I. The petty bourgeois gone wild

Politicized by the Easter riots following the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke in 1968, then philosophized by Sartre, I was in a KPD/ML sympathizer group in 1970 and therefore a Maoist. The Chinese Communists were Stalinists, which I, in turn, quarreled with and made me get off there again. The fact that 20 million people could die for the revolution was an indigestible argument. Only can you en passant Objecting that states regularly sacrifice their people millions of times in wars, Stalin is just one of many, which, of course, also include democracies. And it's always the others' fault. Yet I remained a revolutionary Marxist for a few more years.

In 1970, still as a Maoist, I was confronted with Nietzsche for the first time. In the 12th grade of high school, a philosophy course was offered, which my left-wing extremist classmates and I took part enthusiastically. The downside was the inherently very likeable teacher, who came out as a Nietzschean inspired by Hermann Hesse — a widespread career path of apolitics at the time — and with us the Zarathustra I read that as a Leninist I certainly refused to understand.

I had my first encounter with Nietzsche at this time with a participant in this course who was sitting on the window sill in the smoking room of the high school in a military parka and smoking — of course — the Zarathustra read. A nuisance for me and I hissed: “Nietzsche — a petty bourgeois gone wild! “She hissed back: “Marx is a petty bourgeois gone much worse.” It took about ten more years before Dagmar Allendorf introduced me to free love, more specifically forced me into an open relationship. She then became a good friend for decades and I had learned from her the advantages of open relationships, to which Nietzsche had certainly only contributed from afar and if so, from individualism to feminism.

II. The Suffering Nietzschean

While I was doing my doctorate on practical philosophy with Kant and Hegel between 1979 and 1982, another companion — also with those Maoists and in the said philosophy course — also wrote his dissertation about Nietzsche with Manfred Riedel. As a result, I could no longer avoid a serious confrontation with Nietzsche.

Even with his Nietzsche dissertation, Reinhard Knodt was closer to the zeitgeist of the early eighties than I was with Kant and Hegel as a background for Marx. Since the Colli-Montinari edition, Nietzsche had experienced a renaissance, not only in France and Italy, where post-structuralism had been spreading since the sixties and the post-modern discussion had just begun.

As a moderate Marxist in the meantime, I wrote my very first post-doctoral essay against this Nietzsche Renaissance, which was, of course, never published. Many leftists suddenly became interested in Nietzsche, which I saw as a frustrated escape line after Marx's star faded during the late 1970s. How could leftists be against nuclear power only in the seventies when Marx is concerned with the progress of the productive forces! I was a supporter of atomic energy until Harrisburg 1979.

How could left-wing intellectuals deal with such a dazzling figure as Nietzsche, who questions the scientific knowledge on which the development of productive power is ultimately based! Reinhard Knodt had over The eternal return of suffering doctorate. Instead of doing something about suffering, you present it as unavoidable, surrender to it and suffer attention-seeking like Nietzsche. Associated with this is the widespread lament of intellectuals about a lack of response in politics and society, as with Nietzsche, although you are as clever as you would in Ecce Homo Can read.

III. About Nietzsche through weak thinking

At the beginning of the eighties, it slowly seemed essential for me to philosophically address the problem of the destruction of nature. Following my dissertation, I developed a progressive concept of rationalization: The rationalization of the state begins in the 18th century, that of economics in the 19th and that of the relationship of nature — constitutional state, welfare state, natural state.

The Düsseldorf philosopher Rudolf Heinz, with whom I had studied for three semesters in the mid-seventies, dissuaded me from the concept of rationalization by referring me to French philosophy surrounding post-structuralism. Although this was not about Nietzsche at first, I began to develop a rational approach to the problem of destroying nature. With the help of Rudolf Heinz, I published my first book after completing my doctoral thesis in 1985, Philosophy and ecology. Philosophical and political essays, in which Nietzsche barely appears and only the Schlechta edition is referred to in the bibliography.

The focus on Nietzsche intensified in the second half of the decade when I met Gianni Vattimo, the main Italian representative of post-modern philosophy, whose hermeneutical approach was closer to me at the time than the post-structuralist concepts of Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard. He had already linked the problem of liberation to Nietzsche in 1974: Il Soggetto e la Maschera. Nietzsche e il problema della liberazione (“The subject and the mask. Nietzsche and the problem of liberation”). It was precisely this connection that I had criticized just a few years earlier.

In the meantime, however, I slowly left the communitarian paths of Marxism and returned to the beginnings before Maoism, finally the Extraparliamentary Opposition of the sixty-eight period was also called the anti-authoritarian movement and I had begun philosophizing with Sartre's individualism back then. But the time was not yet ripe for a return to Sartre's existentialism. That will only be the case towards the end of the millennium.

I first learned to understand Nietzsche's hermeneutics as a critique of science and modern technology from Vattimo; he had the book in 1984 Beyond the subject. Nietzsche, Heidegger and hermeneutics published. And it was just natural sciences and technology that appeared to me then and now as the actual background to the destruction of nature, less capitalism. Today, on the other hand, climate radicals believe that they can balance the relationship with nature with natural sciences and technologies. For me, however, these were and are not the solution, but the problem, even more so today when they unabashedly propagate the correct understanding of the world — a religious habit.

This included Nietzsche's criticism of mathematics in science and technology, which Edmund Husserl wrote in 1936 in his Crisis in European Sciences repeating, with the causality that will recur with late Wittgenstein, and the concept of action that Hannah Arendt will spell out, will be helpful. Natural sciences and technology do not capture nature as it really is, but interpret it and thus develop the will to power that experts represent today.

In this sense, Vattimo had not interpreted the history of thought as a process of ever better and more accurate grasping of the world, which dominates the world ever more precisely, but as a story of increasing insight into understanding this process as one of the weakening of knowledge and ethics — en passant In addition to Husserl, can you refer to Einstein's theory of relativity, the fundamental crisis of mathematics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the failure to establish an appropriate scientific language in the logical constructivism of the Erlangen School. In the sciences, you don't want to know anything more about this.

This is how Vattimo developed the theory of “weak thinking” from this in 1983 — Il pensiero debole —, which I followed up in my second book on the destruction of nature in 1989: The technology and the weakness. Ecology according to Nietzsche, Heidegger and “weak thinking”. With that, I had definitely become a Nietzschean. Vattimo's programmatic essay dialectic, difference, weak thinking I translated it and published it in the anthology published by me in 2000 Ethics of thought.

IV. From negative ecology to the art of living

In the same year, I referred this to a term that was based more on Adorno's negative dialectic than Nietzsche's nihilism, but was all the more inspired by the latter. I first published a small programmatic book under the title About the difficulty of understanding nature. Outline of a negative ecology. The quintessence is: There is a difference between science and nature that cannot be bridged. That is precisely why care should be taken when dealing with nature.

I worked out the concept in 1990 and developed it through Lyotards Contradiction extended: That means that the problem cannot be solved politically either, because politics is the place of conflict between types of discourse. The title is Negative ecology. Political philosophy in the technical age. That should be my postdoctoral thesis. It was left behind and when I wanted to make it the basis of a lecture in the second half of the nineties, I had to discover that the concerned pathos surrounding the destroyed nature had left me, so that I did not want to publish the manuscript since then.

Nietzsche was initially a nuisance, which I fought back until I realized that his philosophy was much more innovative and inspiring than what the philosophy of my academic teachers had to offer. And epistemologically, you can learn about as much from Nietzsche as from Wittgenstein: The scientism that prevails today is an ideology that you have to believe as little as religions.

Nobody wants to hear that today. This is how you remain an outsider, bohemian, intellectual, artist of life with Nietzsche according to my book The superman as an artist of life. Nietzsche, Foucault and ethics (2009). On the other hand, if you get into the mainstream with Nietzsche, you have pulled the bad teeth out of him, which Arthur C. Danto recommends in order to make Nietzsche compliant with democracy.

On top of that, I learned a lot about individualism from Nietzsche, although he limits it to genius. You can and must shape your own life and defend yourself against all attempts to have the “last people” dictate this to you. In this way, Nietzsche created an ethics of the individual that brought me back to my anti-authoritarian beginnings with Sartre. So Zarathustra said:

Where the state ends, that is where the human being begins, who is not superfluous: that is where the song of the necessary begins, the unique and irreplaceable way. Where the state ceasing“Look at me then, my brothers! Don't you see him, the rainbow and the bridges of Superman?¹

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Footnotes

1: Thus spoke Zarathustra, Of the new idol.

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