5. At the Tree Line

Nietzsche’s philosophy, which perceives and reflects upon the constitutive grounding of the mind in the body, addresses its existential tensions as differentiations of the understanding of a sublime life. Crucial to the theme of the forest is that Nietzsche moves away from the motif of the forest as a projection surface for sublimity. The "neutrality of great nature" no longer satisfies his ambitions; indeed, it even offends him as a kind of lèse-majesté:

The neutrality of great nature (in mountains, sea, forest, and desert) is pleasing, but only for a short time: afterwards, we become impatient. "Do these things have nothing to say to us? Are we not here for them?" The feeling arises of a crimen laesae majestatis humanae ["lèse-majesté against humanity"; MMA].¹

The decisive inspiration for Nietzsche now becomes the forest in the sense of the tree line as a prelude to the vegetation limit. Forest solitude becomes life solitude. The landscape of his philosophy, the high alpine mountains – particularly the Swiss Upper Engadine around Sils Maria – provided him with illustrative examples for this.² Nietzsche’s wandering thought explores the possibilities of psychic-symbolic vitality with regard to the death zone, which no longer permits human life. Here, his thinking finds an inspiring sublimity once again. In this, Nietzsche’s early intuition of the power of illusion becomes clear. Nietzsche’s answer to the question of being or non-being, posed by the tree line, is: appearance. For:

Could we imagine a humanization of dissonance – and what else is man? – then this dissonance, in order to be able to live, would need a magnificent illusion to cast a veil of beauty over its own essence.³

His realization that the conditions of life include exaggerating appearance as an impregnation with motivating illusions and transfigurations was something Nietzsche himself repeatedly pushed to the limit by seeking out intentional disillusionments on the verge of despair. Without the old European fundamental transfigurations shaped by Plato – the true is the good, the mind participates in it – and Augustine – fulfillment is coming, God is your intimate "thou" – life loses its structural idyll. Nietzsche repeatedly exposed himself to this.

His recognition of the truth of appearance thus refines itself into a fundamental insight into the economy of appearance in life as an interplay of filtering out and intensifying. In this way, the powers of transfiguration, which in the Western tradition had previously been attached to the concepts of Plato and Augustine, become conceivable as liberated psychic construction strategies. One must fashion for oneself the world in which one can live. Being as appearing. Appearance: as "reality once more, only in a selection, reinforcement, correction."⁴.

The forest as a tree line inoculates Nietzsche with thoughts that explore the conditions of the possibility of a successful life. He realizes: an idyll is more than a place; it is understood as a state. It becomes understandable as an equilibrium that embodies a successful coordination of filtering out and intensifying. Filtering out and intensifying are therefore not properties of the idyll. They become forces that first create the place where an idyll can exist. Life can thus design itself as a mixture of filtering out and intensifying. From the classical ora et labora (pray and work!) becomes a neo-classical secerne et densa (filter out and intensify!). For Nietzsche, the post-Platonic tragedy lies in the fact that this work of the existential idyll must also be carried out:

And this is a general law: every living thing can only become healthy, strong, and fruitful within a horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself and is too selfish to enclose its own view within that of another, it will wither away feebly or prematurely to its demise.⁵

In the twilight of constructions, life can light up. For resonances to exist, filtering out must first create the space for the psychic. The priority of exclusion affirms the boundary, the separation, the shielding as

a decision for ignorance, for arbitrary closure, a shutting of one's windowsan inner saying 'no' to this or that thing, a refusal to let things come close, a kind of defensive state against much that is knowable, a contentment with the darkness, with the closing horizon, a saying 'yes' to and an approval of ignorance.⁶

From this perspective, philosophy gains an expanded meaning. Nietzsche reinvents philosophy as a stimulus for the living. Philosophy becomes work on the idyll, which succeeds in excluding despair and making cheerfulness more resilient, without falling into misguided utopias, by discovering itself as autogenic euphoric stimulation through speculative-ironic flights of fancy. Philosophical idyll is heroic because it is won anew time and again. Unlike in Heidegger’s The Country Path – as the manifesto of a deliberately contemplative, humble walking in the "expanse and duration" of horizontal regions – Nietzsche’s alpine contemplativeness gains insights into the power of exaggeration for a being oriented toward vitality. Nietzsche’s heroic idyll is an academy built at the tree line, kindling Mediterranean feelings of life through ice and solitude.⁷

Nietzsche has enhanced the idyll fourfold by understanding it better. He intensifies its idyllic nature by configuring the classic patterns of exclusion – Plato’s sentimental pull toward the past and Augustine’s utopian pull toward the coming of the Kingdom of God – toward the present. He also strengthens the idyll by repeatedly exposing himself to the non-idyllic and experiencing in his own body what still allows for something to be idyllic. Furthermore, through his reflection on truth as appearance, he succeeds in uncovering the fundamental idyllic dimensions of exclusion and condensation as autonomous forces. And finally, his thinking embodies a motivation to take up the work of reconfiguring exclusion and condensation again and again, even in the face of the destruction of old understandings of the idyll.

In his Idylls from Messina the ambiguity of Nietzsche’s idyllic nature becomes clear. The superficial is achieved. The bucolic becomes high-spirited and shows traits of a Dionysian Anacreontics. The melancholy of the unattainable and the fear of ungranted grace remain outside. One no longer has any need for elves, either. The rustling of the forest becomes the rustling of wings that lift one up:

Step by step – that is no life!
Always one foot after the other makes one tired and heavy!
I let the winds lift me,
I love to soar on wings
And chase after every bird.

Reason? – that is a wretched business:
Reason and tongue stumble often!
Flying gave me new strength
And taught me finer business,
Singing and joking and playing songs.⁸

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6. Modernity as Forest

Nietzsche’s enhanced idyll reveals more clearly the anti-modern roots of both right-wing and left-wing understandings of the forest. Among the mythical forest disciples, Platonic melanchocracy dominates. It feeds on the tragic paralysis for which the good is always present only as something irretrievable, revealing itself at best in trace elements to a small elite. Among the revolutionary forest disciples, the agitational morality of Augustinian phobocracy determines the concepts. Their mobilization conceives of the forest as part of the gladius dei, of the sword of God, which will one day destroy the false whole in the name of a coming good.⁹

Even if Nietzsche’s idea of the heroic idyll—inspired by the experience of the tree line to dare a retuning of the fundamental moods of old Europe—appears as an ongoing project indispensable for any future contour of a concept of high culture, the figure of the lonely wanderer above the sea of fog of a confused culture has lost its contemporary pathos. The retuning that Nietzsche aimed for has been realized in the world’s zones of prosperity. The release of appearance as masking and condensation, which he explicitly initiated, took place there in an unphilosophical way. The heroic idyll has established itself post-heroically. The era from 1945 to 1990 resulted in a reasonably successful end of history. Sloterdijk provided the most lasting descriptions of this as early as 2004:

The new liaison between "mass" purchasing power and "mass" frivolity is leading to a psychosocial shift in mood on the broadest front. […] The massive expansion of leisure time affects the modus vivendi of all subcultures and income groups. Countless people used their surplus of free waking time to elaborate on their whims, their talents, their illnesses, their victim subjectivities, and private metaphysics […].¹⁰

For Sloterdijk, modernity appears "as an expanding transcultural levitation experiment," as a "multi-chamber system of buoyancy cells"¹¹. This prestabilized non-disharmony becomes plausible through progress in healthcare and insurance, technology, the experience of radical politics, a culture of science, the property-based market economy, elaborate legal systems, the dominant culture of the creative entrepreneur, and the expansion of the cultural consumer zone.¹² All of this generates effects of increased vitality that raise literate life expectancy while massively expanding leisure time, liquefying the constraints of origin, and thus notoriously brightening the metaphysically tuned life-feelings and reality constructs that always locate the best in a hereafter and paint the here and now as lack, hardship, and misery. And precisely what was identified in classical anti-modernism as the cause for the dehumanization of conditions becomes, in this process, an essential stabilization of the freedoms achieved: the optimized automatisms of well-rehearsed processes. The smooth functioning of the systems secures the most beautiful crystallizations of the citizens a thousand times over.

Modernity thus establishes itself as a real-existing idyll of idylls, in which multiple experiments in the appropriate configuration of masking and condensation take place. Now, every individual monad can shape and enhance inter-monadic idylls through its specific windows and doors. Beyond metaphysical monomaniacal dogmatics and their secular radicalizations in left-wing and right-wing fascism, everyone can build their refuge of resonances against the rest of the world. We are the air that we can breathe for one another, provided there are boundaries to the air that others perceive as breathable. Even the neighbor in the house across the street is like the air of alien planets. Multiple rhizomatic interweaving, made possible by clear boundaries, constitutes the culture of modernity. It is a forest of a thousand forests. For instance, one has the choice to live out one’s elaborate musical taste in the metal subculture within the sub-subcultures of folk metal, symphonic metal, doom metal, black metal, thrash metal, power metal, nu metal, or even metalcore. When the song The Bard’s Song (In the Forest) by the Krefeld metal band Blind Guardian is sung along to by thousands, the truth of modernity as a free choice for the appropriate form of one’s own hymnic freedom becomes clear and distinct.

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7. The New Sustainability

In an era where lack is becoming a scarce commodity, the situation for the pessimists of all countries is becoming less idyllic. They, too, must enhance their idyll and escalate their arts of masking the successful and condensing the catastrophic. For the neo-Augustinians, modern prosperity must continue to be an unpleasant good—a "galley" (E. Jünger), a "context of delusion" (Adorno)—or, as an evil good, represent a criminal nexus of a hubris of the privileged who exploit others. "[A]nd so they paint the misfortune of others on the wall: they always need others! And again and again others!"¹³ In this, exaggerated utopias help the "misery-addicts" who want the great atonement. The greatest enemy of a good society is the idea of a perfect society:

While relief sent its harbingers everywhere, the extreme realists indulged more unrestrainedly than ever before in a cult of depressive thinking. Walter Benjamin went so far as to create the image of the angel of history, who believes he sees a single catastrophe incessantly piling wreckage upon wreckage—thereby creating the test pattern for the visual impairments of a century blinded by radicalisms.¹⁴

Advantageous for the anti-moderns is the modernity-forgetfulness of the moderns. The self-evidence of the soft facts in the bubbles of prosperity ensures that there is a modernity-blindness—not to speak of a willful "levitation denial" (Sloterdijk)—precisely among those who are able to live modernly.

In contrast, a philosophy that followed in Nietzsche’s footsteps would have to find a language for the realized wealth of the real as a new sustainability. Here, thinking becomes a form of gratitude and generosity. It embodies itself in a "principle of responsibility" (Jonas) that rejects the irresponsibly outdated negative language games of fatalistic catastrophe-willingness, lethargic sadness, and the populist phantasms of a new oligarchic elite that must be fought. The force of the great atonement is absorbed.

In the negation of negativity, Nietzsche’s muse of the tree line returns, albeit changed. Here, too, a negative inspiration is at work, though now less existential than cultural. The tree line becomes the modernity line. It becomes perceptible in the polarizing discontent in welfare states, which shows signs of a chronic irritation; observing it does not require much imagination to conceive that the capacities of a modern bourgeoisie are being massively demoralized by it. The current abysmal lifelessness is the agony of the welfare state as an emotional failed state. As with Nietzsche, the idyllic must therefore be enhanced and defended as a new sustainability, more explicitly against the toxic romanticism of left-wing, right-wing, and religious reactionaries. The political aspect is that the private can remain apolitical. Thus, the jargon of populism, aggressive dualisms, and the mood of pessimism tipping into retribution must be consciously masked out again and again and indirectly refuted through an idealizing condensation of what has succeeded. It is a matter of advocating for a different kind of atonement:

Idealization does not consist, as is commonly believed, in subtracting or discounting the small and the incidental. Rather, the decisive factor is a tremendous accentuation of the main features, so that the others disappear in their shadow.¹⁵

In a philosophy of modern idealization of soft facts, the forest can once again be one of many places of elevation that make the possibilities of beautiful diversity livable. Finally, the trees that were obscured by exaggerated ideas of the forest are becoming visible again. Detached from the misguided concepts of the anti-moderns and re-grounded, the forest is becoming a local recreation area, a sensory adventure park, and a forest playground for the next generation. Due to extreme heatwaves, it is gaining importance as a shady, cool location for a type of holiday behavior known as "coolcation" . For readers of Eichendorff, Goethe, and Stifter, the forest will remain a regenerative refuge that, after the turmoil of the 20th century, no longer requires any counter-cultural daydreams. "I walked in the woods / All by myself / And to seek nothing, / That was my intent." (Goethe) The rustling of the forest can once again be just a rustling. The fairies are waiting for you at home.  

The fact that Nietzsche’s ideas, reinforced by Camus’ thoughts on "Mediterranean thinking," have arrived in reality is also evident in the shift in the cultural mood of a new sustainability regarding its guiding idylls. The forest is no longer as important. Longing has become more clear-headed. The Teutonic spirit has become less "addicted to twilight" (Heine): "Away, you dream! As golden as you are; / Here, too, is love and life." (Goethe) Where there was once metaphysically overstretched longing, there is now worldly, ambitious desire. Modern Teutonism is becoming more worldly. It has become truer to the earth and less faithful to the forest. The longing for the forest has given way to a wanderlust for the Mediterranean. The German infatuation with Italy could become a mass phenomenon. Now, everyone could travel like Goethe in 1786 to the land where the orange trees bloom. "The South for everyone."¹⁶ The new dialectic of real-existing historical materialism is: Sola fide, sola solitudine, o sole mio.

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The article image has been painted by the Australian artist Mitchell Nolte (link), whom we commissioned to illustrate our entire forest series. It depicts Zarathustra in a forest landscape of his homeland, burying the tightrope walker—in this case, Nietzsche himself—who, at the beginning of the book, serves as a symbol for the heroic human hovering over the abyss, much like the Aborigines in a "hollow tree."

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Sources

Canetti, Elias: Crowds and Power. Frankfurt am Main 1980.

Eichendorff, Joseph von: Poems. Stuttgart 1998.

Heine, Heinrich: Romanzero. Stuttgart 1998.

Jünger, Ernst: The Forest Passage. Stuttgart 2001.

Sloterdijk, Peter: Spheres III. Frankfurt am Main 2004.

Ibid.: Whoever Has Not Yet Thought of Gray. Berlin 2022.

Virgil: Eclogues. Stuttgart 1999.

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Footnotes

1:Human, All Too Human II, The Wanderer and His Shadow, Aphorism 205.

2: Sloterdijk points out that the phenomenon of the tree line in particular must have been a significant inspiration for Nietzsche in gaining a broader understanding of the nature of human existence during his "marginal walks of vitality." Cf. Sloterdijk, Whoever has not yet thought of gray, pp. 207 et seq.

3:The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 25.

4:Twilight of the Idols, "Reason" in Philosophy, sec. 6.

5:On the Utility and Liability of History for Life, sec. 1.

6:Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 230.

7: Ed. note: "Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!", Nietzsche calls out in The Gay Science to those who, like him, wish tolive dangerously(aph. 283).

8:Idylls from Messina, Prince Free-as-a-Bird.

9: Allusion to the quasi-religious hatred of militant-eschatological environmentalists toward culture as progress and growth, referencing the quote "Gladius Dei super terram … Cito et velociter" ("The sword of God over the earth ... Swift and fast") by the Florentine preacher of repentance Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498).

10: Sloterdijk, Spheres III: Plural Spherology, pp. 691 et seq.

11: Ibid., pp. 722 et seq.

12: Cf. ibid., pp. 677 et seq.

13:The Gay Science, aph. 56.

14: Sloterdijk, Spheres III: Plural Spherology, p. 696.

15:Twilight of the Idols, On the Psychology of the Artist, sec. 8.

16: The talented FDP politician Rudi Ascherl used "South for All" as a central slogan on his website and for his political positions, primarily in 2019 and 2020 in the Leipzig-South constituency.