What does Nietzsche Mean to Me?

12.3.24

Paul Stephan

In the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “ over the next few weeks, our regular authors will each present their personal approach to Nietzsche and his thinking. Our senior editor Paul Stephan makes a start and reports on how he discovered Nietzsche as a teenager — and no longer necessarily sees himself as a “Nietzschean.”

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Like probably for many, Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers I read. When I was around 14 years old, I became interested in the books that were on my parents' shelves and which gave off a subversive air. These were virtually no philosophical works; my parents were less interested in them. The only actual philosophical work that was on our bookshelf — albeit unread — was Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which, however, was of only limited interest to me at that age. (As a student, I only read through his refutations of the proofs of God once and they reinforced my atheism.) And there was even a Freud edition there, which, as an adolescent, I would curiously leaf through from time to time.

At around 12 years of age, however, I had already, I don't know how anymore, Sophie's World Get your hands on by Jostein Gaarder. As a result of reading this, I had developed a certain interest in philosophy and I had come into contact with Nietzsche's ideas for the first time and was fascinated by them. It was a fundamental alternative to the point of view I was familiar with, particularly to my parents' Christianity. That was actually my main topic at that time: The critical examination of my parents' Christian-conservative ideology of the time and the search for alternatives to it. I was actually interested in anything that deviated from that. For example, I read Feuerbach's Enthusiastic The essence of Christianity, Writings by and about Marx, on Buddhism. My literary heroes quickly became — after traversing Tolkien and Rowling's worlds — Kafka and Hesse. Hesse even earlier than Kafka. The allusions to Nietzsche in his works and the reading of a biography of Hesse, which emphasized Nietzsche's influence on him, finally won me in favour of Nietzsche.

My first book was, as far as I remember, So Zarathustra spoke. Even the Birth of Tragedy I read early because I was also very interested in ancient Greece. Reading experiences that can hardly be repeated today, everything was exciting and new. I saw myself as a free spirit in the Nietzsche sense, as a Nietzschean Marxist or a Marxist Nietzschean. Many of my friends back then had a similar view of the world. I remember that one of them, to whom a friend complained of heartsickness, laconically recommended it, but simply the Zarathustra Reading, then he'd get over it.

In hindsight, but already several years older, I think that my friends and I became victims of Nietzsche's manipulative rhetoric to some extent. Nietzsche — especially in the role of his prophet — suggests to the reader that they are “something special” just by reading his writings, to stand out from the “flock,” the “dumb mass.” He appeals to his narcissism. I think this aspect of his writings is one of the main reasons for their success and what makes Nietzsche really “dangerous” in some ways. Not necessarily politically, but psychologically: It provides an ideology that enables you to bury yourself in your own narcissism and thus reinforces it. You become part of a kind, paradoxical, community of “free spirits” — not to say “geniuses” — united only by the name “Nietzsche,” as Klopstock did in more innocent times. You admire Nietzsche, but in reality only yourself and your own “individuality,” “creativity,” “originality.” You don't really understand Nietzsche's texts — you get absorbed in them, live with them.

In retrospect, this phase or this mood seems very unpleasant, even a little embarrassing, but I think it was an important phase of transition and Nietzsche is able to unleash enormous creative and intellectual potential in his readers precisely through this aspect of his writings. They encourage you to be “different,” to think and do things that you would not have dared to do before, they sometimes lead to a noisy disinhibition of your own sense of greatness. And should this feeling not be confirmed by the world around you, should you, on the contrary, be offended, Nietzsche immediately offers the appropriate remedy: “What do you care about these marketplace people — you know that you are better than them? “It was not by chance Nietzsche's girlfriend and, possibly, lover Lou Andreas-Salomé who carried out the groundbreaking psychoanalytic study in 1921 Narcissism as a dual direction published and revealed the productive function of narcissism for artists and thinkers — “creators.” Yes: According to Nietzsche, you have to have a touch of narcissism in you to be able to produce something significant in art or philosophy; perhaps even in all other areas of life.

But now, as they say, I have “matured” and this whole way of thinking repulses me. Nietzsche does not heal his readers' narcissism, but reinforces it and at best offers a “wrong cure” by involving him ever more deeply in a narcissistic thought structure. However, I am now firmly convinced that true artistic, philosophical and, above all, human greatness comes from a completely different direction. I now value Rousseau higher than Nietzsche, even Christ higher than Dionysus. A Christian could easily pass by Nietzsche and think with compassion: “That poor confused person; hasn't he heard anything about Christ being resurrected 2,000 years ago? He has truly risen! “— The great artists, saints, thinkers — if “greatness” is a value in itself at all, I now doubt that too — were perhaps also self-absorbed egoists, but in their egoism they also opened themselves up to something higher that speaks to us through their works; regardless of whether you want to call it “God” or something else. They do not speak as individuals, but as generics. They don't mean they think.

But with all this, I'm not meeting Nietzsche myself. Because as soon as you have questioned your own narcissism and no longer find just a source of self-affirmation in Nietzsche's texts, you can use your philosophy truly discover and discover that it has much more and more to offer. That Nietzsche had just not been understood before. The narcissistic potential is just as hidden in his texts as the opposite if you just read them carefully. For his part, Nietzsche would only have remained a mediocre nerd like Max Stirner or Arthur Schopenhauer — whose fans may forgive me for this comment (I really appreciate both authors, but measure them to the highest standard) — if he had not taken this step himself, if he had not taken the step into the open, into the Self-overcoming would have dared.

For Nietzsche, however, the dream of superman remained the same. He couldn't finally take the step. But that is exactly what makes him so close to us and his thinking so familiar when we understand it correctly: This conflict between self-reference and openness, between humility and height, between “the last person” and “superman,” which is expressed so eloquently and harshly in his texts themselves. Reading them, we witness an inner struggle that is unparalleled in world literature — and which, I would like to say, also our Struggle is, or at least marks, a certain stage of intellectual maturity that we must all go through.

There is therefore no reason for me to reject Nietzsche or to renounce him. Since Nietzsche is no longer an “idol” for me, he is now simply a human and this only makes it interesting as a thinker and writer. Among these, he is still at the forefront for me, even though I sometimes wonder whether Hegel isn't actually more subversive than Nietzsche, at a time when “God is dead.”¹ and “Nothing is true, everything is allowed”² They have long been good as calendar sayings — or even Instagram memes. But even if you want to see Hegel's system idea as our ideal, you still have to recognize that Nietzsche is our reality. Condemning him would be self-denial; sanctifying him would be self-dumbling.

When I read Rousseau, for example, I am sometimes moved, almost carried away by the pure pathos of his writings, his profound belief in goodness, in humanity, in “nature.” But I know that today you couldn't think like that anymore, you couldn't write like that anymore. Some of Nietzsche's texts, on the other hand, appear as if they had only been written yesterday. His “delusion” is the delusion of an era that has not yet ended. He is unable to offer a cure, but he is the first sincere chronicler, witness and seer of this delusion. We, who are looking for healing, individually and collectively, must plunge ourselves into this maelstrom again and again true to our own maxim “What doesn't kill me makes me stronger”³. We just can't drown in it.

Ideas such as the “superman,” the “gifting virtue,” the “eternal return,” the “last man,” “nihilism”... The vision of a world without God and without truth. The story as an eternal struggle between Dionysus and Apollo, masters and slaves, resentment and glory, man and “woman” — all of these may be untrue ideas, but therefore far from dead, none refuted. You have to think them through again and again, look for ways out and hideouts, and be fascinated by them again and again.

In this respect, I can certainly share the polemic of thinkers such as Georg Lukács and Wolfgang Harich against Nietzsche. Yes, there is a lot of “evil” in Nietzsche, much downright ridiculous; he is a philosophical enemy of reason. But I am also taught by Carl Schmitt — and this sentence could also come from Nietzsche himself: “The enemy is our own question as a form.” — And I add his perhaps wisest words with Nietzsche himself: