I. Freedom = Fascination

On Christoph Menke, Professor of Practical Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, one can read on Wikipedia: “He is regarded as an important representative of the 'third generation' of the Frankfurt School.” In his study published by Suhrkamp in 2022 Liberation theory he pleads for a new concept of liberation according to his claim for “radical”. In addition to the surrealists, the biblical Moses, the television series Breaking Bad and a whole series of philosophical 'guardians' from Walter Benjamin to Theodor W. Adorno to Martin Heidegger, is one of his important points of reference Nietzsche, whom he quotes again and again in the book and even quotes from Schopenhauer as an educator ended.

The core thesis of this, according to self-promotion on the cover text, “groundbreaking theory,” is that the entire Western philosophical tradition mistakenly misunderstood freedom as autonomy, as empowerment. If you understand freedom in this way, you link it to domination, exploitation and the power of habit. In the areas of art, religion and — surprisingly — economics of all places, Menke sees a different paradigm of liberation: liberation as a break with habit in fascination, enthusiastic dedication, for the sublime, the divine, but also money.

Since Menke also repeatedly points out the failure of these forms of liberation, he leaves the reader a bit baffled at the end. His basic idea intrigued But without a doubt. Hasn't this exact aspect been overlooked so far in philosophical thinking about freedom? Does freedom actually lie in something completely different from reasonable action, political emancipation, or power gained through self-discipline? Especially in moments of enthusiasm, spontaneity, break and desubjectization? For Menke, liberation is not a heroic active act of self-empowerment, but the passive speech of something external, higher that fascinates us and pulls us away from everyday life, from habit, from our identity.

II. A Fascinating Etymology

Menke, who in his book, for example, deals very extensively with the etymology of the Greek word for “freedom,” eleutheria, concerned, unfortunately hardly talks about the history of his positive counterterm there, although this is also very old. The Latin verb Fascinare means “bewitch.” The Romans thus referred to a power that was anything but liberating, namely that of fascinus or fascinum, the magic of damage, which was usually associated with the “evil eye” of the envious person, which emanates a destructive force for the individual as well as for the community, which must be tamed in order to ensure the respective integrity. However, the spell can only be fought with a corresponding counterspell, so that fascinum Finally, it primarily describes the means against the damage spell, above all the phallic amulets that were ubiquitous in the Roman world and were worn to ward off it.¹ However, this does not contradict Menke's theory, but rather reinforces it. In fact, he regards the Roman-Greek world as the origin of the false understanding of liberation that is still valid today — and it is not surprising from his point of view that it is precisely that world that is almost obsessed with taming the dark power of fascination; but by making use of the same power.

III. Evil Eyes

Nietzsche was undoubtedly familiar with this aspect of ancient culture. The “evil eye” is a metaphor he has used in countless places, almost a leitmotif of his thinking that can be easily overlooked. Of course, he takes the standpoint of antiquity he admires: For him, the “evil eye” is precisely the resentful, unfree slave's view of the freedom of masters, who later finds his ideology in Christian world hate, and which is so dangerous because it poisons the souls of the masters and allows them to develop a guilty conscience themselves. He speaks of a “pessimist look”² who oppose “the passions”³ Judge, the “evil eye”⁴ of the state on the original peoples and the “mob”⁵ to the entire earth, from “tired [n] pessimistic [s] look, d [em] distrust to the riddle of life, the [em] icy [n] no of disgust to life”⁶, the “hypnotic gaze of the sinner”⁷. This gaze is particularly dangerous when you focus on your own life, the “returned [] gaze of the misborn from the very beginning.”⁸: “[E] in remorse seems to me a kind of 'Evil Look”⁹, “Man has looked at his natural slopes with an 'evil eye, 'so that they finally became concealed in him with the 'bad conscience.' ”¹⁰

In short: For Nietzsche, morality is a “fundamental deterioration of the imagination, as an 'evil eye” for all things. '¹¹. It is the envious look of “someone who cannot see the high things about people.”¹², the cynic, the “spoilsport [s]”¹³. It is a permanent threat to “higher [n] people”¹⁴, who have to secure themselves against him by not ceasing to believe in themselves. — This all clearly corresponds to the ancient view of things and it is certainly no coincidence that Nietzsche so often places the term in quotation marks to make it clear that he is quoting exactly that ancient tradition in these places. Accordingly, Nietzsche knows that it takes even an evil eye to be able to combat the morality of resentment.¹⁵

In keeping with the usage of his time, Nietzsche uses the word “fascination” sparingly and when so, almost exclusively in its pejorative, ancient sense. He is actually one of the first to use it more frequently in German-speaking countries. It only became a frequently used and neutral or even positive vocabulary in the course of the 20th century.¹⁶ Whether Wagner and Schopenhauer,¹⁷ the socialists¹⁸ the first Christians¹⁹ the Rousseauist Romantics,²⁰ the mystical underground religions of antiquity,²¹ the martyrs,²² the “saints” in general²³: Fascination is one, if not the, decisive weapon of the “weak” in the fight against the “well-off” and “strong,” with which they manage to pull them out of their self-affirmation and win them over for themselves. By fascinating the strong, the weak become strong: “[T] he sick and weak have Fascination Had to themselves, they are more interesting as the healthy ones”²⁴. In this”Fascinating power of virtue”²⁵ Nietzsche sees one of the greatest threats to freedom. In addition to Paulus²⁶ and Plato²⁷ For Nietzsche, Socrates is a master of fascination: “Socrates fascinated”²⁸, particularly due to “its terrifying ugliness”²⁹ and contradiction and thus took revenge on the distinguished Athenians, became the philosophical representative of the revolt and “mob resentment.”³⁰.

Menke does not address this aspect of Nietzsche in his book, but it is clear how he would integrate it into his theory: In fact, he reads Nietzsche's story of the “slave revolt” affirmatively, he interprets it under inverted values, and therefore these passages only confirm his equation of liberation and fascination. Fascination could be understood as a force that frees rulers from their identity as rulers and the ruled equally from their identity as ruled.

Of course, for Nietzsche, ironically, this Understanding liberation right at the beginning of Western civilization and not the Greco-Roman opposite it. For Nietzsche, Western culture is, right from the start, a culture that is based on a false understanding of freedom, namely by liberation as being fascinated, not by liberation as autonomy and self-empowerment.

That is what it is called right at the beginning of Happy science:

I found a hatred of reason among certain pious people and was good for it: at least that's how the evil intellectual conscience betrayed itself! But in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [dissensive harmony of things; PS] and all the wonderful uncertainty and ambiguity of existence are And don't ask, don't tremble with desire and desire to ask, don't even hate the questioner, maybe even taunt him — that's what I say as contemptuous I feel, and that feeling is what I first look for in everyone [.]³¹

And at the end of the book, he continues this idea:

One kind of honesty was alien to all religious founders and their ilk: — they never made their experiences a matter of conscience of knowledge. “What did I actually experience? What was in me and around me back then? Was my sanity bright enough? Was my will turned against all deceit by the senses and brave in its defense against the fantastic? “— None of them asked this question, not even now all the dear religious people are asking: rather, they are thirsty for things which Contrary to reason are, and do not want to make it too difficult for themselves to satisfy him — that is how they experience “miracles” and “rebirths” and hear the voices of the angels! But we, the others, thirsty of reason, want to look at our experiences as closely as a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day! We want to be our own experiments and test animals.³²

Nietzsche pleads — at least in his middle and late periods — for criticism and skepticism in the face of “fascinating” experiences, against dedication to mystical experiences; for reflection and against the power of the immediate and present that Menke conjures up in his theory of liberation. For him, liberation in the sense of the ideal of the “free spirit” means not falling for charismatic figures such as Paulus, Socrates or Rousseau, not for the omnipresent “future sirens of the market.”³³ and the hollow ideals they promote.

IV. Critique of Fascination

Which concept of freedom and which reading of Western history is now the more plausible? The change in meaning of the word “fascination” mentioned above suggests that we are actually dealing with a growth of fascination in the modern age, with its trivialization and profanation. It's not something we fear and avoid anymore, but rather something we're looking for, whether we're looking for new memes on the Internet, going to museums, or getting carried away by mass political movements. In his study, Menke reflects on the manipulative violence of modern visual worlds as well as the compelling power of modern economics — the corresponding chapter is probably the strongest in the book — and tries to differentiate between genuine and artificially manipulative forms of fascination. But what is the point of this complex, ultimately not really convincing differentiation work? Is the fascination as we experience it today not more, as Nietzsche already describes it, an enslaving power that only binds us more firmly to the existing habit than one that liberates us in some way, if we do not want to completely replace the concept of freedom from ideas such as “autonomy” and “self-determination”?

The matter becomes more controversial when you consider another meaning aspect of “fascination” that Menke has also not addressed. Even though it is in fact not related etymologically, it is difficult today to speak fascinum Not at the Fasces to think of the rod bundle of the Roman Republic, which gave fascism its name. Just like the old Fasces as a type of sublimated fascinum served, a phallic symbol around which the community rallied to avert the power of the “evil eye,” fascism consists in the mythical conjuring of irrational forces to banish the dark energies of dissolution that threaten the community. Fascist politics are downright by definition eine The politics of fascination, which relies on enthusiasm, overwhelming, dedication, desubjectification and the charismatic aura of a leader figure to save “order.”³⁴ It is not the case that Menke completely ignores this problem in his study, but it only plays a minor role for him — surprising for a supposed successor to the Frankfurt School. How can liberation be meaningfully understood essentially and primarily as being fascinated — i.e. desubjectization, sacrifice, submission, etc. — and at the same time sharply separate this concept of freedom from a fascist, irrationalistic one? A squaring of the circle that Menke also fails to do.

Nietzsche goes the other way. He's going — already and right now in Schopenhauer as an educator, which Menke completely wrongly invokes in his study — from an individualistic, enlightenment understanding of liberation, but admits that it moments who needs fascination (ecstasy, dissemination, passivity...) in order to achieve complete freedom. Nietzsche describes this inspiration in a poem, for example:

Meine Truth is!
From hesitant eyes,
from collected shivers
Her gaze hits me
Sweet, angry, a girl's eye...³⁵

The view of — each individual — truth fascinates precisely because it is ambiguous, because it is “sweet” and “evil” at the same time in an inseparable identity. It is only the confrontation with this view that enables Zarathustra to climb the next level of self-expression in this poem.³⁶

In early writing The Dionysian worldview In terms very similar to Menke, Nietzsche celebrates the desubjectizing, delimiting power of “demonically fascinating folk song [s]”³⁷ The Bacchants, but also sees in it a menace to the community, which can only be met through its Apollinian containment; it was only because of this combination of subjectification and desubjectization, freedom and fascination that a high culture such as Greek was able to develop. In this sense, he continues to praise the fascination of Wagner's operas in his late work.³⁸ And Nietzsche writes himself³⁹ and his writings⁴⁰ a similar fascination force too. For Nietzsche, there is also a “fascination of strength”⁴¹. The — temporary and tamed — dedication is necessary to preserve and increase freedom and strength; but similar to how Nietzsche distanced and had to distance himself from his temporary idols Schopenhauer and Wagner in order to become himself, this dedication must not be absolute, must remain an “ironic”, reserved one in a certain sense so as not to lead to self-dissolution and therefore to loss of freedom.

Menke obviously has nothing to do with this individualism. In the mentioned chapter on economic fascination, he even makes the claim that the modern individualistic understanding of self-realization is realized in the neoliberal model of economic self-assertion; just as if it had works such as Sources of self not given by Charles Taylor, who show in detail that self-actualization in the modern sense is essentially a ethical An idea that calls on the individual to do as Nietzsche did in Schopenhauer as an educator writes that realizing one's “higher self” is not just one of the “flies of the market.”⁴² to mix. Menke's positive reference to this work, in which he perhaps most decisively represents an ethic of individual self-realization, does not quite fit in with it. It is similar to Menke's wrap-around against the supposed “western” concept of freedom: He loves the polemic, which sometimes escalates into — stylistically sophisticated — demagogy, but this at the expense of the philosophical depth of this book, which, in its abysmal contempt for individualism, enlightenment and emancipation expressed in it, is much more in the Conservative Revolution camp than That of their opponents is to be located.

V. Freedom in Fascination, Fascination in Freedom

It would be important to develop a comprehensive understanding of freedom that combines all the moments in question — individual self-realization, political self-determination, pragmatic self-empowerment, moral self-determination — and at the same time knows how to integrate the moments of aesthetic fascination, religious devotion, etc. — certainly also the moment of erotic fascination largely omitted by Menke and echoed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche's reflection on the power of fascination that endangers and at the same time enables freedom is more effective than the latest “groundbreaking” review by Heideggers Being and time, in which the “Master from Germany” already propagates a very similar reinterpretation of the concept of freedom in the sense of a desubjectizing sacrifice for the “people,” thinkingly anticipating his subsequent fascination with the “national community.”⁴³

It may be that Nietzsche focuses too much on the moment of individual self-empowerment in his middle and late creative phase. The politically reactionary impetus of his “evil eye” considerations is obvious. But just at a time of growing disenfranchisement of individuals and the strengthening of freedom-hostile, fascinated political and religious movements, singing the song of “lust of desubjektification” (Menke, p. 128) is like a declaration of bankruptcy based on contemporary diagnosis. Free-spiritedness and passion in every respect — political, spiritual, aesthetic, erotic... — must go hand in hand in order to further progress in omnipresent desubjectization preventing and freedom in the very dreadful sense of the ideas of 1789, which Menke and his pioneers are trying to eradicate,⁴⁴ restore, to deepen and broaden.⁴⁵

The “evil eye” of the fascinated person prevents Nietzsche from developing a genuine, authentic passion in particular, inasmuch as he demonizes immediate emotions and replaces them with hollow pathos that covers them up. Perhaps it would be a first step to address the violence of the bad fascination to deprive the “idols” of the present (God, money, 'great art, 'etc.), again a less charged but more exhilarating and liberating sensitivity rediscover. carmen instead of Parsifal, Baltic instead of south, lived solidarity instead of calls for world revolution from catheder, indulging in dreaming in a boat on a Swiss mountain lake, the silence of a cathedral... terms instead of jargon, authenticity instead of authenticity. You like about such ethics Wrinkle up your nose in the exhibition tower, but perhaps today is the smallest and most humble thing — worrying about the “little things”⁴⁶ instead of sacrificing for the “idols” of “big [n] politics”⁴⁷ — more radical than the grand gesture of world destruction and fashionable “West” bashing, which does not gain strength even after its hundredth repetition.

Secondary Sources

Confino, Alon: Foundational Pasts. The Holocaust as Historical Understanding. Cambridge 2012.

Hahnemann, Andy & Björn Weyand: Fascination. The appeal of a term. In: This. (ed.): Fascination. Historical conjunctures and heuristic scope of a term. Berlin e. a. 2009, pp. 7—32.

Stephen, Paul: Truth as story and moment. The critique of truth in Friedrich Nietzsche's work in light of the section How the “real world” finally became a fable. Nordhausen 2018.

Ders. : Zarathustra's “Eye View.” Nietzsche's theory of confrontation with reality. In: Nietzsche research. Yearbook of the Nietzsche Society Vol. 24 Berlin & Boston 2017, pp. 315—327.

Taylor, Charles: Sources of self. The development of modern identity. Transcribed by Joachim Schulte. Frankfurt a. M. 1996.

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Footnotes

1: For example, for a first overview, see the corresponding entry in Pauly's real cyclopaedia of classical studies.

2: Götzen-Dämmerung, rambles, 24.

3: The happy science, 139.

4: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

5: So Zarathustra spoke, From the higher person16.

6: On the genealogy of morality, II, 7.

7: On the genealogy of morality, III, 20.

8: On the genealogy of morality, III, 14.

9: Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, 1.

10: On the genealogy of morality, III, 24.

11: The Antichrist, 25.

12: So Zarathustra spoke, Of the virtuous.

13: So Zarathustra spoke, The dance song.

14: Human, all-too-human I, 480.

15: Cf. Götzen-Dämmerung, preface.

16: Cf. Hahnemann & Weyand, fascination.

17: Cf. The happy science 99.

18: Cf. Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 10 [82].

19: Cf. Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 10 [157].

20: Cf. Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 9 [184].

21: Cf. The Antichrist58.

22: Cf. The Antichrist, 53.

23: Cf. Ecce homo, Why I am a fate, 8.

24: Subsequent fragments 1888, No. 14 [182].

25: Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 10 [184].

26: Cf. Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 10 [189].

27: Cf. Götzen-Dämmerung, What I owe to the elderly, 2.

28: Götzen-Dämmerung, The problem of Socrates, 11.

29: Ibid., 9.

30: Ibid., 7.

31: The happy science, 2.

32: Ibid., 319.

33: Ibid., 377.

34: Just think of Thomas Mann's famous story Mario and the magician. See also the mentioned article by Hahnemann and Weyand.

35: Dionysus Dithyrambi,On the poverty of the richest.

36: For a more detailed interpretation of this constellation, which is central to Nietzsche, see my study Truth as story and moment and the essay summing them up Zarathustra's “Eye View.”

37: The Dionysian worldview, 2.

38: Cf. Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, 6 and Letter to Carl Fuchs dated 27.12.1888.

39: Cf. Letter to Franz Overbeck from Christmas 1888 and Letter to Meta von Salis dated 29.12.1888.

40: Cf. Ecce homo, The birth of tragedy, 1.

41: Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 9 [185].

42: So Zarathustra spoke, From the flies of the market.

43: Menke makes no secret of the derivation of his concept of freedom from Heidegger's ontology (see in particular pp. 226—229). He is one of the most frequently mentioned philosophers in the study. The proximity of Menke's language to the “jargon of authenticity” (Adorno about the diction of Heidegger and his adepts) is unmistakable.

44: Consider, for example, the corresponding relevant statements by Goebbels, Rosenberg or Ernst Bertram (see Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts, p. 6f.), who had all committed themselves to the (brown) abolition of liberal subjectivism in favor of a fascinated dedication to the community.

45: In this sense, Nietzsche speaks of “two brain chambers,” two sensitivities — one scientific (critical) and one passionate (religious, metaphysical and aesthetic) — which everyone who wants to participate in the “higher culture” and who should keep each other in check in order to correct their respective differences: “The source of strength lies in one area, the regulator in the other: with illusions, one Things, passions must be heated, with the help of discerning science, the evil and dangerous consequences of overheating can be prevented” (Human, all-too-human I, 251).

46: Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, 10.

47: Human, all-too-human I, 481.

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