Sit-Express reflection and sideways. [...] We want to express ourselves into Have translated stone and plant, we want into us walk walkwhen we into Transform these halls and gardens.⁶

Griek is inspired by these formulations and strives to highlight the related basic structure of thought and architecture. For him, the common feature lies in the fact that both shape reality in the form of the draft (see p. 46). Through this idea, he can understand architecture as a form of conceptionality through which people interpret the world. Griek is close to Nietzsche in that thinking is regarded as an art whose creativity is primarily to be understood negatively. Art omits, reduces thinking, limits architecture: “Architecture [...] is therefore an cutting out, simplifying, reducing, abstracting the outside, the world (space is not simply there, but a conscious excerpt from the outside, creating space is elimination).” (p. 214) Architecture thinks and thinking is architecture as creating space from chaos through “regulatory fictions” (p. 160).

Nietzsche's idea of appearances is thus received and emphatically polemically opposed to a concept of truth that is based on the understanding of a hierarchical order; a truth whose essence is established and whose structure only needs to be developed. For Griek, the image of the tree (see p. 21 f.) is emblematic. He cites the text as the origin of this idea A City Is Not a Tree by Christopher Alexander from 1965 and notes how Gilles Deleuze applied this image to the entire history of Western ideas. (Cf. p. 20f.)

However, Griek is rubbing himself up against criticism of this totalitarian concept of truth, which in his eyes is hostile to innovation. As a result, his immense range of facts and ideas used is clumped together. His interesting approach that structures of architecture are structures of thought and Vice Versa present and his sometimes comprehensible plea for a “culture of becoming” (p. 39) thus fizzles out in a very erudite polemic. Criticism of the tree does not result in a sketch of an alternative organic; instead, everything is subordinated to a monotonous attack on classical existence. As essay-like as Griek's text may look, he will become predictably tree-like even in his confrontational attitude.

In addition, Griek's approach wants to show an openness to becoming, which presents his text as a “construction site accessible to everyone and completely comprehensible” (p. 36). Even though it is sympathetically intended to pursue a philosophy that also wants to show what it says, the Greek does not succeed. The subject matter does not expand, but degenerates into the expected result of a critique of the truth of the tree over and over again. The polemic scares away the phenomena. An experienced architect in particular would have been expected to provide more specific explanations of individual buildings in order to explain his ideas using real designs, as the works he has positively emphasized Learning from Las Vegas (Brown/ Venturi) and Delirious New York (Koolhaas) afford. It also doesn't help if quotes from Nietzsche are not used as evidence of thought processes, but usually only serve as associative hints, and often only as a kind of sound backdrop. They appear like posters on the fences of a construction site. If books are houses that make you a guest as a reader and get an impression of the quality of their respective living experience: Why should you then move into accommodation in unfinished construction sites that obviously do not want to achieve this quality?!

By failing to elaborate his theses on specific details and Nietzsche's philosophy, Griek is missing the opportunity to illustrate the conceptual innovations highlighted by Nietzsche. In particular, the significance of the body for Nietzsche, which then continues to have an effect in the body phenomenology inaugurated by Heidegger and systematized by Hermann Schmitz, which recognizes moods and atmospheres as substantial realities, is not specified. Yet it is architecture that, like music, cultivates the form of being and provokes an absorption. A philosophical examination of the connection between thinking and construction should have focused on the topic of how moods and buildings, atmospheres and living are connected and how the concept of participation is enriched by these topics.⁷ But since Griek is fixated on the violent dominance of a culture of tree-like existence, he is concerned with standing up for chaos, change, entropy. From this static of being present, he cannot think of an extended static of being, which always requires his own seclusion and conservative order. Because of the axe, you no longer see the alternative to a tree.

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III. Fake architecture

The deeper reason why Griek is unable to work out decisive reflections that characterize Nietzsche's thinking is that he has taken a polemical stance against an ontology of the tree, which legitimizes itself by overemphasizing the concept of “will to power.” Nietzsche's idea of appearances is thus regarded by him almost exclusively as a form of conquest. Life is accentuated as a permanent revolution of creativity against the existence of facts. Only autonomy as active determination is free and everything else is obedience to a totalitarian truth itself, which is “hostile to life” and “always tyrannical” (p. 138). Through his critical reflex, Griek does not sufficiently specify the dimension of the defensive in appearance, which has priority in Nietzsche. The connection between a sense of creativity and the necessary artificial remoteness to the directness for the fragile, uncertain and sometimes also creative animal human is therefore not clearly explained. Even though Griek admirably imaginatively describes the city as “ontological [] immunization machines” (p. 248) and profoundly characterizes the meaning of the house as “dosed openness to becoming cosmic” (p. 233): The understanding of appearance as protection against too much cosmopolitanism is neglected. Yet it is precisely in the preceding motto that this dimension of Nietzsche's thinking dominates as an anti-Christian form of a peripatetic Vita contemplativa.

Greek's ideal of a non-tree-like design as an “open architecture” that respects the “necessary drifting of life” (p. 322) is thus found in designs that are open to being easily replaced by other designs. After all, there should be no compulsion through manifest construction that could possibly block future construction. All gestures as a temporary measure. Instead of the tree, the eternal construction site. However, buildings are not just bossy, virile designs that replace other designs, but when they can achieve the dimension of Apollonian “comfort” as a resonance room design, they are opportunities to enrich life through a redesigned interior. It would be possible here to recall the classic meaning dimensions of the term “power” and inscribe it in architectural contexts: Power as Auctoritas is the competence to design spaces that impresses with the attractiveness of their creativity and not simply Potestas, which forcibly imposes a will on someone else to their rooms. The experience of existing multiple good living creates the desire to design your own space as an individual combination of traditional domesticity. Open architecture is not a building that counteracts the will to build new buildings with unrestrained expressivity through buildings that can be demolished easily. Truth is what makes you live.

In his intentionally incomplete designs, Griek sits down for an unfinished architectural and reflexive design of fundamental confusions that are laid out in Nietzsche's way of thinking. Nietzsche does not point out clearly enough the two basic dimensions of the architecture of appearance: Appearance is a protective wall and appearance is an animating imagination. In addition, especially in Nietzsche's later thinking, there is an “obscuring” (Celan) “will to power” (Celan) overemphasis on the “will to power.” Nietzsche falsely substantiates the vulnerability of the truthful animal to be transfigured into an ontology of chaos, which then legitimizes a naturalism of power.

If Nietzsche had read himself more carefully, he would have noticed the underdifferentiated variety of meanings of the sham. Schein has existential, cultural, physiological, psychological, philosophical and philological connotations: Existentially, it acts as an Apollinian protection against the “original joke.” Or appearance can also take the form of meaning that orders the chaos world. Appearance as a cultural entity protects against the depressing obscurations of a culture that suffers from the loss of its substantial metaphysical interpretation. However, appearances can also be defined as a filter against attacks by resentful sham constructs by angry and embittered people. Physiological appearance indicates that undisturbed life requires a diet of sounds, places, feelings, etc. as a basis in order to adjust stably into bright, lucid states. Psychologically, appearance means the state of emotional stability as complacency. Philosophical appearance as an overall understanding justifies one's own way of life. Philological appearance finally expresses itself in self-encouraging language games, which can be used as “fake bridges” to others. From all this, it could be speculated that a comprehensive architecture of knowledge according to Nietzsche would have to see itself as a mental, physiological, symbolic and philosophical pseudo-construction. The “House of Being” (Nietzsche) is a house of appearance, whose rooms are to be designed in six dimensions in such a way that they make it possible to live in as a walk within oneself.

Despite all sympathy for the contemporary topic, the impressive wealth of knowledge — for example by pointing out the effect of a more efficient protein variant (through the amino acid arginine instead of lysine), which played a role in the evolutionary development of nerve cells in the frontal lobe of the neocortex (see p. 186) — and also the sometimes ingenious wording of Greek — “symbolic big bang” (p. 248), “Boosting the tree” (p. 21) —, the impression of redundant polemic prevails when reading. That's a shame, because as a small plea, the book could certainly have released an innovative, axe-like impulse. However, in the present 300-page version of this exuberant controversy, signs of fatigue arise quite quickly. You soon know how the wind blows and there are ten oh-yes effects on an aha effect. The reviewer openly admits that, on his reading trips, he does not easily want to forego the comfort of clearly structured bookhouses in which you can take a walk and that, despite all philosophical openness, he likes to avoid the airy openness of becoming uninhabitable sign building sites — however innovative, non-intrusive and enthusiastic they may be.

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sources

Greek, Stephen: Nietzsche's architecture of the discerning. The world as science and fiction. Bielefeld 2024.

Heidegger, Martin: Being and time. Tübingen 1953.

Sloterdijk, Peter: spheres I—III. Frankfurt a.M. 1998—2004.

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footnotes

1: The birth of tragedy, paragraph 25.

2: Beyond good and evil, Aph 230.

3: Heidegger, Being and time, P. 137.

4: Beyond good and evil, Aph 62.

5: Published in 2024 by “transcript” publishing house and quoted in body text below.

6: The happy science, Aph 280.

7: Sloterdijks opus magnum spheres explores exactly these questions on thousands of pages and comes to the conclusion that the essential minimal architecture of the House of Being must be designed with a nine-fold emotional and social covering.