Deciding to Serve Life

An Essay on the Meaning of Nietzsche's Philosophy

Deciding to Serve Life

An Essay on the Meaning of Nietzsche's Philosophy

13.5.24

Michael Meyer-Albert

Nietzsche is generally regarded as a literary philosopher whose aphoristic nihilisms not only conjure up the death of God, but who also reinforced the dark sides of German history as a posthumous master thinker. In contrast, the following text would like to be part of the series What does Nietzsche mean to me? invite you to learn to read Nietzsche anew as the discoverer of the all-too-unknown philosophical continent of Mediterranean existentialism.

Nietzsche is generally regarded as a literary philosopher whose aphoristic nihilisms not only conjure up the death of God, but who also reinforced the dark sides of German history as a posthumous master thinker. In contrast, the following text would like to be part of the series What does Nietzsche mean to me? invite you to learn to read Nietzsche anew as the discoverer of the all-too-unknown philosophical continent of Mediterranean existentialism.

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“Step out of your cave: the world is waiting for you like a garden. ”¹

Teutonic Educational Paths

Almost exactly 100 years ago, Thomas Mann said in his speech From the German Republic formulated a late commitment to liberal modernity. He describes this politicization as part of a comprehensive educational path that is exemplary of the cultural history of Germany, that belated nation, which only successfully achieved its arrival in political modernity from outside in the form of a kind of liberalism. Looking back, Thomas Mann summarizes his development in a sentence that, like few lucid, brings up the German spirit: “No metamorphosis of the mind is more familiar to us than that which begins with sympathy with death, at the end of which there is a determination to serve life. ”²

It is precisely this educational path that is also found in Nietzsche's work. The highly gifted pupil and student, who became professor of classical philology at the age of 24 in 1869 and gave up this promising academic career, became a Wagner disciple who hoped for a mystical cultural revolution from the master from Leipzig. As a result of the experiences of the real “Christmas Festival” with their banal narrow-mindedness and narrow-minded banality in Bayreuth in 1876, a world collapsed for Nietzsche. This crisis gave rise to a new hope: the life ideal of the “free spirit.” Since the death-friendly sirens of music were not silent for Nietzsche, but still sound crooked, he has dedicated himself to philosophy as a decision to serve his life. Without Wagner's music, life doesn't have to be a mistake. But for life to sound good, it needs a bright philosophy as a substitute music. Nietzsche's thinking is a critique of tragedy from the spirit of vitality. In the following, I would like to very briefly recall four basic dimensions of his philosophizing vitalism.

The philosophizing body

Nietzsche's thinking contradicts the Western hierarchy, according to which the body is subordinate to the spirit. The classic understanding of truth as something immutable, substantial, universal is inverted by him. Nietzsche therefore defines his thinking as a negation of Plato's philosophy. This turn to the concrete was formulated in the 19th century through Kierkegaard's Christian-existentialist ideas and the Young Hegelian practice philosophy against Hegel's work on the conceptual system. But Nietzsche goes beyond that. His grounding of philosophy does not end in a leap of faith or in revolutionary agitations. For him, thinking is grounded in the nervous open-mindedness of the body. Philosophy is therefore an effect of body tension that is articulated in terms of the media and at the same time reflects its articulations as repercussions on the body. This leads to a philosophy that abandons its ambitions for a comprehensive system. The treatise and the treatise become the essay and the aphorism. The coherence of arguments and definitions becomes constitutively somatic. The work of the term is always also the work on the metaphor, on the sound, on the mood. For the spiritual physicality of “thinkers”³ The rule is: Philosophy becomes style and style becomes philosophy. It is not just about thinking correctly, but above all about how to think correctly fascinates. Thinking that doesn't amaze at yourself isn't worth thinking about. A realm of ideas is only worth as much as it is able to increase the wealth of the world.

Appearance instead of being

Nietzsche's body thinking lives the “path of despair” (Hegel), he not only philosophizes about it. For him, philosophy takes place as an existential confrontation with emotional pain, which always occurs when a world that was believed meant everything falls apart. Nietzsche thinks because what is is too little as commitment and too much as dissonance. The contradictions are too great. The Modus operandi This post-Hegelian somatic dialectic is an “art of transfiguration.” The central location for this can be found in a late preface to the Happy science:

A philosopher who has gone through many health conditions and does it again and again has also gone through just as many philosophies: he may Just no different than translating one's condition into the most spiritual form and distance every time — this art of transfiguration is It's just philosophy.⁴

With this idea, Nietzsche transforms his suffering life into an epochal example. He thus transfigures his existence as a whole into a philosophical existence. The philologist thus becomes a philosopher through his transfigured despair. And only as a philosopher, as a member of a way of life that allows him to repeatedly move his life away as an object of knowledge, does the former model student, model wagon disciple manage to stay alive: “I'm still alive, I still think: I still have to live, because I still have to think. ”⁵ Reading Nietzsche means taking part in a philosophy that transforms tragedy into irony.

The existentialist, unphilosophical openness of Nietzsche's philosophy finally creates a new concept of truth. Because life is surrounded by life-threatening truths, which it cannot simply leave behind, but must come through recognizing, appearances must save life from a demoralizing agony. Appearance creates being in order to be. Truth becomes second-order truth, as Luhmann would say. It is interesting that Nietzsche's concept of truth overlaps with the concept of life in biology in one essential insight: Life requires boundaries as a cell membrane from an environment and as various types of spaces in a cell. Seen in this light, Nietzsche's false truth could be understood as a cultural continuation of naturalistic evolution. His philosophy provides conceptual compartments whose membrane of illusions and transfigurative interpretations enables permeable selectivity. Philosophy as a semblance of distance keeps truth at a distance and thus allows the existence of an unlikely vitality. Nietzsche's answer to the cultural environment of an omnipresent world: The courage to live after the death of God springs from the magic of high-spirited thinking: “Make [S] o/ My old seven things/ Me seven new things. ”⁶ For example, an external world dominated by the test of God and pseudo-religious compensation (Wagner cult, communism, fascism) becomes livable by an inner world that relies on self-interest through philosophical “self-heterogenization” (Novalis). That is why Nietzsche Gottfried Benn's notorious lines could be omitted Your etudes: “Being stupid and having a job:/that is happiness”, rephrase: Being intelligent and being able to believe in yourself: that is happiness. The rest is criticism.

The critique of resentful reason

The role of cultural critic, with which Nietzsche is initially and mostly identified, is actually an effect of Nietzsche's cosmopolitan nervousness. It is too permeable for the world to be able to live without philosophy. His critique is an immune response.

In contrast to Heidegger's thinking, which interprets moods ontologically, Nietzsche sees moods as cultural artifacts. Emotional states are forms of emotion. As a cultural critic resentful of culture, Nietzsche defines Europe's basic anger as resentment. Resentment is the vengeful envy of living life for successful vitality. As an everyday phenomenon: Standing on the edge of the dance floor and instead of getting into the dance mood, start talking about the dancers, the music, the lighting, etc. Nietzsche sees this dynamic as the essential growth of Europe's feelings. This “conspiracy of the suffering against the well-off and the victorious”⁷ takes place as a debt attribution: “I suffer: someone must be to blame for this — that's what every sick sheep thinks. ”⁸

It is crucial for Nietzsche that this search for guilt is actively promoted. In the type of priest, Nietzsche recognizes professional resentment, which mobilizes the mass of frustrated people against the existence and existence of this self through reinterpretations. In return, the value of justice is exploited as a transfiguration for agitations. Successes are defamed as exploitations with noble indignation. For Nietzsche, it is time for Paul to press. Even though Nietzsche's own appraisals against Christianity itself seem to straddle again: His idea of a cultural production of feelings of retaliation from the two components of frustration measures and agitation radicals, which solidify themselves in a militant morality of justice, has an interpretatively unused power, especially for the diagnosis of the 20th century. It is necessary to learn from this what should no longer be the case in the 21st century so that the end of the story achieved with modernity and described by Francis Fukuyama does not come to an end.

Nietzsche's thinking as reverse Paulinism remains current in order to deconstruct the toxic semblance of resentful “truths.” It is particularly important in the 21st century to develop an idea of viable universalisms for the global world following the rage of lethal universalisms in the last century. Philosophically, Nietzsche thus offers a way out of the critical theory industry with its intellectualized “sympathy with death” and its managed sensitivity to the existing.

The art of living of the future

Ultimately, however, Nietzsche's thinking does not result in thinking. His idea of placing life instead of truth at the center of philosophy is consistent in that philosophy is incorporated into the art of living. The criticism of resentment is realized in a lived Yesagen as existential estheticism. For Nietzsche, this is expressed in eight aspects:

a. In post-classical terms, Nietzsche's philosophical hedonism is no longer based solely on the value of self-knowledge. He transforms Socratic self-knowledge into thankful complacency. This is a prophylactic distancing from the automatisms of resentful resentment: “Because one thing is necessary: that people are satisfied with themselves achieve [...]! Anyone who is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to take revenge for it: the rest of us will be his victims.”⁹.

b. In order to achieve one's own satisfaction, it is essential that the physiological place of thought is maintained: adequate sleep, good nutrition, but also a prudent music diet — listen to a little Wagner, a lot of Bizet! — are useful for that.

c. Nietzsche particularly emphasizes the value of selective blindness for a comprehensive affirmation of life. Only by consciously looking away, not seeing, not informing can a space stabilize for sympathetic perceptions of the world. In his empathy for empathy, the empathic person knows that there is an overload of the empathic, which coarsenes empathy, makes sentimentally inaccurate or leads to an addiction to concern. Only a world of avoidance allows cosmopolitanism to come into the world:”Look away Be my only negation! ”¹⁰

d. Nietzsche also repeatedly admonishes against unreflected diligence and “indiscriminate haste at work.”¹¹. The otium of a Vita contemplativa requires “resolute laziness”¹². Only when boredom is consciously managed does the possibility of astonishing liveliness arise.

e. For witty laziness, it is important to lose your stoic self-control again and again and to be able to entrust yourself to the impulses that drive your being. As an “eternal guardian of his castle”¹³ Are you “impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful coincidences of the soul” (ibid.).

f. Nietzsche's art of living thus offers a broad departure path for spiritual and emotional flights of all kinds. Life should develop into further, more lasting and comprehensive states through ever new reflections and transfigurations. It is thus ideally interspersed with the veins of high feelings, as “a constant like climbing stairs and at the same time resting on the cloud.”¹⁴.

g. This creates a stable sense of life in which the absurdity of existence has been converted into a beautiful openness. Before Camus, Nietzsche thinks of the idea of Mediterranean existentialism beyond Camus. The despair in “silence of the world” (Camus), in “abandonment” (Heidegger), in “disgust” (Sartre) for contingency is lightened into the “heaven of chance”¹⁵.

h. For Nietzsche, the art of living is embodied in creative education. The rich pass on their wealth. Her good news is: You too live near the beach. The great is accessible. Be good to life because the chance to live is there.

Nietzsche's “decision to make a living” thus results in Mediterranean existentialism. Reading it means discovering and learning to despise the “sympathies with death,” in yourself and in others. And it means following the appeal of common sense and trusting yourself in the impressions of brilliant life that are always available to everyone. The last transfiguration: Jumping over your own resentful shadow “into seine Sun”¹⁶.

Sources

Man, Thomas: From the German Republic. In: Collected works in individual volumes. From the German Republic. Political Writings and Speeches in Germany. Frankfurt am Main 1995, pp. 23—41.

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