In Nature's temple, living pillars rise,

Speaking sometimes in words of abstruse sense;

Man walks through woods of symbols, dark and dense,

Which gaze at him with fond familiar eyes.

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Like distant echoes blent in the beyond

In unity, in a deep darksome way,

Vast as black night and vast as splendent day,

Perfumes and sounds and colors correspond.¹

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I. The Spleen of Leipzig

For two years now, I have been hiking as part of my work for Nietzsche POParts through “woods of symbols,” as they are described by the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821—1867) in his famous poem Correspondences. It is Nietzsche's labyrinthine thinking, including its diverse receptions, interpretations, and references to the present, that captivates, confuses, inspires me time and again. Sometimes I feel as if I had it with “chaotic night's immensities”² and I would like to scream from the depths with Nietzsche's great brother in spirit: “I envy the most humble beast that ease” (ibid.), sometimes — and fortunately this is more like my normal feeling — I enjoy this trip out into the open sea, to which Nietzsche invites me again and again: “There'll be nothing but beauty, wealth, pleasure, [/] With all things in order and measure.”³

I am the one whose job it is to stay course on this trip “into the Blue”⁴. I'll go deep into the engine room like a text machine, I get up high into the lookout and look for the “dancing star” that this chaos could possibly give birth to.⁵ Meanwhile, there are sometimes cheerful, sometimes in-depth conversations on the mezzanine floors. There is sometimes a dispute. And yes, I sometimes feel as though I find what I'm looking for when an enthusiastic reader writes to me that a text has particularly moved her or brought her to new ideas. That's what counts at the end of the day.

But I want to resist the temptation to get personal here. All I have to say in this regard is that I am extremely grateful to everyone who has supported and accompanied this project since it began more than two years ago, whether as authors, readers, translators, financiers, critics, editors, assistants in the engine room. I would particularly like to thank Buser World Music Form for their generous both financial and spiritual support for the project. A heartfelt thank you! Let's create a rainbow over and over again!

What I actually want to write about now is our project. There are obviously two main levels to consider — past and future. Because writing specifically about the present tense is probably unnecessary. So, it's very simple: Part 1: Where are we? What has happened so far? Part 2: Where could things go in the next few years?

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II. What Has Happened So Far on Nietzsche POParts?

Counting two part articles twice, we have published exactly 90 articles so far, an average of one per week. In addition, there are now 112 aphorisms in the section Darts & Donuts, not to mention occasional special content on our social media channels and on YouTube, where we have published 33 videos so far. If Google Analytics is to be believed, our texts have so far reached a total of around 16,000 visitors from all over the world — especially from Germany (5,500), Switzerland (900) and Austria (700), but also the USA (2,450), China (1,900) and India (1,500) — who viewed our site a total of 36,500 times. The most-read articles were there, at least in quantitative terms, with more than 300 views each Look, I'm Teaching You the Transhumanist by Jörg Scheller, the interview Nietzsche and Ukraine, which I conducted with Vitalii Mudrakov, Is Nietzsche a Philosopher for Adolescents?, the debut article by Natalie Schulte, Homesick for the Stars. Prolegomena of a Critique of Extraterrestrial Reason by Michael Meyer-Albert, Henry Holland's review of Jonas Čeika's book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle, the recently published articles Dionysus as Rolling Stone by Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann and Peace through Strength by Tobias Brücker, my interview with Andreas Urs Sommer about his new Nietzsche biography as well as, which of course makes me particularly happy, my own articles “Poland is Not Yet Lost” Germany's Neighboring Country as a Political Utopia in Nietzsche's Posthumous Writings and Society versus Self-Becoming, my first “conversation” with ChatGPT which has been manually translated into English by Henry Holland.

These figures certainly leave some room for improvement in terms of quantitative reach, but at the same time they also show that our blog is frequently visited, even though we sometimes turn to rather 'sneaky' topics and our texts are often not exactly written for mass use. Nietzsche himself dreamt of great sales successes time and again, but he also warned himself, perhaps not least: What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros!”⁶ In the end, his dream of millions of copies and global translations of his works came true — but in many cases he also simply became a source of catchword and figurehead, one of those “fashion philosophers.”⁷, from which he always tried to differentiate himself, even though his own writing style actually makes him a popular rather than an elite author.

What is worth more in the end? 1,000 likes from people who, at best, have taken a superficial note of your own content and to whom you have ingratiated with, or five readers to whom you have conveyed something decisive. According to Nietzsche's own teaching, the latter option would clearly be preferable, but, as I said, he was not entirely true to himself in this regard. In the end, it must be about hoping that the right readers will find you just by staying true to your own ideas and striving to express them ever better; quantitative success should be understood more as an effect, not as an end in itself.

Yes, it is possible to reach a much wider reach than we do on social media and elsewhere with Nietzsche. But most of what you find there is hardly what we can regard as exemplary as a philosophy magazine: fake quotes with pleasing AI images, mostly mere calendar sayings that do not provoke anyone (unless in a cheap way) or even encourage them to “overcome themselves.” We don't want to be in common with that; there are enough such questionable Nietzsche channels. We continue to use AI, if at all, as a mere tool and slow food instead of algorithm fodder. We are looking for thoughtful depth and authentic passion for the cause.⁸

If you look at the qualitative side, that is actually decisive, things are of course more difficult to grasp and I myself am probably the wrong person to judge it. In any case, as this short list of our “bestsellers” suggests, our choice of subject matter is, consciously, as diverse as Nietzsche's work itself. We do not try to convey a specific doctrine or ideology, but simply to think again and again about, with, and against Nietzsche, to take up the perspectives he has developed and to make it the starting point for our own expeditions. We are not necessarily Nietzscheans, but we are convinced that Nietzsche has something important to say and that it is worthwhile to look at his work again and again in order to better understand our present day.

In this spirit, an archive of possible current perspectives on and with Nietzsche has been created on our blog over the past two years. We reported about several important Nietzsche events, our initial regular authors laid out in a series of articles their personal relationship with Nietzsche, we came up with the topic ”Marx and Nietzsche” again and again, and what is actually to be thought of Nietzsche in general in political terms. However, as the name of our blog might suggest, a particular focus was on aesthetic and pop cultural topics. Two articles — one from Christian Saehrendt and one by myself — were dedicated to Nietzsche's relationship with music, we investigated Nietzsche's reception in the heavy metal scene, compared Nietzsche with Franz Kafka, wrote about Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog, analyzed Taylor Swift with Nietzsche and Nietzsche with the Rolling Stones. But we treated Nietzsche's contemporary context as well: time and again his illustrious relationship with Richard Wagner, arguably his most important thought leader, Arthur Schopenhauer, and his big “brother in spirit,” Søren Kierkegaard. In our main series of articles last year, we undertook various “Hikes with Nietzsche”, which took us all the way to Southeast Asia, and announced the Kingfisher Prize for Radical Essay Writing, dedicated to the topic “Where are they barbarians of the 21st century? “— a question that provoked some excellent submissions. As far as Nietzsche's aftermath is concerned, our authors were particularly interested in his French, post-modern reception, whether that of Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, or Gilles Deleuze. We repeatedly investigated various aspects of digitization, in particular the cultural effects of the increasing use of artificial 'intelligence'. However, interpretations of Nietzsche's writings themselves were not neglected, such as his basic concept of ”Amor fati“or that of resentment, to whom we also dedicate this year's Kingfisher Award. And last but not least, we dealt with news from the “Nietzsche world,” for example we talked with relevant experts such as Andreas Urs Sommer, Werner Stegmaier, and recently Barbara Straka about their research, presented recent publications related to Nietzsche and visited important “Nietzsche places” with you, such as Tribschen, Sils Maria and Naumburg.

It's fair to say that we have dealt with some 'classic Nietzsche topics,' as well as a few more marginal ones, but we are unlikely to run out of material for further articles given the breadth of Nietzsche's work and, above all, his impact. We have actually only just begun to explore the 'fabulous world of Professor Nietzsche' together with you and indeed have a lot of plans for the near and distant future.

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III. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

We definitely want to maintain the current diversity and variety of topics, because there is hardly any other way dealing with Nietzsche. The main topics will continue to be the French reception of Nietzsche, art and aesthetics, pop culture, and digitization. We also want to continue to attach great importance to the visual design and have our articles illustrated in a high-quality way — I would particularly like to highlight the great work of our 'head layouter' Linus Rupp, who is not only responsible for designing and programming the page, but also designs the article images again and again (you will quickly recognize his particular style when scrolling through and he will continue to create article images regularly).

In addition to the term “resentment,” however, the main topic this year should be forests. In several articles, we will deal with various aspects of the forest as livelihood, with Nietzsche and beyond him. It will be about the solitude of the forest, its inhabitants (from mythical creatures to witches to animals), hikes through the forest, but also its increasing threat from human intervention.

Where do we want to go with all this? I think our claim must be to become the place for up-to-date Nietzsche research on the Internet, at least as far the German-speaking world is concerned. We would like to work towards this in the coming years and have certainly laid a good basis for this over the past two years of our existence. The aim must be to understand Nietzsche research not as an elite project or as an academic finger exercise, but to conduct Nietzsche reception “in a scuffle” — very close to current topics and interests, without therefore tending to the spirit of the times or popularizing Nietzsche in a bad sense and robbing Nietzsche of his critical potential.

Because that is what he is above all: a “seismograph,” as Ernst Jünger put it, of the contradictions and tendencies of his time, their observer and critic — who is therefore also suitable to be able to better classify and understand the earthquakes and faults of our time, to move us into a perspective distance from them in order, armed with Nietzsche's hammer, to penetrate ever deeper into the dimensions where the tectonic plates move and the next volcanoes form.

But we also want to increase our international impact. As the analysis above shows, there is certainly interest in our articles and we have already had all of our content translated into English. We increasingly want to replace these largely provisional and sometimes still very deficient AI translations with professional ones — a thoroughly ambitious project in which we are looking for your support in the form of a crowdfunding call. We want to combine this with publishing original English-language texts more often in the future, which we will then translate into German.⁹ — Who knows, we might even be able to become the Internet location for current Nietzsche research worldwide. If you like our work so far, feel free to support us and become a “good European” in the spirit of Nietzsche, a ”interpreter[] and mediator[] among peoples”¹⁰.

We live in an age not just “the isolation of nations, through the rise of national enmities” (ibid.), but even the fragmentation of “nations” themselves into submilieus, which barely have anything to say to each other and seem to reside in their own living environments. Intellectual cross-border exchange is therefore more important than ever in order to counteract this dangerous trend and return to a joint or at least: more common understanding of the world. Nietzsche, the great advocate of “perspectivism”¹¹, who developed and played through such different perspectives in his own work, who has become interesting and important for such different milieus and “nations” — albeit sometimes extremely different, even opposite form — is more suitable than almost any other thinker not only as a figurehead, but as a genuine dialogue partner in such an attempt. Contrary to many prejudices, he was a resolute internationalist and cosmopolitan, not only dreaming of a united Europe,¹² but also of “One goal”¹³, which could unite all of humanity. He was one thing in particular: a “free spirit” in battle with the “idols” of his time. It is indisputable that this spiritual independence sometimes led him astray and this is discussed again and again on our blog¹⁴ — that he can be a role model and source of ideas for us in the fight with the “idols” of our time, be it AI, be it Taylor Swift, be it Donald Trump, is also true, however.

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IV. “A dreamer always wants even more”

In any case, my motto and ours remains — coined not by Nietzsche but by Ernst Bloch, but definitely in his spirit: “A dreamer always wants even more,” and we are just at the beginning of a journey that will take us ever deeper into the rabbit hole of the 'Nietzscheverse.'

But what's the point of all this in the last resort? In a presentation on the social role of art¹⁵ Herbert Marcuse quotes, like Bloch a Nietzschean Marxist, a verse from a poem by the English poet and contemporary of Nietzsche Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881):

One man with a Dream, at pleasure

Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

And three with a new song's measure

Can trample an empire down.¹⁶

These verses certainly reflect Nietzsche's own understanding of the role of art and philosophy for society, for example when he wrote in Zarathustra writes: “It is the quietest words that bring the storm. Thoughts that come with dove feet rule the world.”¹⁷

Nietzsche was undoubtedly one of the inventors of new “measures.” Like only a few, he redefined philosophy through his way of writing and thinking — and, incidentally, also revolutionized poetry, developing  “measures” in a quite literal sense. Time and again, he serves as a source of inspiration for intellectual, political, or cultural avant-gardes who are looking for something new, who dare to swim a few strokes out into the “open sea.”¹⁸. Nietzsche speaks to them from within their souls when he writes: ^‍

[W]hat is needful is a new justice! And a new watchword. And new philosophers. The moral earth, too, is round. The moral earth, too, has its antipodes. The antipodes, too, have the right to exist. There is yet another world to be discovered—and more than one. Embark, philosophers!¹⁹

What has it brought about now, this pathos of the New? Do these brave ones trample down empires? Or did their work remain relatively peripheral, did it even lead to the foundation of new empires which thought they would remain for a millenium...

I'm skeptical, but at the same time I don't want to let my 'naivety' go away. It is Nietzsche who admonishes us again and again: “By my love and hope, I implore you: Don't throw away the hero in your soul! Keep your highest hope holy!”²⁰ And even the early Nietzsche warned: “Who destroys the illusion in himself and in others, nature punishes him as the strictest tyrant.”²¹ Because “only in love, only shadowed by the illusion of love does man create, namely only with absolute belief in what is perfect and right” (ibid.).

Readers more accustomed to the later, skeptical Nietzsche will find this emphasis on the 'lofty' Nietzsche unusual, perhaps even 'sentimental' and 'kitschy.' And yet, it seems to me that Nietzsche expresses his program most clearly and distinctly in On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life: Scientific 'reason' is not everything; it must be revised and supplemented by a deeper, more comprehensive “great reason”²² of the living body, otherwise “the overshadowing and uglifying of Europe”²³ threatens, the complete loss of meaning, the destruction of everything that makes life worth affirming.

I think you can be skeptical of much of what Nietzsche wrote in his life and at least think that this one idea is worth considering. But then it would be not so much the question of to what extent any avant-garde really succeeded in changing the world, but what the position of such an avant-garde should be if they want to at least have the chance to do so.

An imposition? It seems to me that such “militant optimism” (Ernst Bloch) is rather a necessity at a time that (seemingly) leaves little to hope for. We must hope that bold visions such as those of O'Shaughnessy, Marcuse, or even Nietzsche can come true so as not to lose the courage to act — which would make the world even more like Nietzsche described it in his dystopia at the beginning of Zarathustra: “Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: anyone who feels differently goes to a madhouse voluntarily.”²⁴

Nietzsche is at least a thinker for all those who do not voluntarily embark on their path to psychiatry, who do not want to be talked out of their 'delusion,' as individual as themselves, by the one-sided and long-refuted “reason” of science. Not, mind you, in the name of mere irrationality, but of “great reason”! For all those who still bear chaos within themselves, who have the courage to give birth to a “dancing star.”

I think it still makes sense — and perhaps now more than ever — to stick to this basic approach. When writing with, about, against Nietzsche, we should always return to him and stick to him as the key point of every possible 'Nietzscheanism.' The “dancing star,” not to mention the “superman,” as a point of reference to somehow get through the ordered chaos of the world of the 21st century while maintaining at least a minimum of dignity.

And who knows, it might just succeed unexpectedly: a philosophical idea, an aesthetic vision, the silent prayer of a “chapelless faith” (Rainer Maria Rilke) that would be powerful enough to bring down this empire and to let a new reason, a new life, a new living body emerge from its ruins. Let us follow Baudelaire's and Nietzsche's invitation to travel, let us remain true to ourselves:  “There'll be nothing but beauty, wealth, pleasure, [/] With all things in order and measure.”

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En avant!

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Literature

Marcuse, Herbert: Art in the One-Dimensional Society. In: Douglas Kellner (ed.): Art and Liberation. Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse IV. New York: Routledge 2007, pp. 113—122 (online).

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Footnotes

1: Charles Baudelaire, Correspondences. In: Flowers of Evil, translated by Jacques LeClercq (link).

2: Baudelaire, Out of the Depths. In: Flowers of Evil, translated by Jacques LeClercq (link).

3: Baudelaire, Invitation to the Voyage. In: Flowers of Evil, translated by Roy Campbell (link).

4: The Gay Science, Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei, Towards New Seas (own translation).

5: Cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Preface, 5.

6: Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows, paragraph 14 (translation, slightly altered).

7: Human, All Too Human II, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, aph. 5 (own translation).

8: A critical-polemical discussion of the 'AI Nietzsche,' whom you encounter online at every turn, is planned for the near future!

9: In fact, some texts are already available in English or in professional English translation (link).

10: Human, All Too Human I, aph. 475 (translation; slightly altered).

11: See esp. On the Genealogy of Morality, paragraph III, 12.

12: “Owing to the morbid estrangement which the nationality-craze has induced and still induces among the nations of Europe, owing also to the short-sighted and hasty-handed politicians, who with the help of this craze, are at present in power, and do not suspect to what extent the disintegrating policy they pursue must necessarily be only an interlude policy--owing to all this and much else that is altogether unmentionable at present, the most unmistakable signs that Europe wishes to be one, are now overlooked, or arbitrarily and falsely misinterpreted“ (Beyond Good and Evil, aph 256; translation, slightly altered).

13: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of a Thousand and One Goal (own translation).

14: For a critical discussion of the concept of the “good European”, see my older text Das Problem Europa. Überlegungen mit Friedrich Nietzsche ("The problem of Europe. Reflections with Friedrich Nietzsche").

15: Cf. Art in the One-Dimensional Society.           .

16: Cit. ibid., p. 115.

17: Thus Zarathustra Spoke, The Quietest Hour (own translation).

18:The Gay Science, aph. 343 (own translation).

19: The Gappy science, aph. 289 (translation [p. 232]).

20: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of a Tree on a Mountain.

21: On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, paragraph 7 (own translation).

22: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the Despisers of the Body.

23: Beyond Good and Evil, aph 222 (translation).

24: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Preface, 5.