Jonas Čeika wants to “abolish the situation” with a mix of two of the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth century, i.e. fundamentally transform society. Some past authors had such ambitions. Yet no left-wing political philosophizing has made such waves in a long time. This can be seen in the linguistic severity of the counters. At the beginning of 2024, Daniel Tutt, for example, countered with his presentation How to Read Like a Parasite. Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche, which was published by the same publishing house, Repeater Books. Tutt's metaphor, which takes getting used to, calls for an invasion of Nietzsche's “community” in order to carry out reinterpretation work there (see p. 33¹). By banishing the “hermeneutics of innocence” (ibid.) from the toolkit and listening to the suspect again, Tutt wants to expose Nietzsche's “true” political concerns as the main driver of his thinking.

This heated development is due to Čeika's damn good writing style and his popular videos, which both attract attention. Before I go into Čeika's draft, I will first give an overview of the previous events in the same debate.

As Seth Taylor 1990 Nietzschean's left-wing. The Politics of German Expressionism 1910-1920 revealed that the subject of dispute was the alleged closeness between Nietzsche, the thinkers of the “Conservative Revolution” and fascist ideology in general. Taylor criticized extreme forms of this genealogy, Georg Lukács' The destruction of reason (1954), for example, which characterized Nietzsche as an intellectual contributor to fascism. Steven Aschheims was more substantial The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (published in 1992), did not evade Lukács' attack either. Aschheim regarded Lukács' condemnation of Nietzsche as an “anti-modernist” (p. 42) — which points to the ignorance of the zeitgeist in Lukács' volts against expressionism. Yet younger critics such as Daniel Tutt still lean heavily on Lukács' destruction and press charges again. According to these opponents, Nietzsche could all too easily be reforged from right-wing into a pioneer of fascism, and has also deliberately defended the historical predecessor of fascism: a “Bonapartist-liberal order of rule” — according to Tutt (p. 34) — which was “designed” to “reprimand” “reprimand from below”, i.e. primarily by the socialist movements (ibid. p. 42).

Arriving in the 2020s, new motivations for the charged conversation come to light at Čeika. The liberty-stealing nature of wage labor and the division of labor is becoming more visible again, and the deflagration of many of our political actions on bureaucratic side tracks is becoming more noticeable. At the same time, few people who identify themselves as “left” want to shake the basic coordinates of their collective thinking and action. Čeika therefore wants the thinker “who wants to overcome the categories of modernity as a whole” (Hammer and Sickle, p. 4) — Karl Marx — speak again. Nietzsche should “be used to excavate Marxism” (ibid.), including its ignored or intentionally distorted elements. The plea for Nietzschean Marxism is about “ human Restoring the element — active human beings, their lived experience, and the most personal of their concerns” (ibid.).

Philosophy of Being versus Philosophy of Becoming

In general, Čeika's book offers an informed and fiery introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche's most fascinating and momentous concepts and critical thoughts: the “slave revolt,” the impossibility of a single, objective truth, and the “eternal return,” to name just three examples. In the history of philosophy, Čeika introduces his two protagonists by identifying their common root in “the long philosophical tradition of becoming” (ibid., p. 27), which dates back “at least” (ibid.) to Heraclitus (born around 520 BC). He celebrates this tradition as “life-affirming” and presents it as antagonistic to “the life-unifying tradition in philosophy” (ibid.) — in this model: the philosophy of being. The latter includes Plato, but dates back “at least” to Heraclitus's contemporary Parmenides. From these two parallel beginnings, both trends continue to flow effectively through Western philosophy to the present day. This simple scheme is plausible and certainly a welcome guide for newcomers to the history of philosophy. They have already read Čeika's book in abundance, many of which were written on it about his well-visited Philosophy channel on Youtube observant. But above all, the moral evaluation of the two trends — philosophy of becoming = progressive, changing society; philosophy of being = spiteful, reactionary — cannot stand still in this way. Where, for example, should Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) be classified, who philosophically underpinned the National Socialist seizure of power and supported the progressive overthrow of Western democracies?

But this does not change the validity of Čeika's critique of the philosophy of being, which he explains using Plato as an example, and the persuasive power of Čeika's portrait of Nietzsche as the philosopher “of the only world that we truly know — the ever-changing one that we experience through our senses” (ibid., 26). Away with Plato's “eternal world of [extrasensory; HH] forms” (ibid., p. 26) as “true” (ibid.) The basis of reality! But Čeika certainly doesn't mean that major historical upheavals, the majority of which we only know from traditions and not from our senses — China during the so-called “Cultural Revolution,” for example — should not be the subject of a philosophy of becoming. Sometimes the author's glorious desire for affective wording gets in the way of him himself. Overall, however, he uses terminology with sharpness.

Closely linked to this, Čeika Nietzsche, through his biography, comes to the foreground as a philosopher of the (human) body: “Let us get used to reading philosophers from their symptoms: The suffering and illness that Nietzsche's entire body took on forced him to be inextricably aware of the physical.” (ibid., 24th) But what Nietzsche's unavoidable obsession with one's own body teaches is more ambivalent. On the one hand, the pleasures and pain experienced by the body, from which Nietzsche writes his philosophy, offer an approach that is comprehensible to many: From there, readers can then understand his trickier concepts more individually, i.e. in a more meaningful way.

On the other hand, there are key events and processes in physical life that a philosopher of the body cannot ignore: Sex and sexuality are at the top of the list here. But how did Nietzsche then perceive and reflect on sexuality? Čeika says little about this, although there is a lot to report. For example, Nietzsche spoke out in favour of sex education for women before marriage, i.e. against the usual taboo on the subject in order to reduce suffering from sex after marriage.² In addition to such affirmative passages, there are also those who are prone to eugenics and testify to a disgust for heterosexual sex. In the Subsequent fragments from autumn 1881, No. 14 [16], for example, the author wants “[d] he permission to father children” as “an award” in order to deprive “normal sexual intercourse of the character of a means of procreation.”

Despite the many question marks that work and life raise, Čeika does not question Nietzsche's heterosexuality and at the same time tells how Nietzsche's search for a “successful love life” (57) failed — an unnecessary euphemism. Joachim Köhler's alternative story — The Secret of Zarathustra —, which has been available in German since 1989 and was published in English in 2002 (but heavily abridged), argues, however, that Nietzsche was homosexual and had also gained homosexual experience with sex workers in Italy. Even though Köhler's understanding has had little appeal among Nietzscheans worldwide, this in turn, seen from Charles Stone's queer perspective, says more about this genre of scholars than about who and how Nietzsche loved sexually. Stone's justified grumbling at “the hysteria of the prudish Nietzsche establishment,” which “has tried for decades to stifle any discussion of the philosopher's love for men” — published in 2018 in The Gay & Lesbian Review — could persuade a few more readers to reconsider Köhler's theses.

Walter Kaufmann's cunning translations

It is thanks to Čeika how his book intuitively develops from one topic to the next: It's almost a book — we want to know how it ends! His treatment of the disputed “will to power” is preceded by the question of how, after Nietzsche's great “popularity among the left” (Hammer and Sickle, p. 185) until the 1930s, Nietzsche could be converted into a “Nazi hero” (ibid.). Čeika outlines the history of reception rather than describe it comprehensively, so that we do not learn explicitly how the right-wing reception began during the First World War. Čeika places this shift to the right in relation to the book The will to power, created by Nietzsche's suitably oriented sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and not by Nietzsche himself (cf. ibid., p. 186.) He also points to Mazzino Montinari's archival research, which prompted Montinari to adopt the following dictum:”The will to power does not exist.” (ibid., p. 187.)

This sourceless part of Čeika probably refers to Montinaris “La Volonté de Puissance” n'existe pas (1996): A clear signal that Čeika also thinks nothing of Nietzsche's authorship of such a work. Yet he cites from the American book no less than seven times throughout the book The Will to Power and cites Nietzsche as author and Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale as translators, each time in the endnotes. Čeika further obscures the matter by, contrary to current scientific practice, not 1968, the year of the first edition of Kaufmann and Hollingdale's successful translation, but 1901 as the year of publication: The year of publication of Förster-Nietzsche's ambitious work theft. And although Čeika disagrees with Kaufman's interpretation of Nietzsche as “an essentially not-political thinker” (Hammer and Sickle, p. 171), he does not connect this distortion with Kaufman's translation practice. Daniel Tutt, on the other hand, addresses this and finds that Kaufmann, “the most read English-language translator of Nietzsche” (How to Read, p. 31), deliberately falsified Nietzsche: “Words and emphases regarding his [Nietzsche; HH] advocacy of slavery were removed; his hatred of socialism and the working class and his spiritual embrace of a society based on an aristocratic ranking were all mitigated and downplayed.” (ibid., p. 30.) Tutt also provides evidence for his criticism, with a look, for example, at Kaufman's translation of the following passage from Ecce homo, The birth of tragedy, paragraph 4: “That new party of life which takes on the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding of humanity.” Kaufmann deliberately plays down this passage by referring to the “higher breeding of humanity” — semantically strong stuff — as the soporific “to raise humanity higher” (quoted by Tutt, How to Read, p. 146).

The Abundance and the Superman

It seems as though Čeika wants to look the other way at some devastating passages in Nietzsche's work so as not to weaken his own narrative strands. Nonetheless, these strands actually offer new insights. For example, when Čeika draws attention to the connection between Nietzsche's concepts of “superman” and “abundance” and portrays the superman as “generous out of abundance.” He wants the stubborn caricature of Nietzsche's almost best-known character as one who “doesn't care about human suffering” (Hammer and Sickle, p. 233), put an end. In doing so, he is based on the following passage in Beyond good and evil, Aph 260:

In the foreground [of the noble person; HH] is the feeling of abundance, of power that wants to abound, the happiness of high tension, the awareness of a wealth that wants to give and give: — even the noble person helps the unfortunate person, but not or almost not out of compassion, but more out of an urge that the abundance of power creates.

Čeika's discussion makes it clear that this is not about which Power, which is administered by certain states of the 2020s, and previous generations, which can cause defenceless civilian populations, whether through cultural repression, bombing or hunger policies, to die out in misery and extinction. If Nietzsche had written about power in 21st century English rather than in 19th German, he would have been better served by focusing on the concept of “agency” rather than on that of “power” or “power.” The intervention of this central idea of contemporary English-language philosophy — which can only be cumbersome translated into German; “agency” is the best of several unsatisfactory options — could make the debate about Nietzsche's politics of power look completely different. Even according to Čeika's Nietzsche understanding, agency is transferred from “noble people” (in modern times: “people capable of significant actions”) to the “unfortunate” (now: “people who are severely restricted in their actions”), primarily from an “abundance of agency” among the former.

Youtube community with the power to act

Tutt regards Nietzsche's efforts to build a global community through his publications, which would have an impact on the future with his philosophy — and his followers above all as cheated by the prophet-philosopher leading them. Jonas Čeika has built up his community on YouTube with great feedback over the last six years — without any apparent bad intentions. Some of his older videos, which have been available for four years or more, have been viewed almost half a million times, his analysis of Late capitalism based on “K-pop” (Korean-language pop music) even over a million times. The huge amount of work involved in writing and producing these educational films is financed in part by subscribers, who support his community on a monthly basis. But you don't have to be a subscriber to access all videos. Čeika's deep enthusiasm for pop culture, especially for films, has helped him to communicate his educational and philosophical program via YouTube. Parallel to Čeika's theoretical introductions to postmodernism, in which Čeika skillfully opposes half-truths of intellectual influencers Jordan Peterson and Stephen Hicks defends, is, for example, also a post-modernist Review of the film or book American Psycho to see. Since the extent of Nietzsche's continuing influence on thinkers understood as post-modernist cannot be denied — this includes Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida and Richard Rorty — the circle is complete for now. Or are old circles more likely to reappear in new garments in order to confront us anew with our participation in the eternal return?

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Sources

Aschheim, Steven: The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990. Berkely 1992.

Ceika, Jonas: How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle. Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century. London 2021.

Koehler, Joachim: Zarathustra's secret. Friedrich Nietzsche and his encrypted message. Nördlingen 1989.

Lukacs, Georg: The destruction of reason. Berlin 1954.

Montinari, Mazzino: “La Volonté de Puissance” n'existe pas. Transacted by Patricia Farazzi & Michel Valensi. Paris 1996.

Stone, Charles: The Case of Nietzsche. In: The Gay and Lesbian Review. September/October 2018. Available at: https://glreview.org/article/the-case-of-nietzsche/.

Taylor, Seth: Nietzschean's left-wing. The Politics of German Expressionism 1910-1920. Berlin 1990.

Tutt, Daniel: How to Read Like a Parasite. Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche. London 2024.

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Footnotes

1: Here and below, I have translated quotes from English-language books into German myself.

2: Cf. The Gay Science, Aph 71.

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